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The history of Christianity in the Soviet Union was not limited to repression and secularization. Soviet policy toward religion was based on the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which made atheism
the official doctrine of the Soviet Union. Marxism-Leninism has
consistently advocated the control, suppression, and the elimination of religion.^[1]

The state was committed to the destruction of religion,^[2][3] and destroyed churches, mosques and temples,
ridiculed, harassed and executed religious leaders, flooded the schools
and media with atheistic propaganda, and generally promoted 'scientific
atheism' as the truth that society should accept.^[4][5]

Religious beliefs and practices persisted among the majority of the population,^[4]
in the domestic and private spheres but also in the scattered public
spaces allowed by a state that recognized its failure to eradicate
religion and the political dangers of an unrelenting culture war.^[2][6]

Official Soviet stance

The Soviet regime was ostensibly committed to the complete annihilation of religious institutions and ideas.^[7] Militant atheism was central to the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union^[8] and a high priority of all Soviet leaders.^[3] Communism required the abolition of religion.^[3] Convinced atheists were considered to be more virtuous individuals than those of religious belief.^[3]

The state established atheism as the only scientific truth.^{[9][10][11][12][13][14][unreliable source?]}
Criticism of atheism or the state's anti-religious policies was
forbidden and could lead to forced retirement, arrest and/or
imprisonment.^[15][16][17]

The holding of a religion was never officially outlawed and the
Soviet Constitutions always guaranteed the right to believe. However,
since Marxist ideology as interpreted by Lenin^[18]
and his successors dictated that religion was an obstacle to the
construction of the communist society, putting an end to all religion
(and replacing it with atheism^[19])
was a fundamentally important ideological goal of the state. The
persecution of religion was carried out officially through many legal
measures that were designed to hamper religious activities, a massive
volume of anti-religious propaganda as well as education, and through
various other means. The official persecution was also, however,
accompanied by much secret instructions that remained unofficial. In
practice the state also sought to control religious bodies and to
interfere with them, with the ultimate goal of making them disappear.^[19] To this effect, the state sought to control the activities of the leaders of the different religious communities.^[7]

The official persecution was often disguised under euphemisms in
official party documents such as 'struggle against bourgeois ideology',
'dissemination of materialist ideology', etc. The government often
rejected the principle that all religious believers should be treated as
public enemies,^[18]
partly due to pragmatic considerations of the large number of people
adhering to a faith and also partly from the belief that there were many
loyal Soviet citizens included among the number of believers whom ought
to be convinced to become atheists rather than outright attacked.

Religious believers were always subject to anti-religious propaganda,
legislation that restricted their religious practice or suffered
restrictions in Soviet society, however, as a result of the paradigm
stated above, they were rarely officially ever subject to arrest,
imprisonment or death simply for having their beliefs, but usually they
suffered those things during the persecution as a result of some
perception (real or imagined) of their resistance to the state's broader
campaign against religion.^[20]

The campaign was designed to disseminate atheism, and the acts of
violence and terror tactics that would be used, while being almost
always officially invoked on the basis of perceived resistance to the
state, in the larger scheme they were meant not simply as acts against
rebellion, but to further assist in the suppression of religion in order
to disseminate atheism.^[20]

Soviet tactics

The tactics varied over the years and became more moderate or more
harsh at different times. Among common tactics included confiscating
church property, ridiculing religion, harassing
believers, and propagating atheism in the schools. Actions toward
particular religions, however, were determined by State interests, and
most organized religions were never outlawed.

Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers along with execution included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals.^{[21][22][23][24]} Many Orthodox (along with peoples of other faiths) were also subjected to psychological punishment or torture and mind control experimentation in order to force them give up their religious convictions (see Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union).^[22][23][25]
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.^[1]

In the Soviet Union, in addition to the methodical closing and
destruction of churches, the charitable and social work formerly done by
ecclesiastical authorities was taken over by the state. As with all
private property, Church owned property was confiscated into public use.
The few places of worship left to the Church were legally viewed as
state property which the government permitted the church to use.

Protestant Christians in the USSR (Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists etc.) in the period after the Second world war were compulsively sent to mental hospitals,
endured trials and prisons (often for refusal to enter military
service). Some were even compulsively deprived of their parent rights.^[26]

Anti-religious campaign 1917–1921

and 1922 confiscation of Russian Orthodox Church property

In November 1917, following the collapse of the tsarist government, a council of the Russian Orthodox Church reestablished the patriarchate and elected the metropolitan Tikhon as patriarch.^[27]

In November 1917, within weeks of the revolution, the People's
Commissariat for Enlightenment was established, which a month later
created the All-Russian Union of Teachers-Internationalists for the
purpose of removing religious instruction from school curricula.
In order to intensify the anti-religious propaganda in the school
system, the Chief Administration for Political Enlightenment
(Glavpolitprosvet) was established in November 1920.^[28]

Lenin's decree on the separation of church and state
in early 1918 deprived the formerly official church of its status of
legal person, the right to own property, or to teach religion in both
state and private schools or to any group of minors.^[29]
The decree abolished the privileges of the church and thus ended the
alliance between church and state. The clergy openly attacked the
decree. The leadership of the Church issued a special appeal to
believers to obstruct the enforcement of the decree.^[30]

In addition, the Decree “On the Separation of the Church from the
State and the School from the Church" also determined the relationship
between school and church. “School shall be separated from church,” the
Decree said. “The teaching of religious doctrines in all the state and
public, as well as private educational institutions where general
subjects are taught shall not be permitted. Citizens may teach and be
taught religion in private.” The decree put an end to the church's
interference in public education and forcing students to study religion
against their will. A secularized school system was formed.^[30]

Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow
excommunicated the Soviet leadership on January 19, 1918 (Julian
Calendar) for conducting this campaign. In retaliation the regime
arrested and killed dozens of bishops, thousands of the lower clergy and
monastics, and multitudes of laity.^[31] The seizing of church property over the next few years would be marked by a brutal campaign of violent terror.^[32]

During the Russian Civil War, many clerics were killed. Some died as a
result of spontaneous violence endemic in the power vacuum of the war
and some were executed by state security services for supporting the
White armies. The church claimed that 322 bishops and priests had been
killed during the Revolution.^[33]
Between June 1918 and January 1919, official church figures (which did
not include the Volga, Kama and several other regions in Russia) claimed
that one metropolitan, eighteen bishops, one hundred and two priests,
one hundred and fifty-four deacons, and ninety-four monks/nuns had been
killed (laity not recorded).^[34]
The estimate of 330 clergy and monastics killed by 1921 may have been
an underestimate, due to the fact that 579 monasteries/convents had been
liquidated during this period and there were widespread mass executions
of monks/nuns during these liquidations.^[34]

This widespread violence by members of the Red Army against the
church was not openly supported by Lenin, however, in later years
high-ranking Soviet officials including Emelian Yaroslavsky claimed central responsibility for these killings.^[35] They justified the violence by revising history and declaring that the church had been actively fighting against them.^[35]

