RELIGION AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN THE

SOVIET UNION 1945-1964

by GAVIN WHITE

W
HY HAVE churches in the U.S.S.R. been harassed in
recent years? It has been supposed by many that if Stalin
stopped most persecution during the Second World War,
then things under Khrushchev could only improve. Instead they de-
teriorated, and all liberties of Soviet citizens received more respect
except the religious.
A common answer has been that the Soviet authorities were
horrified by the continued hold of religion which they considered to
be a threat to Marxism. Such a view is quite popular in the west
where a clash of ideologies, with Christianity triumphing over
Marxism, consoles churchmen who cannot find such a triumph in
their own society. But this assumes that the Soviet rulers consider
Christianity to be a religion based on certain tenets, and as Marxists
they cannot be expected to do so. For them religion is primarily an
instrument of social control.
Most of us tend to smile at this theme in such writers as E. P.
Thompson, 1 or in the more recent writer who started, 'Much re-
ligious teaching of the nineteenth century contained no social or
political message', and then ended an intelligent survey of social con-
trol as if this really were the critical element in English religion. 2 The
church historian knows only too well the unsuitability of a Church
for the task of imposing unwelcome social ideas. But the Marxist
considers that religious faith is either a sham or a delusion, and that a
religion is basically a device for social control which has been con-
structed by a feudal or bourgeois society, but which can be utilised
by Soviet authority for controlling societies which lie outside the
committed mainstream of Soviet life.
That this was so for the Second World War has been accepted by
English-speaking readers since the publication of Struve's study in

1
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth 1968)
pp 385-440.
2
Jennifer Hart, 'Religion and Social Control in the Mid-nineteenth Century', A. P.
Donajgrodski ed, Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain (London 1977) p 108.

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 G A V I N WHITE

1962. This showed that the 1940 extension of Soviet borders to the
west also saw the Russian Orthodox Church, then on the verge of
extinction as an organised force, sending three of its few bishops to
head churches in the newly invaded lands, and being used again in
1943 and after as the lands were re-conquered from the Germans.
The subject was explored in more detail by Fireside in 1971, and he
observed with some surprise that Orthodoxy was ill-suited to being
the instrument of any regime since, 'Services emphasise ritual, and
sermons are as a rule devoted to purely spiritual, other-worldly to-
pics.' 4 Alexeev and Stavrou studied the same subject but, as dias-
poran Orthodox, knew that even while the state exploited the weak-
ness of the Church, the Church also exploited the weakness of the
state, and particularly the state's naivete on the subject of religion. 5
But it was not only religious bodies which could be used for social
control. National groupings could be employed in the same way,
and if a nationality did not exist where it was needed, then it could be
created. In the 1920s, after the Soviet war with Poland, the northern
boundary between the two powers ran through an area given
national status by the Soviet Union with what has been called an arti-
ficial language, Byelorussian, in order to draw the border peoples to
Moscow rather than to Warsaw. 6 But having once created this
nationality, the Soviet authorities found that it came too much to life
and were obliged to damp it down with programmes of russification
in the 1950s.7 The Moldavian and Karelian languages are similarly
artificial. And behind all this lies the philosophical notion of men as
'hollow', merely pushed by external stimuli, so that the state is able
to 'treat language as an instrument of social control.' 8 And this was
especially so with the peasant population; it was only after the per-
sonality was admitted to exist in the post-Stalin period that social
control ceased to be respectable.9 And once social control was
ideologically doubtful, it was more difficult to justify toleration of
religion.

3
Nikita Struve, Christians in Contemporary Russia (London 1962).
4
Harvey Fireside, Icon and Swastika: The Russian Orthodox Church under Nazi and
Soviet Control (Cambridge Mass. 1971) p 191.
5
W. Alexeev, T. G. Stavrou, The Great Revival: the Russian Church under German
Occupation (Minneapolis 1976).
6
[Helene] Carrere d'Encausse, L'Empire Eclate (Paris 1978) p 232.
7
Ibid p 333.
8
[Robert C ] Tucker, [The Soviet Political Mind: Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change]
(London 1972) pp 161, 165.
9
/iirfpl67.

