Intra-Church processes during the implementation of parish reform in the 1st half of the 1960s

Abstract

The author describes in the article some important components and features of Church life in the period initiated by Nikita Khrushchev and known as the parish reform, which, among other things, was aimed at undermining the fi nancial base of the Russian Orthodox Church (hereinafter referred to as the Church) in the USSR. It is noted that Stalin's post-war system of state-Church relations had a serious defect in the form of ineffective legal consolidation: in addition, after the end of the World War II, the question if the Soviet power praised Orthodoxy and other religions stood no longer disappeared. All this allowed Stalin's successors carrying out a number of serious measures aimed at weakening the Church. Khrushchev's religious policy differed from the persecution of the 1920s-1930s, because it included measures aimed at indirect destruction of Orthodoxy, primarily through administrative pressure on the clergy and laity. The parish reform, aimed at depriving deans of fi nancial powers and handing them over to churchwardens, appointed, in fact, by local authorities, which allowed to ruin churches and monasteries with compliance with the formalities of the regime's toleration, can be considered to be a typical manifestation of that trend.