The church had expressed its support to General Kornilov's
counter-revolutionary coup attempt, assisted the rebellions of Kerensky
and Krasnov, and had called on believers to fight against the new state,
and even to shed blood in fighting against it. There was Tikhon's
appeal "To the Orthodox People" in which he presented Tikhon's call for
believers to be willing even to give up their lives as martyrs in the
effort to preserve their religion (“It is better to shed one’s blood and
to be awarded martyr’s crown than to let the enemies desecrate Orthodox
faith,” said the Appeal.^[30])

Most of the clergy reacted toward the Russian Revolution
with open hostility. During the Civil War, many representatives of the
Russian orthodox clergy collaborated or had sympathies with the White
Armies and foreign invading armies, hoping for a restoration of the
prerevolutionary regime.^[36]
The church had expressed its support to General Kornilov's
counter-revolutionary coup attempt. The church adopted the Enactment on
Legal Status of the Church in Russia which tried to vindicate the
privileges that the church had enjoyed for centuries under the old
regime. The Orthodox Church, said the document, “holds the pre-eminent
public and legal position in Russian state among other denominations”.^[30]
Tikhon anathematised the Soviet government and called on believers to
fight against it and its decrees. The church leadership openly urged
fighting against Soviet Government in its appeal entitled “To the
Orthodox People”. “It is better to shed one’s blood and to be awarded
martyr’s crown than to let the enemies desecrate Orthodox faith,” said
the Appeal.^[30]

The church's opposition to the Soviet Government was part of a
general counter-revolutionary movement. In the first days after the
victory of the October armed uprising in Petrograd, the clergy assisted
the rebellion of Kerensky and Krasnov as they attempted to overthrow
Soviet power. The activity of the Local Council in Moscow supported the
cadets who had revolted. When the rebels seized the Kremlin for a time,
its cathedrals and bell-towers were placed at their disposal at once.^[30]

Church resistance was not organized nationally, however, and Tikhon never gave his blessing to White forces.^[35]
The Patriarch in fact declared his neutrality during the civil war and
attempted to issue instructions to the Russian orthodox church on
political neutrality and disengagement.^[37]
Propaganda at the time claimed that this was a camouflage for the
church's real position which was supposedly support for a return of
Tsarism^[37]

Furthermore, the fraudulence of later Soviet revisions is clearly
shown through the fact that none of the documented acts of brutalities
against members of the clergy by the Reds involved anyone who actually
took up arms with the Whites, and only a few of them were cases of
clergy who gave vocal support.^[35]
The fraudulence of such revisionism was shown even further by the fact
that the slicing up of unarmed prisoners, scalping and torturing
believers, shooting priests' wives and children, and many other such
acts recorded in the documented acts of brutality by the Reds against
the Orthodox church during the civil war have nothing to do with acting
in 'self-defense'.^[35]

Anti-religious atheistic propaganda was considered to be of essential
importance to Lenin's party from its early pre-revolutionary days and
the regime was quick to create atheist journals to attack religion
shortly after its coming to power. The first operated under the name Revolution and the Church (Revolustiia i tserkov).
It was originally believed in the ideology that religion would
disappear quickly with the coming of the revolution and that its
replacement with atheism would be inevitable. The leadership of the new
state did not take much time, however, to come to the conclusion that
religion would not disappear on its own and greater efforts should be
given to anti-religious propaganda.^[37]

For this purpose atheistic work was centrally consolidated underneath
the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the CP Central Committee
(Agitprop) in 1920 using the guidelines of article 13 of the Russian
Communist Party (RCP) adopted by the 8th party congress.

Article 13 stated

As far as religion is concerned, the RCP will not be satisfied by the
decreed separation of Church and State... The Party aims at the
complete destruction of links between the exploiting classes and...
religious propaganda, while assisting the actual liberation of the
working masses from religious prejudices and organizing the broadest
possible education-enlightening and anti-religious propaganda. At the
same time it is necessary carefully to avoid any insult to the
believers' feelings, which would lead to the hardening of religious
fanaticism

^[37]

The article would be very important in anti-religious policy in the
USSR in later years, and its last sentence, which would be both ignored
and recalled back at different point in Soviet history, would play an
important role in later rivalries in the power struggles of later years
between different Soviet leaders.^[28]

Public debates were held between Christians and atheists after the
revolution up until they were suspended in 1929. Among famous
participants of these debates included on the atheist side, Commissar
for Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky.^[38]
People would line up for hours in order to get seats to see them. The
authorities sometimes tried to limit the speaking time of the Christians
to ten minutes, and on other occasions the debates would be called off
at last minute. This may have been a result of a reportedly high quality
of some of the religious debaters. Professor V.S. Martsinkovsky, raised
as orthodox but who had become an evangelical Protestant was one of the
best on the religious side, and Lunacharsky reportedly canceled one of
his debates with him after having lost in a previous debate.^[39] On one occasion in 1921 a large crowd of Komsomol
hecklers arrived at one of Martsinkovsky's debates and occupied the two
front rows. When the leader tried to heckle, he found himself
unsupported by his boys, and after wards they told him that he was not
saying what they were told he was going to say.^[39]

Anti-religious campaign 1921–1928

The tenth CPSU congress met in 1921 and it passed a resolution
calling for 'wide-scale organization, leadership, and cooperation in the
task of anti-religious agitation and propaganda among the broad masses
of the workers, using the mass media, films, books, lectures, and other
devices.^[40]

When church leaders demanded freedom of religion under the
constitution, the Communists responded with terror. They murdered the
metropolitan of Kiev and executed twenty-eight bishops and 6,775
priests. Despite mass demonstrations in support of the church,
repression cowed most ecclesiastical leaders into submission.^[41]

In August 1921, a Plenary meeting of the CPSU Central Committee (the
highest leadership of the state) adopted an 11-point instruction on the
interpretation and application of article 13 (mentioned above). It
differentiated between religious believers and uneducated believers, and
allowed the latter to have party membership if they were devoted to
Communism, but that they should be re-educated to make them atheists. It
also called for moderation in the anti-religious campaign and
emphasized that the state was fighting against all religion and not
simply individual ones (such as the Orthodox church)^[42]

The public debates began to be suppressed after the 10th congress,
until they were formally suspended in 1929 and replaced with public
lectures by atheists. V. S. Martsinkovsky was arrested and sent into
exile in 1922 on account of his preaching that was attracting people to
religion and told he could return in a few years once the workers had
become wiser (he was in fact never allowed to return).^[43]

The church allegedly tried to set up free religio-philosophical
academies, study circles and periodicals in the 1920s, which Lenin met
by arresting and expelling all the organizers abroad and shutting down
these efforts with force.^[44]

Despite the August 1921 instruction, the state took a very hard line
against the Orthodox Church on the pretext that it was a legacy of the
Tsarist past (the difference in practice and policy may have reflected
internal disagreement among the party leadership). Leon Trotsky wanted Patriarch Tikhon to be killed, but Lenin forbade it for fear it would produce another Patriarch Hermogenes (a Patriarch who was killed by the Poles when they occupied Moscow in 1612).^[45][46]

In order to weaken the Orthodox church, the state supported a schism
called the Renovationist sect, by giving it legal recognition in 1922
and continuing to terrorize the old Orthodox as well as deprive it of
legal means of existence.^[45] The Patriarch was arrested in 1922 under thinly veiled criminal proceedings,^[8] and his chancery was taken over by the Renovationists.^[47]
He refused to give in to the government's demands and was tortured. The
Renovationists restored a Holy Synod to power, and brought division
among clergy and faithful.