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 Religion and Social Control in the Soviet Union 1945—1964
But it had never been respectable to use social control in Soviet
society, and its use with peasants was only justified by their being
outside Soviet society. It was Herzen who wrote of the 'two
Russias', regime and peasants, existing from the eighteenth cen-
tury, 10 and this concept was developed by Preobrazhenski of the 'left
opposition' in Lenin's day as the relationship between a colonial
power and its colony. 11 But if colonialism is the analogy, then it is
the colonialism of Leopold and the Congo in the days of red rubber,
with armies of city workers sent out to confiscate foodstuffs, both in
the period of war communism under Lenin and in that of collectivi-
sation under Stalin, with the millions of deaths which ensued. 12 In
imperial Russia there was never any pretence of peasants having the
normal rights of citizens, and it was not until 1906 that they were
given a more generous form of passport for internal travel. 13 In the
Soviet Union peasants have, with some exceptions, had internal
passports only since 1976, though the process has continued since
then. 14 Until 1964 collective farm workers had no system of social
security, and even when they did receive a system of pensions these
were lower than for the country as a whole. 15 Most astonishingly,
collective farms were not even allowed to purchase power from the
national electricity grid until 1954, as if to make it clear that they
were not really part of the nation. 16 As for income, collective farm
income rose rapidly from 1953 until 1958 when agriculture
flourished, but then fell in relation to fixed wages. 17 In general,
workers in urban areas received half as much again as workers on
state farms who received half as much again as workers on collective
farms, and it is significant that Khrushchev expressed astonishment
when he heard of a few collective farm workers who were actually
paid more than urban workers. 18
Yet this division was never intended to be permanent. It has been
said that in 1945 Stalin had no choice but to leave agriculture in ruins
10
Ibidp 125.
11
[Lazar] Volin, [A Century of Russian Agriculture:fromAlexander II to Khrushchev]
(Cambridge Mass. 1970) p 193.
12
Ibidp 234.
13
/fcWpl08.
14
[Helene] Carrere d'Encausse, he Pouvoir Conftsque [: Gouvemants et Couvemes en
U.R.S.S.] (Paris 1980) p 397.
15
Volin p 428.
16
/6idp478.
17
Ibid pp 420, 427, 528.
™ Ibidp422.

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 GAVIN WHITE

if he was to re-build industry with the resources available, and indus-

try must come first for any regime which was 'urbanist and anti-
peasant'. , 9 Agriculture was to be used to feed the cities in the knowl-
edge that peasant revolts had always been too isolated to be dan-
gerous in the past and would be so in the future, 20 while the continu-
ing peasant revolts in the Ukraine could be put down at leisure.21
Agriculture was still a wealth to be used for the cities; agricultural
weakness had not yet become a drain on the whole economy. 22 And
if agriculture was to be left alone, so was the Church which main-
tained the relatively strong position it had achieved during the war
and which was expected to keep the peasants quiescent.
But Stalin did not entirely neglect the agricultural problem. He no
longer tried to apply Marxist doctrine to the peasants, perhaps
recognising that Michurin's notion of directing evolution was ex-
tremely chancy when applied to people. 23 Instead he left the peasants
alone and tried to change their environment. Though the
'agrogorod', the agricultural worker's urban dwelling unit which
would make peasants think like workers, only reached fruition in
Khrushchev's day, it was under Stalin that it began. 24 And Stalin, far
more than Khrushchev, did try to change agriculture by Michurinist
direction of biological evolution. The ideas of T. D. Lysenko not
only wrecked Soviet scientific progress, but they did immense
damage to agriculture, and even forestry, with his programme of
planting trees in groups since 'some trees would voluntarily die out,
sacrificing themselves for the sake of the other seeds in the interest of
preservation of the species. According to Lysenko, competition took
place only between species, not within'. 25 Of course we in the west
have heard something not dissimilar from the sociobiologists, but
not as an indirect means of changing human nature.
Religion, however, probably meant more to Stalin than just a
means of controlling peasants until science could change them. It has
been ably argued that after the terrible losses of the Second World
War there was very little left of the communist party, which was out-

19
[William O.] McCagg, [Stalin Embattled 1943-1948] (Detroit 1978) pp 247, 248.
20
Volin p 164
2
' Martin McCauley ed, Communist Power in Europe 1944-1949 (London 1977) p 44.
22
Carrere d'Encausse, he Pouvoir Confisque p 396.
23
Tucker p 152.
24
[Edward] Crankshaw, [Khruschev] (London 1966) pp 166, 179.
25
[Werner G.] Hahn, The Politics of Soviet Agriculture 1960-1970 (Baltimore 1972) p
68.

