The Spirit of the Soviet Christ

EACH TIME I RETURN FROM A TRIP TO THE SOVIET UNION, I resolve to hurry to the library and take out a stack of books on Russian Orthodox Christianity and how it relates to the rest of Russian history. Usually other things intervene.

This time, however, when I got back to the United States in July, I kept my promise to myself. And to my good fortune, I happened upon the three dusty volumes, now long out of print, of the once-famous memoirs of Maurice Paleologue, the French ambassador to Russia from 1914 to 1918.

Like another traveling Frenchman a century earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote the classic book on democracy in America, Paleologue was an acute observer of everything his eye fell upon. One of the things that fascinated him most was the simple but tenacious Christian faith of the Russian people. But in writing about it he mentioned some disquieting elements that are all the more interesting 70 years later.

"Are the Russian people as religious as is commonly asserted?" he asked in his diary on June 9, 1915. His answer helped to explain some things that have puzzled me during my four trips to the Soviet Union in the past five years. "The nation," Paleologue said, "is more sincere, or at any rate more Christian, than its Church. In the simple faith of the masses, there is more spirituality, mysticism and evangelism than in the Orthodox theology and ordinances."

It is a severe judgment, and perhaps should not have been made then, or repeated now, in such unqualified form. Yet there is an element of truth in it. During Paleologue's tenure in Petrograd, which was at that time the capital of imperial Russia and has since been renamed Leningrad, both the Romanov dynasty and the Orthodox Church were preparing to pay the price for their alienation from the vast majority of the Russian people. Paleologue saw it happening before his eyes: "The official church is daily losing its hold over [people's] hearts by allowing itself to become the tool of autocracy. "

While Paleologue was there the roof caved in. The Russian armies were defeated on the fields of battle with tremendous loss of life. Food rioters, led at first by bands of enraged women, broke into the stores of the capital city, and the troops refused to fire on the civilians. The czar abdicated, and a provisional government took over but was soon displaced by the rule of Lenin's Bolshevik Party.

Within a few months, the official church found itself separated from the masses for a new set of reasons. An officially atheistic communist government came to power, seized all church properties, closed numerous churches, forbade the publications of religious books and pamphlets, and restricted Christian education to the church building.

The leadership of the church responded to blow after blow as best it could. It resisted at times, compromised at others, and finally settled down to keep its liturgy and doctrine as intact as possible. Sometimes things went very badly. Sometimes they improved slightly. But no one ever knew when or where the next attack would come.

Stalin called upon the leaders of the Orthodox Church to lend their public support to the state after the German invasion in 1941. They did, and many churches were reopened. But many years after the war, Khrushchev, who is generally viewed as something of a reformer, ruthlessly closed hundreds of churches and stepped up the anti-religious campaign.

WITH THE COMING TO POWER of Mikhail Gorbachev, suddenly things seemed to move the other way. The new general-secretary spoke of "new thinking" and of glasnost, and he seemed to go out of his way to make Soviet Christians feel they were no longer outcasts, barely tolerated in an officially atheistic society.

Still, the average Russian Christian remained skeptical. How long would this swing of the pendulum last? When I asked Christian friends in 1985 what they made of it all, they would sometimes argue about it openly in my presence. Some thought Gorbachev was a genuine reformer who really wanted to change things. Others dismissed him as only the latest trickster.

By 1987, however, the new currents had begun to touch even the most apprehensive of my friends. Tolya, a Christian poet and a resolute dissident, told me in 1986 that he fully expected to die without ever having seen Paris or Rome, to say nothing of the United States. Two years later he arrived at our front door in Cambridge, Massachusetts, still shaking his head incredulously.

Testing the new waters, Tolya had applied for a visa to accept an invitation to read his poetry and to lecture about the great Soviet poet Ahkmatova at three U.S. colleges. In previous years the application would have been turned down immediately; the Soviet government did not want outspoken and articulate critics blabbing abroad. This time, however, the request was honored, and within a few weeks Tolya had his visa and was on the Aeroflot jet for New York. "I am standing here in your living room," he said, "and I still don't believe it."

When we met a year later, this time in his apartment in Moscow, he had also been to Paris and was preparing to leave for Rome for yet another poetry reading. "I am evidence for glasnost despite myself," he said.