In 1922 there was a famine in Russia. Factory and office workers in
1921 proposed that the church's wealth be used for hunger relief. These
proposals were supported by some clergymen. But many other priests led
by Tikhon opposed giving any part of the valuables to help the hungry.
Tikhon threatened repressions against those clergymen and laymen who
wanted to give away church riches.^[30]

All-Russia Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR decreed on
February 26, 1922 that surplus church valuables should be expropriated
in response to the people’s requests. Under the decree, part of the gold
and silver articles were to be confiscated from the property placed at
the disposal of believers by the state free of charge. Articles made of
precious metals were to be taken away with caution and the clergymen
were to be informed in advance of the procedure and dates for the
confiscation. It was stipulated that the process of expropriation should
not hinder public worship or hurt the interests of believers.^[30]

Soviet police reports from 1922 claim that the peasantry (and
especially women) considered Tikhon to be a martyr after his arrest over
his supposed resistance and that the 'progressive' clergy were traitors
to the religion; there were also rumors circulated that Jews were
running the Soviet Supreme Church Administration, and for this reason
Lenin forbade Trotsky from involvement with the campaign, and prevented
certain key roles being given to those of Jewish descent.^[48]

There was bloody incident in a town called Shuia. Lenin wrote that
their enemies had foolishly afforded them a great opportunity by this
action, since he believed that the peasant masses would not support the
church's hold on its valuables in light of the famine and that the
resistance that the church offered could be met with retaliation against
the clergy.^[46]
Otto von Radowitz, the counselor at the German embassy in Moscow,
recorded that the campaign was a deliberate provocation to get the
clergy to react in order to attack it in response.^[8]

Lenin outlined that the entire issue of the church valuable campaign
could be used as a pretext in the public eye to attack the church and
kill clergy.^[48]

The sixth sector of the OGPU, led by Yevgeny Tuchkov, began aggressively arresting and executing bishops, priests, and devout worshipers, such as Metropolitan Veniamin in Petrograd in 1922 for refusing to accede to the demand to hand in church valuables (including sacred relics). Archbishop Andronik of Perm, who worked as a missionary in Japan, was buried alive.^[49]
Bishop Germogen of Tobolsk, who voluntarily accompanied the czar into
exile, was strapped to the paddle wheel of a steamboat and mangled by
the rotating blades. .^[49]

In 1922, the Solovki Camp
of Special Purpose, the first Russian concentration camp and a former
Orthodox monastery, was established in the Solovki Islands in the White
Sea [1].
Eight metropolitans, twenty archbishops, and forty-seven bishops of the
Orthodox Church died there, along with tens of thousands of the laity.
Of these, 95,000 were put to death, executed by firing squad.^{[citation needed]} Father Pavel Florensky was one of the New-martyrs of this particular period.

In the first five years after the Bolshevik revolution, an English
journalist estimated that 28 bishops and 1,215 priests were executed.^[50][51] Recently released evidence indicates over 8,000 were killed in 1922 during the conflict over church valuables.^[50] This included people like the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna who was at this point a monastic. Along with her murder was Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich Romanov; the Princes Ioann Konstantinovich, Konstantin Konstantinovich, Igor Konstantinovich and Vladimir Pavlovich Paley; Grand Duke Sergei's secretary, Fyodor Remez; and Varvara Yakovleva, a sister from the Grand Duchess Elizabeth's convent.

They were herded into the forest, pushed into an abandoned mineshaft
and grenades were then hurled into the mineshaft. Her remains were
buried in Jerusalem, in the Church of Maria Magdalene.

Specialized anti-religious publications began in 1922, including Yemelyan Yaroslavsky’s Bezbozhnik, which would later form the basis for the League of the Militant Godless.

With the conclusion of the campaign of seizing church valuables, the terror campaign against the church^[52] was called off for a while. The church closings ended for a period and abuses were investigated.^[53] The propaganda war continue, and public institutions worked to purge religious views from intellectuals and academia.^[54][55]

The old Marxist assumption that religion would disappear on its own
with changing material conditions was pragmatically challenged as
religion as persisted. The Soviet leadership debated with themselves of
how best to combat religion. The positions ranged from the 'rightist'
belief that religion would die on its own naturally with increasing
education, and the 'leftist' belief that religion needed to be attacked
strongly. Lenin called the struggle to disseminate atheism ‘the cause of
our state’.^[56]

The government had difficulties trying to implement anti-religious
education in schools, due to a shortage of atheist teachers.
Anti-religious education began in secondary schools in 1925.

The state changed its position on the renovationists and began to
increasingly see them as an independent threat in the late 1920s due to
their great success in attracting people to religion.^[57] Tikhon died in 1925 and the Soviets forbade patriarchal elections to be held.^[58] Patriarchal locum tenens (acting Patriarch) Metropolitan Sergius
(Stragorodsky, 1887–1944), going against the opinion of a major part of
the church's parishes, in 1927 issued a declaration accepting the
Soviet authority over the church as legitimate, pledging the church's
cooperation with the government and condemning political dissent within
the church. With his notorious Declaration of 1927, he made the church
in the Soviet Union a political tool of the atheist government. The
majority of the clergy vehemently protested against this concordat, but
they were systematically killed.

He did this in order to secure the survival of the church.^[58]
Metropolitan Sergius formally expressed his "loyalty" to the Soviet
government and henceforth refrained from criticizing the state in any
way. This attitude of loyalty, however, provoked more divisions in the
church itself: inside Russia, a number of faithful opposed Sergius, and
abroad, the Russian metropolitans of America and western Europe severed
their relations with Moscow.^[29]

By this he granted himself with the power that he, being a deputy of imprisoned Metropolitan Peter and acting against his will, had no right to assume according to the XXXIV Apostolic canon, which led to a split with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia abroad and the Russian True Orthodox Church (Russian Catacomb Church) within the Soviet Union,^[2] as they remained faithful to the Canons of the Apostles, declaring the part of the church led by Metropolitan Sergius schism, sometimes coined as sergianism.^[59]

Due to this canonical disagreement it is disputed which church has
been the legitimate successor to the Russian Orthodox Church that had
existed before 1925. [2][3][4][5]

In 1927, the state tried to mend the schism by bringing the
renovationists back into the Orthodox church, partly so that the former
could be better controlled through agents they had in the latter.

