ANDRIY FERT
As a researcher of religion in the late Soviet period, it is hard not to notice two phenomena that oversimplify our understanding of it, particularly the Orthodox Church. The first was observed by Nikolai Mitrokhin, a prominent scholar of the Russian Orthodox Church, who termed it “plenipotentiary collection sickness.”1 Back in 1943, a government organ devoted exclusively to the sphere of religion was set up in the USSR. This was the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, which later became the Council for Religious Affairs. It had a representative—or “plenipotentiary”—in each administrative region, or oblast’. This Council was dissolved soon after the collapse of the USSR, and the materials produced by its plenipotentiaries ended up in public archives. They were discovered by historians and, as Mitrokhin notes, “We consequently have a veritable mountain of books and academic articles laying out what our colleagues found in these collections.”
“So where is the problem?” you might well ask. “This was the organ responsible for religion, so where else should we look, if not in its archives?” There is naturally a great deal of interest in the “plenipotentiary collection.” But the problem lies elsewhere: in the fact that, for many researchers, everything starts and finishes with this “plenipotentiary collection.” They do not take into account numerous other sources: materials from local executive committees, Soviet organizations such as the Knowledge Society or the Society for the Protection of Monuments, the press, or memoirs. Mitrokhin drew attention to this back in 2012, but I still encounter many publications suffering from the same sickness in 2020.
The second problem is a tendency by many people to focus solely upon persecution of the Church in the Soviet Union. I am not at all suggesting that there was no persecution or restrictions. However, by focusing solely upon persecution, we overlook a great deal else, such as how “the severity of the law was compensated by the laxity of its enforcement,” as the Russian saying goes. Or even how religious organizations “manipulated the state for their own ends,” as state officials lamented for the umpteenth year about their failure to get the abbess of Sts. Florus and Laurus Women’s Monastery in Kyiv to remove an electric stove from her room or to deposit donations in a bank account—it being illegal to hoard cash.
Now imagine what occurs when both these issues combine in one piece of research. First, you end up with narrow and one-sided material—the viewpoint of an official in a single government organ. Second, you are unable to compare this material with anything else. If a plenipotentiary reports that the number of baptisms in Kyiv churches has gone down in a particular year, or that fewer people are attending church on Sundays, how can we verify these statements? Assuming that measures were carried out as described in a plenipotentiary’s reports is even worse. This results in a simple and convenient picture of an all-powerful persecutor and defenseless victims.
In the spirit of the Annales school of historiography, I am trying to take a broader view by asking questions about who wrote the reports on religion, who read them, what the reader expected to see, and how this influenced what the author included in or omitted from his narrative. In other words, I am interested not so much in how the Church fared in late Soviet Kyiv in the first instance, but in how it had to be described as “inevitably dying out,” and in who produced this description.
The main impetus for my efforts was the late Sonja Luehrmann’s 2015 book, Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge. 2 She posed the question of how to extract historical knowledge from the documents produced by Soviet officials who were responsible for religion. This becomes possible not just by reading, but by reading between the lines; by paying attention to the classification of a document, revisions to it, the topic addressed, the manner in which believers are cited, how an archival file is assembled, and so on.
Kyiv Case Study
The city of Kyiv offers a particularly interesting case study. It was the capital of Soviet Ukraine, as well as the administrative center for the Ukrainian Exarchate—the largest component of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Soviet period. Between 1966 and 1988 there were eight Orthodox churches and two women’s monasteries open in Kyiv. Compared with other cities in the USSR, this was a huge number; at that time, the Russian Orthodox Church had only 16 functioning monasteries in total. Moreover, Kyiv was one of the cities regularly visited by foreign religious delegations. Most notable, however, was that not a single church or monastery was closed for the duration of Brezhnev’s Period of Stagnation. This is strange, because churches were being slowly but surely closed everywhere else.
