Mnogaya leta: Advocate of a Russian church — Soviet state concordat

Abstract

In 1974, the important Russian nationalist samizdat journal Veche was suppressed by the KGB after a three-year existence and its editor, Vladimir Osipov, sentenced to eight years in the camps. Though this has not been sufficiently understood in the West, Veche represented a publication of considerable political significance, serving as a sounding-board for most strands of contemporary ethnic Russian nationalism. In this respect, the title was most appropriate: the word veche refers to the medieval popular assembly. Today Veche remains the unsurpassed source for every student of this important ideological current in the USSR, a trend which, moreover, continues to have sympathisers in the ranks of the Party-state elite and the Soviet military. * The KGB has apparently resolved not to permit sequentially numbered Russian nationalist samizdat journals to appear in the future. Thus Obshchina (Community), a publication of the Moscow-based ReligioPhilosophical Seminar headed by Alexandr Ogorodnikov, now in prison, was the object of severe harassment and persecution by the authorities, as was the journal Mariya, organ of a most interesting Russian Orthodox women's club, whose leaders were expelled to the West (others have i~ince been arrested). Given this situation, it was with some surprise that one learned of the appearance in 1980 and 1981 of a samizdat almanac, Mnogaya teta (Many Years), l edited by the conservative nationalist Gennadi Shimanov. Each issue of the almanac contained approximately two hundred pages. One wondered why the regime would permit Shimanov and his authors' collective (Felix Karelin and Vladimir Ibragimov being the most noteworthy contributors) to engage tn such activity. An examination of Mnogaya teta, which is now available in the West,2 suggests an answer to this question. Whereas Veche, while professing its loyalty to the Soviet state, had focused on points of conflict between the regime and Russian nationalists for example, the widespread and