One can also notice dramatic changes in the churches themselves. Two years ago, when I worshiped at the Danielovsky Monastery in Moscow, it had only recently been returned to the church after use by the government as a factory, a prison, and a warehouse. A massive restoration was obviously under way, but nobody believed it would be ready for the 1988 celebration of the millennium of Christianity in Russia. It was, and this year when I returned to see how things were going, the whole sprawling complex was finished, and the church was crowded with worshipers on a Sunday morning.

Moscow friends who had just returned from a vacation in Vilnius, the capital of Soviet Lithuania, told me that the Catholic Church of St. Kasimir in Lithuania, used for decades by the Soviet government as a museum of atheism, is now being restored as a church. There is no new location for the museum; in fact, most people think it has gone out of business forever.

The new church newspaper is sold openly, and the formerly "underground" Christian periodicals like Slovo (The Word) are no longer suppressed. The only problem is that they are quite difficult to find, given the demand and the serious paper shortage. Bibles in Russian can now be freely imported into the Soviet Union, and tourists no longer need to sneak them in under their shirts and socks. One knowledgeable Orthodox official said he estimated that about two million Russian Bibles have arrived during the past two years.

But television, always a barometer of cultural trends in Russia as in America, revealed the most decisive story. On previous visits to the USSR, I had never once seen a program about Christianity or the church on television (and I had watched a lot more of it than I do at home in order to improve my tongue-tied Russian). This year, however, it was impossible to watch for a whole evening without seeing at least one such program, sometimes more, on one or more of Moscow's three channels. Indeed during the past couple of years, Father Mark Smirnoff, who is an Orthodox priest and also an editor of Moscow News, one of the most progressive papers, often appears on television and is referred to as "Father" Smirnoff.

MY OWN BIGGEST ADVENTURE IN MOSCOW this time also came through television. After I had met for an afternoon of vigorous exchange with the staff of a Moscow monthly called Science and Religion, which began 40 years ago as a quasi-official journal of "scientific atheism," its young editor, who is trying to turn it into a journal of "dialogue," asked me to appear on a TV panel show with two Soviet philosophers to debate the future of Christianity "in the USSR and also in the rest of the world." It seemed like a fairly large topic, but I accepted.

It was an unforgettable afternoon. The other participants were Dr. Pawel Gurevitch, an affable self-described "materialist" who is a member of the philosophy section of the Soviet Academy of Science, and Nikita Pokrovsky, a friendly young historian of modern philosophy from Moscow State University. Our exchange was vigorous but congenial. When the chair saw that all of us agreed that a spiritual renaissance of some sort was going on in the USSR, he asked each of us to comment on it.

Gurevitch said he thought it was superficial and uninformed. Pokrovsky seemed to agree. But I felt something else needed to be said. "How could it not be uninformed," I asked, smiling, but with a certain edge in my voice, "in a country that has imposed an official state religion of atheism on its citizens for more than half a century, and where until recently it has been impossible to buy a Bible or even a book about religion that was not written from an atheistic perspective?"

I was surprised to hear those words coming out of my mouth. For years now, like most liberationist theologians, I have been contending that idolatry (of money, pleasure, power) and not atheism is the main antagonist of Christian faith today -- and I am sure it is. Still, when I thought about it later, it seemed consistent to me. State atheism is idolatry just as, in our own country, our national civil religion is. Idolatry assumes many forms.

In any case, I was very surprised to see both my co-panelists nod vigorously when I made the point. I had the impression that each of them would like to have said it himself but was hesitant. When I said it, however, they were happy to agree, and on camera. "Glasnost," as one of my Russian friends told me later, "removes the external restraints, but it will take us awhile to get rid of the inner ones."

A few days after the TV panel I had a long lunch with Father Irinarch Gresin, the first Russian Orthodox priest to study theology in the United States. Father Gresin, who had been a monk in the Monastery of St. Sergius in Zagorsk, was asked by the leaders of his church to study in the United States in order to learn something about religious pluralism so that he could work in the church's Department of External Affairs. He had thoughtfully gathered a few fellow priests and one or two lay employees of the department to chat with me.

The conversation was very frank, hopeful but hedged with caution. Yes, this was a real change in government policy toward the churches, not just cosmetic. Christians were now invited to work in hospitals and alcohol treatment clinics. Just a few weeks earlier a group of Orthodox, Baptist, and Adventist choirs had staged a concert at the Bolshoi Theatre to benefit their charitable work. By the church's count, more than 1,700 churches had been reopened in less than two years. But now what? For years, one of the priests said, the church has lived as an oppressed victim of a cruel regime. Now it has the opportunity for which it has prayed for decades. But will it be able to respond to the challenge?

