“Muscovite Intelligentsia, Orthodox Revival, and Late Socialism: The Limits of Acceptable Communist Religiosity, 1964-1987” Customarily when we think of religion in the Soviet Union, we think of persecution. Certainly the first decades of the Soviet Union were very dark for the religious, as was the aggressive anti-religion campaign under Nikita Khrushchev. Yet Joseph Stalin expanded possibilities for religions during and after World War II, something which gave religious groups enough to revive. From the end of the War until after glasnost’, although the Communist Party remained committed ideologically to atheism, and although religious freedoms were heavily restricted and religious antagonism remained, nevertheless, space emerged for a kind of religiosity that was, for pragmatic purposes, accepted by state officials, who actually helped normalize religious practice. In the Soviet Union after World War II, there were acceptable and unacceptable ways of communally practicing religion, demonstrated by the fact that officials determined that certain religious gatherings transgressed the lines of acceptability and merited discipline. Acceptability had little to do with the specifics of belief systems—since they all inherently clashed with materialist ideology—but with social-communal aspects: what kinds of people came, the settings of the gatherings, and affective characteristics of the interactions like enthusiasm, engagement, and authenticity. Studying religious gatherings reveals that even though believers participated in them for their own reasons, state officials policed them as contests for mobilization. It is true that on one level, there was a sort of battle over ideologies, of atheism vs. religion, but it was the power to mobilize people—get crowds, followers, and enthusiasm—that state officials instinctively fought, something revealed by their reports and actions. Religious gatherings were among the few opportunities for voluntary public assembly in the Soviet Union after World War II, making them extremely valuable sites for the study of power, ideology, and belonging. Treatments of religion in communist lands from without have not focused on religious gatherings as a type of associational life but have customarily yielded narratives of victimhood or collaboration. Although this does tell part of the story, studying everyday religious life as a site of social interaction can tell us about the extent of control in Soviet society (the so-called “totalitarian” debate), Scholars like Moshe Lewin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Lewis Siegelbaum, Steven Kotkin, Gail Kligman, and Katherine Verdery have effectively made this case. The Romanian and Soviet states and their institutions were shaped by their tasks (they did not begin fully formed), and particular state-citizen relations were formed by their interactions. There are also a few scholars of Soviet history, such as Sonja Luehrmann, Edward Roslof, Daniel Peris, Catherine Wanner, and Glennys Young, who have explored the complexities of the churches and states and their dynamic relationships. the extent of atomization in society and whether avenues for belonging and social action existed (the “civil society” question), Hannah Arendt, for example, has argued that “totalitarianism” is possible when society is atomized, when people are alienated from each other and life is highly segmented. and whether ideology carried any importance for average Soviet citizens—including whether dissidents were only important to Western observers. Scholars of Russia and Eastern Europe have recently argued that ideological discourse had become empty and ignored by the 1970s, and that society’s focus had shifted enthusiastically toward consumption. It was not a titanic struggle of state ideologues and dissidents, they argue; dissidents were in fact marginal to everyday society and commoners considered them to be “out of touch.” See the works of Alexei Yurchak, Juliane Furst, and Paulina Bren, for example. In this chapter, I focus on the struggle between state and church officials trying to maintain religious norms against attempts by certain Russian Orthodox priests and believers to enliven church practices in the era of Leonid Brezhnev. Although efforts by Orthodox churchmen from the 1920s until 1943 and during Khrushchev’s anti-religion campaign might be best described as designed for survival, this does not characterize the periods following Stalin’s encouragement of the Orthodox Church during World War II or under Brezhnev roughly until Glasnost’ under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. In these periods, state and church leaders cooperated in trying to normalize religious life and practices, thereby defining abnormal and unacceptable religious