The study of religion in the USSR

Abstract

I A passionate and enduring interest in religious questions has been a feature of Russian intellectual life since the time of Tsar Nicholas I in the middle of the nineteenth century . Old Russia had repeatedly and consistently rejected the need for any systematic secular philosophy. `The Russians are philosophers not in words, but in deeds', wrote Krizanic after his unsuccessful attempt to introduce Western philosophical ideas into Russia in the seventeenth century . 1 Philosophy was rejected not only because it was considered irrelevant to salvation, but because, in the prophetic words of an Old Believer of the early nineteenth century `it can lead to the overthrow of kingdoms' . 2 Thus, after the upheavals of 1848, Nicholas I abolished philosophy as a legitimate subject of study in the universities . This extraordinary ban was lifted in 1863, but other crippling restrictions on academic philosophy remained in force until 1889 . The effect of such harassment was not to prevent the study of philosophy, still less discussion of religious questions, but rather to force such study and such discussion out of the classroom into the rapidly established secret societies, that is, away from an atmosphere of critical analysis into uncritical enthusiasm--a situation which, consequent upon the Bolshevik Party's imposition of similar restrictions on the free discussion of philosophical and religious questions, continues to this day . The state ideology which the Bolshevik Party has imposed in the Soviet Union, and which is known as Marxism-Leninism, is a total Weltanschauung which brooks no alternative to be openly expressed . Based as it is on the materialist conception of history of Marx, the philosophical and dialectical materialism of Engels as codified by Plekhanov, and the political vision of Lenin, this Weltanschauung is adamantly opposed to all and every form of religion . The guardian of this ideology is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and without some understanding of its theoretical basis, it is impossible to understand the subservience of Soviet scholarship, in all fields of endeavour but particularly in philosophy and religious studies, to it, and thus the context in which all (official) work in these fields is produced .