In 1968 the position of Plenipotentiary for Religious Affairs was created for the city of Kyiv. (As throughout the USSR, there was previously only a plenipotentiary responsible for Kyiv Region.) From 1970 on, so-called Support Commissions were created in every one of the city’s 12 districts. Attached to the executive committee administering each district, these were supposed to monitor the religious situation locally. From 1979 on, so-called Support Groups were also set up in all factories, housing authorities, research bodies, and universities. The unwritten aim of all these institutions was to “reduce the religious network in the city.” In total—if we are to believe the reports—more than a thousand people were engaged in the process of monitoring the life of religious communities, clerics, and members of the dvadtsatki—those groups of 20 people featuring in the legal registration documents of every religious community. This is an impressive number.
But what if most of them did not receive any pay, and “checking religion” was extra work at the weekends, assigned as part of “labor and Party discipline”? Of these thousand people, only three were paid—the plenipotentiary and his two assistants. Moreover, theirs was a standard salary—typically 80-90 rubles a month. The work of the others was thus decidedly substandard.
For example, out of 19 members of the Support Commission for the Podil District of Kyiv—the most “religious” in the city—only eight regularly attended meetings, and only four actively participated in discussions. The Commission regularly called upon representatives of the Support Groups to give reports, and discovered on every occasion that “the comrades are not doing any work.”
The Support Group for Kyiv’s Labor Social Club was twice summoned to meetings of its local Commission. On the first occasion in 1976, the result was pitiful:
They are not conducting any work, as is shown by the case of Comrade Sidorchenko having his child baptized in church. He is a Shock Worker of Communist Labor… there is no plan of atheist education. No individual work is being conducted with believers.
On the second occasion, in 1978, “the comrades…reported quite calmly that they are doing nothing and even have scant idea about what they are supposed to be doing. This is despite the fact that the Commission… is being addressed for the second time.” Such cases of “no work is being conducted” were the norm. “How do you know all this?” Protopriest Vladislav, head of a Kyiv parish permitted to function during the Soviet period, once asked me in a genuinely surprised voice. He had just acquainted me with the previous parish priest, whom I would go on to interview a few days later. “From the archives,” I responded. “It is possible to find out all of this in several archives offering completely open access.” I conduct my research in three of them.
Three Key Archives
The first is the Central State Archives of Supreme Authorities and Governments of Ukraine (CSASAGU).3 Central state institutions of the Soviet period transferred their documentation to this archive. Materials of the Council for Religious Affairs attached to the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic are also found here, forming Collection 4648.
What does it contain? Apart from the obvious items requested most frequently by researchers—such as correspondence between regional plenipotentiaries and the leaders of religious associations—there are other interesting items, such as individual employee files. These are all accessible, with photographs, profiles, resumes, old telephone numbers, and occasionally explanatory notes such as this: Three Key Archives
“Despite warnings from you and the Party office, I became blind drunk at the hotel during a field trip to Dnepropetrovsk Region and ended up in hospital. My behavior was also highly immoral and incompatible with the office of a departmental head.”
This was written in December 1976 by Comrade Gladarevsky, a long-serving chief inspector and later departmental head of the Council. He was fired, but then re-hired so he could scrape through to the end of the year and thus receive a pension. He was not sent on any more field trips, however.
This is my favorite archive: you may freely copy whatever you wish and request as many files as you like. You can then sit the whole day without a break taking notes and photos before filling out your next request for files, which will be brought to you the following day (unless the water or heating are cut off.) The only downside is that this archive is difficult to get to—an eloquent example of poor urban planning.
The second archive— unfortunately, the most important for my research—is the State Archive of the City of Kyiv (SAK).4 If CSASAGU offers a general impression of what interested the bosses and what directives they issued, then SAK allows you to see how work was conducted on the ground. I say “unfortunately” because, despite its many merits, SAK is the least friendly archive I have ever visited. It is located near a metro station on the first floor of a Soviet-era residential building with thick walls and poor heating. You are not allowed to take photos of documents unless you write a detailed request to the archive director, who may or may not appear at his desk the following week. The archive is open three days a week, so your requested files might appear only the week after that, and a maximum of only 10 at a time!
his archive also has a lunch break between 1 and 2 p.m., when the woman in charge of the reading room simply shoos you out of the building. There is nothing to do except wander around the neighborhood for a whole hour. SAK is located across a noisy highway from Babi Yar, where over 100,000 were massacred under Nazi occupation. There are almost no cafes nearby where one could pass the time. I sometimes get a coffee from a street stall and go to the Babi Yar site. There, I sit on the slope of the ravine, watching locals walking their dogs, and ponder what I have just read in the archive.
