Religion in the Soviet Union
This article may be in need of reorganization to comply with Wikipedia's layout guidelines. (July 2020) |
Part of a series on the |
Culture of the Soviet Union |
---|
People |
Languages |
Traditions |
Cuisine |
Festivals |
Literature |
Music |
Sport |
Religion in the
The vast majority of people in the Russian Empire were, at the time of the revolution, religious believers. After the
Marxism-Leninism and religion
As the founder of the Soviet state, Vladimir Lenin, put it:
Religion is the opium of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion. All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class.[16][17]
Marxist–Leninist atheism has consistently advocated the control, suppression, and elimination of religion. Within about a year of the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, including the churches themselves, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed. Many more were persecuted.[18]
Christianity
Orthodox
Orthodox Christians constituted a majority of believers in the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, three Orthodox churches claimed substantial memberships there: the
Russian Orthodox Church
According to both Soviet and Western sources[
Georgian Orthodox Church
The Georgian Orthodox Church, another
Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church
The Ukrainian AOC separated from the Russian Orthodox Church in January 1919, when the short-lived Ukrainian state adopted a decree declaring autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.[21] Its independence was reaffirmed by the Bolsheviks in the Ukrainian Republic, and by 1924 it had 30 bishops, almost 1,500 priests, nearly 1,100 parishes, and between 4 and 6 million members.
From its inception, the Ukrainian AOC faced the hostility of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Ukrainian Republic. In the late 1920s, Soviet authorities accused it of nationalist tendencies. In 1930 the government forced the church to reorganize as the "Ukrainian Orthodox Church", and few of its parishes survived until 1936. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian AOC continued to function outside the borders of the Soviet Union, and it was revived on Ukrainian territory under the German occupation during World War II. In the late 1980s, some of the Orthodox faithful in the Ukrainian Republic appealed to the Soviet government to reestablish the Ukrainian AOC.[clarification needed (with what result?)]
Armenian Apostolic
The
Catholics
Latin Church
The majority of the 5.5 million Latin Catholics in the Soviet Union lived in the Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Latvian republics, with a sprinkling in the Moldavian, Ukrainian, and Russian republics. Following World War II, the most active Latin Catholic community in the Soviet Union was in the Lithuanian Republic, where the majority of people are Catholics. The Latin Church there was viewed as an institution that both fostered and defended Lithuanian national interests and values. From 1972 a Catholic underground publication,
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
Western Ukraine, which included largely the historic region of Galicia, became part of the Soviet Union in 1939. Although Ukrainian, its population was never part of the Russian Empire, but was Eastern Catholic. After the Second World War, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church identified closely with the nationalist aspirations of the region, arousing the hostility of the Soviet government, which was in combat with Ukrainian Insurgency. In 1945, Soviet authorities arrested the church's Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj, nine bishops and hundreds of clergy and leading lay activists, and deported them to forced labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere. The nine bishops and many of the clergy died in prisons, concentration camps, internal exile, or soon after their release during the post-Stalin thaw,[22] but after 18 years of imprisonment and persecution, Metropolitan Slipyj was released when Pope John XXIII intervened on his behalf. Slipyj went to Rome, where he received the title of Major Archbishop of Lviv, and became a cardinal in 1965.[22]
In 1946 a synod was called in Lviv, where, despite being uncanonical in both Catholic and Orthodox understanding, the Union of Brest was annulled, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was officially annexed to the Russian Orthodox Church. St. George's Cathedral in Lviv became the throne of Russian Orthodox Archbishop Makariy.[22]
For the clergy that joined the Russian Orthodox Church, the Soviet authorities refrained from the large-scale persecution seen elsewhere. In Lviv only one church was closed. In fact, the western dioceses of Lviv-Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk were the largest in the USSR. Canon law was also relaxed, allowing the clergy to shave their beards (a practice uncommon in Orthodoxy) and to conduct the liturgy in Ukrainian instead of Slavonic.[citation needed]
In 1989 the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was officially re-established after a catacomb period of more than 40 years.
