Denzil Dean Harber

Religion in the Soviet Union

Part II

Workers International News “Religion in the Soviet Union II”, by Paul Dixon (Denzil Harber), November 1945, p.44-48, (2,779 words). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Ted Crawford and Paul Flewers.


This is the concluding section of an article the first instalment of which appeared in our previous issue.

It is of interest to note that even during this period—the first since the Revolution—of undoubted religious persecution, the servile head of the Orthodox Church, the Acting-Patriarch Sergius, found it possible to declare, at a stage-managed interview with foreign correspondents, that: ‘There never has been, nor is there any persecution of religion in the USSR.’ The Orthodox Church was even then quite willing to put its services at the disposal of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the same way as it had given them to Tsarism, only the Stalinist bureaucracy did not want them!

But it had not long to wait. The Left zigzag of the bureaucracy was inevitably followed by a turn to the Right. The anti-religious processions which had been organised during the Church festivals of Christmas and Easter were abolished; the sale of Christmas trees was allowed once more; exiled priests were allowed to return to their parishes. But Stalin hastened to go even further than relaxing the pressure against the Church—he gave it rights that it had never previously enjoyed since the Revolution. In the New Constitution of the USSR of 1936 priests were given the right to vote and to be elected in Soviet elections.

Nevertheless the alliance between Stalin and the Orthodox Church was not yet finally cemented. In the period of mass purges of 1937 the attack upon the Church was for a short time resumed. Once again priests were arrested and banished and in January 1938 the ‘Society of Militant Atheists’ accused the Clergy of being in the service of the military staffs of Fascist states, of disorganising the Army, of trying to wreck railways, etc, etc.

But this renewed attack was very speedily followed by an even more drastic swing to the Right, a swing which reached truly remarkable proportions after the German invasion of the USSR. Not only did all government pressure upon the Church cease but all anti-religious propaganda also . The ‘Society of Militant Atheists’ had built up a huge publishing concern which in ten years had published 1700 books and issued magazines with a circulation of some 43 million copies. The whole undertaking was closed down upon the grounds of ‘paper shortage’. At the same time school textbooks were revised and anti-religious passages removed. Anti-religious tests for the Army and Civil Service were abolished.

In return the Church entered enthusiastically into the service of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The following message sent by Sergius, the Acting Patriarch, to Stalin, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution (November 1942), gives eloquent proof of this:

On this twenty-fifth anniversary of the Republic of the Soviets, in the name of our Clergy and of all the believers of the Russian Orthodox Church, faithful children of our Fatherland, I salute with cordiality and piety, in your person, the leader chosen by God, the leader of our military and cultural forces, who is guiding us to triumph over the barbarous invasion, to the prosperity of our country in peace, towards a radiant future for its peoples. May God bless by success and glory your valorous exploits for our Fatherland.

Similar messages were sent on this and all other suitable occasions by all the main dignitaries of the Orthodox Church. The War in fact brought with it nothing more nor less than the incorporation of the Russian Orthodox Church into the Stalinist bureaucracy, with all the privileges that this entails . Some idea of these latter can be gleaned from the contribution made by ecclesiastical dignitaries to the Soviet war effort, as published in the Soviet Press. For instance, on 27 December 1942, Alexander Alexandrovich Troitski, priest of the parish of Chubino, writes to Stalin announcing that he has already subscribed 30,000 rubles, ‘taken from my own savings’ towards national defence. Now, he states, ‘I have decided to buy, with my savings, an aeroplane for the Red Army, and I am remitting for this great work the sum of a hundred thousand rubles. I have already paid in fifty thousand of them to the State Bank and I will remit the fifty thousand remaining on 15 January 1943.’ It must be noted that Alexander Alexandrovich Troitski is no highly placed ecclesiastic, but merely a parish priest. It must also be remembered that the average monthly wage of a Soviet worker, upon the eve of the present war, was 300 rubles . In other words this parish priest has been able to amass savings so vast that he is able to give from them to the state a sum equal to the total earnings of a worker for more than eight years . What must the income of the parish priest be like?

Nor is this merely an isolated instance. Many others exist of similar huge sums being given by the relatively lower ranks of the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. The priest of the Church of the Assumption, for instance, announces to Stalin on 4 January 1943 that he has already paid into the State Bank: ‘All my personal savings, amounting to 273,000 rubles. I beg of you, Joseph Vissarionovich’, he continues, ‘to have built with this money two war planes, giving them the names of our heroic ancestors Alexander Nevsky and Dmitri Donskoy.’