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 Religion and Social Control in the Soviet Union 1945-1964
flanked by a bureaucracy inspired by Malenkov and his 'metal-eat-
ers'. 26 Statistics on party membership do not entirely bear this out,
and even if it is accepted that most party members were non-ideo-
logical promotions from the battlefield we must still consider that
the Party had been so constantly purged in the 1930s that a weak
Party was nothing new. 27 Nonetheless, Stalin may well have felt
threatened by the industrialists and it is quite possible that he did res-
pond by building up not one counter-weight but two, Party and
Church. In Soviet Russia it has been customary to see Leningrad as a
Party centre but Moscow as a national centre, with the Church as an
element in the national identity, and if swift action against the indus-
trialists was needed then party and Church could both be encour-
aged. 28 Almost certainly the Party was so used but got out of control
and became a threat to Stalin, thus leading to the bloody purge of the
otherwise mysterious Leningrad affair in 1949. 29 That the victims
were Marxists is a reminder that the faith which has been most
dangerous to its devotee in the Societ Union has not been Christian-
ity but Marxism. In fact there is another theory of the Leningrad
affair, that it was Stalin's purge of the moderate Zhdanov faction,30
but like the Kirov affair of 1934 it may always be a mystery. Yet the
counter-weight theory does give the best explanation of why Stalin
may have kept the Church in case he needed it in the future, though it
must be admitted that a Stalin who ran his empire with the secrecy
and night habits of a Howard Hughes cannot be easily submitted to
rational analysis.
All changed with Khrushchev. The reign of terror ended, though
subtler repression did not. It has been stated that this was necessary if
anyone was to be found willing to work in a bureaucracy hitherto so
dangerous, though genuine humanitarian impulses existed in
Khrushchev who may have had his colleagues' blood on his hands
but disliked it. 31 But as Roy Medvedev has written of him, 'there
was one freedom that he would not tolerate: that formerly extended
to the Orthodox church'. 32 Repression of religion became general,
but without recourse to violence.
26
McCagg pp 21, 86, 98, 120.
27
Carrere d'Encausse, he Pouvoir Confisque pp 55, 94.
28
McCagg pp 93, 131, 179-180.
29
Ibid pp 118-120.
30
Werner G. Hahn, Postwar Soviet Politics: the Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Modera-
tion 1946-53 (Ithaca 1982) p 122.
31
Roy Medvedev, Khrushchev (Oxford 1982) pp 90, 91.
32
/fcidp213.

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 GAVIN WHITE

The religious policy of Khrushchev, like every other policy of

Khrushchev, must be seen in relation to his agricultural ambitions.
And it should be noted that the life of Khrushchev by the Medvedev
brothers refers to his religious policy only twice, once when his clos-
ing of churches drove older peasants from the villages and thus
harmed agricultural production, and once when his successors
allowed churches to re-open and thus halted the drift from the
land. 33 If Stalin's farm policy allowed religion, Khrushchev's did
not, and for him this would not have seemed repression but deliver-
ance. Peasants were to be brought into the mainstream of Soviet life
and thus no longer needed religious solace and could be freed from
superstition and the priests. In fact collective farm personnel were
being made 'more aware politically' even before Stalin's death, 34 and
attempts were now made to supersede the old rural sense of com-
munity. The new ideal was not that of the farm but of the grain fac-
tory, 35 and in this ideal mechanisation was seen as 'an essential attri-
bute of a socialist farm enterprise, contributing mightily to that
Marxist desideratum, the erosion of the gap between agriculture and
industry'. 36 Scattered villages were to be replaced by urban-style
apartment houses, 37 and even the Communist Party was divided
into urban and rural sections so that peasants might receive attention
which had never been theirs before. 38 By 1958 when it seemed that
all Khrushchev's agricultural policies would triumph, he felt confi-
dent enough to dissolve the machine tractor stations which were vir-
tual colonies of city workers providing technical guidance and politi-
cal guidance for the rural population. 39 Peasants were now to
provide both for themselves. There was some movement towards
collective farms being absorbed into state farms which were ideo-
logically preferable and turned peasants into salaried workers, but
this did not have much impact in most areas. 40 And if Khrushchev's
virgin lands campaign, like his corn campaign, was undertaken with
such pellmell enthusiasm that it led to a degree of catastrophe, from

33
Roy A. Medvedev, Zhores A. Medvedev, [Khrushchev: The Years of Power]
(London 1977) pp 150-181.
34
Ibid p 37.
35
Volin p 199.
36
Ibid p 476.
37
Hahn, The Politics of Soviet Agriculture 1960-1970 p 190.
38
Carrere d'Encausse, Le Pouvoir Confisque p 157.
39
Roy A. Medvedev, Zhores A. Medvedev p 85.
40
Carrere d'Encausse, Le Pouvoir Confisque pp 140, 141.