Protestants
Protestant communities (particularly
Baptists, Evangelical Christians, and Pentecostals
The Second World War saw a relaxation of church-state relations in the Soviet Union and the Protestant community benefited alongside their Russian Orthodox counterparts. In 1944, the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists was formed, bringing together the two main strands within Soviet Protestantism. Over the following two years, the leaders of the two main Pentecostal branches within the Soviet Union also agreed to join. The immediate post-war period saw the growth of Baptist and Pentecostal congregations and there was a religious revival in these years. Statistics provided by the leaders of the registered church suggest 250,000 baptised members in 1946 rising to 540,000 by 1958.[23] In fact the influence of the Protestantism was much wider than these figures suggest: in addition to the existence of unregistered Baptist and Pentecostal groups, there were also thousands who attended worship without taking baptism. Many Baptist and Pentecostal congregations were in Ukraine. Women significantly outnumbered men in these congregations, though the pastors were male.[24] By 1991, Ukraine had the second largest Baptist community in the world, behind only the United States.[25]
Although the Soviet state had established the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in 1944, and encouraged congregations to register, this did not signal the end to the persecution of Christians. Many leaders and ordinary believers of different Protestant communities fell victims to the persecution by Communist government, including imprisonment. Persecution was particularly vicious in the years 1948-53 and again in the early 1960s.
Despite the Soviet state's attempt to create a single, unified church movement, there were many divisions within the evangelical church. In the early 1960s, a break-away group formed a new movement which called for a spiritual awakening and greater independence from the Soviet state. Leaders of this group (eventually known as the Council of the Church of Evangelical Christians-Baptists) faced particular persecution. Pentecostals, too, formed their own underground organization and were targeted by the state as a result.
Lutherans
Lutherans, the second largest Protestant group, lived for the most part in the Latvian and Estonian republics. In the 1980s, Lutheran churches in these republics identified to some extent with nationality issues[
Other Protestants
A number of other Protestant groups were present, including
Other Christian groups
The March 1961 instruction on religious cults explained for the first time, that "sects, the teaching and character of activities of which has anti-state and savagely extremist [изуверский] character:
A number of congregations of
Judaism
See history of the Jews in the Soviet Union.
Islam
After the Bolshevik revolution, Islam was for some time (until 1929) treated better than the Russian Orthodox Church, which Bolsheviks regarded as a center of the "reaction", and other religions. In the declaration "Ко всем трудящимся мусульманам России и Востока" (To All Working Muslims in Russia and the Orient) of November 1917, the Bolshevik government declared the freedom to exercise their religion and customs for Muslims "whose beliefs and customs had been suppressed by the Czars and the Russian oppressors".[29]
In the second half of 1920s and in 1930s, state repressions, suppression and atheist propaganda against all religions increased. E.g. in 1930, out of the 12,000 mosques in Tatarstan, more than 10,000 were closed, from 90 to 97% mullahs and muezzins were deprived of the right to exercise their profession.[30]
During the Great Patriotic War, the restrictions on religion were erased somewhat. In 1943 the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan was established. In 1949, 415 registered mosques functioned in the Soviet Union.[31]
In the late 1980s, Islam had the second largest following in the Soviet Union: between 45 and 50 million people identified themselves as Muslims. But the Soviet Union had only about 500 working mosques, a fraction of the number in prerevolutionary Russia, and Soviet law forbade Islamic religious activity outside working mosques and Islamic schools.
All working mosques, religious schools, and Islamic publications were supervised by four "spiritual directorates" established by Soviet authorities to provide government control. The
Soviet Muslims differed linguistically and culturally from each other, speaking about fifteen
Culturally, some Muslim groups had highly developed urban traditions, whereas others were recently nomadic. Some lived in industrialized environments, others in isolated mountainous regions. In sum, Muslims were not a homogeneous group with a common national identity and heritage, although they shared the same religion and the same country.
In the late 1980s, unofficial Muslim congregations, meeting in tea houses and private homes with their own mullahs, greatly outnumbered those in the officially sanctioned mosques. The unofficial mullahs were either self-taught or informally trained by other mullahs. In the late 1980s, unofficial Islam appeared to split into fundamentalist congregations and groups that emphasized Sufism.
