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This article written in
1945 analyses the relationship between the Soviet state and the
Russian Orthodox Church. There was a clear dividing line between
Lenin's approach to this question and the zig-zag policy later
adopted by Stalin. First published in Workers International News,
October 1945.
In a recent issue of
Workers' International News we dealt with the degeneration
of the Stalinist Bureaucracy as illustrated by the monstrous growth
of nationalism which it has engendered in the Soviet Union. The
course of this Stalinist degeneration can, however, be followed by
studying almost any aspect of Soviet life. Especially clearly it is
revealed in the relations of the Bureaucracy with the Russian
Orthodox Church.
The attitude of the
Bolsheviks towards the Orthodox Church was conditioned not only by
the materialist basis upon which Marxism stands but also by the
special role played by this Church in Tsarist Russia. It had been not
only one of the greatest landowners - it owned 7.5 million acres
and had an annual income of 150,000,000 rubles. It was also a tool,
and a willing tool, of Tsarism. With the growth of the revolutionary
movement towards the end of the 19th Century the Russian
clergy asked to be allowed to cooperate with the Tsarist Secret
Service in tracking down revolutionaries and many played no small
role in this respect.
After the massacre of
the St. Petersburg workers by the Tsar's troops on Bloody Sunday
(January 1905) the Holy Synod (the governing body of the Church)
issued a proclamation denouncing certain "evil-minded persons"
who "lead others into useless death without repentance, with
bitterness in their hearts and curses on their lips". "Our
enemies," stated the Synod, "wish to shake the foundations of our
orthodox faith and the autocratic power of the Tsars... Fear God,
honour the Tsar...submit to every power ordained of God... Toil
according to God's ordinance in the sweat of the brow."
After the October
Revolution, in January 1918, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church,
Tikhon, issued a message to the faithful, in which he denounced the
Bolsheviks as "monsters of the human race" and excommunicated all
who should support the Revolution.
Lenin wrote; "Marx
said, ‘Religion is the opium of the people' - and this
postulate is the corner stone of the whole philosophy of Marxism with
regard to religion. Marxism always regarded all modern religions and
churches, and every kind of religious organisation as instruments of
that bourgeois reaction whose aim is to defend exploitation,
stupefying the working class." (The Attitude of the Workers'
Party towards religion, May, 1909)
But in the same article
Lenin made it clear that the Bolsheviks did not expect religion
immediately to disappear, even after the seizure of power. Engels, to
whom Lenin refers, had established this some forty years previously
in Anti-Duhring where he wrote:
"And when this act
(the proletarian revolution) has been accomplished, when society, by
taking possession of all means of production and using them on a
planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage
in which they are at present held by these means of production which
they themselves have produced but which now confront them as an
irresistible extraneous force; when then man no longer merely
proposes, but also disposes - only then will the last extraneous
force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will
also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason
that then there will be nothing left to reflect."
Only in a fully
socialist society can religion be expected to disappear completely
for only then will the social basis of religion - the fear
of the masses caused by their helplessness before the blind forces of
production - cease to exist. Meanwhile, the CPSU, as its 1919
Programme put it, endeavoured;
"to secure the
complete break up of the union between the exploiting classes and the
organisations for religious propaganda, thus co-operating in the
actual deliverance of the working masses from religious prejudices,
and organising the most extensive propaganda of scientific
enlightenment and anti-religious conceptions. While doing this, we
must carefully avoid anything that can wound the feelings of
believers, for such a method can only lead to the strengthening of
religious fanaticism."
With this objective in
view the Soviet State decreed the separation of the Church from the
State and freed the educational system from all Church influence. All
citizens were given the right to carry on both religious and
anti-religious propaganda. The property of the Church was confiscated
but the church buildings were returned for the use of the clergy. The
Church retained freedom of worship, association, meeting and
propaganda. On the other hand vigorous anti-religious propaganda was
carried on by the CPSU which set up the "Society of Militant
Atheists" with its journal, The Atheist.
During the years of the
Civil War the bulk of the Russian clergy supported the Whites but
their resistance to the Soviet Regime was broken by the early 1920's.
In 1921, in order to get funds for buying foodstuffs abroad in order
to relieve the famine, the Soviet Government decreed the confiscation
of gold, silver and precious stones belonging to the Church. The
Patriarch ordered the clergy to resist and a bitter struggle resulted
in the course of which 45 clergy were executed and 250 sentenced to
long terms of imprisonment. By this time it was obvious that the
Soviet Government had come to stay and a section of the clergy
hastened to make their peace with it upon the best terms they could.
In 1922 this section set up the so-called "Living Church" which
declared capitalism to be a "deadly sin". A split in the Orthodox
Church was the consequence. But henceforth even the majority of the
clergy who were opposed to the "Living Church" paid lip-service
to the Soviet State.