life as well. Their cooperation meant that those within the Orthodox Church attempting renewal or innovation struggled against both bodies. Unacceptable Religiosity Although closing churches, seminaries, monasteries, and reducing numbers of priests, Khrushchev’s anti-religion campaign ultimately did little to deflate bourgeoning religiosity. The Brezhnev regime inherited decade-old religious problems: crowded churches—especially on feast days—, zealous priests, and active believers. Orthodox Churches were not dying out as officials expected, and even youth and intellectuals had participated in greater numbers over the past ten years. To deal with these problems, under Brezhnev, officials largely jettisoned overt attacks on religious bodies in their aim to manage religion, preferring bureaucratic obstacles, surveillance with threats, and the discipline of leaders. At church services, “enemy propaganda” was proclaimed, but they were a pragmatic concession for a Soviet Union which claimed personal freedom of conscience. Yet state officials still differentiated between acceptable and unacceptable services according to how well services served the goal of being places where religion would be restricted to establish a religion-free public space. Authorities also wanted a religion-free social consciousness, so services were supposed to be places where individuals “satisfied their needs,” as officials put it, but not sites for communal belonging. A service was benign when there were few participants of advanced age, lacking in animation. Thus troubling to officials was the evidence that more youth, intellectuals, and professionals were attending church, participating as choir members, or taking part in rites like baptism, weddings, or burials. If religion appealed across gender, educational, and generational lines, then it presented an alternative avenue of social belonging. When Khrushchev had churches closed, this only made them more crowded and generated complaints. When distributed abroad, complaints—argued Moscow commissioner A.A. Trushin of the Council for Religious Affairs (CRA)—“gave [foreigners] reason to strengthen slanderous propaganda in their own countries about persecution of the church and religion in our country.” Trushin tried to “eliminate selected errors” and renew services in a few of these locations. Keston Archive, “Council for Religious Affairs of Moscow Oblast, Report,” n.d.1965. Archive file <KGB 54>, p. 84-85. Original archival source: TsGAMO, Fond 7383, Op. 1, Del. 71. Although unfortunate, church services had to be permitted for freedom of conscience, and for Soviet reputation. If mass participation for holidays could be described as the vestiges of a dying custom, the same could not be said of certain priests and their sermons attracting crowds for ordinary Sunday services, Vespers, and even during the week. Trushin criticized certain priests’ efforts toward “strengthening beliefs in god” and church life (as though exceptional) and labeled such activity as “ignit[ing] religious fanaticism.” By officials’ definition, a priest was “fanatic” when he worked toward enlivening church life or preaching with conviction. Ibid., 105. In the full dissertation chapter, I explore many cases of priests who unacceptably dynamized religiosity, including Alexander Men’ and Mikhail Trukhanov, both of whom officials described as “igniting religious fanaticism” in their work with youth and as “surrounded by hysterics.” Keston Archive, “Council for Religious Affairs of Moscow Oblast, Report,” Archive file <KGB 87>, p. 10, 15-17, 20 (Originally from TsGAMO, Fond 7383, Op. 3, Del. 62, 1968). Archive file <KGB 88>, p. 27-28 (Originally from TsGAMO, Fond 7383, Op. 3, Del. 65). What a believer might have described as healthy church life, state representatives diagnosed as irrational or a social ailment. Normal religious practice was individualistic participation in a church service. For today, I’ll focus on Priest Dmitrii Dudko, who when Brezhnev came to power in 1964 was attracting crowds to the Church of Saint Nikolai in Moscow. Dudko appealed to those who felt that too many church services were, as one seeker put it, “largely a formality, where old women attended sterile services rushed through by ignorant priests.” Oliver Bullough, The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation, 2013, 82. One student on a religious quest, Aleksandr Ogorodnikov, heard that Dudko “was actually preaching to parishioners.” Whereas his impression of most sermons were that they were self-censored, “as abstract as possible,” and priests spoke “incomprehensibly” as though “not addressing the people,” he felt “alive” listening to Dudko. Ibid., 83. By the 1970s, Dudko was well-known across Moscow and was baptizing known