Policy toward religions in practice
Mass repression in the Soviet Union |
---|
Economic repression |
Political repression |
Ideological repression |
Ethnic repression |
|
Soviet policy toward religion was based on the ideology of
Marxism-Leninism advocates the suppression and ultimately the disappearance of religious beliefs, considering them to be "unscientific" and "superstitious". In the 1920s and 1930s, such organizations as the
The state's efforts to eradicate religion in the Soviet Union, however, varied over the years with respect to particular religions and were affected by higher state interests. In 1923, a
In 1929, with the onset of the Cultural Revolution in the Soviet Union and an upsurge of radical militancy in the Party and Komsomol, a powerful "hard line" in favor of mass closing of churches and arrests of priests became dominant and evidently won Stalin's approval. Secret "hard line" instructions were issued to local party organizations, but not published. When the anti-religious drive inflamed the anger of the rural population, not to mention that of the Pope and other Western church spokesmen, the state was able to back off from a policy that it had never publicly endorsed anyway.[34][35]
Although all Soviet leaders had the same long-range goal of developing a cohesive Soviet people, they pursued different policies to achieve it. For the Soviet government, questions of nationality and religion were always closely linked. Therefore, their attitude toward religion also varied from a total ban on some religions to official support of others.
Policy towards nationalities and religion
This section relies largely or entirely on a single source. (November 2022) |
In theory, the
Twenty-two nationalities lived in autonomous republics with a degree of local self-government and representation in the Council of Nationalities in the Supreme Soviet. Eighteen more nationalities had territorial enclaves (autonomous oblasts and autonomous okrugs) but had very few powers of self-government. The remaining nationalities had no right of self-government at all. Joseph Stalin's 1913 definition of a nation as "a historically constituted and stable community of people formed on the basis of common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup revealed in a common culture" was retained by Soviet authorities throughout the 1980s.[citation needed] However, in granting nationalities union republic status, three additional factors were considered: a population of at least 1 million, territorial compactness, and location on the borders of the Soviet Union.
Although Lenin believed that eventually all nationalities would merge into one, he insisted that the Soviet Union be established as a federation of formally equal nations. In the 1920s, genuine cultural concessions were granted to the nationalities. Communist elites of various nationalities were permitted to flourish and to have considerable self-government. National cultures, religions, and languages were not merely tolerated but, in areas with Muslim populations, encouraged.
Demographic changes in the 1960s and 1970s whittled down the overall Russian majority, but they also caused two nationalities (the Kazakhs and Kirgiz) to become minorities in their own republics at the time of the 1979 census, and considerably reduced the majority of the titular nationalities in other republics. This situation led Leonid Brezhnev to declare at the 24th Communist Party Congress in 1971 that the process of creating a unified Soviet people had been completed, and proposals were made to abolish the federative system and replace it with a single state. In the 1970s, however, a broad movement of national dissent began to spread throughout the Soviet Union. It manifestated itself in many ways: Jews insisted on their right to emigrate to Israel; Crimean Tatars demanded to be allowed to return to Crimea; Lithuanians called for the restoration of the rights of the Catholic Church; and Helsinki Watch groups were established in the Georgian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian republics. Petitions, literature, and occasional public demonstrations voiced public demands for the human rights of all nationalities. By the end of the 1970s, however, massive and concerted efforts by the KGB had largely suppressed the national dissent movement. Nevertheless, Brezhnev had learned his lesson. Proposals to dismantle the federative system were abandoned in favour of a policy of drawing the nationalities together more gradually.
Soviet officials identified religion closely with nationality. The implementation of policy toward a particular religion, therefore, depended on the state's perception of the bond between that religion and the nationality practicing it, the size of the religious community, the extent to which the religion accepted outside authority, and the nationality's willingness to subordinate itself to political authority. Thus the smaller the religious community and the more closely it identified with a particular nationality, the tighter were the state's policies, especially if the religion also recognized a foreign authority such as the pope.
Policy towards Orthodoxy
As for the Russian Orthodox Church, Soviet authorities sought to control it and, in times of national crisis, to exploit it for the state's own purposes; but their ultimate goal was to eliminate it. During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941 only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence prior to World War I.
Such crackdowns related to many people's dissatisfaction with the church in pre-revolutionary Russia. The close ties between the church and the state led to the perception of the church as corrupt and greedy by many members of the
The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 induced Stalin to enlist the Russian Orthodox Church as an ally to arouse Russian patriotism against foreign aggression. Russian Orthodox religious life experienced a revival: thousands of churches were reopened; there were 22,000 by the time Nikita Khrushchev came to power. The state permitted religious publications, and church membership grew.