The Komsomol and later LMG would try to implement the 10th Congress
resolution by various attacks, parades, theatrical performances,
journals, brochures and films. The Komsomol would hold crude blasphemous
'Komsomol Christmases' and 'Komsomol Easters' headed by hooligans
dressed as orthodox clergy.^[43]
The processions would include the burning of icons, religious books,
mock images of Christ, the Virgin, etc. The propaganda campaign,
however, was a failure and many people remained with their religious
convictions. The church held its own public events with some success,
and well competed with the anti-religious propaganda during these years.^[60]

Anti-religious campaign 1928–1941

The Orthodox church suffered terribly in the 1930s, and many of its members were killed or sent to labor camps.
In the period between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox Churches in
the Russian Republic fell from 29,584 to fewer than 500. 1929 was a
watershed year in which Soviet policy brought much new legislation in
place that would form the basis for the harsh anti-religious persecution
in the following decade.

Anti-religious education was introduced from the first-grade up in
1928 and anti-religious work was intensified throughout the education
system. A massive purge was conducted at the same time of Christian
intellectuals, who mostly died in the camps or in prison,^[61] in order to take away the church’s intellectuals and assist official propaganda that only backward people believed in God.^[62]

The church's successful competition with the ongoing and widespread
atheistic propaganda, prompted new laws to be adopted in 1929 on
'Religious Associations' as well as amendments to the constitution,
which forbade all forms of public, social, communal, educational,
publishing or missionary activities for religious believers.^[60]
This also prevented, of course, the church from printing any material
for public consumption or responding to the criticism against it. This
caused many religious tracts to be circulated as illegal literature or samizdat.^[21]
Numerous other measures were introduced that were designed to cripple
the church, and effectively made it illegal to have religious activities
of any sort outside of liturgical services within the walls of the few
churches that would remain open, and even these would be subject to much
interference and harassment. Catechism classes, religious schools,
study groups, Sunday schools and religious publications were all illegal
and/or banned.

The League of the Militant Godless
(LMG), under Emelian Yaroslavsky, was the main instrument of the
anti-religious campaign and it was given special powers that allowed it
to dictate to public institutions throughout the country what they
needed to do for the campaign.^[38]

After 1929 and through the 1930s, the closing of churches, mass
arrests of the clergy and religiously active laity, and persecution of
people for attending church reached unprecedented proportions.^[2][60]
The LMG employed terror tactics against believers in order to further
the campaign, while employing the guise of protecting the state or
prosecuting law-breakers. The clergy were attacked as foreign spies and
trials of bishops were conducted with their clergy as well as lay
adherents who were reported as 'subversive terroristic gangs' that had
been unmasked.^[63] Official propaganda at the time called for the banishment of the very concept of God from the Soviet Union.^[64] These persecutions were meant to assist the ultimate socialist goal of eliminating religion.^[64][65] From 1932 to 1937 Joseph Stalin
declared the 'five year plans of atheism' and the LMG was charged with
completely eliminating all religious expression in the country.^[64]
Many of these same methods and terror tactics were also imposed against
others that the regime considered to be its ideological enemies.

The debate between the ‘rightist’ and ‘leftist’ sides of how to best
combat religion found some conclusion in 1930 and after wards, when the
state officially condemned extremes on both sides. Marxist leaders who
took either position on this issue would find themselves attacked by a
paranoid Stalin who did not tolerate other authorities to speak as
authorities on public policy.^[66]

A lull in the active persecution was experienced in 1930-33 following
Stalin's 1930 article 'Diziness From Success', however, it swept back
in fervor again after wards.^[67]

In 1934 the persecution of the Renovationist sect began to reach the proportions of the persecution of the old Orthodox church.^[68]

During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot.^[69]
Many thousands of victims of persecution became recognized in a special
canon of saints known as the "new martyrs and confessors of Russia".

A decline in enthusiasm in the campaign occurred in the late 1930s.^[70] The tone of the anti-religious campaign changed and became more moderate .^[64] It ended at the outbreak of World War II.

Official Soviet figures reported that up to one third of urban and
two thirds of rural population still held religious beliefs by 1937.
However, the anti-religious campaign of the past decade and the terror
tactics of the militantly atheist
regime, had effectively eliminated all public expressions of religion
and communal gatherings of believers outside of the walls of the few
churches that still held services.^[71]
This was accomplished in a country that only a few decades earlier had
had a deeply Christian public life and culture that had developed for
almost a thousand years.

World War II rapprochement

The USSR annexed new territories including Eastern Poland, the baltic
republics and a portion of Finland in 1939-1940. Anti-religious work in
these territories was lax in comparison with the rest of the country,
which as a whole experienced a decline in persecution after the
annexations. The regular seven-day work week was brought back in 1940.

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and many churches were
re-opened under the German occupation. Stalin ended the anti-religious
campaign in order to rally the country and prevent a large base of Nazi
support (which existed in some areas in the early stages of the
invasion). In September 1941, three months after the Nazi attack, the
last antireligious periodicals were shut down (officially because of a
paper shortage.^[72] Churches were re-opened in the Soviet Union and the League of the Militant Godless (LMG) was disbanded.^[73] Emelian Yaroslavsky,
the leader and founder of the LMG, who had led the entire national
anti-religious campaign in the 1930s, found himself writing an article
in praise of Orthodox Christian Fydor Dostoevsky for his alleged hatred of the Germans^[74]

The German forces, while allowing much greater religious tolerance,
attempted to sever the Orthodox church's loyalties to the Patriarch in
Moscow during the occupation, sometimes with threats. Ukrainian
Banderist nationalist partisans killed a number of clergy under the
occupation who retained loyalty to the Patriarch. The Germans, while
allowing the reopening of churches and religious life in the occupied
region, did not allow for seminaries to reopen due to the occupation
objective of eliminating education for the Slavic peoples, which would
be reduced to no more than the first two primary school grades.^[75]

Joseph Stalin revived the Russian Orthodox Church to intensify
patriotic support for the war effort and presented Russia as a defender
of Christian civilization, because he saw the church had an ability to
arouse the people in a way that the party could not and because he
wanted western help.^[5] On September 4, 1943, Metropolitans Sergius (Stragorodsky), Alexius (Simansky) and Nikolay (Yarushevich) were officially received by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
who proposed to create the Moscow Patriarchate. They received a
permission to convene a council on September 8, 1943, that elected
Sergius Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia.^[76]
The church had a public presence once again and passed measures
reaffirming their hierarchical structure that flatly contradicted the
1929 legislation and even Lenin's 1918 decree. The official legislation
was never withdrawn, however, which is suggestive that the authorities
did not consider that this tolerance would become permanent.^[77]

This is considered by some violation of the XXX Apostolic canon, as no church hierarch could be consecrated by secular authorities. [6] A new patriarch was elected, theological schools were opened, and thousands of churches began to function. The Moscow Theological Academy Seminary, which had been closed since 1918, was re-opened.

