Religion in the Soviet Union

As the founder of the Soviet state, Vladimir Lenin, put it: Religion is the opium of the people—this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion. Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class. Marxist–Leninist atheism has consistently advocated the control, suppression, and elimination of religion. Within about a year of the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, including the churches themselves, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed. Many more were persecuted. The Russian Orthodox Church also used its properties to aid the cause of the White Russians during this period, several closed churches were later reopened ==Christianity==

Orthodox Christianity in Moscow was demolished by the Soviet authorities in 1931 to make way for the Palace of Soviets. The palace was never finished, and the cathedral was rebuilt in 2000. Orthodox Christians constituted a majority of believers in the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, three Orthodox churches claimed substantial memberships there: the Russian Orthodox Church, the Georgian Orthodox Church, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (AOC). They were members of the major confederation of Orthodox churches in the world, generally referred to as the Eastern Orthodox Church. The first two functioned openly and were tolerated by the state, but the Ukrainian AOC was not permitted to function openly. Parishes of the Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church reappeared in Belarus only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but they did not receive recognition from the Belarusian Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, which controls Belarusian eparchies. Russian Orthodox Church According to both Soviet and Western sources, in the late 1980s, the Russian Orthodox Church had over 50 million believers but only about 7,000 registered active churches. Over 4,000 of these churches were located in the Ukrainian Republic (almost half of them in western Ukraine). The distribution of the six monasteries and ten convents of the Russian Orthodox Church was equally disproportionate: only two of the monasteries were located in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, with another two in Ukraine and one each in Belarus and Lithuania. Seven convents were located in Ukraine and one each in Moldova, Estonia, and Latvia. Georgian Orthodox Church The Georgian Orthodox Church, another autocephalous member of Eastern Orthodoxy, was headed by a Georgian patriarch. In the late 1980s it had 15 bishops, 180 priests, 200 parishes, and an estimated 2.5 million followers. In 1811, the Georgian Orthodox Church was incorporated into the Russian Orthodox Church, but it regained its independence in 1917, after the fall of the Tsar. Nevertheless, the Russian Orthodox Church did not officially recognise its independence until 1943. Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church The Ukrainian AOC separated from the Russian Orthodox Church in January 1919, when the short-lived Ukrainian state adopted a decree declaring autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Its independence was reaffirmed by the Bolsheviks in the Ukrainian Republic, and by 1924 it had 30 bishops, almost 1,500 priests, nearly 1,100 parishes, and between 4 and 6 million members. From its inception, the Ukrainian AOC faced the hostility of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Ukrainian Republic. In the late 1920s, Soviet authorities accused it of nationalist tendencies. In 1930 the government forced the church to reorganise as the "Ukrainian Orthodox Church", and few of its parishes survived until 1936. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian AOC continued to function outside the borders of the Soviet Union, and it was revived on Ukrainian territory under the German occupation during World War II. In the late 1980s, some of the Orthodox faithful in the Ukrainian Republic appealed to the Soviet government to reestablish the Ukrainian AOC. Armenian Apostolic The Armenian Apostolic Church is an independent Oriental Orthodox church. In the 1980s it had about 4 million adherents – almost the entire population of Armenia. It was permitted 6 bishops, between 50 and 100 priests, and between 20 and 30 churches, and it had one theological seminary and six monasteries. Catholics Catholics formed a substantial and active religious constituency in the Soviet Union. Their number increased dramatically with the annexation of territories of the Second Polish Republic in 1939 and the Baltic republics in 1940. Catholics in the Soviet Union were divided between those belonging to the Latin Church, which was recognised by the government, and those remaining loyal to the Greek Catholic Church, which was banned in 1946. Latin Church The majority of the 5.5 million Latin Catholics in the Soviet Union lived in the Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Latvian republics, with a sprinkling in the Moldavian, Ukrainian, and Russian republics. Following World War II, the most active Latin Catholic community in the Soviet Union was in the Lithuanian Republic, where the majority of people are Catholics. The Latin Church there was viewed as an institution that both fostered and defended Lithuanian national interests and values. From 1972 a Catholic underground publication, The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, supported not only Lithuanians' religious rights but also their national rights. Greek Catholic Church Western Ukraine, which included largely the historic region of Galicia, became part of the Soviet Union in 1939. Although Ukrainian, its population was never part of the Russian Empire, but was Eastern Catholic. After the Second World War, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church