Judging by his How to Write a Thesis, however, Umberto Eco would have approved of making copying documents difficult.5 You work more closely with the text, take notes on it, read it several times—and so notice things which you would probably not have noticed later from copies on your laptop screen. For example, how masterfully an official in Podil District softens the annual report by a rankand-file colleague “in the field” about the level of religiosity there in order to make it palatable to his boss.
The main thing about this archive, however, is that it is an antidote to “plenipotentiary collection sickness.” Its offerings include materials from the aforementioned district Support Commissions; archives from the “Knowledge” Society with theses from their seminars on atheist propaganda held at Kyiv factories; itineraries and scripts for guided tours of churches, both those functioning and turned into museums. All this affords the opportunity to view work in the religious sphere in the 1970s and 80s from different vantage points.
This is especially true of the minutes from meetings of the Support Commissions. Often handwritten during the meetings themselves and containing numerous semantic and grammatical errors, they provide insight into the thinking of religious affairs officials and the routine of their everyday work. These minutes demonstrate better than anything else that no one understood how to make religion die out; how to “reduce the level of religious ritualism” and “clerical income.” They reveal the complete apathy of those who the plenipotentiary described in chipper accounts as “local activists,” apathy stemming from the fact that they kept encountering the same problems on the ground: Communists baptizing their children, Communists attending church on Sundays. These “activists” would ask their bosses to “give us recommendations for what is to be done,” “invite scholars to help us sort this out,” but in response they would receive the same set of recommendations: to “promote socialist rituals” and “have prophylactic conversations with parents of baptized children.” This was never successful. Such apathy is also evident from the almost carbon-copy annual workplans of the Support Commissions, as if nothing changed from year to year.
The third archive I use is the State Archive of Kyiv Oblast [DAKO in Ukrainian.]6 Here I quite unexpectedly found the “Case File of the Religious Community of the ROC in the Village of Tolstyi Les in Chernobyl District, De-registered in 1987.” Within the exclusion zone caused by the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, there were several functioning Orthodox churches, which all had to be legally dissolved after the inhabitants of the district were obliged to evacuate. The file of the community in Tolstyi Les consists of more than 100 pages relating the history of the church and its parishioners from 1944 to 1986. It is an extraordinary find for the researcher: everything in a single file, not only materials from the plenipotentiary, but also the local Support Commission, police, and even internal documents from the parish itself.
The reading room in which documents from this collection may be studied is located in a basement, in a tiny room with no windows or ventilation. In Soviet tradition, the lower part of the white walls is painted over in a toxic shade of green. Completing the experience, I examined the Tolstyi Les materials there during the run of the popular recent HBO series, Chernobyl.
“As the village is located close to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the wind was blowing in our direction, evacuation took place earlier than in the town of Chernobyl, so the Easter service did not take place. The church was closed up, and I have the keys. I was evacuated together with the people… There were no religiously motivated manifestations or statements of an undesirable nature. Now… the people are at work, receiving assistance from the authorities and eagerly awaiting orders. They are prepared to return to their village right away,” Fr. Fyodor Lenok, then village priest in Tolstyi Les, tells the regional plenipotentiary in a confidential conversation on 8 May 1986, almost two weeks after the Chernobyl catastrophe.
Eyewitnesses
“Everything you say is so interesting, but I am thinking that eyewitnesses of the 1970s and 80s are still alive, have you not thought about interviewing them?” the historian Boris Kolonnitsky asked me at “Constructing the ‘Soviet’?”—a conference held at St. Petersburg’s European University in 2018.
Naturally, I have considered this, but sometimes it is easier said than done. Of the three employees of the Office of the Plenipotentiary for Religious Affairs whom I have managed to track down, only one has agreed to speak with me. Viktor Yelensky is a well-known religious studies expert, a recent member of the Ukrainian parliament, and among the most prominent supporters of the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Back in the 1980s, he was a senior inspector for the Council for Religious Affairs, whose task was to supervise the work of regional plenipotentiaries and to check up on religious communities, including ensuring that no children were present at worship services. The other two former employees declined to meet me for different reasons, even though I tried to explain to them that my aim was in no way to accuse them of “persecuting religion in the Soviet period.”