Many surviving clergy could return from camps or prisons, although a
significant number (especially those who did not recognize Sergii's 1927
loyalty pledge) remained and were not allowed to return unless they
renounced their position. Some clergy that had not recognized the 1927,
such as Bishop Afanasii (Sakharov) recognized the validity of the new
election and even encouraged those in the underground church to do so as
well, but were not allowed to return from exile even still.

Even after the rapprochement, there was still use of terror tactics
in some cases. After the Red Army recaptured occupied territories, many
clergy in these territories were arrested and sent to prisons or camps
for very long terms, allegedly for collaboration with the Germans, but
effectively for their rebuilding of religious life underneath the
occupation.^[78]

For example, Riga priest Nikolai Trubetskoi (1907–1978) lived under the Nazi occupation of Latvia,
and when the Germans retreated out of Latvia in 1944, he escaped out of
a German evacuation boat and hid behind to await the Red Army, but he
was arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to ten years of hard labour for
collaboration with the enemy. This was because under the occupation he
had been a zealous pastor and a had done very successful missionary
work. In reference to missionary work in the occupied territory near
Leningrad he wrote 'We opened and re-consecrated closed churches,
carried out mass baptisms. It's hard to imagine how, after years of
Soviet domination, people hungered after the Word of God. We married and
buried people; we had literally no time for sleep. I think that if such
a mission were sent today [1978] to the Urals, Siberia or even the
Ukraine, we'd see the same result.'.^[79]

Metropolitan Iosif (Chernov) (1893–1975), the Bishop of Taganrog
before the War, had spent nine years in Soviet prisons and camps by the
time Germans occupied the city. He used the opportunity of the
occupation to very actively revive church life and suffered threats from
the Nazis for remaining loyal to the Patriarch in Moscow. After the
Nazis retreateed, he was sentenced to eleven yars of hard labour in
Eastern Siberia for reviving church life. He was released in 1955.^[80]
Archbishop Veniamin (1900–1976) of Poltava lived in the territory that
belonged to Poland from 1921 to 1939. He was consecrated a bishop in
1941 just before the invasion, and he suffered some pressure from the
occupying forces to break relations with the Patriarch in Moscow, but he
resisted. After the Germans retreated he was arrested and imprisoned
for twelve years in the Kolyma camps, from which experience he never physically recovered and lost all of his hair.

These mass arrests were echoed in territories that were not even
occupied by the Germans. For example, in April 1946 there was a wave of
arrests in Moscow of clergy that belonged to Bishop Afanasii's group
that had returned to the official church; they were sentenced to long
terms of hard labour. Many laity were arrested and imprisoned as well
including the religious philosopher SI Fudel; most of them had already
been in prison and few of them would see freedom until after Stalin
died. The spiritual father of the group, Fr Seraphim (Batiukov), had
died in 1942, but his body was dug up and disposed of elsewhere in order
to prevent pilgrimages to his grave by people who believed him to be a
saint.

Postwar era

Between 1945 and 1959 the official organization of the church was
greatly expanded, although individual members of the clergy were
occasionally arrested and exiled. The number of open churches reached
25,000. By 1957 about 22,000 Russian Orthodox churches had become
active. But in 1959, Nikita Khrushchev
initiated his own campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church and
forced the closure of about 12,000 churches. By 1985, fewer than 7,000
churches remained active.

As the Red Army progressively began to push the German soldiers out
of Russia and victory became more certain, anti-religious propaganda
began to resurrect. The Central Committee issued new resolutions in 1944
and 45 that called for a renewal of anti-religious propaganda. For the
rest of Stalin's life, however, the propaganda was mostly limited to
words and its main target was against the Vatican. With the construction
of the 'Iron Curtain' across countries with large amounts of Roman
Catholics, this policy was partly meant to isolate the communist
countries from the Vatican's influence. Caricatures of Pius XII and
other RCC bishops depicted them as war mongers and supporters of police
brutalities. This propaganda was accompanied with the liquidation of
Uniate churches (eastern-rite catholic churches) in the Ukraine,
Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania which were forcibly merged with the
Orthodox church.^[81]
They were given the option of becoming western-rite Catholics, but the
absence of functioning churches in that rite except in large cities and
dedication to the Byzantine ritual stopped many from doing so; many who
resisted the official measure were imprisoned. The Lutheran Church in
the Baltic territories along with the Roman Catholic Church were both
subject to attacks for what the state perceived as loyalties to foreign
influences (the Lutherans in particular were blamed for having open
support for the German conquest.^[81]

Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and its clergy became one of the victims of Soviet authorities in immediate postwar time.^[29]
In 1945 Soviet authorities arrested, deported and sentenced to forced
labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere the church's metropolitan Josyf Slipyj
and nine bishops, as well as hundreds of clergy and leading lay
activists. While being restricted in the rest of the country, the
Orthodox church was encouraged to expand in the western Ukraine in order
to take away believers from the Ukrainian Catholics.^[82]

All the above-mentioned bishops and significant part of clergymen
died in prisons, concentration camps, internal exile, or soon after
their release during the post-Stalin thaw.^[83]
The exception was metropolitan Josyf Slipyj who, after 18 years of
imprisonment and persecution, was released thanks to the intervention of
Pope John XXIII, arrived in Rome, where he received the title of Major Archbishop of Lviv, and became cardinal in 1965.^[83] All Eastern-rite monasteries had been shut down by 1953.^[84]

The Orthodox believers had to fight hard in order to keep the
churches that were re-opened during the war, and some of them were
closed by the Council for the Affairs of the Orthodox Church, which also
tried to prevent bishops from using disciplinary measures against
church members for immorality.^[85]
Local plenipotentiaries of the Council for the Affairs of the Orthodox
Church used much effort to make it difficult for clergy to protect newly
reopened churches (this likely applied to other religions as well). For
example in 1949, three of the fifty-five churches in the diocese of
Crimea were closed, partly perhaps as a measure to scale down the
prestige and achievements of the martyr-Bishop Luka. In order to assist
new closures, a new measure was imposed that allowed for churches to be
closed if it had not been served by a priest for six months. This new
measure, coupled with the post-war shortage of clergy caused by the
regime (through both the liquidation or arrests of clergy by the state
and the lack of reopenings for seminaries), allowed for many churches to
be closed.

The Protestants also saw more tolerance in the post-war period.^[86]
The baptists, however, were viewed with great suspicion for their
active proselytizing tand their strong foreign ties, especially with the
United States^[81]/

Tax exemptions for Monasteries was instituted on August 29, 1945.