identified closely with the nationalist aspirations of the region, arousing the hostility of the Soviet government, which was in combat with Ukrainian Insurgency. In 1945, Soviet authorities arrested the church's Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj, nine bishops and hundreds of clergy and leading lay activists, and deported them to forced labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere. The nine bishops and many of the clergy died in prisons, concentration camps, internal exile, or soon after their release during the post-Stalin thaw, but after 18 years of imprisonment and persecution, Metropolitan Slipyj was released when Pope John XXIII intervened on his behalf. Slipyj went to Rome, where he received the title of Major Archbishop of Lviv, and became a cardinal in 1965. In fact the influence of the Protestantism was much wider than these figures suggest: in addition to the existence of unregistered Baptist and Pentecostal groups, there were also thousands who attended worship without taking baptism. Many Baptist and Pentecostal congregations were in Ukraine. Women significantly outnumbered men in these congregations, though the pastors were male. By 1991, Ukraine had the second largest Baptist community in the world, behind only the United States. Although the Soviet state had established the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in 1944, and encouraged congregations to register, this did not signal the end to the persecution of Christians. Many leaders and ordinary believers of different Protestant communities fell victims to the persecution by Communist government, including gulag imprisonment. Persecution was particularly vicious in the years 1948–53 and again in the early 1960s. Despite the Soviet state's attempt to create a single, unified church movement, there were many divisions within the evangelical church. In the early 1960s, a break-away group formed a new movement which called for a spiritual awakening and greater independence from the Soviet state. Leaders of this group (eventually known as the Council of the Church of Evangelical Christians-Baptists) faced particular persecution. Pentecostals, too, formed their own underground organisation and were targeted by the state as a result. Lutherans Lutherans, the second largest Protestant group, lived for the most part in the Latvian and Estonian republics. In the 1990s, Lutheran churches in these republics finally began to settle themselves in the two republics. The state's attitude toward Lutherans was generally benign. The Lutheran Church in different regions of the country was persecuted during the Soviet era, and church property was confiscated. Many of its members and pastors were oppressed, and some were forced to emigrate. Other Protestants A number of other Protestant groups were present, including Adventists and Reformed. Other Christian groups The March 1961 instruction on religious cults explained for the first time, that "sects, the teaching and character of activities of which has anti-state and savagely extremist [изуверский] character: Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostals, Adventists-reformists" are not to be registered and were thus banned. A number of congregations of Russian Mennonites, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other Christian groups existed in the Soviet Union. Nearly 9,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were deported to Siberia in 1951; the numbers of those who were not deported is unknown. The number of Jehovah's Witnesses increased greatly over this period, with a KGB estimate of around 20,000 in 1968. Russian Mennonites began to emigrate from the Soviet Union in the face of increasing violence and persecution, state restrictions on freedom of religion, and biased allotments of communal farmland. They emigrated to Germany, Britain, the United States, parts of South America, and other regions. ==Judaism==

See history of the Jews in the Soviet Union. == Islam ==

After the Bolshevik revolution, Islam was for some time (until 1929) treated better than the Russian Orthodox Church, which Bolsheviks regarded as a center of the "reaction", and other religions. In the declaration "Ко всем трудящимся мусульманам России и Востока" (To All Working Muslims in Russia and the Orient) of November 1917, the Bolshevik government declared the freedom to exercise their religion and customs for Muslims "whose beliefs and customs had been suppressed by the Czars and the Russian oppressors." During the Great Patriotic War, the restrictions on religion were erased somewhat. In 1943 the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan was established. In 1949, 415 registered mosques functioned in the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, Islam had the second largest following in the Soviet Union: between 45 and 50 million people identified themselves as Muslims. However, the Soviet Union had only about 500 working mosques, a fraction of the number in prerevolutionary Russia; further, Soviet law forbade Islamic religious activity outside working mosques and Islamic schools. All working mosques, religious schools, and Islamic publications were supervised by four "spiritual directorates" established by Soviet authorities to provide government control. The Spiritual Directorate for Central Asia and Kazakhstan, the Spiritual Directorate for the European Soviet Union and Siberia, and the Spiritual Directorate for the Northern Caucasus and Dagestan oversaw the religious life of Sunni Muslims. The Spiritual Directorate for Transcaucasia dealt with both Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims. The overwhelming majority of the Muslims were Sunnis. , Samarkand, 1964. Soviet Muslims differed linguistically and culturally from each other, speaking about fifteen