Stalin, former pupil of the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary, welcomed Acting Patriarch Sergei’s patriotic stance. He was also pleased by the offertories collected in churches for the production of armaments. The Dmitri Donskoi tank column came from this source. It suited Stalin nicely that the Russian Orthodox Church was stiffening the military commitment of its congregations. Buildings were quietly allowed to be reopened for religious purposes. Stalin formalised the position by inviting Acting Patriarch Sergei to a meeting with him in the Kremlin on 4 September 1943. Sergei arrived, wondering what exactly awaited him.11 Stalin acted as if no contretemps had ever taken place between the Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church. Jovially he enquired of Sergei why he had come with so few priests. Sergei overcame the temptation to say that he could easily have mustered more clergy if Stalin had not spent the previous decade arresting and executing them. Yet the atmosphere was lightened by Stalin’s proposal that in return for the termination of persecution and for a measure of freedom to hold services of worship the Church should acknowledge the legitimacy of the Soviet state and avoid criticism of its internal and external policies.12
The timing of this concession was never explained by Stalin; he did not even allow Pravda to make a public announcement. Yet it was a concordat in all but name. This has led to speculation that foreign policy might have been the motivating factor. Stalin was about to meet Roosevelt and Churchill at the Tehran Conference. It has been suggested that a demonstrable diminution of anti-religious persecution was thought likely to enable him to squeeze a better deal out of the Western Allies.13
This would be more plausible if he had simultaneously lessened the pressure on the other Christian denominations, especially those with organisations in the West. But Stalin openly privileged the Russian Orthodox Church. The explanation is probably connected to his calculations about rule in the USSR. The meeting with the Acting Patriarch occurred shortly after the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. The Red Army was about to start offensives to retake the western borderlands. Hitler had permitted Christian denominations, including the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, to function under German occupation. Religious freedom, having been tasted again, would be hard to suppress quickly. While restoring limited autonomy to the Russian Orthodox Church, Stalin enabled it to resume charge of buildings which had not belonged to it since the 1920s. As the Soviet armed forces fought their way into Ukraine and Belorussia, churches were transferred into the possession of the Russian Orthodox Church. Evidently Stalin judged that Christian believers would be more easily controlled if Sergei, who was elected Patriarch at the Synod held in September 1943, was presiding over them. Stalin left nothing to chance. He appointed G. Karpov to the Governmental Council on the Russian Orthodox Church to oversee relations with it. Stalin wanted his pound of flesh.
Another change in policy occurred in the international communist movement. Stalin reverted to his inclination in early 1941 to abolish the Comintern. Turning to Dimitrov, he instructed him to organise the necessary formalities. At meetings of the Comintern Executive Committee in May 1943 the foreign communist leaders meekly agreed to Stalin’s demands.14 He claimed to have concluded that it had been mistaken to try — as Lenin had done — to run the world communist movement from a single centre. He himself had repeated the error, and the result had been that communist parties had been accused by their enemies of being directed by the Kremlin. Stalin wanted them to be able to appeal to their respective parties without this albatross round their necks.15
It hardly needs to be stressed that Stalin was being disingenuous. He had not the slightest intention of releasing his political grip on foreign communist parties. While allowing them the appearance of autonomy, he aimed to keep them on a short lead. Comintern Secretary-General Georgi Dimitrov would simply be transferred to the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat of the All-Union Communist Party. His duties would be kept secret and essentially unchanged. Dimitrov had always been expected to advise and obey Stalin in relation to the world communist movement, and the same situation persisted after the Comintern’s dissolution. This gives a clue to Stalin’s reasons for the astonishing decision. There was speculation at the time and subsequently that he was trying to reassure the Western Allies about his intentions. But it can hardly have been the main motive. The period when Stalin most needed to call upon their trust had already passed. The USSR had been at its weakest before Stalingrad and Kursk, when the Wehrmacht had hopes of winning the war. Yet Stalin had done nothing for two years. He had bided his time until victory for the Red Army started to appear likely.
The timing is unlikely to have been accidental. Stalin and his advisers were making plans for Europe after the war. Ivan Maiski and Maxim Litvinov, removed as ambassadors to London and Washington, gave their ideas. Dimitrov added his. Molotov was constantly available. All were thinking hard about what could be done to maximise the security and power of communism to the west. Clandestine communist groupings had been scratching out an existence in the early years of the Soviet–Nazi military conflict. While the USSR was on the defensive, anything that could be done by the foreign parties of the Comintern to sabotage Hitler’s New Order in Europe was welcomed. But in mid-1943 these limits on ambition had to be lifted. Stalin wanted to build up support for communist parties in eastern and east-central Europe. The parties themselves were frail — and he had not helped the situation by exterminating as many Polish comrades as possible in 1938. The Red Army was poised to recover the western borderlands of the USSR, as its territory had stood before the Nazi–Soviet diplomatic agreement of August 1939. Indeed, it was about to overrun most countries to the east of Germany and Stalin knew that their communists were regarded as agents of Moscow. It was vital for them and him to pretend that they were not Moscow’s stooges. The Comintern’s dissolution was a basic precondition.
This meant that communist parties should find ways to identify themselves not only as internationalists but also as defenders of the national agenda. Stalin ensured that this was understood among the foreign communist leaders resident in Moscow as well as among those who had maintained contact from their own countries. Heroes, symbols, poems and songs of a nationalist resonance had to be grasped by communism; and in this way, he assumed, the local appeal of communist parties would be enhanced. This had been undertaken for Russians in the USSR; it needed to be repeated in countries which the Red Army was about to conquer. Communism was neither just an international movement nor just a Russian one; it was seeking, at Stalin’s behest, to acquire a diversity of national colours.16
This was a concession masking militant aims. Other shifts of policy in the second half of 1943 were less covertly introduced. Among them was the reassertion of Marxism–Leninism. Russian national feeling was far from being rejected. Heroes of old Russia — the ones acceptable to the regime — were retained: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Suvorov, Lomonosov, Pushkin and Tolstoi. But the limits had to be respected. And as the war was drawing to a close, the Kremlin began to emphasise Soviet motifs. Patriotism was put forward as a greater value than internationalism, and the ‘fraternal friendship’ of the Soviet peoples was affirmed. Cosmopolitan became a dirty word. Any sign of admiration for the societies and cultures of the West was severely punished. The Soviet armed forces’ dependence on jeeps, explosives and other military equipment supplied to the USSR by the USA under the terms of Lend– Lease was the object of Stalin’s suspicion. The influx of high-quality foreign products could undermine official Soviet boasts. In 1942 the crime ‘praise of American technology’ was added to the USSR’s legal code and people could be thrown into the Gulag camps simply for expressing appreciation of a jeep.17 Stalin was aiming at the reinsulation of the Soviet mind from foreign influences at the very time when hopes were growing for the convergence of the Red Army with its Western Allies in Germany for the defeat of Nazi power.