During the final years of Joseph Stalin's rule, there was once again a tightening of anti-religious measurements.[37] In April 1948, Council for Religious Affairs sent out an instruction to its local commissioners to halt the registration of new religious communities and from that point churches were no longer opened.[38] The "Knowledge Society", which was established a year earlier, was engaged in educational activities and again began to publish anti-religious literature.[38]
Khrushchev reversed the government's policy of cooperation with the Russian Orthodox Church. Although it remained officially sanctioned, in 1959 Khrushchev launched an antireligious campaign that was continued in a less stringent manner by his successor, Leonid Brezhnev. By 1975 the number of active Russian Orthodox churches was reduced to 7,000. Some of the most prominent members of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and some activists were jailed or forced to leave the church. Their place was taken by docile clergy who were obedient to the state and who were sometimes infiltrated by KGB agents, making the Russian Orthodox Church useful to the government. It espoused and propagated Soviet foreign policy and furthered the russification of non-Russian Christians, such as Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians.
The state applied a different policy toward the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Viewed by the government as very nationalistic, both were suppressed, first at the end of the 1920s and again in 1944 after they had renewed themselves under German occupation. The leadership of both churches was decimated; large numbers of priests were shot or sent to labor camps, and members of their congregations were harassed and persecuted.
The Georgian Orthodox Church was subject to a somewhat different policy and fared far worse than the Russian Orthodox Church. During World War II, however, it was allowed greater autonomy in running its affairs in return for calling its members to support the war effort, although it did not achieve the kind of accommodation with the authorities that the Russian Orthodox Church had. The government reimposed tight control over it after the war. Out of some 2,100 churches in 1917, only 200 were still open in the 1980s, and it was forbidden to serve its adherents outside the Georgian Republic. In many cases, the government forced the Georgian Orthodox Church to conduct services in Old Church Slavonic instead of in the Georgian language.
Policy towards Catholicism and Protestantism
The Soviet government's policies toward the Catholic Church were strongly influenced by Soviet Catholics' recognition of an outside authority as head of their church. As a result of World War II, millions of Catholics (including Greco-Catholics) became Soviet citizens and were subjected to new repression. Also, in the three republics where most of the Catholics lived, the
Soviet policy was particularly harsh toward the
Before World War II, there were fewer Protestants in the Soviet Union than adherents of other faiths, but they showed remarkable growth since then. In 1944 the Soviet government established the
Policy toward other Christian groups
A number of congregations of
Jehovah's Witnesses were banned from practicing their religion. Under
Early in the Bolshevik period, predominantly before the end of the
Policy towards Islam
Soviet policy toward Islam was affected, on the one hand by the large Muslim population, its close ties to national cultures, and its tendency to accept Soviet authority, and on the other hand by its susceptibility to foreign influence. Although actively encouraging atheism, Soviet authorities permitted some limited religious activity in all the Muslim republics, under the auspices of the regional branches of the
Policy towards Judaism
While Lenin publicly condemned
The
The training of rabbis became impossible until the early 1940s, and until the late 1980s only one Yiddish periodical was published. Because of its identification with Zionism, Hebrew was taught only in schools for diplomats. Most of the 5,000 synagogues functioning prior to the Bolshevik Revolution were closed under Stalin, and others were closed under Khrushchev. The practice of Judaism became very difficult, intensifying the desire of Jews to leave the Soviet Union.[41]
See also
- Hujum
- Index of Soviet Union-related articles
- Council for Religious Affairs
- Culture of the Soviet Union
- Demographics of the Soviet Union
- State Atheism
- Soviet anti-religious legislation
- Soviet Anti-Catholic Campaigns
- Persecution of Christians in Warsaw Pact countries
- Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union
- Persecutions of the Catholic Church and Pius XII
- USSR anti-religious campaign (1917–1921)
- USSR anti-religious campaign (1921–1928)
- USSR anti-religious campaign (1928–1941)
- USSR anti-religious campaign (1958–1964)
- USSR anti-religious campaign (1970s–1990)
- Eastern Catholic victims of Soviet persecutions
- Persecution of Muslims in the former USSR
- Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Soviet Union
- Soviet Orientalist studies in Islam
- Religion in Russia
- Bezbozhnik
- Enemy of the people
- Russification
- Sovietization
- Red Terror
References
Notes
- ^ Article 123 of the constitution stated that all citizens of the union had equal rights "irrespective of their nationality or race, in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life.", while Article 124 allowed freedom of religion, including separation of church from school and state.[36]
References
- ^ Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly Failed
- ^ a b "Revelations from the Russian Archives: ANTI-RELIGIOUS CAMPAIGNS". Library of Congress. US Government. Retrieved 2 May 2016.