Stalin's new tolerance for religion was limited, however, and the
state would not tolerate priests who actively promoted the expansion of
religion, such as the Sakharovites. For example in 1945, Bishop Manuil
was made head of the Orenburg Diocese in the Southern Urals where he
reopened dozens of new parishes, re-lit the fires of faith in many
lukewarm people and sparked a religious revival in the area.
Consequently he was arrested in 1947 and sentenced to eight years of
hard labour.^[80]
Dimitri Dudko was arrested for unpublished religious poems, and a group
of Moscow University students that had started a religio-philosophic
study group in the late 1940s were also infamously arrested.^[87]
The latter group had started in 1946-1947 by Ilia Shmain, a 16- to
17-year-old youth and a student of philology. Shmain had concluded that
materialist philosophy was inadequate to explain fundamental existential
questions, and he started his club where the group discussed art,
philosophy and religion. They discussed both eastern religions and
Christianity. They had planned to get baptized when they were arrested
on January 19, 1949 and then sentenced to 8–10 years of hard labour
under the charge of criticizing the teachings of Marxist-Leninism (since
they had criticized the atheistic aspects of it).^[88] The theological seminary in Saratov was shut down in 1949.^[89]

Administrative decrees and political articles of the criminal code
continued to be used as guises under which antireligious persecution
occurred. Religiously active and dedicated believers who tried to
disseminate their faith were attacked.

There was little physical attack on the church for the remainder of
Stalin's lifetime, however, the persecution escalated in 1947 at which
point it was again declared that membership in the Komsomol or holding
of a teaching position was incompatible with religious belief.
Anti-religious propaganda was renewed in the newspapers, but with much
less strength as it was before. Often the propaganda would refrain from
mentioning religion specifically and would use some euphemism for it.^[90]

Beginning in 1946, the Soviet press began to criticize passive
attitudes towards religion, especially in youth organizations such as
the Komsomol and the Pioneers. It criticized public schools where it
demanded re-activization of antireligious propaganda on all levels.

In 1947 the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge, Znanie
(Knowledge), for short, was established and it effectively inherited
the role that had been left behind by the LMG as an anti-religious
propaganda organ.^[4][91]
It was a much more scholarly institution than the LMG, however, and it
was very diverse such that even religious believers could join it. In
1949 it claimed to have 40,200 full and associate members.^[91]
The CPSU Central Committee criticized the organization in 1949 for
failing to have enough membership including particularly scholarly
membership, not paying sufficient attention to atheist propaganda and
for showing insufficient concern for ideological content in its
lectures. The Committee called for it to be transformed into a mass
voluntary organization of Soviet Intelligentsia (note: this did not mean
people could actually refuse to join), it called for it to have more
ideological content in its lectures and that all lectures are to be
submitted for approval prior to delivery.

In 1950 it claimed to have 243,000 full and associate members with 1800 institutional members.^[91]
It would eventually climb, by 1972, to have 2,470,000 members,
including 1700 members of the Union and Republican Academics of Sciences
and 107,000 professors and doctors of sciences; it would run 'Houses of
Scientific Atheism' in Soviet cities.^[92]

The USSR Academy of Sciences published its first post-war atheistic
periodical in 1950, but did not follow up with a second until 1954.

On July 7, 1954, the CPSU Central Committee noted that the Orthodox
church and other Christian sects had successfully been attracting many
young people with their sermons and public activities (which were still
technically illegal under the 1929 legislation), and more people were
coming to religious services. The Committee therefore called on public
institutions to intensify anti-religious propaganda. It also called for
all school subjects to be saturated with atheism and that anti-religious
education should be enhanced. On November 10, 1954, the Committee
issued a contrary resolution (there was a lack of political unity after
Stalin's death) that criticized arbitrariness in the anti-religious
campaign, as well as the use of slander, libel and insults against
believers.^[93]

Public institutions, in answer to the July 1954 resolution, would
begin producing more anti-religious propaganda in the coming years. The
Academy of Science in 1957 published its Yearbook of the Museum of
History of Religion and Atheism, and Znanie would begin producing a
monthly-journal in 1959 called Nauka i religiia (Science and Religion),
which would have some resemblance to the pre-war Bezbozhnik. It grew
from 100,000 copies per issue to 400,000 by the early 1980s, and then
declined to 340,000-350,000.^[94]

The school system would also begin enhancing atheistic materials in
its curriculum. For example, one published textbook had the declaration,
'Religion is a fantastic and perverse reflection of the world in man's
consciousness.... Religion has become the medium for the spiritual
enslavement of the masses.^[95]

The period in the years following shortly after 1954 was
characterized by much liberalism towards religious belief, but this
would come to an end in the late 1950s. The church was built up during
this period and the number of baptisms as well as seminary candidates
rose^[96]

Resumption of anti-religious campaign

A new period of persecution began in the late 1950s under Nikita Khrushchev.^[97]
The church had advanced its position considerably since 1941, and the
government considered it to be necessary to take measures in response.

The two state organizations for overseeing religion in the country
(one for the Orthodox, the other for everyone else), changed their
functions between 1957 and 1964. Originally Stalin had created them in
1943 as liaison bodies between religious communities and the state,
however, in the Khrushchev years their function was re-interpreted as
dictatorial supervisors over the religious activities in the country.^[98]

New instructions were issued in 1958 attacked the position of
monasteries, by placing them under high taxation, cutting their land and
working to shut them down in order to weaken the church.

From 1959 to 1964, the persecution operated on several key levels:

1. There was a massive closure of churches^[52] (reducing the number from 22,000 to 7,000 by 1965.^[99])
2. Closures of monasteries and convents as well reinforcement of the 1929 legislation to ban piligrimages
3. Closure of most of the still existing seminaries and bans on pastoral courses
4. Banning all services outside of church walls and recording the
   personal identities of all adults requesting church baptisms, weddings
   or funerals.^[100]
   Non-fulfillment of these regulations by clergy would lead to
   disallowance of state registration for them (which meant they could no
   longer do any pastoral work or liturgy at all, without special state
   permission).
5. The deprivation of parental rights for teaching religion to their
   children, a ban on the presence of children at church services
   (beginning in 1961 with the Baptists and then extended to the Orthodox
   in 1963) and the administration of the Eucharist to children over the
   age of four.
6. The forced retirement, arrests and prison sentences to clergymen who criticized atheism^[101] or the anti-religious campaign, who conducted Christian charity or who in made religion popular by personal example.^[101]
7. It also disallowed the ringing of church bells and services in
   daytime in some rural settings from May to the end of October under the
   pretext of field work requirements.^[101]

The government adopted many methods of creating situations that
allowed for churches or seminaries to be legally closed (e.g. refusing
to give permits for building repair, and then shutting down churches on
grounds they were unsafe).

