A Long Walk
To Church
A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy
Nathaniel Davis
Prologue.
Preface.
Introduction: Communism and Religion.
1. From the Bolshevik Revolution to World War II.
2. The Turnaround.
3. Stalin's Last Years and the Early Khrushchev Period.
4. Khrushchev's Attack
5. The Period of Stagnation.
6. The Millennium
7. Squalls and Tempests.
8. Accusations and Schisms.
9. Russian Orthodox Clergy.
10. Illegal and Underground Orthodox Religion.
11. Monks, Nuns, and Convents.
12. Theological Education.
13. Publications and Finances.
14. The Laity.
15. Conclusion
Selected Bibliography.
Prologue.
ON A WINTER DAY forty years ago, I remember standing in a country village far from Moscow looking for a church — as was my wont. I approached a bent, much bundled, aged woman. I asked her if there was a church close by and, if so, where I might go to find it. Her eyes were the pale, watery blue sometimes characteristic of the old. A deeply melancholy expression came over her face, and she answered: “It's a long, long walk to church.”
In point of fact, for the quarter century between Khrushchev's campaign against religion and Gorbachev's revision of policy in 1988, one could travel east from Chita for 1,000 kilometers on the Trans-Siberian Railroad without passing a single church. One could also travel 600 kilometers west from there without passing a church. Sakha-Yakutia, with an area more than the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, has had only one church from the time of the Khrushchev drive until 1993. Most of the million Russians living east of the Urals and north of the sixty-second parallel have had to travel almost 2,000 kilometers to reach the nearest functioning church. Truly, it has been a long walk to church.
Preface.
This study is a secular examination of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in recent times. It is difficult to be objective about religion. I am reminded of a cartoon published long ago of a matron in a bookshop asking for “an impartial history of the [U.S.] Civil War, written from the Southern point of view.” For those who might be curious, I am a member of the United Church of Christ.
For those unfamiliar with Orthodox ecclesiastical usage, a monastic priest takes a saint's name when he becomes a monk and drops his surname. Sometimes, in written works, the surname is added in parentheses after the saint's name in order to avoid confusion. For example, one might write “Metropolitan Kirill (Gundyaev).” The metropolitan's name as a boy was Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev.
I am indebted to Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, to the late Philip E. Mosely, and to the late Frank Nowak, who reviewed early work that ultimately led to this manuscript. Haym Jaffe of Drexel University assisted me in statistical projections. William C. Fletcher of the University of Kansas read this manuscript and prepared a perceptive, enlightening, and immensely helpful commentary on the book and all its parts. Donald W. Treadgold of the University of Washington encouraged me to go to Westview Press and introduced me to senior editor Peter W. Kracht, who has proved extremely helpful and unfailingly supportive of my efforts — as has his associate, Mick Gusinde-Duffy. The project editor, Mary Jo Lawrence, and the copy editor, Ida May B. Norton, have been extremely helpful and untiring in their care, patience, and support. I am also indebted to my wife, Elizabeth, my son, Thomas Rohde Davis, and my daughter, Margaret Davis Mainardi, for criticism, editing, and work on the draft. The manuscript was typed by my son, and some early materials were typed by my daughter. James F. Winstead of Harvey Mudd College prepared the graphs in the volume.
Research for this study was supported in part by a grant from the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United States Information Agency. Research was also supported by a fellowship from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed.
N. D.
Introduction: Communism and Religion.
WHEN THE COMMUNISTS took control in Russia, they were determined to subdue all opposition forces, including the Russian Orthodox Church. More fundamentally, as Marxists, they wanted to build a society without God, and the church blocked the way. Not only in the lands that became the Soviet Union but in every country where the communists seized power after World War II, a struggle between the state and the churches ensued.
Twice in the history of communist rule in the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks and the Soviet state drove the church to the threshold of institutional death, or at least to its antechamber. The first time was at the end of the 1930s, when Stalin's men had wiped out virtually all of the resources of the church. The second time, although less dramatic, was in Brezhnev's “period of stagnation.” Following Khrushchev's headlong assault in the early 1960s, the subsequent slow erosion of Orthodox institutional strength exposed the possibility of the church's ultimate extinction.
Both times, fortuitous events saved the institutional body of the church. In 1939, the turnaround followed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Soviet annexations, Hitler's invasion of the USSR, German permissiveness toward Orthodox Church renewal in the occupied zones, and Stalin's later policies toward liberated areas. In the late 1980s, the millennium of the baptism of Rus in 988 (the Millennium), glasnost and democratization, Gorbachev's felt need for new sources of support, his desire for international acceptance, and his pragmatism led to a new Soviet religious policy. Now, after the collapse of the communist institution, aggressive Marxist ideological materialism in Russia is a whispered memory. For a second time the church is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of misfortune.
Why has the church twice been renewed in vigor and strength? Was it luck, which could change? Was it something intrinsic in the natural order that prevents the triumph of antireligion? Was it the constancy of God, which ultimately rules human history, politics, and society? 1 There are at least two problems in any attempt to answer these questions. First one must consider whether the things observed in the external realm of life — church buildings, priests, church attendance, and other religious activities — truly reflect the inner reality. Second, one must consider whether the world's historical and social experience makes it possible to say that the communists, in trying to build an atheist society, assumed an inherently impossible task.
