RELIGIOUS POLICY AFTER STALIN: STATE REPRESSION AND THE WITNESS ORGANIZATION‘S RESPONSE
“You adulterous people, don‟t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.” James 4:4
“When the government changed, the officials changed loyalties, but we remained the same.” Victor Popovych, Jehovah‘s Witness since 1967.459
The death of Stalin in 1953 ushered in a new era in Soviet religious policy and religious life. Under Stalin‘s successor, N.S. Khrushchev (1953-64), the state brought renewed urgency to eliminating religious belief, a task that had been neglected during
Stalin‘s last years. This neglect was a small part of Khrushchev‘s broader criticism of Stalin, which reached full fruition with the 1956 ―Secret Speech‖ denouncing Stalin‘s ―personality cult.‖ Khrushchev based his critique in large part on a perception that the Party had strayed from its original, Leninist principles and needed to return its focus to the building of communism.460 The state‘s proclaimed intention to liquidate religion in the near future had direct roots in this larger ideological framework. Khrushchev had declared at the Twenty- first Party Congress in 1961that the current generation would live to see communism by 1980. When he set this goal, he understood that certain preconditions would have to be met.
4592002 Yearbook, 203. 460
Historian William Taubman writes that Khrushchev may have viewed the antireligious initiative ―as a form of de-Stalinization in that it abandoned Stalin‘s compromise with religion and returned to Lenin‘s more militant approach.‖ William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), 512-13.
This included the creation of an atheist society.461 Khrushchev‘s vision imbued atheist work with a renewed sense of priority and justified the continued repression of religious believers as necessary to the all-important task of achieving communism.
The new religious policy, what I call ―the Khrushchev system,‖ created two basic dichotomies. First, it divided all religions into registered and unregistered organizations. Registered organizations had to conform to the strictures of the state‘s laws on religious cults and consent to strong governmental oversight. Unregistered organizations had no right to exist and faced criminal prosecution of their leaders and active members if they continued to operate outside of the law. By allowing registration for some and not for others, the state hoped to ―divide and rule,‖ eliminating religion as a source of independent authority.462 Second, the state separated ―rank-and-file‖ or ―ordinary‖ believers from leaders and fanatics. The former had to be patiently convinced to abandon their faith, while the latter had to be isolated from society through coercive measures. The government intended to pit believers against one another by offering better treatment to some, but not all. It encouraged members of religious organizations to believe that a few bad seeds in their leadership were at fault for inciting conflict with the Soviet state and for preventing registration. It also represented the state‘s attempt to justify, both to its own citizens and to the outside world, why it continued to imprison believers despite endorsing freedom of conscience in principle.
While opponents ousted Khrushchev from power in 1964, much of the Khrushchev system remained in place until the Gorbachev era. Under Leonid Il‘ich Brezhnev (1964-82), the state no longer promised a clear date for achieving communism, however, making the battle against religious belief one of lower priority. Yet it employed much of the same
461 Ibid., 508-13.
rhetoric about religion and continued to deny registration to certain religious organizations. As anthropologist Alexei Yurchak notes about this era, ―The form of ideological
representations—documents, speeches, ritualized practices, slogans, posters, monuments, and urban visual propaganda—became increasingly normalized, ubiquitous, and predictable.‖463 Yurchak‘s words offer an apt description of religious policy and atheist work after
Khrushchev. The ossification of policy and rhetoric until the late 1970s limited the state‘s ability to respond effectively to evolving religious conditions and did little to eliminate religious belief among its citizens. This chapter lays out the basic features of the Khrushchev system and explores the hard-line tactics of official religious policy, including police tactics, KGB infiltration, arrests and imprisonment, and the end of the mass exile. It also describes how the Witness organization responded to these tactics and administrative changes in the organization.
Khrushchev’s Antireligious Campaigns and Policy
Religious policy in the Soviet Union stood at a crossroads in 1953. In the late Stalin era, the state had allowed the Russian Orthodox Church to resume a limited legal existence, and granted some local religious organizations the right to register and operate within the confines of the law. At the same time, the wartime annexation of the western borderlands had resulted in the sharp increase in the number of churches in the Soviet Union. The Stalinist state fiercely repressed religious believers whom it felt represented a threat to Soviet power, but it made minimal investment in atheist or antireligious propaganda. The result was a growth in religious belief at a time when Soviet society was supposed to be making renewed progress toward a communist utopia after the deprivations of World War II.