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 Religion and Social Control in the Soviet Union 1945-1964
his point of view it had the virtue of uprooting whole populations
and, in theory, leaving their old ideas behind them. 41
We know a good deal about Khrushchev's aims in agriculture but
very little about his motives in religious policy. Yet what we know
of his rural aims suggests that it would be logical for him to discon-
tinue religious activity in the countryside, and to him this would not
be so much persecution as the winding down of some 'quango' or
quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation which had out-
lived its usefulness. And if Marxists in general regard churches as
agencies of social control, Khrushchev in particular had good reason
to do so. He had been sent into Poland at the time of the partition in
1939, and with the deportations and the shootings there had also
been the imposition of a Moscow bishop to control the Church. 42
And yet his partially Ukrainian background may have been as much
a factor as any in turning him against religious activity, for religion in
the Ukraine was traditionally divisive. It is in some ways difficult to
reconcile the view of religion as social control with anti-religious
propaganda, and yet Khrushchev's first independent decree in 1954
concerned a modernisation of anti-religious activity as if religion was
an objective force. 43
But after the removal of Khrushchev in 1964 there was no change
in his religious policy. It did not progress; it just drifted. Perhaps this
was because nobody knew what to do with agriculture, and religion
went with it. Perhaps nobody really cared about religion anyway.
But it may also be that the ability of the Church to use the concept of
social control was fading. For twenty years churchmen could de-
mand the minimum freedom to be a Church on the grounds that
otherwise they would not look like a Church and could not impress
peasants, or impress foreigners, and since the state considered that
the religious side of religion was unimportant, that freedom was
given. The Church would then act as a Church while making ges-
tures to convince the state that it had social significance, which
foreigners sometimes took too seriously—though some foreigners
helpfully pretended to be impressed by what Russian church leaders
said in order to give them more leverage in their manipulation of the
state.
But there is a paradox here. Churchmen could only take advantage
41
Roy A. Medvedev, Zhores A. Medvedev pp 118-121.
42
Crankshaw p 135.
43
Ibid p 200.

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 GAVIN WHITE

of the Marxist blinkers of the state as long as the state was Marxist,
and if the state or part of it should become more pragmatic then the
Church will lose out. The old game of Marxists using religion in the
conviction that their history is inevitable so concessions do not
matter, and Christians using Marxism in the conviction that their
history is inevitable so concessions do not matter, may not work in
the future. Each deceiving the other was profitable in its day, but if
the Soviet Union becomes less Marxist, which is improbable for the
immediate future, or merely becomes a more homogeneous society
less concerned about controlling anyone, then the Church may be
redundant.
But toleration may be bought for a number of prices. Ethnic
Russians worried about the Soviet Union's Asian birthrate tend to
retreat into their Orthodox past, 44 and there may be some role for
the Church there. Alternatively, there is the threat of modern
science. Marxism is tied to the climate in which it began to a far
greater extent than is Christianity. Newtonian certainties applied to
human history made an attractive ideology as long as Newtonian
certainties were certain, but when Heisenberg's uncertainty prin-
ciple escapes from the laboratory and is applied to history, then
Marxism suffers.45 It may be that religion may be brought into the
system to provide an external point of reference, though it is hard to
see this being done with official approval. But if toleration must be
sought and a price must be paid, this is not only so in the Soviet
Union. Churches which seek toleration or even privilege are accuse
tomed to exaggerate their social utility, and churchmen who do this
frequently come to believe their own exaggerations. And yet there is
a question which defies analysis about social control and social util-
ity. This concerns the extent to which religion, even if ineffective in
imposing unwelcome social ideas, is effective in imposing welcome
ones. Ultimately the function of religion in social control may be
greater than we believe, but the process may be more one of society
seeking sanction for what it wants than being bullied into accepting
what it does not want.

University of Glasgow
44
Edward Allworth ed, Ethnic Russia in the U.S.S.R.: The Dilemma of Dominance
(New York 1980) pp 46, 78, 111; Carrere d'Encausse, L'Empire Eclate p 341.
45
Tucker p 150.

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