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[Woodstock Report, October 1992, no. 31, pp. 3-8]
Copyright © 1992 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
The Woodstock Theological Center sponsored a forum on May 6, 1992, that discussed the role that religion will play in the development of free-market democracies in the former Soviet republics. Dr. James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, author, and historian, gave the opening presentation. Respondents were Dr. Thomas E. Bird, professor of Slavic Studies at Queens College; John H. Erickson, associate professor of Canon Law and Church History at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, New York; and Father Victor Potapov, rector of St. John the Baptist Russian Orthodox Church in Washington, D.C. Dr. Angela E. Stent, associate professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, moderated the discussion. We present abridged versions of the four talks. The views expressed at a Woodstock forum do not necessarily reflect the views of the Woodstock Theological Center.
James H. Billington is Librarian of Congress and an author and historian. His books include The Icon and the Axe, Fire in the Minds of Men and an account of the 1991 coup, Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope. He participates as a host, commentator, and consultant on educational and network television programs.
The revival of religion in Russia and the former Soviet republics is an extremely rich, complex, and even chaotic development. It is part of the great general change that happened in eastern Europe in 1989, in westernized parts of the Soviet Union in 1990, and at the heart of empire in Moscow in 1991.
The first thing to say about all of this is that it is consistently misnamed in all journalistic and most scholarly accounts. It is described routinely as a revolution, the second Russian revolution. Revolutions in the modern era have been violent, political, and motivated by secular ideologies. They have been led by intellectual elites, essentially from above, operating on certain social and political conditions. These are the essentials of a revolutionary movement. The changes in eastern Europe were exactly the opposite: not revolutionary but evolutionary, not violent but expressly nonviolent, not secular but deeply motivated and effected by a kind of religious idealism and with the direct participation of religious leaders. In fact, the movement was not led from above, but from below.
The fundamental model for this change was the Polish movement. The pattern, once it developed, had idiosyncrasies in all regions, but the one thing that was common to all of them was the role of religion: Catholic in Poland, Lutheran in East Germany, and Orthodox in Russia. I don't think that this commonality has been recognized.
The role of religion is the most single, stunning, intellectual omission from media analyses and, indeed, from most university-based analyses of world events. None of the great non-political events of the post-war world have been correctly understood: Khomeni and the rise of fundamentalist Islam, the whole religious development beginning in Poland and extending into the other areas in eastern Europe, the nature and rise of the left in Latin America, and the nature and rise of the right in the United States. The one thing common to all of them was a central role of religion which was completely neglected by the behaviorist establishment which analyzes reality for the modern western mind.
Religion played a special role in this development in eastern Europe for the simple dialectical reason that religion was the one area of private life that communism was structurally and systematically pledged to eliminate, not merely to control and rechannel, but to eliminate. This is a very serious matter and it has been seriously neglected. The elites of the western world totally missed, for instance, as recently as Khrushchev, the powerful anti-religious campaign of the late fifties and early sixties. It was missed in the western world at the same time as Khrushchev was being lionized as a great reformer.
The beginning of the religious revival dates back to 1964 and three events: the Illekov Report (the central committee statement announcing that the Khrushchev campaign had failed), the destruction of the second largest and oldest church in Russia, and the first expedition to find icons by 500 students from Moscow University. These events were followed during the Brezhnev era by the rise of village prose writers, replacing the urban secular poets as the main focus of literary agitation, a sort of surrogate for political opposition in those years of stagnation.
Christianity grew slowly from below, despite the weakening and demeaning of the church from above, because the decision was made to no longer try to wipe it out. This led to a dual phenomenon in the slow religious revival that was beginning at this time. First, there was an out-migration to the sects, that is, a general movement of the population away from the Orthodox Church into the Baptist community or into the Pentecostal, Adventist, and other communities. The second was an in-migration into the establishment of religious consciousness, beginning with Brezhnev's death-bed decision to restore the Danilov Monastery for the Millennium of Christianity. The Millennium of Christianity in 1988 was itself co-opted as a national festival. It became clear that religion was co-opting the political authorities rather than the other way around.