The higher up one goes in the Church hierarchy the greater become the sums subscribed. For instance, on 5 January 1943, Alexis, Metropolitan of Leningrad, informs Stalin that his Bishopric has already subscribed 3,182,143 rubles; he is now adding to this a further 500,000 rubles! He finished up with the statement that ‘We pray to God that He may aid you in your great historic mission; to defend the honour, the liberty and the glory of our fatherland.’

In each case a polite, if somewhat brief, reply is sent by Stalin and published in the press. For instance, the above mentioned priest of the Church of the Assumption received the following answer:

I thank you, Vladimir Alexandrovich, for your solicitude for the Red Army Air Force. Your desire shall be granted.

Receive my greetings

J Stalin

Nor was it long before Stalin gave his loyal supporters of the Russian Orthodox Church an appropriate recompense. In the official Soviet daily, Izvestia , on 5 September 1943, there appeared the announcement that Stalin had received leading Church dignitaries in the course of which:

… the Metropolitan Sergius informed the President of the Council of Peoples Commissars that the leading circles of the Orthodox Church had the intention of calling together in the near future a council of bishops with the object of electing the Patriarch of Moscow and of all the Russias, and of forming a Holy Synod alongside the Patriarch.

The head of the government, J Stalin, showed himself sympathetic to this possibility and declared that there would be ‘no objections on the part of the government’.

On 8 September 1943, the Church had its wish—it elected a Patriarch, for the first time since the Kerensky period. Nor was that all—an official link was established between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet State. There exists today a ‘Council for the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church attached to the Council of Peoples Commissars of the USSR’. When in January of this year a Church Assembly met in order to elect a new Patriarch to replace Sergius who had recently died, it was greeted by a speech by GG Karpov, the President of this Council for the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church. He informed the assembled ecclesiastics that:

The Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has authorised me to convey to the present High Assembly greetings in the name of the government and best wishes for successful and fruitful work for the construction of the Highest Church Administration.

I am deeply convinced that the decisions of the Assembly will serve towards strengthening the Church and will be an important starting point in the future development of the activities of the Church, which are directed towards assisting the Soviet people in the attainment of the great historical tasks before it.

But Karpov does not stop here; he goes on to give a new appreciation of the past of the Church. Lenin, writing in 1901 (Socialism and Religion ) referred to ‘that shameful and accursed past when the Church was in feudal dependence on the state, and Russian citizens were in feudal dependence on the Established Church’. Not so Karpov to-day:

The Russian Orthodox Church [he announced], in the days of hard trial, which our Fatherland repeatedly underwent in the past, did not break its link with the people, it lived with their needs, their hopes, their wishes and contributed its mite to the common struggle… many leading members of the Church sacrificed their lives for the good of the Fatherland.

It is hardly surprising under these circumstances that the Assembly was able to state in the message which it sent to the Soviet government:

Our Church, thanks to God, lives with a full life, according to our laws and to the customs of the Church. In all its activities our Church meets with full cooperation in its needs from the government and in first place from the Council for the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church attached to the Sovnarkom of the USSR.

At every step now, the Orthodox Church hastens publicly to announce its support for Stalin and his policy. For instance, in Izvestia of 17 February of this year one meets the heading ‘The Most Holy Patriarch of Moscow and of all Russia on the decisions of the Crimea Conference’. In it we read ‘The Church blesses these bright Christian wishes and hopes’; and redoubles its prayers to ‘the Lord of Hosts’ and the ‘Prince of Peace’ (Isaiah, IX, 6)’ etc, etc.

The priests of the other Churches existing in the USSR do not lag behind their Orthodox brothers in their expressions of loyalty to Stalin and his government. Thus Abdurakhman Rassolev, Mufti of the Central Spiritual Direction of the Mussulmans, sends his congratulations to Stalin on the occasion of the twenty-sixth anniversary of the October Revolution and ends with these words: ‘May Allah aid you to bring to a successful conclusion your glorious efforts for the liberation of the oppressed peoples. So may it be.’

Similar greetings are sent on the appropriate occasions by the Jewish Clergy. Thus Stalin has secured the backing not only of Christ, but of Allah and Jehovah also!