intellectuals. Authorities pressured the warden and the rector to curb his influence. Dmitrii Dudko, Podarok ot Boga: Kniga v Piati Chastiakh [Gift from God: A Book in Five Parts] (Moskva: Izd. Sretenskogo Monastyria, 2002), 160. The rector made a schedule to minimize Dudko’s involvement and forbade him from preaching, saying that his sermons were “agitation,” but Dudko would stand up to preach when he served, counting on the fact that the people would support him in case the rector made a scene. Ibid., 162. For some time Dudko had preached on social issues like depression, alcoholism, abortion, violence, and the lack of trust between people, topics that contrasted with the norm of religious abstraction. Bullough, The Last Man in Russia, 83. Sensing popular interest, he started holding sessions where people would submit questions that he would answer in public. The questions were far from the safe theological abstractions people had come to expect of religious gatherings. Students like Ogorodnikov were “astonished” with enthusiasm, and people traveled from distant cities and republics, including intellectuals, atheists, people of various faiths, and Western correspondents, making the gatherings feel as though they had universal appeal. Ibid., 84, 89. Trushin, rather, described this as Dudko“constant surrounding of himself by extremist youth.” GARF, January 4, 1976, f. 6991, op. 6, d. 989, 7 Highly problematic for Soviet authorities, Dudko was attempting to forge a communal religious identity, something that contrasted with one priest’s complaint “‘we’ve lost our common language with our flock. Quick, perform the service—bang! bang! bang!—and home again as fast as possible!’” Dmitrii Dudko, Our Hope (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1977), 85–86. Dudko felt “these discussions are uniting us,” and that “a kind of unwritten brotherhood is forming” among believers of various confessions and even non-believers. He emphasized “it’s not I who am holding a discussion, but we.” Ibid., 161. Eventually, church leaders forbid Dudko from holding these sessions, and at disciplinary meetings in the office of the patriarch, the first issue they mentioned was that it was “not church form” to conduct questions and answers. That he was drawing people to church was not praised by church leaders. Dudko evidently “repented” and promised to only preach “’on Gospel themes.’” On the basis of this repentance, in September 1974 he was transferred as an assistant priest to the village of Kabanovo at the far eastern edge of the Oblast, a minimum two hours’ travel from the heart of Moscow. The warden there told him, “‘Batyushka, don’t worry. It won’t be bad here with us. […] Now just talk a little less with the people.’” Dudko, Podarok ot Boga, 220. In short, acceptability meant doing the minimum. Priests were not the only ones with agency, although state authorities cast religious animation as the product of a priest “activating” a congregation. According to the law of 1929, a religious association could only register if there were twenty or more people who petitioned to form one. Of course, bureaucrats often made each step difficult. There had to be proper documentation, including local authorities’ approval to use an existing building or build a new one (which should meet all fire and sanitary requirements), and the appropriate representative of the Council for Religious Affairs should approve it as well. A group in Naro-Fominsk endeavored to successfully register a church over the course of the late 1960s. Their application spent months being ignored, despite their repeated attempts to discover and remedy the reasons for non-response or rejection by local bodies. When they still could not get local authorities to agree, in 1970 nearly 1,500 believers made an appeal to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, complaining that “local powers” had been using “any pretext” for refusing their applications, and that the city council “could not be but mistaken” in its assessment of the “measure and degree of [their] need,” concluding that their treatment was “nothing other than the display of brute force, flouting our right which is granted by the Constitution and Law.” Samizdat Archive Association and Radio Liberty (Munich, Germany), Sobranie Dokumentov Samizdata [Collection of Samizdat Documents] (Munich: Samizdat Archive Association, 1972), AC 764. Trushin complained that this effort was instigated by 30 church “activists,” who went from “home to home” to collect signatures. The commissioner said state representatives needed to “strengthen ideological work among the population” and “monitor the activity of churchmen” there. Keston Archive, “Council for Religious Affairs of Moscow Oblast, Report,” Archive file <KGB 40>, 9, 