- JSTOR 128810.
- ISBN 9780521416436.
- ISBN 9789633860144.
- OL 25433417M.
- ISBN 0-521-46784-5.
- ^ Why Stalin Tried to Stamp Out Religion in the Soviet Union
- ^ How churches in the Soviet Union were desecrated and repurposed
- ^ How did the Soviets use captured churches?
- ^ 10 beautiful Moscow churches destroyed in Soviet times
- ^ Religion and the State in Russia and China: Suppression, Survival, and Revival, by Christopher Marsh, page 47. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011.
- ^ Inside Central Asia: A Political and Cultural History, by Dilip Hiro. Penguin, 2009.
- ISBN 9788185574479. Retrieved 14 July 2016.
Forced Conversion under Atheistic Regimes: It might be added that the most modern example of forced "conversions" came not from any theocratic state, but from a professedly atheist government — that of the Soviet Union under the Communists.
- ^ Geoffrey Blainey; A Short History of Christianity; Viking; 2011; p.494"
- ^ Lenin, V. I. "About the attitude of the working party toward the religion". Collected works, v. 17, p.41. Retrieved 9 September 2006.
- ^ "Lenin: The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion". www.marxists.org. Retrieved 2 July 2023.
- ^ Country Studies: Russia-The Russian Orthodox Church U.S. Library of Congress, Accessed 2008-04-03
- ^ N. S. Timasheff, Religion In Soviet Russia 1917-1942 (1942) online
- ISBN 978-0-8444-0727-2.
- ISBN 978-1-895571-45-5.
- ^ a b c d e "The Ukrainian Greek Catholics: A Historical Survey". Religious Information Service of Ukraine. Archived from the original on 2 April 2012.
- ^ State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), f. 6991, op. 4, d. 6 and d. 94.
- ^ N. Beliakova and Miriam Dobson, ‘Protestant women in the late Soviet era: gender, authority, and dissent’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 58 (2), 2016, 117-140.
- ^ Wanne, Catherine (2006). "EVANGELICALISM AND THE RESURGENCE OF RELIGION IN UKRAINE" (PDF). The National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.
- ^ Lutheran Churches. Religious Information Service of Ukraine. [full citation needed]
- ^ Keston Institute and the Defence of Persecuted Christians in the USSR. [full citation needed]
- ^ ГАРФ. Ф. 6991. Оп. 2. Д. 306. Л. 11–12.
- ^ Ко всем трудящимся мусульманам России и Востока
- ^ "Ислам в СССР: предыстория репрессий". Archived from the original on 8 October 2016. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
- ^ Искусство и религия: Современное исламское искусство народов России By Червонная С. М. Page 118.
- ISBN 0-19-505001-0
- ^ "Moscow Keeps Easter; No Riots Expected; A Faithful Few Still Go to Church and Are Unmolested", The New York Times. 6 April 1923. Page 4. Retrieved 2011-03-14.
- ^ Fitzpatrick, S. On the drive against religion in 1929–30. Stalin's Peasants. New-York, 1994. pages 59–63.
- ^ Fitzpatrick, S. Everyday Stalinism. New-York, 1999. p.27
- OCLC 1007090474.
- OCLC 247791350.
- ^ ISBN 9781315705699.
- ^ Helene Carrere d'Encausse, The National Republics Lose Their Independence, in Edward A. Allworth, (edit), Central Asia: One Hundred Thirty Years of Russian Dominance, A Historical Overview. Duke University Press, 1994.
- ^ "Anti-religious Campaigns". www.loc.gov. Archived from the original on 27 July 2004.
- ^ a b Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Montefiore, 2007
Bibliography
- Ramet, S. P. (1984). Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- ——. (1992). Religious policy in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Smolkin, Victoria (2018). A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691174273.