State-Stamped Religion Isn’t Free : Overtures to Russian Orthodox Church Hide Repression

The observance of the millennium of Christianity in the Soviet Union this week invites a look at the status of religious freedom in that country. The fundamental question is whether ordinary Soviet citizens of all faiths are allowed to worship and practice their religion without undue state interference. The answer remains unequivocally no. Despite the move toward reform in several key areas of Soviet life, repression remains the overall policy on religious activity.

Religion has marginally benefitted from Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika . Some of these reforms are substantive--including some prisoner releases, the virtual cessation of religious arrests since February, 1987, slight increases in the availability of religious literature and Jewish emigration visas, and promises that the first Jewish yeshiva will be allowed and that the oppressive 1929 law restricting worship will soon be amended. Others, like the state’s celebration of the Christian millennium in Moscow and Gorbachev’s recent meeting with the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, are mostly symbolic. The state-favored Russian Orthodox Church has profited more than the other religions from such changes, but it, too, can continue to claim scores of prisoners of conscience, thousands of closed churches and seminaries, and state administration of its affairs. Other religious groups, particularly those outside Moscow, have gained little from glasnost .

The Soviet government still refuses to recognize the legitimacy of some religious organizations--including the 4-million-strong Ukrainian Catholic Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Hare Krishnas; even secret worship in these faiths is swiftly and often violently crushed. In February more than 200 militia occupied the Ukrainian village of Bratkivtsi while armed police stormed a building where local Catholics secretly prayed. The police destroyed the sanctuary screen and confiscated everything movable. Last Christmas, 20 elderly believers were praying at the home of an 84-year-old Ukrainian Catholic nun when four militia broke into the apartment, kicked and intimidated the worshipers and took them to headquarters for warnings. They were later released and left to find their way home on foot.

Worship by “legal” religions is banned unless it takes place in a state-approved building by a state-approved congregation. Registration continues to be granted sparingly, and can be withdrawn arbitrarily at any time. As recently as February the state denied a Russian Orthodox community in Berezniki official recognition and refused an evangelical Baptist community in Krasnodar permission to modernize and expand its overcrowded prayer house.

Believers who live a great distance from the nearest church are effectively barred from community worship. In Azerbaijan not one church exists for the 100,000 Armenians living in the predominantly Muslim area that dissidents want annexed to the Armenian Republic. In other areas the number of worship places are grossly inadequate. In Klaipeda, Lithuania, for example, 8,000 parishioners are forced to crowd into the services of one small Catholic church, two other churches in the area having been closed by authorities.

Organized religious instruction for minors, including Hebrew lessons, and Bible and other religion discussion groups for adults remain banned. Secret religious schools, like a Baptist Bible class in the Tadzhik Republic that was discovered in early 1987, continue to be searched out and shut down by the state. There is only one officially sanctioned Hebrew class that Jews may attend in the whole Soviet Union (in Baku), and it was shut down for a month this spring under pressure from the authorities.

The Soviet Union has the world’s largest Muslim population, estimated at about 45 million, yet only 500 mosques are allowed to function; before 1917 more than 25,000 were within today’s Soviet borders.

Strict state controls keep religious literature and artifacts in short supply. Those who attempt to satisfy the demand for Bibles and prayer books through clandestine production are arrested and imprisoned. More than 200 persons are serving sentences for religious reasons in prisons, labor camps, psychiatric institutions and places of internal exile. Some--like Nicolai Boiko, who was arrested in 1968 for leading an unregistered Baptist church--have not only suffered multiple arrests but also have been resentenced to longer prison terms while still serving the original sentence. As recently as December, harsh prison conditions were cited as causing the death of a religious prisoner of conscience, an Armenian Hare Krishna.

The state routinely interferes in the designation of religious leaders and in day-to-day church operations. Pervasive KGB infiltration of ecclesiastic administrations, long suspected by human-rights groups, was confirmed last June by a former KGB informant. Professed religious believers are barred from top jobs and are discriminated against and harassed in schools and work places. In short, the Soviet regime retains its role as supervisor of the daily life of religious communities--a role marked by militant atheism and overt hostility toward religion.

Believers in and out of the Soviet Union, mindful of the slaughter of clergy and laity during Stalin’s reign of terror and the anti-religion campaign of Khrushchev, are hopeful that changes begun in the Gorbachev regime herald a new age of Soviet religious tolerance. Time will tell if these hopes are justified. In and of themselves, the recent changes, when taken in the context of ongoing widespread repression, are pitifully inadequate.