Soviet Party Urged to Halt Any Religious Persecution

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, Tuesday called upon the Communist Party to respect religious beliefs and to halt any persecution of the country’s believers.

Addressing a special party conference on reform, Gorbachev said the party’s view of religion as “non-materialistic and unscientific” has not changed but that freedom of conscience has to be upheld as a fundamental right of all citizens.

“All believers, irrespective of the religion they profess, are full-fledged citizens of the Soviet Union,” Gorbachev said, noting that the present constitutional guarantees of religious freedom would be supplemented by a new law assuring freedom of conscience.

The party’s own commitment to atheism was “no reason for a disrespectful attitude to the spiritual mindedness of the believer and still less for applying any administrative pressure to assert materialistic views,” Gorbachev said.

The country’s own history, through the development of the Soviet state and World War II, had “united believers and non-believers as Soviet citizens and patriots,” he added, and today most believers are participating in the reform effort.

Gorbachev’s comments strengthened the party’s earlier commitment, made as part of the celebration this month of the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity in Russia, to ensure full religious freedom as one of the basic civil liberties here.

An estimated 80 million Soviet citizens are Christians, Muslims, Jews or Buddhists, and some specialists on religion in the Soviet Union have put the figure at nearly twice that in a population of 285 million.

In recent months, the government has relaxed its restrictions on the Russian Orthodox Church and assisted it in reopening a number of churches and monasteries. Preparations have been started on opening a dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church. And in Soviet Central Asia, the government has given permission for the construction of more mosques and the training of more Muslim imams.

Gorbachev told the conference that the party will take further measures to ensure the observance of basic human rights and the civil liberties guaranteed by the Soviet constitution.

“Human rights in our society are not a gift from the state or a blessing from someone,” he said. “They are an inalienable characteristic of socialism, its achievement.”

Without recognition of those rights, he continued, the political and economic reforms will fail because they depend on active popular support.

Freedom of speech, “enabling a person to express his opinions on any matter,” is also vital to the reforms because it is “a real guarantee that any problem of public interest will be discussed from every angle . . . and this will help find optimal solutions,” he said.

In a further effort to broaden support for the reform program, Gorbachev told the conference that the return to family farming should be expanded rapidly through the leasing of agricultural land, collectively owned since the 1930s, to individual farmers.

Experiments have shown that yields rise quickly under these systems, Gorbachev said, and such measures help solve the country’s serious food shortage.