12. Originally from TsGAMO, Fond 7383, Op. 3, Del. 70. To Trushin, this was not a need for a church, but increased state presence. The local paper called the activists “’charlatans on the fringes of religion.’” Amnesty International, Research Department and Amnesty International, International Secretariat, A Chronicle of Current Events 20 (1971): 247. To want a church was one thing, but to be energized enough to try for one was unacceptable and abnormal. Young Ogorodnikov, a frequent participant where Dudko served, wanted more than what he saw as the unintelligible Church Slavonic, ritualism, and anonymity of the people at the services, plus there were no other avenues for religious learning or expression. Desiring “brotherly Christian relations,” he set up a Christian Seminar study group in 1974. Inviting anyone to the Seminar in his janitor’s quarters, a variety in age, lifestyle, education, and views attended. Alexander Ogorodnikov, A Desperate Cry (Keston: Keston College, 1986), 5–8. Some traveled great distances and spent the night. Its popularity spread, and branches emerged elsewhere in Leningrad, Smolensk, and beyond. Around 20-40 typically attended the gathering in Moscow, but as many as hundreds attended all the branches combined. Koenraad de Wolf, Dissident for Life : Alexander Ogorodnikov and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in Russia (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2012), 67. Later, there were seminars in Ufa, Odessa, Christopol, Kazan, Minsk, Riga, Pskov, and Novosibirsk. The Seminar was not a gathering of political “dissidents,” as they had no ambition to political change. It was, says Ogorodnikov, “a self-organised, informal group of friends, who wanted to get together to learn.” Ogorodnikov, A Desperate Cry, 5. Some contrasted “uninspired and wooden” church services with the Seminar as “fresh.” de Wolf, Dissident for Life, 70. One attendee remarked, “Those conversations, that way of life, […was] so full of meaning and depth, so full of the warmth and genuine feeling […].” Community and togetherness were central to their themes and talks. Ogorodnikov, A Desperate Cry, 7. They did not adhere to the Soviet view of faith as limited to individual conscience. State Response But Soviet authorities effectively reduced bourgeoning communities by attacking the leaders, showing the relative fragility of these religious communities. As Trushin put it in 1974, when summarizing the cases of priests and wardens stripped of registration, he applied the blanket accusation that they were all “fanatics and extremists.” Keston Archive, “Council for Religious Affairs of Moscow Oblast, Report,” 1974, Archive file <KGB 175>, 3. Originally from TsGAMO, Fond 7383, Op. 3, Del. 82. By casting the dynamically religious as abnormal or “fringe,” opposing “our social norms,” state representatives suggested such people warranted discipline. Now in Kabanovo, Dudko was visited by friends regularly as he continued along the same trajectory he started in Moscow, ignoring warnings from the church warden that “too many people gather at your place.” Dudko, Podarok ot Boga, 225. The warden terminated Dudko’s contract in 1975. Ibid., 257–61. In January 1976 CRA chief Kuroedov wrote an article in Izvestia about Dudko, claiming that the parishioners of the church in Kabanovo “dismissed” Dudko “for sermons of an anti-Soviet content” and that he was a champion of the “West.” GARF, f. 6991, op. 6, d. 989, 29. Though the parishioners actually advocated for Dudko, Kuroedov’s assertions demonstrated that communal dynamism and Western sympathy were paths to marginalization in the Soviet Union. Dudko’s renegade status increased his prestige with the disaffected. He was transferred to Grebnevo, a place restricted to foreigners. There, too, people visited in large numbers, and his presence transformed the village into a sort of pilgrimage site, particularly for Muscovite intellectuals. Bullough, The Last Man in Russia, 109–10. One man felt he was in a “family…, with people I could trust.” Discussions would usually last the entire afternoon on Sundays. Ibid., 120. Ogorodnikov and others felt that there in Grebnevo, “‘we created an independent Christian society. It is not just that we had lunch or something, we lived the life [...]’” Ibid., 91. Church and state authorities appointed and recalled three rectors in turn until they found one firm enough to marginalize Dudko by never scheduling him to serve on Sundays or feast days, when there would be more people expecting a sermon. N. N. Sokolova, Pod Krovom Vsevyshnego [Under the Blood of the Most High] (Moskva: Izd-vo, Pravoslavnoe bratstvo sviatogo apostola Ioanna Bogoslova, 1999), 362. The KGB regularly planted agents, appearing as interested youth. Police raids and