463 Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 14.
In the spring of 1954, the Communist Party‘s‘ agitprop department assessed the neglected state of antireligious efforts, reporting to Khrushchev on the ―unsatisfactory state‖ of atheist work. The department blamed the Party for the rise of both Russian Orthodoxy and various ―religious sects.‖ The Party, it concluded, had wrongly assumed religion would die a rapid and natural death in a socialist society. This had led to a passive attitude toward atheist work, resulting in a dearth of public lectures and published articles and books on this subject. The report cited the western borderlands for the especially low amount of atheist work in these regions. 464
The state officially announced its recommitment to atheist work in a July 25, 1954, Pravda editorial, ushering in the so-called ―Hundred Days Campaign.‖465 Denouncing previous ―passivity‖ toward religious belief, the state called for an active ―struggle‖ against religion. It demanded increased promotion of the natural sciences and a materialist
worldview and the exposure of the falsity of religious superstitions and prejudices. This was a battle, the editorial informed readers, ―between science and superstition, between darkness and light.‖ Previous propaganda, it noted, had been divorced from real life and offended the feelings of believers. The new atheist methods would do neither—they would be both
concrete and tactful. In this sense, the decree harkened back to the earliest Bolshevik policies on religion, which also criticized offenses to religious sentiments.466 The Party called upon all state and Party institutions to participate in a unified front for atheism. It named schools, the Komsomol, the Ministry of Culture, and the Knowledge Society as key fronts in this new
464 RGANI, f. 5, op. 16, d. 650, ll. 18-24.
465 Joan Delaney Grossman notes that while the editorial was published only on July 24, a secret resolution
outlining the shortcomings in atheist work was adopted by the TsK on July 7. Grossman, ―Khrushchev‘s Anti- Religious Policy,‖ 375.
466 The 1919 Party Program, passed at the Eighth Party Congress, ―warned against insulting believers‘ feelings
campaign.467 A September editorial in Moskovskaia pravda (Moscow Truth) tied the campaign directly to communism, stating: ―The overcoming of religious survivals in the consciousness of workers, their adoption of a materialist worldview, will speed the progress of our society forward to communism.‖468 Similarly, an August editorial in Sovetskaia Moldaviia (Soviet Moldavia) declared of believers: ―We need to patiently, in a comradely way help them to free themselves from religious survivals and become fully conscious and active builders of communism.‖469
Despite the warning against offending religious sentiments, the Hundred Days Campaign proceeded to do precisely that as local officials struggled to demonstrate progress in the fight against religious belief. This period marked the first mention of the Witnesses in many local and regional papers, as newspaper editors attempted to fulfill the Party‘s call to make propaganda specific to local conditions. The Transcarpathian regional paper Sovetskoe Zakarpat‟e (Soviet Transcarpathia) featured the Witnesses prominently in an article on local Christian communities. The article reflects the basic flaws of the Hundred Days Campaign in its strident attacks and wild accusations against believers. In particular, it includes a detailed denunciation of the Witnesses, whom it accused of preaching the creation of a theocratic state and sabotaging collectivization. More problematically, it alleged that the Witnesses had actively collaborated with Ukrainian partisans and fascists during the wartime occupation of Ukraine, and that Witnesses had ties to American espionage. In the mad rush to produce concrete results in the campaign, many individuals, like this journalist, borrowed heavily from what little atheist propaganda had been produced in the late Stalin era. In the case of the
467 ―Shire razvernut‘ nauchno-ateisticheskuiu propagandu,‖ Pravda, July 24, 1954, 1.
468 ―Bol‘she vnimaniia nauchno-ateisticheskoi propagande,‖ Moskovskaia pravda, September 5, 1954, 1. 469 I. Nemeshaev, ―Marksizm-leninizm o religii,‖ Sovetskaia Moldaviia, August 10, 1954, 4.