MY READING OF PALEOLOGUE AFTER I returned home helped me to understand the caution with which Father Gresin and the other Orthodox leaders spoke. If, even in 1915, the official church had begun to "lose its hold over [people's] hearts," the last 70 years had not made the matter any better. Persecution does not always breed solidarity. As many other oppressed groups have discovered, it can also spawn division and mistrust.

Some of this appears to have happened in the USSR. Many of my Orthodox friends in Moscow today remain contemptuous of the official church and deeply critical of what they believe was an undue willingness to compromise with the state. The new generation of Orthodox leaders understands this dilemma. They realize they now need to reach out, not only to those who have completely lost touch with the church but also to Christians who have come to distrust it.

Meanwhile, as Father Gresin, who works every day with Christian groups other than Orthodox ones, knows only too well, the Orthodox Church no longer holds a monopoly. During the difficult years, churches that could adapt more easily to clandestine circumstances thrived all over the USSR. Father Gresin told me that he estimates there are nearly 15 million Evangelical Baptists in the country now and that the number is increasing rapidly. The Adventist Church is also increasing in membership. And much to my amazement, one evening I ran across an energetic circle of Hare Krishnas dancing and chanting on Arbat Street in the middle of old Moscow. They are now a fully legal registered sect, and a group of Soviet devotees recently made a pilgrimage to India where they visited Rajiv Gandhi.

It would also be a mistake to think that the non-Orthodox Christian bodies of the USSR have escaped entirely from the internal strife and partial paralysis that official persecution and harassment always bring. For decades, for example, Baptists in the USSR have disagreed among themselves about how much to conform to the government regulation of religion. All religious groups and "sects" in the Soviet Union must register with the appropriate government agency; only those that do so stand any chance of getting permits to build or repair their meeting houses or to travel abroad to denominational and ecumenical gatherings. There can be little doubt that for years the government has misused this authority to try to exert control over the churches.

In the face of this legal pressure, some church leaders have resisted any cooperation with the state. They are "non-registrants," who, if not actually persecuted, have lived and worshiped under a constant cloud. Other Christian groups felt that the mere act of registering did not compromise them, as long as they could continue to preach the gospel and live the Christian life in their families, towns, and places of work. Sometimes misunderstandings undermined relations between Christians with different views of where to draw the line.

Now, with glasnost, although the registration requirement still remains, a new law is being prepared by the Supreme Soviet that will guarantee the churches all the rights of corporate bodies (including that of owning property), as well as the right to publish books and periodicals and to carry on religious education in whatever way they choose. To the astonishment of many Western observers, the new law will also permit alternative service for conscientious objectors to the military.

The non-Orthodox churches as well as the Orthodox Church are looking forward eagerly to the passage of this important legislation. Still, I am convinced that in the long run the future of Christianity in the Soviet Union is tied up with the health of the Orthodox faith. Despite everything, it still lives in the bones of the people. "Thus, contrary to common report," wrote Paleologue, "the Russian is very far from attaching importance to formal rites exclusively ... The moving force with [them] -- and by a long way the most potent -- is implicit faith, pure Christianity without an element of metaphysics, the ever present thought of the Saviour, a deliberate contemplation of suffering and death ..." I think he is still right.

There is a fund of Christian faith among quite ordinary people that intersects with the vast apparatus of Orthodoxy but is in no way contained by it. When the Baptists came to Russia in the 19th century they were not preaching into a void. As any reader of Gogol or Tolstoy can appreciate, the soil was already prepared.

The Orthodox Church, however, has not always been receptive to the depth and intensity of the spirits its own message has nurtured. Tolstoy was buried in an unblessed grave, unblessed at least by the official church, since he had been excommunicated by the Holy Synod.

THERE IS ANOTHER MATTER ON WHICH the Orthodox Church, and the other churches as well, must now make a decision. After years of assuring the world that the USSR was a classless society, the privileged elites there are now faced with a genuine grassroots rebellion. The courageous coal workers who went on strike in Siberia and in the Ukraine posed a poignant question to the policy of staying completely out of such worldly matters -- a position shared in this case by the leaders of both the Orthodox Church and the other churches.