searches were common, and some of his followers were arrested and held for a time. Dudko, Podarok ot Boga, 289. Dudko was arrested in 1980, kept in the Lefortovo Prison of Moscow. Bullough, The Last Man in Russia, 172. The next time Dudko’s friends and fans saw him was on television, several months later. Millions of people watched him that evening as he denounced his previous activity and “admitted” his crimes, that he worked against the Soviet state by giving the West false information about the Soviet Union. His “confession” was devastating, as he had baptized thousands, and to many, he was a solitary beacon of “truth.” Ibid., 176. State authorities also acted aggressively against the Christian Seminar, which had been meeting for two years since 1974. KGB agents interrogated, threatened, and mocked participants. One was failed in his exams. Another was taken to a psychiatric hospital, where the doctor told Ogorodnikov that “‘I’m not against belief. Belief is a matter for a man’s conscience. But [...] for him [religion] is an obsessional idée fixe. [...] You can go into a church, pray, take communion - but why preach?’” Another participant was told his religious enthusiasm was a “result of a mental illness.” de Wolf, Dissident for Life, 77–78. The doctor’s words are telling: it was labeled a social disorder to have religion move beyond the realm of individual conscience. Ogorodnikov was eventually fired and arrested for “‘the leading of a parasitical and anti-social way of life.’” Many fabricated accusations were made of him, including of rape. He was eventually charged with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” in May 1980. Ibid., 121. He was given a prison sentence, beaten, and harshly treated. Ogorodnikov, A Desperate Cry, 24. Conclusion In conclusion, state and church officials found unacceptable those Orthodox priests and believers in the Moscow region who made attempts to enliven church life, especially among the youth and intelligentsia. Authorities attacked leaders as the problems and assumed that the people who made particular priests popular could be simply neutralized by more education. Fearing the power of religious groups but wanting to maintain legitimacy in citizens’ eyes, state and church officials used inner-church divisions, scandals, poor training, over-work, transfers, or other “legal” measures to keep Orthodox gatherings predictably banal. State attempts at creating alternative attractions to church were less successful. In the Orthodox Church, church communities scarcely lasted beyond the charisma of the priest since attraction to the priest was what gathered the crowds in the first place. By contrast, Baptists tended to regard their churches as communities, and their very notion of belonging included being persecuted. This made their communities durable, beyond removal of a pastor. Ogorodnikov’s Seminar was an attempt at democratized religiosity, but there was ultimately little to hold the group together beyond a common interest in intellectual-religious debate. Yet the Orthodox Church still presented state authorities with certain problems. The spectacle of a crowded church and youth participation weakened state claims that religion was disappearing, and voluntary or enthusiastic gatherings could contrast with mandatory or unenthusiastic state-sponsored ones. The participation of intellectuals weakened the claim that religion was reducible to superstition. Last, grassroots gatherings did indeed represent a potential political threat, as alternative identities and ways of belonging could be mobilized in the future. Such gatherings were also fearsome to church and state leaders because communal behavior that was voluntary and enthusiastic threatened an order predicated upon hierarchy and submission. Similarly, participants at Dudko’s question-and-answer session complained about discussions of state ideologies or atheism-vs.-religion as tiresome, smelling of top-down didacticism. More exciting was doing something with authenticity in an “open” way and the emergence of an “us” that was not predetermined. In the era of “Mature Socialism,” church and state leaders were trying to keep things the “old” way. When people built a communal identity, they threatened the established social norms typically promulgated by the state (e.g. as fellow socialist citizens, workers, or members of the party or dominant national group). Although those who gathered did not articulate public goals or unifying platforms so much as project a desire to be free to define their own pursuits, state authorities feared new ways or languages of belonging, whereas traditionalism was acceptable because it reflected a type of established conformity. Ryan J. Voogt Ryan J. Voogt PhD Candidate University of Kentucky 7 1