Soviet Faithful Hail New Age of Tolerance on Easter

Father Ignaty Krekshin stood outside the door to the church of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God as Easter Day began, and pronounced words not heard here since the reign of Stalin: “Christ is risen!”

From inside the whitewashed walls, members of the congregation answered, “Indeed, he is risen!” joyously marking the rebirth of both their Savior and their church.

The reopening of the onion-domed sanctuary five months ago is another sign of the more honored place now accorded religion and the Russian Orthodox Church in Soviet life after decades of indifference, hostility and persecution.

“This is truly a great moment,” said factory worker Valentina Nazarova, her eyes welling with emotion as she stood by sputtering candles near the altar. “When I come here, I feel like I have returned to my family.”

Nikita S. Khrushchev, who waged a fierce anti-religion campaign, once reportedly said he would put the last priest on television so people would remember what one had looked like. But Soviet radio and TV on Saturday carried Russian Orthodox Easter services live, and the announcer on TV’s main news program told viewers that “Easter reminds us that to survive today is possible only by loving each other.”

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the first Kremlin leader to meet with a Pope, is the driving force behind the new concordat with Russian Orthodoxy and Christianity as a whole. Gorbachev, who has said he has been baptized, also said it took only one church service while a boy in southern Russia to show him religion was not for him.

But since Gorbachev became Soviet leader, the Communist Party he heads has renounced its longtime claim to know the solutions to all problems and has let others, including church leaders, take part in bodies like the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies that are searching for the answers.

Western specialists see a share of political consensus-building in Gorbachev’s actions, as well as deep concern in the Soviet Union over the consequences of the official atheism policy, pursued with such brutality in the early years of Communist rule that an estimated 50,000 Orthodox priests, monks and nuns were killed or sent to die in prisons and camps.

Of the 48,000 Orthodox churches that existed before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, only about 9,700 are functioning today. The others were razed in state-sanctioned atheism campaigns, converted into warehouses or offices or put to other use. But in the past two years, more than 2,200 churches, like that in Borodino, were returned to believers--a sign of the resurgence in belief.

“By destroying thousands of churches and introducing state atheism, have we achieved any noble aims?” an engineer from the industrial city of Togliatti asked in a letter to a Soviet weekly. “Lack of spirituality, lack of community, inhumane pragmatism, belief in nothing at all--are these not our values today?”

Many Soviets would agree. Newspapers and magazines persistently probe the causes or consequences of the country’s bezdukhovnost , or “lack of spirituality.” With crime soaring and lax labor discipline supposedly hamstringing economic reform, a return to faith seems the answer to many.

“Religion can be a motivating force, and what Soviet society desperately needs is some sort of motivating force to get people back to work,” said Jane Ellis, who monitors developments in Soviet church affairs at Keston College, a British-based religious rights watchdog group.

With scientific Marxism-Leninism discarded as a sure moral compass, religion is visibly seeping in to fill the vacuum. A Moscow television news show aired a report on the recent opening of a Sunday school in the capital’s Epiphany Cathedral. As the camera focused on the rapt face of a girl 8 or 9 years old learning about the Bible, the announcer said, “It’s difficult to imagine that this girl, once she’s grown, could ever abandon” what she learned as a child.

“We are returning to the old ways,” said a 44-year-old woman at the Borodino church who gave her name only as Galina. “It is badly needed after all that has happened here.”

In the most joyous liturgy in the Orthodox year, the newly reopened Borodino church’s Father Ignaty, a 34-year-old graduate in art history from Moscow State University, led at least 400 worshipers on a procession around the church, which was built in 1816 and serves seven villages. The original was destroyed in the titanic battle waged here between Napoleon’s Grand Army and Imperial Russian troops, in which 75,000 men were killed or wounded.

It was the first Easter ceremony held at the church, about 70 miles west of Moscow, since Soviet authorities shut it at the onset of the bloody collectivization drive in 1929.

Hundreds of middle-age and elderly women in kerchiefs jammed the two-room sanctuary decorated with icons and books donated by another church. But there were also teen-agers, several scores of men and some families with their children. At the portico outside, a uniformed police officer watched as the midnight Easter service unfolded.

In the more tolerant atmosphere of Gorbachev’s rule, a small number of church Sunday schools have sprung up, and small groups of Christians are allowed into state hospitals to comfort the sick and do menial jobs such as making beds and emptying bedpans. In some cities and villages, church bells are pealing again on the Sabbath for the first time in decades.

For religious activists, however, the changes in favor of the rights of the country’s estimated 65 million Christians--of whom 50 million are Russian Orthodox--have not cut deep enough. More than five years into Gorbachev’s rule, the Orthodox church, as well as all other religious denominations in the Soviet Union, is still subjugated to the government’s Council on Religious Affairs and has no legal status of its own.

“The council is supposed to serve as the middleman between the government and our church,” said Father Mikhail Dronov, who works in the publishing department of the Moscow Patriarchate. “But in fact, the only thing the council does is slow things down. I don’t see why we need it.”

For at least two years, Soviet authorities have talked of plans to enact a new, more liberal Law on the Freedom of Conscience to replace Stalin-era restrictions on believers. The government ordered the bill reworked this month, and the repeated delays indicate serious disagreement about what the statute should say. Some activists say it will advocate dissolving the Council on Religious Affairs.

However, in the meantime, for want of new legislation, the 1929 Law on Religious Associations remains theoretically in force. Newly founded Sunday schools or not, that law bans all religious instruction for children, the seeking of converts and charity work by the faithful.

For many in the Orthodox church, seizing fully the possibilities offered by Gorbachev’s reforms seems impossible as long as Patriarch Pimen, 79 and visibly frail, remains at the helm of Russian Orthodoxy, which celebrated its 1,000th anniversary with great pomp two years ago.

“What is remarkable is the slow and cautious way with which the Orthodox leaders act, and how they resist change,” Ellis said. “Communist Party officials are being voted out, yet the church leaders remain the same, though they were appointed as cautious and obedient during the years of stagnation.”

Younger priests like Dronov, who is in his 30s, want their long subservient church to acquire some of the clout that organized religion has in the West, which they say is just as necessary for Soviet change as Gorbachev’s success in pursuing his agenda for economic and social reform.

“To resolve the lack of morality in our society, it is simply indispensable to give the church the widest possibility to proselytize, but this isn’t being done,” Dronov said. “We want the church to speak out, and for everyone to hear its voice.”