Then came Gorbachev's more general tolerance and the election of Patriarch Alexy and the Metropolitan Cyril of Smolensk. Finally, there was Yeltsin's positive alliance with the church. The patriarch, in fact, supported Yeltsin during the presidential campaign and spoke out in a crucial moment during the August putsch. What we saw with the putsch was a great national event that was internally interpreted in Russia in semi-religious tones. This again has been totally missed in the Western reportage of the coup.
The redemptive value of innocent suffering, the three young men who were killed in the coup attempt, the funeral procession, the playing on tradition, all contributed to a catharsis of repentance and forgiveness. What the people were basically doing was discovering freedom from central power and, at the same time, responsibility for moral decision. For two days it was not clear what was going to happen. Everybody, for the first time in adult memory, had to make moral decisions within themselves, within their families, and within their institutions. They had to say where they stood on the basis of some kind of morality. This was totally unprecedented in a system designed to diffuse and to literally evaporate any sense of individual moral choice.
Behind the discovery of both freedom and responsibility was the discovery of the inter-relationship between democracy and religion, and the fact that the people had to find a different way of doing business. There had to be a basis for defining moral responsibility which was transcendent of and not contingent simply on the state. These are very important internal discoveries that are still going on, that are part of the total transformation of the perceptual atmosphere in which life is now conducted among the Russian majority.
There was a further acceleration of the growth of Christianity from below and a movement in from the periphery. A large number of Ukrainians entered the seminaries, which might otherwise have been populated by Uniates. There were a significant number of Jewish converts and a large number of people in the seminaries who did not come from traditional Orthodox backgrounds at all. The Siberians have basically taken over the country, playing an enormously and centrally important role. They bring with them a totally different orientation towards both democracy and religion, particularly towards ownership of and responsibility for property.
It is a time of great change. There are three attitudes within the Christian community, which is predominantly Orthodox. The first is apocalypticism, which is very characteristic of the intellectuals. Change is always explained in apocalyptical terms. There has never been such a sustained apocalyptical mood in Moscow among otherwise adult and responsible intellectuals. It is simply a phenomenon and by no means a comforting one. People who think of apocalyptical expectations begin with Chernobyl, which also means wormwood, and is therefore reminiscent of the star "Wormwood" in the book of Revelation (8:11). Such thinking can lead to all kinds of occult and unbelievable calculations, conspiracy theories, the sense of the impending end of the world, the third millennium. This mood is off to a flying start in Russia.
The second attitude is neo-authoritarianism, the so-called Red-Brown movement. The idea is that there is need for a new central authority. There was a letter from a group of professors, including Rubikoff, one of the leaders in scientific atheism as a militant faith, saying to the patriarch, "You are the only hope for restoring authority to Russia, please rise up and defend our mighty land." Neo-authoritarians, the Red-Brown movement, are former communists who are turning towards some kind of national, crypto-fascism. This movement is growing very quickly and is extremely strong. It has the support of some of the hierarchy and the older members of the clergy.
The third trend is the recovery of piety and the rediscovery of local Christian community, particularly in the provinces. Parish development is something with which the new patriarch has tried to identify. He has visited 22 dioceses. He has been much more an itinerant pastor, perhaps in unconscious imitation of the Pope, a visitor of all the regions of his patrimony.
In any event, these are three quite different tendencies that you see in the current confusion. There is an interest in ownership, in autonomy, but not in market economy. Economists continue to be mistrusted.
There is no good historical writing going on, or even literature for that matter; everything is journalism. There is a tremendous flood of journalism. The Library of Congress has a Moscow office acquiring this material. It is probably the best collection available, but absolutely no one is reading it. In our rough computations, political journals are the most numerous of the new private journals but religious and philosophical journals are second. It is a very close race between the two. So there is an enormous interest at a journalistic level and at a personal level in parish development and in other Christian groups. There is a substantial sub-current of conversion to Catholicism and a considerable interest in fundamental Protestantism, both of which deeply worry the Orthodox hierarchy.
