Kelly, Catriona Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918–1988 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 378 as it was) at the top level. There has been exploration elsewhere of the role of military leaders, for example in Brock Millman’s article, ‘The Problem with Generals’ (Journal of Contemporary History, 33, 1998, 2, pp. 291–320; not cited here), which examines the liability presented by British generals in the field of the intervention, who, fired up by anti-Bolshevism, interpreted the instructions they were given very loosely. There is still a lot of interesting work to do on the activities of the plethora of political, economic and voluntary representatives working in the field, and the experiences of ordinary soldiers. The vast memoir literature stemming from the intervention, not to mention the many collections of private papers belonging to agents in the intervention, are a valuable resource for the exploration of these topics which are not drawn on here. There are some stylistic and typing errors that might have been picked up by copy-editing (‘Wrangle’ for Wrangel´ a total of six times on page 261 is the worst). The book offers a solid, archivally-based overview of some of the key episodes in the intervention. The structured account it gives of some of the key phases of military activity may be useful. Its attempt to speak about the Allied intervention as a whole while employing primary material relating to only Britain and Canada, and a very limited selection of reading on the other participating governments, is disappointing. And there is still plenty for future studies to do in broadening our understanding of agency in the intervention, and our understanding of the intervention as an international phenomenon. Northumbria University Charlotte Alston Kelly, Catriona. Socialist Churches: Radical Secularization and the Preservation of the Past in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918–1988. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2016. xx + 413 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. $59.00. Much has been written over decades about how the Soviet state treated (or mistreated) religious communities. Here, in her ‘microhistory of church preservation and destruction’ (p. 16) focusing on one city, the former Russian imperial capital, Catriona Kelly studies the way the state — in all its various manifestations — treated their places of worship. ‘Under Lenin they took [the churches] away, and under Stalin they took them away’, Kelly quotes one city priest as telling her, ‘during the War they gave them back, under Khrushchev they closed them again, and then under Brezhnev things stayed as they were, then under Gorbachev they started giving them back, and under Yeltsin’ (p. 275). If this is the (not inaccurate) perspective of one cleric, Kelly takes a more rounded view. She examines the stances of ideologues in the Communist party seeking to close as many places of worship as possible; REVIEWS 379 officials desperate for premises for homes, enterprises and cultural institutions (including anti-religious museums); heritage enthusiasts seeking to preserve what they considered important (curiously they disdained neo-Byzantine and style russe buildings of the 1840–1900 period and removed traces of this period from earlier buildings); proponents of turning the imperial capital — with all its backward-looking connotations — into a socialist city; and local people who tried to make their views on preservation of churches heard. Kelly’s findings are, for non architectural specialists, at times surprising. Leningrad saw fewer churches demolished than other cities, but one key factor was how a church fitted into the ansambl´ (the urban surroundings), ‘an enormously important value term in St. Petersburg preservation’ (p. 305). While the imperial city contained a range of Christian churches (including Old Believer, Catholic, Lutheran and Armenian, alongside German, Dutch, English, Swedish) as well as places of worship of other faiths (Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist), Kelly focuses mainly on Russian Orthodox churches. These of themselves made up a variety, including cathedrals, streetside churches and ‘house churches’ within institutions (which faced a ‘far more energetic drive’ [p. 56] to close them after the Decree on the Confiscation of Church Property). By the 1920s, far from all of these churches were in the hands of the newlyrecreated Moscow Patriarchate — internal theological and external political rifts, exacerbated by Metropolitan Sergii’s 1927 declaration of loyalty to the Soviet regime, saw rival...