Turkic languages, ten Iranian languages, and thirty Caucasian languages. Hence, communication between different Muslim groups was difficult. In 1989 Russian often served as a lingua franca among some educated Muslims. Culturally, some Muslim groups had highly developed urban traditions, whereas others were recently nomadic. Some lived in industrialised environments, others in isolated mountainous regions. In sum, Muslims were not a homogeneous group with a common national identity and heritage, although they shared the same religion and the same country. In the late 1980s, unofficial Muslim congregations, meeting in tea houses and private homes with their own mullahs, greatly outnumbered those in the officially sanctioned mosques. The unofficial mullahs were either self-taught or informally trained by other mullahs. In the late 1980s, unofficial Islam appeared to split into fundamentalist congregations and groups that emphasised Sufism. == Policy toward religions in practice ==

Soviet policy toward religion was based on the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which made atheism the official doctrine of the Communist Party. However, "the Soviet law and administrative practice through most of the 1920s extended some tolerance to religion and forbade the arbitrary closing or destruction of some functioning churches", and each successive Soviet constitution granted freedom of belief. Marxism-Leninism advocates the suppression and ultimately the disappearance of religious beliefs, considering them to be "unscientific" and "superstitious". In the 1920s and 1930s, such organisations as the League of the Militant Godless were active in anti-religious propaganda. Atheism was the norm in schools, communist organisations (such as the Young Pioneer Organization), and the media. The state's efforts to eradicate religion in the Soviet Union, however, varied over the years with respect to particular religions and were affected by higher state interests. In 1923, a New York Times correspondent saw Christians observing Easter peacefully in Moscow despite violent anti-religious actions in previous years. Official policies and practices not only varied with time, but also differed in their application from one nationality to another and from one religion to another. In 1929, with the onset of the Cultural Revolution in the Soviet Union and an upsurge of radical militancy in the Party and Komsomol, a powerful "hard line" in favor of mass closing of churches and arrests of priests became dominant and evidently won Stalin's approval. Secret "hard line" instructions were issued to local party organizations, but not published. When the anti-religious drive inflamed the anger of the rural population, not to mention that of the Pope and other Western church spokesmen, the state was able to back off from a policy that it had never publicly endorsed anyway. Although all Soviet leaders had the same long-range goal of developing a cohesive Soviet people, they pursued different policies to achieve it. For the Soviet government, questions of nationality and religion were always closely linked. Therefore, their attitude toward religion also varied from a total ban on some religions to official support of others. Policy towards nationalities and religion map of religious groups in the Soviet Union, 1953 In theory, the Soviet Constitution described the state's position regarding nationalities and religions. It stated that every Soviet citizen also had a particular nationality, and every Soviet passport carried these two entries. The constitution granted a large degree of local autonomy, but this autonomy was subordinated to central authority. In addition, because local and central administrative structures were often not clearly divided, local autonomy was further weakened. Although under the Constitution all nationalities were equal, in practice they were not treated so. Only fifteen nationalities had union republic status, which granted them, in principle, many rights, including the right to secede from the union. Twenty-two nationalities lived in autonomous republics with a degree of local self-government and representation in the Council of Nationalities in the Supreme Soviet. Eighteen more nationalities had territorial enclaves (autonomous oblasts and autonomous okrugs) but had very few powers of self-government. The remaining nationalities had no right of self-government at all. Joseph Stalin's 1913 definition of a nation as "a historically constituted and stable community of people formed on the basis of common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup revealed in a common culture" was retained by Soviet authorities throughout the 1980s. However, in granting nationalities union republic status, three additional factors were considered: a population of at least 1 million, territorial compactness, and location on the borders of the Soviet Union. Although Lenin believed that eventually all nationalities would merge into one, he insisted that the Soviet Union be established as a federation of formally equal nations. In the 1920s, genuine cultural concessions were granted to the nationalities. Communist elites of various nationalities were permitted to flourish and to have considerable self-government. National cultures, religions, and languages were not merely tolerated but, in areas with Muslim populations, encouraged. Demographic changes in the 1960s and 1970s whittled down the overall Russian majority, but they also caused two nationalities (the Kazakhs and Kirgiz) to become minorities in their own republics at the time of the 1979 census, and considerably reduced the majority of the titular nationalities in other republics. This situation led Leonid Brezhnev to declare at the 24th Communist Party Congress in 1971 that the process of creating a unified Soviet people had been