Interviewing priests and nuns is even more difficult. Almost all those Kyiv churches and monasteries that were open during the Soviet period have been retained by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), which I have found to be an incredibly insular organization. When I have tried to approach priests or abbesses directly, I have always received the same response: “We will not speak with you without the bishop’s blessing.”
In 2019 I wrote to Metropolitan Onufry, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), asking him to grant me his blessing to conduct interviews. A month later, I was contacted by the Church’s chancellery and asked to submit printed copies of all the articles I had ever written on church topics. I complied, and—quite unexpectedly—was granted a blessing two weeks later. Unfortunately, this was sufficient only for two interviews. But what interviews they were! Each transcript consisted of around 25 pages of small, tightly spaced script.
Some highlights: “You probably want to know if we collaborated with the KGB?”, “Of course, the state security organs demanded that we report any anti-Soviet expression, break the confidentiality of the sacrament of confession,” “I refused to break the confidentiality of confession, and the Lord came to my defense, so that I never had any problems as a result,” “Please understand that His Holiness [the Patriarch] had to collaborate, in this way he was defending the Church,” “We were constantly being monitored.”
But the longer you talk, the more episodes arise in conversation illustrating that the monitoring was not all that close. How it was possible to come to an arrangement with all officials except those who were totally “ideological”—of whom there were hardly any. How they took bribes and turned a blind eye to “the activization of church people.” How they would suggest writing, “Please allow us to move the old barn 15 meters closer to the road,” rather than “Please allow us to build a new barn.”
Mother Alipiia
“Now I can say for sure that she was a witch!” one priest who served in a Kyiv church during the 1980s told me. I had asked him about Mother Alipiia—a homeless woman living in the Goloseevo Forest to the south of Kyiv during the 1980s. Today, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) is considering the possibility of canonizing her. Her grave at Goloseevo Monastery has become a pilgrimage site; even on a workday, there are dense crowds there. In addition to invoking Divine retribution against homosexuals, she is reputed to have healed people from radiation sickness after the Chernobyl catastrophe, and prophesied schism in Ukrainian Orthodoxy.
Whoever Mother Alipiia may have been, for some strange reason she never fell within the sights of Soviet officials. She often walked barefoot from her hut in the forest to the nearest church. According to its priest, she would shout or thrash about for no apparent reason during services. She also regularly received believers in her hut in the forest, where she healed their illnesses with mysterious potions. How could officials possibly have overlooked such a colorful character? They regularly apprehended people in the forest, filled in “sacred springs,” and isolated klikushi [Russian: “shriekers” or female demoniacs], but they never once—not in a single report—breathed a word about Mother Alipiia, who was well known to every priest in Kyiv.
Mother Alipiia is an example of how officials “sacrificed truth to efficiency.” Although they reported that they regularly checked up on churches, in actual fact they did not visit so regularly. If they did see Mother Alipiia there, they did not relay this to their superiors, as this would have messed up their reports. And even if they had thought to act, they had no idea what to do with Alipiia, or with the people’s faith in her and her miracles.
Notes:
- Nikolai Mitrokhin, “Bolezn’ pod nazvaniem ‘fond upolnomochennogo’ ili neskol’ko stranits ob aktual’nykh problemakh izucheniia religioznosti v SSSR,” Gosudarstvo, Religiia, Tserkov’, 3-4 (30), 2012, 505-11, http://www.intelros.ru/pdf/GosRelTserkov/2012_03-04/22.pdf.
- Sonja Luehrmann, Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- http://tsdavo.gov.ua/en/welcome/.
- http://www.kiev-arhiv.gov.ua/en/. 5 Hua Hsu, “A guide to thesis writing that is a guide to life,” New Yorker, 6 April 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-guideto-thesis-writing-that-is-a-guide-to-life.
- http://dako.gov.ua/.
Andriy Fert is a graduate student at the National University of Kyiv—Mohyla Academy, Ukraine. His doctoral research focuses on Soviet policy towards Orthodox communities in Kyiv in the 1970s and 80s.