Anti-religious education and anti-religious propaganda were
intensified as well as improved. Stalin’s legacy of tolerating the
church after 1941 was criticized as a break with Lenin.

In 1960, The Central Committee brought back 'individual work' among
believers, which was a concept used in the 1930s. This was a practice of
atheist tutors (appointed by different public institutions including
the CP, Komsomol, Znanie and trade unions) visiting known religious
believers at their homes try to convince them to become atheists. In
most cases the tutors were workmates of the believers. If the believer
was not convinced, the tutor would bring it to the attention of their
union or professional collectives, and the backwardness and obstinancy
of the specific believers were presented in public meetings. If this did
not work, administrative harassment would follow at work or school, and
the believers would often be subject to lower-paid jobs, blocking of
promotion, or expulsion from college if the believer was in college.
Teachers commonly physically punished believing schoolchildren.^[102]

The closure of churches and seminaries was actually reported in the
Soviet media as reflecting a natural decline of people who followed
religious faith.

The government in 1961 forbade clergy from applying any kind of
disciplinary measures to the faithful. Priests were turned into the
employees of the group of lay members who ‘owned’ the parish under the
law. The state attempted to achieve more defections from clergy to
atheism, although they would have little success.

Measures were introduced that interfered with the spiritual life of
the church and worked to destroy its financial capacity. Clergy were
watched in order to find instances where they could be arrested for
breaking the law.

New public institutions were creating to assist the anti-religious
struggle. Laxity in the anti-religious struggle was criticized and
methodology was discussed in conferences and other means.

It is estimated that 50,000 clergy had been executed between 1917 and the end of the Khrushchev era.^[51]
The number of laity likely greatly exceeds this. Members of the church
hierarchy were jailed or forced out, their places taken by docile
clergy, many of whom had ties with the KGB.

1964–1970s

After Khrushchev's fall, Soviet writers began to cautiously question
the effectiveness of his anti-religious campaign. They came to a general
conclusion that it had failed in spreading atheism, and that it had
only antagonized believers as well as pushed them underground, where
they were more dangerous to the state. It had also drawn the sympathies
of many unbelievers and indifferent people. The mass persecutions
stopped after Khrushchev, although few of the closed churches would be
re-opened, and the few that did matched those closed by local
authorities.^[103]

The two main anti-religious serials, Yearbook of the Museum of History of Religion and Atheism and Problems of History of Religion and Atheism
soon ceased publication. This may have reflected negative attitudes
towards such dubious scholastic publications among the genuine scholars
that were part of the institutions that produced these documents.^[103]

On November 10, 1964, the Central Committee of the CPSU made a
resolution in which it reaffirmed previous instructions that actions
that offend believers or do administrative interference in the church as
unacceptable.^[104]

The principle of persecuting religion in order to spread atheism did
not disappear, however, even if the methodology was re-examined after
Khrushchev. Many of the secret, unofficial, instructions aimed at
suppressing the Church were made into official laws during Brezhnev's
control, which thereby legally legitimized many aspects of the
persecutions.

One of the early signs of the change in policy were articles in the
official press reported that there were millions of believers who
supported communism, including particularly leftist religious movements
in the west and third world (e.g. Liberation theology in Latin America),
and that all religion should not be attacked.^[105]

The Academy of Social Sciences of the CPSU Central Committee was
handed the function of publishing major studies on religion and atheism,
which was work previously done by the Academy of Sciences. A new
publication, 'Problems of Scientific Atheism', came to replace 'Problems
of History and Atheism' in 1966. The new publication was less scholarly
than the previous one and contained intellectually cruder criticism of
religion.

In 1965 the two councils over religious affairs in the country were
amalgamated into the Council for Religious Affairs (CRA). This new body
was given official legislation that gave it dictatorial powers over the
administration of religious bodies in the country (previously the two
organizations that preceded it used such powers under unofficial
instructions). Several years later, V. Furov, the CRA deputy head wrote
in a report to the CPSU Central Committee, 'The Synod is under CRA's
supervision. The question of selection and distribution of its permanent
members is fully in CRA's hands, the candidacies of the rotating
members are likewise coordinated beforehand with the CRA's responsible
officials. Patriarch Pimen and the permanent members for the Synod work
out all Synod sessions' agendas at the CRA offices ... and co-ordinate
[with us] the final 'Decisions of the Holy Synod'.^[106]

The state did not permit the re-opening of seminaries right through
to the end of the 1980s, however, it agreed to allow expansions of the
three seminaries and two graduate academies in the country that were not
closed.

The volume of anti-religious propaganda, in lectures, books, the press, articles, etc., generally decreased after 1964.^[107] The circulation, however, of the works that were printed would come to surpass what it had been under Khrushchev.^[108]
There was not a lull in anti-religious propaganda, therefore, although
the party documents of the time used less direct language in criticizing
religion.^[108]

The tone of the anti-religious propaganda was lowered and became less
vicious as it had been in previous years. This incurred some criticism
by Pravda, which editorialized about a growing indifference to
anti-religious struggle. Znanie was criticized for reducing its volume
of anti-religious lectures.

The Komsomol was criticized in internal Komsomol and in party
documents in the 1970s and 1980s for laxity in anti-religious work among
youth. The resolution of the 15th Komsomol congress in 1966 resolved to
created special republican and district Komsomol schools, modeled after
party schools, as part of the renewal of ideology and atheism among
Soviet youth.^[109]

In December 1971, the 'Philosophic Society of the USSR' was founded
with the aim (rather than pursuing truth) of, 'an untiring atheistic
propaganda of scientific materialism and... struggle against the
revisionist tolerant tendencies towards religion, against all
concessions to the religious Weltanschauung.^[110] This had followed from a 1967 CPSU Central Committee resolution.

While clergy who violated the law could be punished, there was never
any legal penalty given to secular authorities who violated the Laws on
Religious Cults.

Despite the decline in direct persecution, the Soviet media reported
in the post-Khrushchev years that religious rites (e.g. weddings,
baptisms and funerals) were on the decline as well as the actual number
of people practicing religion. This was presented as a natural process,
rather than a result of terror, harassment, threats or physical
closures, as had characterized previous anti-religious work. The quality
of the studies that found these figures was questioned by scholars,
including even Soviet scholars implicitly.^[105]

The Soviet media attempted to popularize KVAT clubs (clubs of
Militant Atheism) but they found little success anywhere except Latvia.
Similar clubs found some success in the western Ukraine.

Renewal of persecution in 1970s

A more aggressive period of anti-religious persecution began in the
mid 1970s, following upon the 1975 amendments to the 1929 anti-religious
legislation and the 25th party congress. This resulted from growing
alarm over indifference, especially among youth, towards the
anti-religious struggle, as well as growing influences of the Church.

