Pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Religious Diplomacy of USSR during the Cold War

Abstract

The paper deals with the issue of organization of pilgrimage trips of representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate to the Holy Land (Israel and Jordan) during the Cold War Era. The author argues that a number of foreign policy factors (primarily the struggle for Russian property and the tension of Soviet-Israeli relations) led to the opening of the opportunity to make Orthodox pilgrimage trips from the USSR to the Holy Land. The paper provides evidence that the Soviet government considered the possibility of regular dispatch of groups of Soviet pilgrims from among the “clergy and laity” already in 1956, whereas in reality the first group went only in 1964. Archpriest Mikhail Zernov's project on the restoration of pilgrimage trips from the USSR to the Holy Land that has not been analyzed before is introduced into academic circulation. The author examines the specifics of the composition of the pilgrim groups, and a description of pilgrims' activities, as well as the perception of the role of pilgrims by Soviet officials. The author comes to the conclusion that the establishment of the practice of sending pilgrim groups through the ROC MP became one of the USSR's foreign policy instruments in the Middle East, which provided an alternative to traditional diplomacy.