The Thinking Reed

These remarks by ‘a young scientist’ are quoted in the newspaper Sovetskaya Kultura, which admits that such views are held not by him alone, but ‘not uncommonly’.88 The newspaper even mentions the connection between interest in religion and disillusionment with propaganda, because ‘our demands and tastes often prove to be on a higher level than is supposed by some information media and cultural institutions.’ It notes that religion has succeeded in ‘extending the frontiers of its influence, spreading this even among the educated strata of the population, the artistic and technical intelligentsia’.89 Izvestiya also admits that ‘we really do come into conflict with an increase of interest in religion and the Church.’90 This admission is all the more valuable because when something similar was said by a Western ecclesiastic who had visited the USSR, his words were declared to be ‘lies bordering on provocation’.91 To be sure, when it comes to explaining why, the Soviet papers put the whole blame on the ‘village prose’ writers and propagandists for church music. Against the religious revival the authors of these articles can oppose only lectures and talks. They do not, of course, want to discuss the social and ideological roots of religion (in official circles in the Soviet Union Marx has long been forgotten). Filimonov complains that ‘grandmothers’ lead young people astray. Yet here’s a strange fact. Twenty years ago the churches were full of old people, and it is the same today. But those old worshippers of twenty years ago are long since dead! A new shift has come on, and what is interesting is that today’s ‘grandmothers’ were Komsomol members in the 1920s. Previously, they never went to church. Amazing, too, is the charge of ‘conformism’ hurled by Filimonov at the religious youth, for in a country where atheism has been proclaimed the state ideology and religion — to put it mildly — is not approved of, it is not conformism that leads a person into church.

People hope to find in the Church liberation from the dogmas of official ideology, but Orthodoxy can offer them only illusory liberation. In Lithuania they may still put their hopes in some liberating power possessed by Catholicism, but would it be a great gain if the rigid dogmatism of Stalinism were to be replaced by the dogmatism — no less rigid — of Russian Orthodoxy? At best we should be merely replacing a poor copy by the original, but is the original any good?

American scholars say that Stalinist pseudo-Marxism is the ‘secular religion of Soviet society’.92 Here we find its trinity, its saints and apostles; here are ‘the holy scriptures of the Soviet belief system: the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin’.93 Even such an Eastern rite is practised as the mummifying of the remains of saints — Lenin, then Stalin. ‘The so-called Red Corners (displaying the pictures of leaders and founding fathers, slogans and banners) are reminiscent of small shrines,’ writes Hollander. ‘Masses of people assemble to listen to secular sermons (at speeches and rallies). All these are among the quasi-religious manifestations of the Soviet belief system.’94 Recently the Red Corners received a series of pictures which tell the life story of Saint Brezhnev. A Soviet person can count thousands of examples of this sort of thing, and it was not accidental that even after the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Yu. Karyakin spoke of the link between Stalinism and religion.

That such critical thinkers as Marx, Engels and Lenin should have become objects of worship is one of history’s many bad jokes. What matters more to us now is that a crude pseudo-religion cannot, of course, compete on equal terms with the centuries-old tradition of Christianity. But when he rejects Stalinism in the name of Orthodoxy, a dissident intellectual is not making such a decisive turn as he thinks. It was precisely Stalinist pseudo-religiosity that fostered his inclination towards the religiosity of Orthodoxy. The new ideas turn out to be suspiciously like the old. It is typical that many are drawn to religion not by moral preaching or Christian internationalism (in this respect people like G. Pomerants and L. Pinsky are rather exceptional) but by ceremonies, rituals and authority — in short, not by those features that contrast religion to Stalinism but those in which they are akin. This is particularly noticeable when we consider the Orthodox nationalists.