All accounts from the Soviet Union during the past few years agree that never since the Revolution has religion had such a hold over the mass of the population. We read of church services being attended by thousands, including young workers and soldiers of the Red Army. According to Soviet War News of 22 August 1941, there existed at that time 30,000 religious associations of all kinds in the Soviet Union. An English clergyman, Canon Widdrington, has estimated the number of supporters of the Orthodox Church alone to be some 60,000,000 persons.

The conclusions to be drawn from all this are sufficiently obvious. In the first place there is no question of religion dying out in the Soviet Union as would be the case in a society which was advancing towards socialism. Thus is the lie given, by this fact alone, to the Stalinist claims to have ‘finally and irrevocably’ established socialism in the Soviet Union. On the contrary, religion is maintaining and increasing its hold over broad sections of the Soviet masses. This is undoubtedly due to the increasingly capitalist nature of income distribution within the Soviet Union. Without the bureaucracy having become a class, and with the basic economic conquest of the October Revolution as yet still in existence, the bureaucracy has taken for itself an ever-mounting proportion of the national income of the Soviet State. The inequalities between the position of the bureaucrats, with their incomes of tens and hundreds of thousands of rubles and that of the workers with their few hundreds, have assumed a capitalist character. At the same time, despite all the empty boasting about ‘social security’, the masses still live miserably and at the mercy of economic forces which neither they nor the bureaucracy can control. True these uncontrolled economic forces no longer, as in the capitalist world, threaten the masses with unemployment, but they affect them in equally significant ways—through periods of famine or semi-famine, through the chronic shortage of goods of all kinds, a shortage which is continually assuming acute forms in one sphere or another, or through drastic forced movements of population. Moreover the very nature of the rule of the bureaucracy itself means that the lives and the liberty of the masses are constantly threatened by a force over which they have no control and the actions of which they cannot foresee.

The social roots of religion, the fear of the uncontrolled social forces which dominate the masses in their daily lives, ‘the impotence of the exploited classes in struggle with the exploiters’ (Lenin), not only still exist in the Soviet Union, they are being strengthened as the degeneration of the bureaucracy proceeds and the burdens which it heaps upon the masses increase.

In the second place there has ceased to exist any reason for a schism between the bureaucracy and the Church. The bitter hatred of the clergy for the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky which represented the toiling masses and was working for the establishment of a classless society is not extended to their degenerate Stalinist successors who represent a usurping caste anxious only for the maintenance and extension of its own position and privileges. With such a caste it is possible for the clergy to come to terms in the same way as they have been able to come to terms with ruling and exploiting classes throughout history. True, in the present case the terms that the clergy have received have not as yet been particularly good, though they steadily improve with time. But that is because even Stalin’s Russia is still not yet capitalist Russia and the effects of the terrific blow that the October Revolution dealt at religion have not yet disappeared; broad sections of the masses still contemptuously turn their backs upon religion.

Stalin, therefore, does not, at least as yet, need the services of the Church so urgently as the Tsar did. But need them he does nevertheless. Inevitably, under the conditions of the rule of the bureaucracy, the Church must command the support of broad sections of the population; Stalin cannot destroy this support by administrative means—he has tried and failed. He must therefore secure an agreement with this Church which he cannot crush in order to secure the hold of the bureaucracy over the Soviet masses, for the nature of his regime does not permit the existence of an independent and potentially hostile force within the Soviet State.

As we have indicated, such an agreement was not difficult to arrange. And today Stalin who in his interview with the First American Trade Union Delegation (September 1927) once stated ‘The Party cannot be neutral with regard to religion, and it conducts anti-religious propaganda against any and all religious prejudices because it stands for science, while religious prejudices go against science, since every religion is something contrary to science.’—that same Stalin today is not neutral towards religion but gives it active, if as yet limited, support, for which he receives public thanks from the clergy.

The Church then is today an integral, though subordinate, part of the Stalinist state machine and the clergy enjoy the privileges accorded to the members of the bureaucracy. With the continuation of Stalinist rule and of Stalinist degeneration we may expect the alliance not only to continue but, by and large, to be strengthened with increasing privileges granted to the clergy. This does not, of course, signify that there may not take place in the future conflicts, and sharp ones at that, between the bureaucracy and the Church. Such conflicts will take place between sections of the bureaucracy itself and have taken place in the past between ruling classes and their Churches. But the general tendency will be one of increasing integration.

Only the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy and the restoration of direct proletarian rule in the Soviet Union can, in alliance with the World Revolution, destroy the new privileges which religion is gaining and pave the way for the destruction of religion itself.


Last updated: 5 March 2009