Beyond this general characterization, I think there is the beginning of a profound stage in the history of the Christian church. If one of the great poverties of Christianity in the modern world is the absence of authentic prophets, saints, and martyrs, in Russia you are dealing with a Christian community which has all three. The leading prophet, Father Aleksandr Men, was murdered two years ago and thereby became an authentic martyr. The martyrs of the Soviet era, the so-called "new martyrs," which the church abroad has always venerated and honored, were honored in April with a very moving liturgy in the Cathedral of the Assumption inside the Kremlin. This is the first time the martyrs of the Soviet period were recognized.
The rediscovery of the lost martyrs of the Soviet period can be summed up in the words of one of them when he entered the gulag and went off to his death. "You must realize that here my life ends and my life begins." It was a play on the word "life" in Russian. Life meaning "my life" and "my life" as told in the lives of the saints. More and more, Russians are finding an explanation not at a simple historical level, but at a deep spiritual level. The redemptive value of innocent suffering is the only way of accounting for the martyr. This is the beginning of something very much deeper than anything I have talked about so far, of which only the outlines are visible, but something which is certainly of inestimable potential value to the Christian world in particular and for the world in general.
Finally, there are beginnings of new Christian communities, such as the new hospital in the monastery in Petersburg. There is the Christian revival union which is setting up a voluntary association working for reconstitution of agrarian life on a village basis. There is the Russian Bible Society in which the Baptists and the Orthodox are collaborating. And there is the work of reconstructing icon painting as a religious art.
The leaders of these activities are under 35. These are the people who were on the barricades. They are building new communities from the bottom up, renouncing the entire high political arena. It is out of the deep authentic revival of the small local communities that something new will grow over the long run. Whether it will be able to flourish in the short run, in view of the crisis at the social-political level, is one of the great questions that remains to be answered.
Thomas E. Bird is professor of Slavic Studies at Queens College, a member of the Eastern Orthodox/Roman Catholic Theological Consultation (USA) and former president of Pax Romana. He has written and edited many books on religious communities of the former Soviet Republics.
The major problem in addressing the question of what is happening in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union on any level, whether political, economic, philosophical, or religious, is our tendency to project. We live, those of us who are Roman Catholics, in a period that is post-Vatican II, that opened up new attitudes and approaches to the world, to the Roman Catholic Church, and to believers who are not Roman Catholics. We tend to project on others many of those attitudes of ecumenism and dialogue. We make buzz words out of "inter-faith" and "inter-cultural" and then proceed to project those ideas, attitudes, and assumptions onto other societies and other peoples.
The entire sociological gestalt of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has been living under a kind of bell jar that was placed over it in the late teens and early twenties and now has been taken off. The Soviet Union has not lived through a civil rights decade of the sixties, has not lived through the various kinds of laboratory experiences of learning to talk first "at" and then "to" and then "with" one another.
For all of the horror that the communist regimes represented in those various countries, they did, as my Moscow taxi drivers keep reminding me, keep a sense of law and order. That sense of law and order has dissipated with the new democracy and the new parliament. We now have attitudes that are curious and anxious and troubled and, above all, suspicious.
Chesterton said, "Christianity has not failed; Christianity has not yet been tried." A variation on that theme came from that mid-nineteenth century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov who said that in the tenth century Russia had been baptized but had never been catechized. That is a fact of life today for all of eastern Europe, for all of those areas that were under socialism: East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Russia. Socialism was very effective in a variety of regrettable ways. The socialist legacy has taken deep root in terms of rewriting history. One of the favorite buzz words among historians and sociologists and journalists in the Soviet Union is "blank spots," blank pages in history, non-people, events that never happened, events that happened but are not recorded. Events that have not been incorporated into the people's understanding of their history and development.