Such was the situation
before the rise of the Stalinist Bureaucracy and its victory over the
Bolshevik-Leninist Left Opposition. The Church continued to function
in the Soviet Union, but the masses had turned from it, especially in
the towns. Its support amongst the youth was very small, and its main
basis lay amongst the more backward masses, especially the older
generation of peasants. The clergy lived upon donations from their
supporters and were entirely cut off from Soviet life. Priests had no
right to vote in Soviet elections or to be elected to Soviet
organisations. For the class-conscious Soviet worker the Church was a
relic of the past which was destined gradually to wither away under
the influence of the rising material and cultural standards of the
masses.
Such would without
doubt have been the course of development had the isolation of the
Soviet State been broken by the World Revolution and the growth of
the Stalinist Bureaucracy been thus prevented. We would have
witnessed the fulfilment of the confident prophesy of the A.B.C of
Communism - the text book issued by the CPSU in the days of
Lenin and Trotsky -
"the transition
from the Society which makes an end of capitalism to the society
which is completely freed from all traces of class division and class
struggle, will bring about the natural death of all religion and all
superstition."
The actual course of
events under Stalinist rule has been almost diametrically opposite -
a conclusive proof of the nature of the Stalinist regime and of the
extent to which it has "finally and irrevocably" established
Socialism!
The attitude of t he
Bureaucracy towards the Church has passed through the usual zig-zags
of Stalinist policy. During the ultra-left period of forcible
collectivisation and the Five Year Plan in Four an attempt was made
to liquidate the Church and its influence by government decree.
Starting in 1929 churches were forcibly closed and priests arrested
and exiled all over the Soviet Union. The celebrated Shrine of the
Iberian Virgin in Moscow - esteemed by believers to be the
"holiest" in all Russia was demolished - Stalin and his
Government were not afraid of strengthening religious fanaticism by
wounding the feelings of believers as Lenin and Trotsky had been!
Religion, they believed, could be liquidated, like the kulak, by a
stroke of the pen. The Society of Militant Atheists, under Stalin's
orders, issued on May 15th 1932, the "Five Year Plan of
Atheism" - by May 1st 1937, such as the "Plan",
"not a single house of prayer shall remain in the territory of the
USSR, and the very concept of God must be banished from the Soviet
Union as a survival of the Middle Ages and an instrument for the
oppression of the working masses."!
Unfortunately for the
Stalinist "Plan", during the very period when it was proclaimed,
the Bureaucracy was actually strengthening the social basis of
religion in the Soviet Union - by the ever increasing miseries
which its disastrous economic policy was imposing upon the masses.
The Great Famine of 1932-1933 in which millions died in the Soviet
Union did more for the strengthening of the hold of the Church over
the masses that could have been done by any amount of religious
propaganda. Like so many other Stalinist "Plans" of this period,
the "Five Year Plan of Atheism" was officially forgotten long
before the time for its fulfilment was due.
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 U.S.S.R." 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 zig-zag 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 U.S.S.R. 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 U.S.S.R. 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 1,700 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 25th anniversary of the
October Revolution (November 1942) gives eloquent proof of this:
"On this 25th
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 December 27th, 1942, Alexander Alexandrovich Troitski,
priest of the parish of Chubino, writes to Stalin announcing that he
has already subscribed 30,000 roubles, "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 roubles. I have
already paid in fifty thousand of them to the State Bank and I will
remit the fifty thousand remaining on January 15th 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 roubles. 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 January 4th, 1943, that he has
already paid into the State Bank, "All my personal savings,
amounting to 273,000 roubles. I beg of you, Joseph Vissarionovich,"
he continues, "to have built with this money two war planes, giving
them the names of heroic ancestors Alexander Nevsk and Dmitri
Donskoi."
The higher up one goes in
the Church hierarchy the greater become the sums subscribed. For
instance, on January 5th, 1943, Alexis, Metropolitan of Leningrad,
informs Stalin that his Bishopric has already subscribed 3,182,143
roubles; he is now adding to this a further 500,000 roubles! 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 September 5th, 1943, there appeared the
announcement that Stalin had received leading Church dignitaries in
the course off 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 Russians, 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 September 8th, 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
U.S.S.R." 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 G.G. 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 authorized 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 toward strengthening
the Church and will be an important starting point [for] 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 today. "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 might 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
co-operation in its needs from the Government and in first place from
the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church attached
to the Sovnakom of the U.S.S.R."
At every step now,
the Orthodox Church hastens publicly to announce its support for
Stalin and his policy. For instance, in "Izvestia" of February
17th 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 U.S.S.R. 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 26th 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 August 22nd 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
roubles 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.
October 1945
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