Religion has been defined as “the outward act or form by which men indicate their recognition of the existence of a god. . . the outer form and embodiment [of] the inner spirit.” 2 Outward manifestations are all that can really be examined, as a secular analysis of the inner spirit is uncongenial to the instincts of social scientists and historians. It was also beyond the communists' natural reach.
Nevertheless, churches are earthly institutions, rooted in the terrain of observable reality. They are not made of disembodied ectoplasm, conjured up out of nothingness. In June 1991, Patriarch Aleksi II (Ridiger) responded to those who claimed that the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in the late 1920S, Metropolitan Sergi (Stragorodski), could have defied the communists and refused to make a declaration of loyalty to a godless state: Metropolitan Sergi wanted to save the Church. I know that many people, hearing these words, protest that it is Christ who saves the Church and not people. This is true. But it is also true that, without human efforts, God's help does not save. The Ecumenical Church is indestructible. But where is the celebrated Church of Carthage? Are there Orthodox believers today in Kaledoniya, in Asia Minor, where Gregory the Illuminator and Basil the Great earned their renown? Before our eyes the Church in Albania was destroyed. . . . And in Russia there were powers wishing to do the same thing. 3
Think of a “City of God” in the Soviet Union, which the communists assaulted in their days of militant atheism. The city's “temples” might represent the various religious bodies, each one rooted in the earth, where the city could be attacked and where its dimensions on the ground could be measured. Each of the temples also had — and has — a vertical dimension in the realm of the spirit, and no one who stood on the earth could clearly see to the tops of the columns, domes, and towers, as they were shrouded in mist. That is the realm of philosophers and theologians, who are not earthbound. This study will describe the situation on the ground; it is at this level that the communists made their assault, because they too were earthbound. 4
When they were young and filled with optimism and arrogance, the communists honestly believed that they could destroy the temples by knocking out the bottoms of the columns and by blocking all efforts to shore them up. Faith might have died within a generation or two in a nation where no house of worship stood, where no priest celebrated the liturgy, where no one taught a child about God, and where an empty silence of the spirit ruled the land. Even a catacomb church was within reach of the communists' bulldozers. Dedicated Christians worshiping secretly in the deep forest might have been hard to find and apprehend, but their activity was still of flesh and blood and not beyond the grasp of state authority if the believers were pursued with sufficient means and determination.
The image of an earthbound “temple” is intended only to distinguish the inquiries of the historian and the philosopher, not to describe the churches as inert or the historian's task as a simple measurement of dimensions and unchanging forms. At its heart a church consists of people; it might better be described as “an army on the march.” 5 Moreover, religious institutions do not always grow or shrink incrementally, which would enable the scholar to count churches, priests, and other resources and project trends in some linear fashion. Hegel wrote that “history is in fact a spiral process; great creative periods are followed by periods of reaction in which the spirit, apparently dying, is restoring itself to emerge in new creativity at a higher level.” 6 The Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang said much the same thing: “Thoughts and ideas are somewhat like seeds. They have a way of lying dormant underground until a more favorable climate brings them again to life.” 7
The appearance on the world stage of great individuals also results in imponderables and discontinuities. Perhaps this is the curse of historians, particularly those who write their histories too soon. Augustus, who left a memoir of the most notable events of his reign, made no mention of the birth of Christ. The year before the Millennium of the baptism of Rus, 1987, may have been like 1533 — the year before Luther completed his translation of the Bible, Calvin began to write the Institutes, and the Society of Jesus was conceived. By the time 1991 had drawn to a close, the collapse of communist government and of the USSR had provided a discontinuity no less portentous than the events that followed the year 1533. History's great periods of tumult are inherently uncontrollable, unpredictable, ruled by personality and chance, and also by those furious, primordial forces that characterize social revolutions in every epoch. Some anthropologists and historians have argued that the communists' objective of eradicating religious practice was intrinsically unattainable. They point out that secular power has never succeeded in eradicating religious practice in any society and that this suggests some fundamental human need to worship. Were the communists necessarily doomed to failure?
As a step toward providing the answer, we may all agree that secular political power has been able to change religious patterns, even if not to eliminate them. In 1555 the Treaty of Augsburg, between the Catholics and Protestants in Germany, decreed that the religion of a territory would be determined by its prince. With few exceptions, it was. Similarly, in Kievan Rus, Prince Vladimir accepted Orthodox Christianity in 988, thereby determining the prevailing religion in his land. It is also clear from history that redirecting religious allegiances has always been a bloody and a difficult business. A realistic communist would have concluded that the destruction of a competing religion required a great and sustained effort. Nevertheless, religions — indigestible though they may be — have been devoured by the adherents of other faiths.
Religions can undeniably be changed, but can religion be destroyed? To prove that communist power could not have eradicated religion, one must show both that (1) religion is an intrinsic and universal social need, and (2) communism is not a substitute faith.
The renowned anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote in the 1930s that religious phenomena are universal, and her findings are still accepted by her colleagues:
The striking fact about. . . [the] plain distinction between the religious and the non-religious in actual ethnographic recording is that it needs so little recasting in its transfer from one society to another. No matter into how exotic a society the traveler has wandered, he still finds the distinction made and in comparatively familiar terms. And it is universal. There is no monograph in existence that does not group a certain class of facts as religion, and there are no records of travelers, provided they are full enough to warrant such a judgment, that do not indicate this category. 8