We now have the Orthodox Church, which is very much the state church and the voluntary church of a very large majority of the population of the Republic of Russia and especially of the other Slavic people, in Byelorussia and the Ukraine. We have a Catholic Church that is being reconstituted in its Latin-rite form very much in the mold of the 1920s and 1930s. In Ukraine and Byelorussia and in Russia itself it is the Polish church, not the Catholica. It does not bring a notion of universality. It has exotic western appeal, but it comes as the Polish church. We have a number of Latin-rite bishops now in Ukraine. They are all Poles. We have three Latin-rite dioceses in Byelorussia. Two bishops have been appointed; they are both Polish. We have a bishop in Moscow. He is Polish. We have a handful of bishops throughout the rest of the Soviet Union. One is a native born son of Germanic background, all of the others are Poles.
The Catholic Church which is coming back after the thirties and forties to the former republics of the Soviet Union is very much a 1990s Roman Catholic restoration church. It is being brought in under a hierarchy that is Polish and the tilt, the flavor, the mood, the atmosphere of the Catholicism that is being brought into those Republics now comes under the auspices of Opus Dei, Communione e Liberazione, and the Neo-Catechumenate. These are certainly people who are within the household of the Roman Catholic Church, but they represent a very particular point of view.
Will religion influence the development of new democracies in the former Soviet Republics? Most assuredly it will. There is a phenomenon that is well known to this audience because Margaret O'Brien Steinfels wrote about it in America magazine. She talks about a "right" and a "left" in the Roman Catholic Church.
There is at least a growing and important and extremely influential right that is growing apace within the Orthodox community. The right that I speak of is frequently schismatic and canonically not in communion with world Orthodoxy, if we mean in communion with ancient and the newer patriarchates. That right wing movement within Orthodoxy, which exists in Greece, North America and now in Russia, is a conservative theological body that in the Russian context has been traditionally monarchist, often anti-Semitic and now, in the early nineties, anti-democratic. It is what Professor Billington might call "Slavophile." It is conservative and looks to the past of the Slavic people for its inspiration. It finds ideas that have germinated in the West highly suspicious and probably undesirable. There is a serious and deep suspicion of a free market economy and an abhorrence of profit and the profit motive.
There is a serious counterweight to democracy, therefore, in that conservative Russian church which is now taking root in Russia once again. In my opinion, that is going to bring the state church, the Moscow patriarchate, from central to a more right, more conservative, and more nationalist point of view.
John H. Erickson is an associate professor of Canon Law and Church History at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Center in Crestwood, New York. He is president of the Orthodox Theological Society of America. He is a member of the Eastern Orthodox/Roman Catholic Consultation (USA). His most recent book is The Challenge of Our Past: Essays in Orthodox Church History and Canon Law.
I would like to look at what appears to be the direction of the Russian Orthodox Church, concentrating on the statements and other aspects of policy of the Patriarch of Moscow, Alexy. What is the official policy of the Russian Orthodox Church despite pressures, whether from individuals or other sources? Certainly one element that I don't believe has been mentioned this evening is that in this new era of openness the Russian Orthodox Church has the possibility to be much more fully engaged with worldwide Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is not distinctly a Russian or Greek national phenomenon. Recently, the heads of the several Orthodox Churches, convened by the patriarch of Constantinople, met to discuss pressing issues facing all of world Orthodoxy. The themes emphasized in their joint communique are important to note because they reflect so much the interest and the special points of emphasis of Patriarch Alexy of Moscow.
First, one of the commitments, both of the Russian Orthodox Church and of global Orthodoxy, seems to be to continue ecumenical engagement with other Christians, despite some very deep disappointments recently. It comes as a shock and great disappointment to find any number of Christian confessions not only setting up shop in Moscow and elsewhere, but also very actively soliciting funds. Certainly all of them are seeking the conversion of Russia. Some of us believe that Russia has converted. There are some needs in Russia, but a new program of evangelization as though the word of God has never been heard there before is certainly out of place.
