Russia at war 1941-1945

Church support was still needed to enhance the respectability of the Soviet

Government... and was particularly essential in the fight against centrifugal forces in the borderlands___Outside the new Soviet borders there was even more for the

Church to do as an ally of the Soviet State. The Red Army was now operating in

countries with an Orthodox population—Rumania, Bulgaria and Serbia—and the

Russian Orthodox Church could assist in promoting... friendship among the

Orthodox peoples of the Balkans.

[ Kolarz, op. cit., p. 56.]

The unspectacular election of Sergius as Patriarch in 1943 by a handful of metropolitans and bishops contrasted strikingly with the sumptuous election of Alexis in February 1945

attended by 204 ecclesiastical dignitaries and laymen. Among the guests were the

Patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria and the representatives of other Balkan and Near-East Patriarchs. Metropolitan Benjamin of North America was also present, and alluded approvingly to the old messianic traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church by saying that Moscow might yet become "The Third Rome".

Stalin was all in favour of Moscow's becoming a sort of "Vatican" of the Orthodox Church, and Alexis was given every encouragement to extend his foreign contacts and to claim for himself and his Church a leading position in the religious world. On April 10, 1945 Stalin had another meeting with the Patriarch Alexis and the Metropolitan Nicholas, and gave the Patriarch every encouragement for his forthcoming journey to the Near and Middle East—a journey which lasted four weeks. A special plane, piloted by a Hero of the Soviet Union, was placed at the Patriarch's disposal. The political implications of all these contacts were obvious enough; and, as already said, the Church hierarchy, and in particular the Metropolitan Nicholas were to lend special respectability to a variety of committees of inquiry, as well as to the Peace Movement in its various international manifestations, such as the famous congress of the Partisans of Peace at the Salle Pleyel in Paris in 1949.

There was much talk in Moscow, especially towards the end of the war, about Stalin, the ex-seminarist, having a soft spot for the Church, which was thought to be somehow

associated in his mind with the Muscovite State and with his "forerunners", the Moscow Tsars.

The international purpose served by the Church was also only too obvious. It did its best to establish a friendly contact with certain other Churches; a great fuss was made over the visit to Moscow of the Archbishop of York whose only complaint was that the bearded

old gentlemen would insist on kissing him on every possible occasion; he thought this

"constant diving into their whiskers" was being a bit overdone. Sir Archibald Clark Kerr (later Lord Inverchapel), the British Ambassador told me, at the end of 1944, about a meeting he had with Stalin, at which the Marshal assured him that "in his own way, he also believed in God." "I dare say," Clark Kerr commented, "he had his tongue in his cheek when he said so; but it is surely interesting that he should have thought it politic to make such a remark to me!"

The modus vivendi established between the Church and the State during the war was of considerable mutual benefit, though no doubt it made many diehard communists squirm

at times; it was all very "un-Leninist". Stalin's apparent wish that the Russian Orthodox Church should become a sort of "Vatican" for all Orthodox Christians throughout the world, met with a considerable measure of success, though not complete success. The

resistance to the whole concept developed after the war, together wth the intensification of cold-war currents.

It is true that, even at the height of the Stalin-Patriarch honeymoon, both the Party and the Komsomol continued to discourage religious practices among their members, and no

chaplains were ever attached to the Red Army. But active anti-religious propaganda in Russia was not to be resumed on a large scale until after Stalin's death.

The Russian Orthodox Church was traditionally anti-Catholic; nevertheless with the

establishment of a Polish Army in Russia in 1943 and the subsequent liberation of Poland by the Red Army, Stalin was very anxious, at one stage, to normalise relations with the Catholic Church as well. In this he was much less successful. And, on one famous

occasion, he even had a big practical joke played on him by an obscure American parish priest.

PART FIVE Stalingrad