Abstract
Most of us in the West were totally unprepared for that fourth antireligious holocaust in the first fifty Soviet years, and we should hardly be blamed, for it appears that the attack was an unexpected shock for the believers inside the Soviet Union as well. Few of them, if any, seem to have remembered the first signs of the gathering clouds: the two 1954 Central Committee resolutions, mentioned in Volume 1 of this study. This is understandable in view of the fact that in actual practice the period between 1953 and 1957 appeared to have been the most peaceful and even somewhat promising for the Church: student numbers in seminaries were growing, after the near-freeze of Stalin’s last three years. Reports again began to appear on rebuilding and repairing of churches and even on some new church construction. Also, new bishops of the younger generation began to be consecrated.
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Chapter 6: Persecutions under Khrushchev
Bourdeaux, ‘The Black Quinquennium: The Russian Church, 1959–1964’, Religion in Communist Lands (henceforth RCF), vol. 9, no. 1–2 (1981) p. 18.
Levitin, ‘Sviataia Rus’ v eti dni’ (Samizdat: 21 October 1964), AS 719, p. 15.
Talantov, ‘Bedstvennoe polozhenie Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi v Kirovskoi oblasti i rol’ Moskovskoi patriarkhii’ (Kirov: Samizdat, 1966–7), Keston College Samizdat archive (no. 739?) p. 1021
Bourdeaux, Patriarch, ch. 4. On Talantov, see Levitin-Krasnov, Rodnoiprostor (Frankfurt/M.: Possev, 1981) pp. 293–9.
F. Kovalsky, ‘Pressure on the Orthodox Church in Belorussia’ (Samizdat, 1965?), Keston Coll. Archives, SU Ort. 12/1; see also, Pospielovsky, Russian Church, vol. 2, p. 441.
I. A. Kryvelev, ‘Preodolenie religiozno-bytovykh perezhitkov u narodov SSR’, Sovetskaia etnografiia, no. 4 (1961) pp. 37–43.
V. Gagarin, Religioznye perezhitki v Komi ASSR i ikh preodolenie (Sykty’vkar, 1971) pp. 64–73.
V. M. Motitsky, Staroobriadchestvo Zabaikal’ia (Ulan Ude: Buriatskoe knigoizdatel’stvo, 1976) pp. 60–62. See also n. 28 below, on the growth of religious observances in the late 1950s to early 1960s.
Michael Rowe, ‘The 1979 Baptist Congress in Moscow …’, Religion in Communist Lands, no. 3 (1978) pp. 188–200
Pospielovsky, ‘The Forty-First All-Union Congress of the Evangelical Baptists …’ St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, no. 4 (1975) pp. 246–53.
Rev. D. Konstantinov, Gonimaia Tserkov’ (New York: Vseslavianskoe izdvo, 1967) p. 287; he cites the 1962 date. An inside source from Belorussia gives 1960 as the date of implementation of this measure in the Belorussian SSR: F. Kovalsky, ‘Pressure on the Orthodox Church in Belorussia’ (Keston College Archives, Su Ort. 12/1). As documents 713 and 717 (an appeal of four lay persons to the Eastern Patriarchs on behalf of the Pochaev Lavra, dated 1963; and an unsigned group address of lay Orthodox believers of the Ukraine and Belorussia to the World Council of Churches conference in Odessa, of 2 February 1964) cite 1961 as the year of the implementation of all these oppressive measures.
Konstantinov Gonimaia, p. 305. The reason for so many clergy arrests in the Orenburg Diocese may have been the fact that Manuil (Lemeshevsky), its ruling archbishop, had continued Patriarch Tikhon’s practice of secret ordinations of priests (unregistered and undeclared to the CROCA plenipotentiaries) as a security in case of mass liquidation of the overt clergy by the regime. See, Yakunin, ‘O sovremennom polozhenii R.P.Ts….’, Vol’noeslovo, no. 35–36 (1979) pp. 70–1.
Unofficial information from the Russian Church sources; Bourdeaux, Patriarch, p. 73; Archb. Vasilii (Krivocheine), ‘Arkhiepiskop Veniamin (Novitsky) (1900–1976)’, VRKhD, no. 120 (1977) p. 290; Konstantinov (Gonimaia, p. 304), erroneously states that Archbishop Veniamin was tried in 1961.
See above: Eshliman-Yakunin and Talantov. Also: Talantov, ‘O polozhenii Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi v SSSR, o predatel’stve eio upravleniia’ (Kirov. Samizdat, August 1967-March 1968; AS 745), 18 p.
Soviet authors admitted later that the clerical desertions had no effect on the faith of the believers, who retorted: ‘The rascal had served us to make money, and now he serves you to make money; the more such priests go over to the atheists, the better for us.’ D. Ushinin, ‘Novye veianiia v ateisticheskoi propagande v SSSR’, Grani, no. 60 (1966) pp. 214–15.
AS 713, AS 717; Bourdeaux, Patriarch, 164–82; Valentin Shkol’nyi, ‘Brat i sestra’, NiR, no. 6 (1965) pp. 42–5.
For example: ‘Vsem detiam bozhiim’, Posey, no. 11 (1969) p.12; Bourdeaux and Katherine Murray, Young Christians in Russia (London: Lakehead, 1976) pp. 130–37.
A. Khvorostianov and B. Borovik, ‘Izuver poluchil po zaslugam’, NiR, no. 1 (1962) pp. 81–2.
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© 1988 Dimitry V. Pospielovsky
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Pospielovsky, D.V. (1988). Persecutions under Khrushchev. In: Soviet Antireligious Campaigns and Persecutions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19002-7_6
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