How safe was it during these times to proclaim one’s religiosity? Was it something that you just had to keep to yourself? What were the consequences, if any, of being overtly religious? (Either Christian, Moslem, Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, or various and sundry other religious beliefs?)
What were the consequences of being overtly against the Communist Party line?
Labor camp in Siberia is my first guess. I’m sure there were some tolerances allowed depending on the local Party official. If you kept your religion private and out of sight, I’m sure nothing terrible was done, although you’d probably not get invited into the Party itself.
I can only say about 1970s, being overtly religious would have exposed you to taunting/persecution/ostracism in school, possible expulsion from the “komsomol”, definitely from the communist party if you were in it, lack of promotion or outright firing from any job higher than a janitor, and having a file in the KGB that would follow you wherever you went.
My High School Band was invited to Russia in 1986 during the period of Glastnost. I was only 14 years old and had just completed my freshman year of High School so I wasn’t as aware of what I was seeing as I would have been had I been a little older. That said, we visited Moscow, Kalinin, and Leningrad (now St Petersburg). I’d been taught to believe Russia forbade religion and was very surprised at the large number of churches I saw over there. We walked into a few that were very beautifully decorated and clearly Christian based on the images of Jesus and Mary. I remember one woman at the altar that was wiping down a painting that had a number of images of Jesus and Mary on it. While cleaning she was humming a soft hymn, and every time she’d clean a face she’d bend down and kiss it. It’s plausible that these actions were for the benefit of American tourists (I think there were about 20 schools invited to go to Russia and 20 Russian schools invited to the US) and that’s possible in Moscow where we were tightly controlled. But we were a bit more free to explore on our own in Leningrad which is where I saw the woman worshipping. So it didn’t seem to be condoned but also not actively forbidden at the time.
In the former Yugoslavia, if you belonged to whatever was the pre-communist religious majority of the area, you were usually all right as long as you kept a low profile and were not pushy about it. Of course, under the communists being at least openly sympathetic and in agreement with the communists was necessary to get the good jobs and positions. Now someone who was an open practitioner of a minority religious group (say a Christian living in Bosnia or a Muslim living Serbia) unless the communist were on a campaign of diversity and breaking down ethnic barriers was often doubly screwed: persecuted by the communists and by the dominant religious group.
The KGB also infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church, and controlled who was named bishop or Patriarch. My understanding is that in practice only the elderly were allowed to openly Christianity; everyone else had to very discreet. Openly practicing Judaism was impossible.
Persecution of Christians was most common in the early years, when Lenin and Trotsky were certain that religious groups were enemies of the revolution and popular support for religion would vanish as communism was implemented. Tens of thousands of clergy were murdered, while others were imprisoned, exiled, or tortured for their beliefs.
Christianity did not go away. During WWII, resources were needed elsewhere and most anti-church violence stopped. After the war, state suppression of religion was still the rule, but it was less thorough and violent than before.
Depends on the time period you’re talking about. I walked into a synagogue in Leningrad in 1989 on Yom Kippur - it was definitely operating, and much to my surprise someone spotted me on entry and explained politely that it was an Orthodox synagogue, so women had to sit upstairs. Most people there were over the age of 60, for sure, and as a foreigner I was a subject of much curiosity (and lots of attempted nephew fixups by the other ladies upstairs).
An ex of mine was a nice Jewish boy in Moscow in the 1970s. He told stories of secretly studying Hebrew and karate at the same time and place, all the better to be able to defend himself against the anti-Semitic thugs who knew that Hebrew was being taught there and stalked the students on the way out of class.
Hebrew and karate is a great combination to be taught. I love it.
**Not **the situation causing the need for the karate, of course, just the idea of teaching nice Jewish boys Hebrew and karate at the same time and place.
E. F. Schumacher begins his book A Guide for the Perplexed with this anecdote:
On a visit to Leningrad some years ago, I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on the map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: “We don’t show churches on our maps.” Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was clearly marked. “That is a museum,” he said, “not what we call a ‘living church.’ It is only the ‘living churches’ we don’t show.”
I wouldn’t consider “The Voice of the Martyrs” as a reliable source. They’re the ones that claimed that Mexico, among other absurd places, had official state-sponsored persecution of Christianity.
I am sure he exaggerated for effect. Yes, there were a few “living churches” in Leningrad in the 70s. No, they were nowhere near “enormous”. The cathedrals were not “living churches”. In fact, the two biggest ones (Isaakievskiy and Kazanskiy) were turned into “Museums of Atheism”, and Isaakievskiy was used to demonstrate the Foucault Pendulum (I remember visiting both the pendulum demonstration and the “museum of atheism” on a field trip with my class).
Or even more: from material that I’ve read, in WWII the Stalinist leadership wished to get as many as possible of the population in non-German-occupied Russia “on side” to resist the German onslaught; and decided, pragmatically, to ease up on the Christians – including, expanding the previously minimised seminaries for the training of Russian Orthodox clergy. Have seen this described as – in Soviet terms – a brief religious revival. Can’t give explicit cites, I’m afraid: the above, largely from what I remember from Gulag by Solzhenitsyn – who to put it mildly, was not inclined to falsely ascribe any good deeds, to Soviet Communist authority. As stated by ITRc: after the end of the war, the heat was turned up again on religious believers; but never thereafter quite so extremely, as in the worst times of the 1920s and 30s.
Quite, when it suited the Party to co-opt the Orthodox church leadership, or the Jewish community, they did so (hence the Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan as the Soviet answer to Zionism). I seem to remember some TV documentary claiming there were reports of Stalin himself secretly visiting a priest at a low point in WW2. But equally, later there were atheist and anti-Semitic campaigns. And newer denominations and religious affiliations, particularly those with connections to the West or an inconvenient tendency to insist on individual conscience, like Baptists, Pentecostalists and Jehovah’s Witnesses, were always in trouble.
I understand that in his youth, Stalin spent a brief spell studying for the Orthodox priesthood – can see him musing, in a desperate situation, re “perhaps all that crap has something going for it, after all”.
I remember hearing in the 1970s and 80s, about Baptist churches gaining many adherents in the USSR, and the regime’s attempts at repressing them. This would seem to gell with many serious Christians in Russia, regarding the Russian Orthodox Church as being corrupted by / collaborating with the atheist governing regime – which would seem to have indeed been the case to some extent (by no means 100%) – and choosing instead, allegiance to a genuinely “outlaw” church which dealt in an, at least more pure, form of Christianity.
If I have things rightly, the above was not something totally new, brought in with Communism: in Tsarist times, the Orthodox Church supported, and was favoured by, the secular government; alternative forms of Christianity, were not – though persecution of them was generally less harsh than anything that was done post-1917.
I remember seeing on “60 Minutes” in the late 1970’s that the Soviet TV stations ran the most popular western shows (a family was shown watching “Kojak”) on Sunday mornings, to deter people from attending church.
I was a little surprised, having been raised in America during the Cold War. I thought they used more persuasive methods to keep people from church.