completed, and proposals were made to abolish the federative system and replace it with a single state. In the 1970s, however, a broad movement of national dissent began to spread throughout the Soviet Union. It manifestated itself in many ways: Jews insisted on their right to emigrate to Israel; Crimean Tatars demanded to be allowed to return to Crimea; Lithuanians called for the restoration of the rights of the Catholic Church; and Helsinki Watch groups were established in the Georgian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian republics. Petitions, literature, and occasional public demonstrations voiced public demands for the human rights of all nationalities. By the end of the 1970s, however, massive and concerted efforts by the KGB had largely suppressed the national dissent movement. Nevertheless, Brezhnev had learned his lesson. Proposals to dismantle the federative system were abandoned in favour of a policy of drawing the nationalities together more gradually. Soviet officials identified religion closely with nationality. The implementation of policy toward a particular religion, therefore, depended on the state's perception of the bond between that religion and the nationality practicing it, the size of the religious community, the extent to which the religion accepted outside authority, and the nationality's willingness to subordinate itself to political authority. Thus the smaller the religious community and the more closely it identified with a particular nationality, the tighter were the state's policies, especially if the religion also recognised a foreign authority such as the pope. Policy towards Orthodoxy , was demolished in the 1930s under Stalin. Soviet authorities both exploited the Church for state purposes and also moved to eliminate it. In the first five years of Soviet rule, 12 bishops and 1,215 priests were killed. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Almost all seminaries were closed, and most religious material was banned from publication. By 1941 only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence prior to World War I. Such crackdowns related to many people's dissatisfaction with the church in pre-revolutionary Russia. The close ties between the church and the state led to the perception of the church as corrupt and greedy by many members of the intelligentsia. Many peasants, while highly religious, also viewed the church unfavorably. Respect for religion did not extend to the local priests. The church owned a significant portion of Russia's land, and this was a bone of contention – land ownership was a big factor in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 induced Stalin to enlist the Russian Orthodox Church as an ally to arouse Russian patriotism against foreign aggression. Russian Orthodox religious life experienced a revival: thousands of churches were reopened; there were 22,000 by the time Nikita Khrushchev came to power. The state permitted religious publications, and church membership grew. During the final years of Joseph Stalin's rule, there was once again a tightening of anti-religious measurements. In April 1948, Council for Religious Affairs sent out an instruction to its local commissioners to halt the registration of new religious communities and from that point churches were no longer opened. The "Knowledge Society", which was established a year earlier, was engaged in educational activities and again began to publish anti-religious literature. In 1989, as part of the general relaxation of restrictions on religions, some additional Muslim religious associations were registered, and some of the mosques that had been closed by the government were returned to Muslim communities. The government also announced plans to permit the training of limited numbers of Muslim religious leaders in two- and five-year courses in Ufa and Baku, respectively. Policy towards Judaism Although Lenin publicly condemned antisemitism, the government was hostile toward Judaism from the beginning. In 1919 the Soviet authorities abolished Jewish community councils, which were traditionally responsible for maintaining synagogues. They created a special Jewish section of the party, whose tasks included propaganda against Jewish clergy and religion. To offset Jewish national and religious aspirations, and to reflect the Jewish national movement's role in the socialist movement of the Russian Empire (for example, Trotsky was first a member of the Jewish Bund, not the Social Democratic Labour Party), an alternative to the Land of Israel was established in 1934. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast, created in 1928 by Stalin, with Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East as its administrative center, was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew, would be the national language, and proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of its culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ended in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges. Jewish leaders were arrested and executed, and Yiddish schools were shut down. Further persecutions and purges followed. The training of rabbis became impossible until the early 1940s, and until the late 1980s only one Yiddish periodical was published. Because of its identification with Zionism, Hebrew was taught only in schools for diplomats. Most of the 5,000 synagogues functioning prior to the Bolshevik Revolution were closed under Stalin, and others were closed under Khrushchev. The practice of Judaism became very difficult, intensifying the desire of Jews to leave the Soviet Union. == Religion in the Post-Soviet states ==

• Armenia • Azerbaijan • Belarus • Estonia • Georgia • Kazakhstan • Kyrgyzstan • Latvia • Lithuania • Moldova • Russia • Tajikistan • Turkmenistan • Ukraine • Uzbekistan == See also ==