Mr. G. in the U.S.S.R.

A brand-new magazine is on sale this week on Russia's newsstands. Title: Science and Religion. Editorial slant: religion ridiculed in village-atheist terms, scientists chided for any signs of backsliding from faithlessness. (One author accuses leftish U.S. Astronomer Harlow Shapley of attempting to reconcile God and the expanding universe, advises him: "Your hopes are vain, Professor Shapley!") The magazine's lead article is by Britain's spry old Philosopher-Mathematician Bertrand Russell, 87, who asks: "Has religion made a useful contribution to civilization?" His answer: No, except for helping to establish the calendar and inducing the "Egyptian priests to prepare such careful chronology of eclipses that in time they could predict them."

Baptist "Subversion." The importance of Science and Religion lies not in its contents but in its appearance at this late date after God's official demise in the U.S.S.R. And this is not the only evidence that religion in Russia is far from limited to dying-off old folks. Moscow's Izvestia is devoting column after indignant column to the "subversive"' doings of Russian Baptists--grown from 100,000 before the Revolution to about 500,000 today. Typical of Izvestia's reports from all over is a letter telling how one Lukeria Sevchuk was converted by Baptists and began to bring pressure on her daughters, Nina and Natasha, to join her in the faith. Nina valiantly held out, but ailing Natasha committed suicide, leaving a note to mother: "You are a serpent. You can now bring your revivalists here. Nobody will bother you."

The Baptists and other evangelical sects, says Izvestia, "mislead people with high-flown words, and try to divert them from industrious life, from the enlightened happenings of our great era. They try to disrupt Soviet morality."

Meat in the Soup. Similar evidence that religion in Russia is alive is provided by one of the latest Soviet novels to reach the West (via an Italian translation). The Miraculous Icon is a 19th century moral tale in reverse: hero sinks down and down into the depths of Christianity, is saved in the nick of time by conversion to clear-eyed atheism.

Villains of the piece are mostly peasant oldsters who launch a religious revival when young Hero Rodka finds a buried icon of St. Nicholas near an abandoned church. From a larger village nearby comes Father Dmitry to read the Bible ("All listened attentively with heavy breathing, but in every face it was plain to read that they understood not one word"). Rodka is finally hooked by religion when he hears awesome reverberations in the church tower just before midnight each night and he staggers home convinced that God exists, muttering: "No more future, no more happiness, all finished." (The noises in the tower turn out to be echoes from the 11:50 express.)

Rodka's rescuer is his faithfully unbelieving schoolmarm, Paraskovia Petrovna, who hales Father Dmitry before District Agitprop Director Kuchin and argues with him en route on behalf of edifying atheism. Director Kuchin is fed up with staging anti-God lectures ("Nobody comes but atheists"); he has his own sophisticated recipe for the conversion of Russia. "We must make it so that the last of the old ones believes no more in the omnipotent, but in us," he says. "And for this we mnst show what we can do. First, a piece of meat in the soup, good clothes for winter, then--radio, electricity, books, movies. Against this, Mister God can't hold out long."

But even in today's more consumer-conscious Russia, from all indications, God is doing somewhat better than just holding out.

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