Another point of emphasis of the Russian Orthodox Church in its official statements, and certainly of the patriarch of Moscow, is that the Russian Orthodox Church is not to be identified simply with this or that national interest. The supra-national character of the church is emphasized again and again, despite any number of centrifugal tendencies. This is not just Great Russian imperialism with a desire to keep down Byelorussia or Ukrainians or other peoples. Russians themselves may find the church captive or the pawn of nationalist forces. Nationalism seems to be very often one of the most corrosive and dangerous factors entering into the future of church life.
On the more positive side, however, the Russian Orthodox Church, the patriarch of Moscow and also inter-Orthodox gatherings are emphasizing social and cultural concerns, concerns for establishing hospitals, Bible societies, agriculture. When the Patriarch of Moscow visited the United States this past fall, his question was what kind of aid can we provide? Can we offer technical training for staffing chaplaincies, such as training in substance abuse programs and establishing hospices for the terminally ill? These are areas in which the Russian Orthodox Church seeks to be very active. I think this is quite important because there is a danger that the Orthodox Church and the other churches in eastern Europe might identify Orthodoxy not as a basis for a national ideology but simply as a cultural heritage. We would become, of our own free will, museum keepers devoted to restoring icons but not at all concerned about the living image of God in our fellow human beings. In the social programs being stressed now by the Russian Orthodox Church I think there is a helpful corrective.
A final element that could be noted is that of catechesis: how to establish the faith not just in a superficial, purely ritual fashion, but as the very basis of the life of these people? Patriarch Alexy of Moscow has called for a new catechization of Russia. He has devoted a great deal of attention not just to the formation of increasing numbers of nominal Orthodox Christians, but to that essential reorientation to values that is part of being a Christian.
Father Victor Potapov is a graduate of Holy Trinity Seminary and Norwich University. He is the rector of St. John the Baptist Russian Orthodox Church, Washington, D.C., and he is on the staff of the Voice of America.
The religious revival that we are witnessing did not begin the day after the aborted putsch. The religious revival which we are witnessing is a phenomenon which began several decades ago. It is true that the West has not paid very much attention to this revival, as it did not pay very much attention to the persecution.
For example, in the Khrushchev persecution, close to 14,000 churches were closed at the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, and almost no one here in the West noticed. The same applies to the revival.
The churches in Russia and especially the Russian Orthodox Church are faced with enormous problems, problems which have accumulated throughout the more than seven decades of communist militantly atheistic rule in Soviet Russia. Only now, when the church is faced with the reopening of thousands of parishes all over the country, have these problems come to light.
We have a generation of people who have had absolutely no religious training. We have a church which is faced with the restoration of thousands of temples with no help from the government. We have a church which is faced with enormous moral problems. We all read in the press not too long ago the fact that many of the bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church were close collaborators of the KGB and the communist party of the Soviet Union, unfortunately. I need to qualify that statement to include not only bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church but Baltic Catholics and the Protestant evangelical churches. Father Gleb Yakunin, vice-chairman of the parliamentary commission studying the role of the social structures in Russia, says that 3,000 people within the evangelical community collaborated with the KGB. Especially prevalent were collaborators among the Moslem religions in Russia.
These problems need to be addressed. This collaboration, if it hasn't stopped, needs to be put to a halt because, from a spiritual point of view, I cannot imagine a bishop or a priest who is a collaborator building a strong spiritual life. Dr. Billington spoke of the recognition of the new martyrs of Russia. Only a handful of martyrs were recognized at that ceremony. We know that in this century the Russian Orthodox Church gave to the repository of world Christian spirituality more martyrs than in the first centuries of Roman persecution of the early church. Unfortunately, the Moscow patriarch has not recognized the vast majority of martyrs. A commission set up to study and collect materials on the martyrdom of Russian Christians has come up with a ludicrous idea that these martyrs need to be politically rehabilitated before they can be formally canonized by the church.
The leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church are all people who are chosen for their posts during the Brezhnev era, before perestroika. We know through numerous documents that were smuggled out to the West before perestroika and now through the revelations concerning the complicity of the church, the KGB and the communist party that every single person who held an important position in the church was carefully filtered by the KGB. I am skeptical that these people are capable of leading the church to a genuine revival.