Unseparate Church and State

After six decades, uneasy coexistence is a victory for Orthodoxy

A light rain is falling upon the Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius in Zagorsk. The monastery stands behind a fortress wall, half a mile around and 50 ft. thick, that protects the weathered stones and ancient relics of Trinity Cathedral. It is graduation day at the most important of the Soviet Union's three surviving Russian Orthodox seminaries. The 78 graduates, clad in black tunics and trousers, take their places in the cathedral before the ornate screen, hung with treasured icons, that separates the sanctuary from the congregation. Hundreds of candles shimmer against the gold and silver on the walls, and the smell of hot wax mingles with that of flowers.

Later, in the seminary building--a former tsarist palace--Pimen, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and head of the Russian Orthodox Church, bestows his blessing in a deep, resounding voice and offers a few words of instruction. The candidates stride forward to receive their diplomas and then bend to kiss the Patriarch's hand. Afterward, new graduates, friends, proud families and church dignitaries, assembled from all over the U.S.S.R., dine on bread, cheese, sausages and potatoes.

Something is stirring in Russian Orthodoxy. Congregations are getting younger. Applications for seminaries are increasing. About two-thirds of the new priests come from families that are indifferent or hostile to religion, a dramatic indication that youthful unbelievers are converting to Christianity, despite the atheist orientation of Soviet schools. The graduates at Zagorsk are about to take up their duties with a church that still maintains 11,000 active parishes after six decades of Soviet rule, often marked by systematic persecution. Official Soviet statistics admit two out of five burials are accompanied by a church service, and one out of six babies is baptized. In the Kharkov cathedral there are 120 to 170 baptisms every Sunday. Today the Russian Orthodox Church has 73 bishops, 10,000 priests and, according to U.S.S.R. government estimates, 30 million members who regularly attend services. Some Orthodox priests put baptized membership at 60 million.

Intellectuals are converting, and long dormant theological debates are reviving on such matters as whether to replace Old Church Slavonic with modern Russian in the liturgy. According to Anatoli Levitin-Krasnov, a Soviet exile who writes on religious affairs, the new vigor in the Orthodox Church is due to "widespread disillusionment with Marxism" among the young. Others believe that the rediscovery of Orthodoxy, complete with icons and ancient liturgical music, like a revival of interest in the nation's pre-revolutionary religious philosophers, is part of a new concern for Russia's historical culture. The best-known proponent of religious renewal is exiled Writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, but its keenest and most significant supporters are in the Soviet Union. Members of the Christian Seminar on Problems of Religious Renaissance, formed in 1974, proclaim: "We heard a call to salvation--the voice of our ancestors, our fathers, our saints. We found Russia."

The religious wing of the human rights movement is another indication of vigor. About half the samizdat (underground writings) that reach the West are religious in content. Young religious rights activists are bolder than their elders. The official Communist response to new religious stirrings has been modified reprisal. Five of the Christian Seminar members are under arrest; others are being harassed or undergoing forced "psychiatric" treatment. In January authorities arrested Father Dmitri Dudko, a Moscow priest whose fiery sermons attacked official atheism. In what dissidents consider a pre-Olympics "cleanup," many other prominent Orthodox believers were rounded up in late 1979 and early 1980. Among them: Father Gleb Yakunin, an Orthodox priest who appealed to the regime and the World Council of Churches for religious liberty and founded the Christian Committee for the Defense of Believers' Rights in 1976.

Even so, the Soviet government and the Orthodox Church leadership continue in an odd embrace--one that leaves the church semifree to operate, though it is politically controlled and thus compromised. Despite Marxist dogma, Orthodoxy as a living faith in the U.S.S.R. represents continuity with the nation's pre-Soviet past. It also serves to legitimize the Communist government and its claims to "acknowledge" religious practice.

Considering the fact that the 1917 Revolution was dedicated to the destruction of religion, the present standoff is something of a triumph for Orthodoxy.* The early Bolshevik regime confiscated church lands and abolished religious influence in schools. Intense atheism campaigns in the 1920s and '30s led to the imprisonment and death of thousands of priests and the desecration of countless churches. In the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, workers boasted that they burned 20,000 icons in socialist competition. By 1939, when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler, the Russian Orthodox Church had only 100 or so churches open throughout the Soviet Union, compared with 40,437 before the Revolution.

The historic turning point came when Hitler violated the pact, and his mechanized divisions drove deep into the Soviet Union. The all-but-crushed church called upon the faithful to defend Mother Russia and quickly raised 300 million rubles for the Red Army. In desperate need of a spiritual force that could bolster national solidarity, Stalin allowed the church more freedom. Since then, except for a strong antireligious period in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the church's right to peaceful coexistence with atheism has not been seriously threatened.

The price of survival is high. Article 52 of the 1977 Soviet constitution assures citizens the "right to profess or not to profess any religion and to conduct religious worship." But the church is not permitted to give formal religious instruction to those under age 18. It is against Soviet law for a congregation to worship in public unless its members are officially registered. The state wields total control over whether a parish can use or repair a building, indeed whether a parish can exist at all.

Within the church, government control is pervasive. The appointment of every cleric, from Patriarch Pimen on down, must be cleared by the Council for Religious Affairs, a government agency that supervises all religious matters. Under these circumstances, contends Father Michael Meyerson-Aksyonov, a convert to Orthodoxy who tried unsuccessfully to enter a Soviet seminary and is an emigre now living in the U.S., "the priest is not the spiritual or moral leader of the community. He is a performer of rites and nothing more."

State supervision is reinforced by extralegal methods. Most of this year's graduates at Zagorsk were probably appreached at some point by the KGB secret police and asked to spy on colleagues. Some observers charge that promotion in the hierarchy tends to go not only to mediocrities but to men with known character weaknesses--which leaves them subject to blackmail.

A high official of the World Council of Churches, which the Russian Orthodox Church was permitted to join in 1961, points out that the Orthodox hierarchy consists of "churchmen who are struggling to safeguard their Christian integrity against great odds."

"What is amazing," notes Father Meyerson-Aksyonov, "is not that the church leadership is corrupt but that it is not so corrupt." In a possible sign of new independence, the Soviet delegates to the W.C.C. Executive Committee did not register opposition to a resolution expressing "serious concern" over the Soviet "military action" in Afghanistan, and other world conflicts.

Government spokesmen profess pleasure with things as they are. So does Archbishop Nikodim, 59, who is substituting for the ailing Metropolitan Yuvenali as foreign affairs director of the church. "In the West, for some reason, thousands of Orthodox priests in Russia are considered nearly as traitors, and two or three [dissident] persons are considered to be the church," says Nikodim. "I don't know Father Dudko. Maybe he is a wonderful person. But I think groups that exist, or would like to exist, around Dudko and others are not for the benefit of the church, since our church finds its beauty in unity. The action of the church is not for sensation or effect. In our diocese in Kharkov, all the priests work zealously every day, take care of the people and preach. Thousands of priests work the same way and have no conflicts with the state." When problems arise with the state's watchdog agency, "we have respect for each other, and we always try to find a reasonable solution that would not destroy the harmony of relations between church and state, nor harm the freedom of action of the church."

* The Russian Orthodox, the 4 million or more other Eastern Orthodox and the 43 million Muslims in the Soviet Union are much less harassed than the 2 million Soviet Jews, 4 million Roman Catholics and a small percentage of the country's 3 million Protestants who bitterly resist all state control of the church. Seven of these Protestant dissenters have lived in the U.S. embassy in Moscow for two years, seeking in vain to emigrate.

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