Formation of the Soviet Totalitarian Model of State-church Relations

Abstract

The article sets the task of researching the Soviet totalitarian model of state-church relations formed during Lenin’s reign, which fundamentally changed the religious situation in the country after the October Revolution of 1917. The coming to the state leadership of the Bolshevik Party meant the beginning of an era of brutal persecution for the Orthodox Church. With a negative attitude towards all religions, the Bolsheviks showed particular hostility towards Orthodoxy, so their relations with the church took conflicting forms from the very beginning. The Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars “On the Separation of Church and State: of January 20, 1918 deprived the Orthodox Church of its legal and property rights and laid the foundations for its lawless position for the entire period of Soviet rule. This decree became an attack on the entire system of church life and an act of open persecution of the church. An active process of seizure and seizure of monastery and church buildings began. Thousands of clergy and active believers were thrown into prisons and concentration camps, extrajudicial massacres took place against them en masse.

The blasphemous campaign conducted by the Bolsheviks during 1918-1920 to reveal the cancer with holy relics became the first of the largest nationwide anti-church actions in the entire history of the Soviet period. Holy relics removed from monasteries and cathedrals were placed in atheistic museums. Persons guilty of resisting the opening of coffins with holy relics was held criminally liable. At the same time, there was a mass closure of monasteries, their land and buildings were seized, church valuables were requisitioned and looted, the inhabitants were evicted and subjected to repression. Direct punitive actions against the church began under the guise of a 1922 campaign to seize objects made of precious metals from temples for use in aid of the starving. A higher measure of punishment was applied to those accused of organizing opposition to the seizure of church valuables. During this period, the Bolsheviks also tried to remove Patriarch Tikhon and other authoritative archpastors from the church administration in order to destroy the unity of the church, make it under their control, and subsequently disintegrate and destroy it.

Confrontation with the Orthodox Church was the basis of Soviet religious policy during the period of Lenin’s rule. In relation to other confessions, contrary to the declarations of full equality of all religions in the Soviet state, in the first years after the October Revolution, the policy of the Bolsheviks was less strict. For propaganda purposes, the “former ruling” Orthodox Church was opposed to all other religions that were previously restricted in their rights or persecuted by tsarism. However, at the end of 1923 (already without the participation of the seriously ill Lenin, who had previously been directly involved in the adoption of almost all fundamentally important decisions of the Soviet government and the Bolshevik Party regarding church policy), a new structure for the implementation of state religious policy was formed in the USSR and the transition of the Soviet state to a more flexible of course regarding the church (the so-called “religious non”).