Witnesses, this meant information from their postwar trials in the USSR and in Eastern Europe. Disregarding the instructions of the Party not to offend religious sentiments or undermine the loyalty of religious citizens, this article managed to do both. It even claimed that Witnesses had attempted to roast a young girl alive as a human sacrifice to Jehovah before villagers intervened to save her life.470
By November 1954, the Party realized the need to pull back from its original call to action. On November 20, the TsK passed a new resolution, published in Pravda the following day, blaming newspapers, lecturers, and local officials for treating believers in a rude manner, using coercive measures against believers, and interfering in internal church matters. It stressed that atheist work should be carried out only by qualified personnel. The Hundred Days Campaign had accomplished its goal of returning attention to antireligious work, but it had little progress to show in the actual reduction of religious belief. While the November editorial stated that officials and agitators simply needed to correct their tactical mistakes and not abandon atheist efforts, the latter is how officials and agitators at all levels perceived it. The Russian Republic (RSFSR) Knowledge Society, for example, noted the following year that atheist lectures had declined despite the TsK directive not to abandon these efforts.471 The antireligious campaign, it seemed, had ended as abruptly as it had begun.472 For the next two years, the Party-state invested little effort in atheist education. Internal struggles for power among the Party leadership and other urgent domestic concerns
470
S. D. Mashin, ―Religioznoe sektantstvo i ego reaktsionnaia sushchnost‘,‖ Sovetskoe zakarpat‟e, August 24, 1954, 3.
471
GARF, f. A-561, op. 1, d. 22, l. 4.
472 ―Postanovlenie TsK KPSS: Ob oshibkakh v provedenii nauchno-ateisticheskoi propagandy sredi naseleniia,‖ Pravda, November 11, 1954, 2.
pushed the antireligious efforts onto the back burner. Dimitry Pospielovsky has described this period as ―the most ‗liberal‘ for the Christians since 1947.‖473
By 1957, however, the Party gradually began to return its attention to atheist matters.474 The timing coincided with Khrushchev‘s triumph over an attempted ouster and the resultant elimination of all major challenges to his rule. In the aftermath of the so-called Anti-Party Group‘s defeat, Khrushchev had a greater mandate and freedom to enact reforms as he saw fit, including the renewal of the antireligious campaign. The institutions named in the original Hundred Days Campaign became the major players in atheist work for the next three decades. The Knowledge Society assumed the work of the now defunct Stalin-era institution, the League of Militant Godless, incorporating more atheist topics into its lectures to educate the public.475 In 1957, it doubled its lectures on atheism over the previous year, hosting both a ten-day seminar at the all-union level and several dozen republic-level and regional seminars to discuss proper approaches to atheist propaganda.476
Within a year, more organized efforts between institutions developed to tackle the problem of persistent religious belief. A spring 1958 conference brought together individuals from the agitation and propaganda department of the TsK, the Knowledge Society, the Komsomol, the CRCA and CROCA, newspaper editors, and publishers. The conference participants acknowledged that many people mistakenly thought the November 1954 resolution cancelled out the July resolution. As a result, these institutions had largely
473 Pospielovsky is referring here primarily to the Russian Orthodox Church, but the statement holds true for
other Christian denominations. Pospielovsky, The Russian Church, 330.
474
Tatiana Chumachenko cites these factors in accounting for the gap between the two antireligious campaigns. Chumachenko, Church and State, 136.
475
For background on the League, see Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
abandoned their atheist work and allowed religious organizations to strengthen their proselytism activities.477 Now those gathered pledged to correct the problem through renewed efforts. In 1959, the Knowledge Society began publication of the journal Nauka i religiia (Science and Religion), followed soon after by a Ukrainian-language journal, Voyovnychyi ateist (Militant Atheist, later renamed Liudyna i svit, or Man and the World).