Anti-religious propaganda was intensified. At the same time, the
anti-religious propaganda came to increasingly distinguish between the
supposed loyal majority of believers and the enemies of the state who
occupied the fringes of religion. Priests and bishops who did not
completely subordinate themselves to the state and/or who engaged in
religious activities outside of the routine performance of religious
rites, were considered to be enemies of the state. Bishops criticized
for 'high religious activity' were moved around the country. The Council
for Religious Affairs claimed to have gained control of the Patriarch's
Synod, which was forced to co-ordinate its sessions and decisions with
the CRA.^[111]

The church hierarchy could have no disciplinary powers. While the
state allowed for freedom of sermons and homilies, this freedom was
limited in that they could only be of an 'exclusively religious
character' (in practice this meant that clergymen who preached against
atheism and the state ideology were not protected).^[112] Lukewarm clergy were tolerated while clergy with a missionary zeal could be deregistered.

People who were more highly educated or who occupied more important
positions were subject to harsher harassment and punishment than those
who were uneducated. Religious youth at colleges could sometimes be sent
to psychiatric hospitals on grounds that only a person with a
psychological disorder would still be religious after going through the
whole anti-religious education.^[113]

In 1975 the CRA was given an official legal supervision role over the
state (prior to this it had unofficial control). Every parish was
placed at the disposal of the CRA,^[52]
which alone had the power to grant registration. The CRA could
arbitrarily decide on the registration of religious communities, and
allow them to worship or not. This policy was accompanied by
intimidation, blackmail and threat to the clergy, and as a whole it was
meant to demoralize the Church.^[114]

The Soviet Constitution of 1977 was sometimes interpreted by
authorities as containing a requirement for parents to raise their
children as atheists.^[115]
It was legally possible to deprive parents of their children if they
failed to raise them as atheists, but these legal restrictions were only
enforced selectively when the authorities chose to do so.

The methodology of anti-religious propaganda was refined and old
methods were criticized, and participants were criticized for laxity.
The CPSU Central Committee issued an important resolution in 1979 that
called for stronger anti-religious propaganda.

There were rumours in the late 1970s that a comprehensive scientific
study was done by Pisarov that blatantly contradicted the official
figures of people abandoning religion, but was never published for that
reason.^[105]

The CC issued another resolution in 1983 that promised for
ideological work against religion to be the top priority of party
committees on all level.^[116]

The Church and state fought a propaganda battle over the role of the
Church in Russia’s history in the years leading up to the 1000th
anniversary of Russia’s conversion to Christianity.

By 1987 the number of functioning churches in the Soviet Union had fallen to 6893 and the number of functioning monasteries to just 18.

Penetration of churches by Soviet secret services

According to Konstanin Khrachev, former chairman of Soviet Council on
Religious Affairs, "Not a single candidate for the office of bishop or
any other high-ranking office, much less a member of Holy Synod, went
through without confirmation by the Central Committee of the CPSU and
the KGB". Cited from Yevgenia Albats and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The State Within a State: The KGB and Its Hold on Russia - Past, Present, and Future. 1994. ISBN 0-374-52738-5, page 46.</ref>^[117]

There were rumours that the KGB infiltration of the clergy even reached the point that KGB agents listened to confessions.^[118]

Glasnost

Beginning in the late 1980s, under Mikhail Gorbachev,
the new political and social freedoms resulted in many church buildings
being returned to the church, to be restored by local parishioners. A
pivotal point in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church came in 1988
- the millennial anniversary of the Baptism of Kievan Rus'.

Throughout the summer of that year, major government-supported
celebrations took place in Moscow and other cities; many older churches
and some monasteries were reopened. An implicit ban on religious
expression on state TV was finally lifted. For the first time in the
history of the Soviet Union, people could see live transmissions of
church services on television.^{[citation needed]}

The Moscow Patriarchate successfully applied pressure in order to get
revision of some of the anti-religious legislation. In January 1981,
the clergy were requalified in their tax status from being taxed as a
private commercial enterprise (as they were before) to being taxed as
equal to that of medical private practice or private educators. This new
legislation also gave the clergy equal property and inheritance rights
as well as the privileges that were granted to citizens if they were war
veterans. The parish lay organization of 20 persons who owned the
parish was granted the status of a legal person with its appropriate
rights and the ability to make contracts (the church had been deprived
of this status by Lenin in 1918). For the first time in many years,
religious societies could legally own their houses of worship. There was
still some ambiguity left in this legislation, however, which allowed
room for re-interpretation if the state wished to halt 'uncontrolled'
dissemination of building new churches.^[119]

The religious bodies could still be heavily infiltrated by state
agents, due to the power of local governments to reject elected parish
officials and install their own people in the lay organization that
owned the parish, which meant that even if they had ownership over their
churches, it was still effectively in the state's hands. The largest
gain of this new legislation, however, was that children of ten years of
age and over could actively participate in religious ritual (e.g.
service as acolytes, psalmists, in choirs) and that children of any age
could be present inside a church during services as well as receive
communion.

Professors at theological schools, and all clergy as well as laity
working for the Department of External Ecclesiastical Relations of the
Church were taxed similarly to all Soviet employees in recognition of
their contribution to a positive Soviet image abroad.

The state's allowance of expansions to existing seminaries bore
fruit, and by the early 1980s, the student population at these
institutions had grown to 2,300 day and extramural students (it had been
800 in 1964).^[107]

Religious societies were given control over their own bank accounts in 1985.

This legislation in the 1980s marked a new attitude of acceptance
towards religion by a state that decided that the best it could do was
simply to minimize what it considered the harmful impact of religion.^[120]
While the state tried to intensify persecution during the 1980s, the
church came to see this increasingly as merely rearguard attacks by an
ideologically bankrupt, but still physically powerful, enemy. The top
party leaders refrained from direct involvement in the new offensive,
perhaps due to an uncertainty over their potential success and a desire
to have some manoeuvrabality according to a desire to avoid antagonzing
believers too much on the eve of the millennial anniversary of Russia's
conversion to Christianity.^[116]

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the government of Russia to some extent openly embraced the Russian Orthodox Church, and there was a renaissance in the number of the faithful in Russia.^[5]

See also

• Religion in the Soviet Union
• USSR anti-religious campaign (1921–1928)
• USSR anti-religious campaign (1928–1941)
• USSR anti-religious campaign (1958–1964)
• USSR anti-religious campaign (1970s–1990)
• Persecution of Muslims in the former USSR
• Soviet anti-religious legislation
• Terrible Triangle
• Red Terror
• History of the Russian Orthodox Church
• Vladimir N. Beneshevich
• Gleb Yakunin
• Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
• Josyf Slipyj
• Museum of Soviet occupation
• Persecution of Christians in Warsaw Pact countries
• Persecutions of the Catholic Church and Pius XII
• Persecution of Muslims
• Sergei Kourdakov
• New Martyr
• The Rage Against God

References

External links

• Lenin's letter to Molotov on Shuia crisis
• Letters of Metropolitan Sergii of Vilnius