Looking Back: Christianity in the USSR

From April 1974

CHRISTIANITY IN THE U.S.S.R.

by Janice A. Broun

The expulsion of the Russian writer and Christian Alexander Solzhenitsyn from his own country has focused attention on the difficulties faced by Christians, Jews, and others who dissent from the ideological orthodoxy of the Soviet Communist Party. This article by Mrs. Janice Broun, Glasgow representative of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Communism, considers the special problems of the Orthodox Church, traditional mainstream of Russian Christianity, and of the “illegal” Protestant groups.

A CONFUSING pictures presents itself to us when we examine Christianity in the U.S.S.R. today.

The officially recognised All Union Council of Evangelical Christians and Baptists (A.U.C.E.B.C.) provides fairly relational statistics as to the number of congregations (5,000) and baptised members (about 500,000), but the main church, the Russian Orthodox, is estimated to have anything between 25 and 50 million members. However, many are prevented from worshipping because there are only about 8,000 churches left open after drastic persecution in the early 1960s, and because of discrimination against believers in professions such as teaching.

Hope of prayers

Contradictory statements from the atheist Government, aiming to play down the influence Christianity still exerts, and from believers within the U.S.S.R. who have no access to statistics and and can often only speak for one particular area or group, make any accurate assessment almost impossible. Only the Council of Prisoners’ Relatives of the persecuted Evangelical Christian Baptist Church has sent out regular accurate information in the hope of, at least, our prayers.

Take some leading Orthodox laymen. Solzhenitsyn speaks of “many towns and villages which do not have a church within 100 or even 200 kilometres” and says “The church is ruled dictatorially by atheists.” Every official church is in this position and there is some infiltration of key positions by men of dubious authenticity, so that believers have little confidence in church leaders. As one protest puts it, “The people say, ‘We have a fine Bishop! He is a believer…’.”

Word of mouth

Solzhenitsyn contrasts negligence of basic requirements for the faithful, as well as the forbidding of charity to the needy, with his Church’s exploitation to the full in the furtherance of Communist aims in the outside world.

In only a few areas, like Moscow and Leningrad, are there anywhere nearly enough churches and priests to deal with the growing number of enquirers: Jews, intellectuals, young folk, who find a gap in their lives which God alone can fill. The State has savagely severed every link with the past, except the Orthodox Church itself, with all that it represents of “Holy Russia”.

Because of the restrictions placed on ministers of every State-recognised church, which limits their activities to the conduct of services, evangelism is the task of the individual layman.

Bible mission

The A.U.C.E.B.C. has to be very guarded on its statements. It has retracted from the statutes imposed on it in 1960, which forbade evangelism among those under 30, and caused a split into two Evangelical Churches. It carries out a Biblical mission to a limited extent, and some members give material help in secret to their severely persecuted brethren of the unregistered, and therefore “illegal”, Evangelical Christian Baptist Church. (E.C.B.)

Although the A.U.C.E.B.C. claims that many “dissidents” return to its fold, there seems little doubt that the E.C.B. Church is stronger in numbers and attracts a greater proportion of the young, partly because of its uncompromising rejection of the right of the State to interfere in internal church affairs.

Persecution varies considerably from place to place, but 700 E.C.B. members have served sentences of one or more years since 1960, in conditions so bad that several have died. Solzhenitsyn, for instance, has just called attention to a second ten year sentence imposed on the gifted Ukrainian Baptist leader, Zdovorets.

Certain encouraging facts, however, emerge from often contradictory evidence in a vast area where knowledge is hard to come by. The increasing emphasis in atheist effort against the Christian upbringing of children – even to the extent, sometimes, of removing them from their parents – suggests a considerable concern about the appeal of religion to youth.

Now in fashion

The whole atmosphere of worship, pervaded by the real presence of the Holy Spirit, is an asset no Soviet Christians can afford to throw overboard. Official churches have benefited by an easing of persecution, and by the growing sympathy of the intelligentsia. To have an icon – described as the “fifth column” of religion – at home is now the fashion.

Two courageous elderly school teachers spoke up on “church affairs”; Talantov died in prison in 1971, and Levitin, who formed the vital link between Church and the now ruthlessly suppressed civil rights movement, has only just been freed after two-and-a-half years. With E.C.B. laders like Klaasen, Lydia and Georgi Vins, Hrapov and Zdovorets, they represent the moral conscience of their people.

Official churches are muzzled; it is for these profits to risk health, lives, exile, even sanity to speak God’s word in a corrupt society.

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