While the state may have pledged to avoid the pitfalls of the Hundred Days
Campaign, in reality this second wave of antireligious work proved even more damaging to believers and definitely offended religious sentiments. Despite voicing a commitment to persuasion over coercion, the state did not abandon the latter form, particularly in regard to unregistered religious groups. The state was also not above using interventionist tactics to reduce the strength of registered religions, including the Russian Orthodox Church. Indeed, a critical component of the second antireligious campaign was state closure of churches. In total, the government shut down over five thousand Russian Orthodox churches as well as most of the Church‘s few remaining monasteries, convents, and seminaries. These measures disproportionately affected the western borderlands, whose recent annexation to the Soviet Union meant they had more churches and more believers than the rest of the country. Churches in Ukraine, Moldavia, and Belorussia accounted for five-sixths of those that lost their registered status during the Khrushchev era.478
The more limited space for Russian Orthodox worship had the unintended and, from the state‘s perspective, undesirable effect of pushing believers from registered churches into unregistered religious organizations. Toward the end of the closures in 1963, the Moldavian
477
RGANI, f. 5, op. 33, d. 91, ll. 30-31.
478 Nathaniel Davis, ―The Number of Orthodox Churches before and after the Khrushchev Antireligious Drive,‖ Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 612-20.
Komsomol noted that the locales without an active Russian Orthodox Church had the highest density of ―sectarian‖ religious belief. It suggested that some Orthodox believers who found themselves without a local church joined unregistered sects instead.479 An inspector for the Council for Religious Affairs (CRA) who visited Moldavia in early 1966 suggested that the reduction in Orthodox churches had in fact encouraged the growth of sectarianism in the western borderlands. He gave an example from Fălești district where the number of churches had decreased from fifty in 1946 to nine in 1966. In the same period, Baptist membership more than tripled, while Witnesses, Pentecostals, and other minority religions also increased their numbers. The inspector complained that these groups were much harder to deal with than the Russian Orthodox Church and more stalwart in their beliefs. The Moscow CRA official reading the report, however, underlined not these remarks, but instead the inspector‘s comments offering an alternative explanation that blamed the religious situation on the legacy of private land ownership.480
At the same time that the state shut down thousands of churches, it elevated the importance of registration as the only acceptable channel for organized religious worship. In March 1961, the government passed new instructions for the CROCA and the CRCA on how to apply the 1929 Law on Religious Associations, which had established the original
registration guidelines for religious organizations under Stalin. In accordance with the law, groups of twenty or more adult believers had the right to petition for registration. If approved for registration, they could then legally hold worship services in designated ―prayer houses,‖ appoint ministers (sluzhiteli), and collect voluntary donations among their members to cover costs directly related to the group‘s operation.
479 AOSPRM, f. 278, inv. 5, d. 163, ff. 28-29. 480 GARF, f. 6991, op. 6, d. 8, l. 102.
The instructions also identified numerous restrictions on what registered religious groups could and could not do. For example, they could not encourage members to ignore their civic duties (such as military service and voting) or tell members not to participate in the political, cultural, and social life of the country. They could not use prayer houses to give political speeches. They could not use donations for philanthropic purposes or create
committees or subgroups unrelated to religious rituals. Special prayer meetings for children, youth, and women, were prohibited. Registered religious groups could not hold prayer services outside of approved buildings without permission. The government reserved the right to examine periodically the group‘s financial records, property, and other relevant documents. In short, the state offered the carrot of registration to religious groups in exchange for greater state control and a narrower sphere of acceptable religious practice.
Historian Philip Walters has correctly labeled the new policy as one of ―divide and rule,‖ defined as the ―granting [of] concessions to registered congregations and even whole denominations, while dealing harshly with unregistered and dissident groups.‖481 The instructions made it clear that no religion could exist without registration and affirmed that the state had not changed its attitude toward religious organizations it considered hostile to Soviet power. Most importantly for the Witnesses, Article 23 of the instructions stated that those sects whose actions and beliefs ―carry an anti-state and fanatical character‖ did not qualify for registration. The list of such groups included, but was not limited to, ―Jehovists,‖ Pentecostals, True Orthodox Christians, the True Orthodox Church, and Reform
Adventists.482 While the instructions and Article 23 were not made public, this information circulated among the CRCA, whose republic and oblast-level officials clarified to their
481 Walters, ―A Survey,‖ 23.
lower-ranking employees that under no condition were ―Jehovists‖ and other named religious organizations to be granted registration.483
The secretive nature of the 1961 instructions allowed the state to claim, as it did repeatedly in the post-Stalin era until the advent of glasnost‘, that the state granted full
freedom of conscience to all believers. This was hardly the case. First, some religions that the