Religious Renaissance in the Russian Orthodox Church: Fact or Fiction?

Abstract

In one years' time, the Communist party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the coup d'etat that brought the Bolsheviks to power. In two years' time, Orthodox Christians on the territory of today's USSR will celebrate the millennium of their emergence from the darkness of paganism into the light of the eternal truth of Christianity. The first event will be surrounded by all the fanfare usually accorded such official happenings in the Soviet Union. The second event will be carefully and cynically window-dressed to gain as much propaganda mileage as possible, to delude the gullible, and to amass a supply of testimonials about the total freedom of religion in the Soviet Union from hand-picked Western church representatives who will attend the celebrations to which the Russian or Ukrainian Orthodox man in the street will have no access. Seventy years of communism as opposed to one thousand years of Orthodoxy may sound like a puny comparison, yet those seventy years have resulted in more losses to the church than, perhaps, the total of martyrs heretofore. It is not the purpose of this essay to examine the history of the Russian Orthodox Church over the entire Soviet period: suffice it to say that this church, being numerically the largest and the closest to the Western concept of an established church, was the first target for the fury of a regime that declared war on religion from its first days in power. By 1930, on the most conservative estimates, forty thousand Russian Orthodox priests and at least three hundred bishops had been killed, as well as several tens of thousands of monastics and other church functionaries, to say nothing of several million laymen and laywomen.1 To these numbers should be added