(ВОС-)СОЗДАНИЕ РОССИЙСКОЙВЫСШЕЙ ДУХОВНОЙ ШКОЛЫ В КОНТЕКСТЕ РЕАЛИЗАЦИИ ДИПЛОМАТИЧЕСКОЙ МИССИИ МОСКОВСКОЙ ПАТРИАРХИИ ПОСЛЕВОЕННОГО ПЕРИОДА

Abstract

The article analyzes the mutual influence of the key factor of the “Stalinist turn” in the religious policy of the Soviet government – the vocation of the Moscow Patriarchate to participate in international politics (implementation of a large-scale program of inter-church and church-state contacts in the countries and regions where the influence of the Soviet Union was spread) with the revival of the infrastructure of higher spiritual education in the post-war USSR. Despite its obviousness, this fact, repeatedly mentioned in historiography, has not yet been the object of a special research. At the same time, it is important both for confessional history, especially for the reconstruction of the factors that formed a special model of state-church relations in the post-war USSR, and for the reconstruction of how the Soviet foreign policy line of the Cold War era was forming and what role religious factor played in it. These trends carry a certain universalism and reflect the global trend: in the Soviet foreign policy of the second half of the 1940s, Orthodoxy served as a “façade” for coming to a particular region based on the revival of historical confessional ties. In other cases, the spread of ecclesiastical jurisdiction (the transfer of hierarchs and parishes of one territory or another to the Moscow Patriarchate) acquired the character of a full-fledged springboard for cultural and political consolidation of Soviet presence. During this period, the Church had to overcome the stereotype of the “red church” (dependent on the Soviet government), which was widespread abroad. To do this, church charismatics, bright preachers, negotiators-diplomats were in demand in the international arena. They were to be formed in the institutions of church education due to the almost complete elimination of the church infrastructure in the pre-war USSR.