Living in unspeakably filthy hovels and impossibly crowded communal apartments, often unable to buy even the most basic necessities for their families, the miners of the USSR finally took a step: They boldly refused to go to work until something was done. The question their inspiring action placed before the churches is the same one that emanates from the coal fields of Appalachia: "Which side are you on?" Nicholai Berdyaev, the great Russian Orthodox theologian of the early 20th century (also disowned by the official church), once wrote that the whole idea of communal property and justice for the poor -- which was eventually taken over in the USSR in the slogans, if not the performance, of the Bolsheviks -- originated in Russian Christianity.

This is undoubtedly something of an overstatement, but again Paleologue drew attention to the same element. In characterizing the faith of the simple Russian moujik, he pointed out that "the Gospels contain many precepts from which inferences can be drawn subversive to the modern state as we conceive it." Indeed they do. And innumerable Russian Christians in the past have realized it. But Paleologue's point has particular relevance for Russian Christians, as they ask themselves what shape the gospel should take in a world not only of glasnost, but of food shortages, coal strikes, and a general stirring from the no longer patient masses of the Soviet people.

"The parable of the rich man who burns in hell merely because he is rich," Paleologue wrote, "while Lazarus rests in Abraham's bosom, is a dangerous subject of meditation for the simple minds of the Russian proletariat and peasantry." He then goes on to quote Tolstoy, who, as he recalled, "does not hesitate to say that private property is inconsistent with Christian doctrine, that every [person] has a right to the fruits of the globe as he has to the rays of the sun, and that the land should belong exclusively to those who cultivate it."

IN THEIR UNDERSTANDABLE EFFORT TO STAY ALIVE during the awful decades of Stalinist terror and bureaucratic repression, Russian Christians have developed a style of spirituality that is incandescent and deeply interior. One has only to listen attentively to the Orthodox chants or the Baptist hymns of the Moscow churches to know they have preserved a depth of spirituality that often seems missing in our market-oriented, growth-obsessed churches. We have more to learn from them, much more, than they from us.

Still, what about the miners? A New York Times reporter who was able to visit the strike area told me that he had never seen such appalling living conditions anywhere. In one family of seven he visited, both the father and two sons worked in the mines and the family lived in a single room in a crumbling, multistory apartment house, sharing the kitchen with two other families in the three-room unit. There was no bathroom, and the only running water was the single kitchen tap. All three families had to use it for washing as well as cooking, and the water was often shut off completely two or three days a week.

The Soviet miners' strike was, in my opinion, only the beginning. The USSR could be faced with a period of labor strife and, if some relief does not come soon, even food riots in the near future. The desperate and ugly conditions under which so many of the people live has had heartbreaking effects on people's lives. Street crime is on the increase. Drugs are making an appearance. Young people escape their crowded apartments and boring jobs through drinking and promiscuity. Family violence is rife. The brilliant Soviet movie Little Eva presents a graphic portrayal of these wretched living conditions and how they tear at the fabric of family life.

When the pastor of the Moscow Baptist Church asked me to come to the pulpit and bring the congregation "greetings from the Christian people of America," I thought very quickly as I pushed my way through the packed aisles. I told them I rejoiced in the changes I saw going on in their country, and I asked them to pray for the people of ours, where the gospel is often confused with a formula for becoming healthy, happy, and rich. They seemed to appreciate being asked to pray for us. My suspicion is that Western visitors assure them endlessly that we are praying for them.

Yet as I reflected on it later, it seemed clear to me that they do deserve our prayers. No longer now the prayers recited for so many years for the "silent church" or the martyr church or the pathetic victims of a brutal regime. Now the churches of the Soviet Union need our support and our prayers as they enter a wholly new phase of their history, one in which the voice of Christ may be coming from the blackened lungs of the Siberian miners, or from the clenched teeth of the enraged grandmothers who stand for hours in a long line in the snow only to discover that the bar of soap or the kilo of sugar they hoped to buy was sold to the equally angry person in front of them.

Paleologue wrote that "when life is very hard and they feel the wretchedness of their social conditions very deeply, the Russians like to think that it was Christ who said, 'The first shall be last and the last first.'" He might have added that Christ spoke not only about the "last" but also about the "least."

The "last" in Soviet society today are no longer Christians. Little by little, and recently in larger steps, they have become pretty much like everyone else in a country going through changes that are so fundamental and fragmenting that they can cause giddiness. And the "least" are no longer quiescent. The wounded and the dispossessed are no longer silent. My prayer is that God will enable the Christians of Russia to hear their cry.

Harvey Cox was the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts when this article appeared. He is the author of The Secular City (Macmillan, 1965) and The Silencing of Leonardo Boff (Meyer-Stone Books, 1988).