All in all, the 16 February 1922 decree heralded important changes in the legal treatment of cults (as opposed to extra-legal impositions of repression upon them).31 These changes do not seem to have been part of a carefully premeditated plan. Over the course of late summer to winter 1921, Soviet leaders havered about whether to accept offers of aid to the starving from religious groups in Russia. By the terms of the 20 January 1918 decree, such groups were not allowed to raise funds or to engage in political or philanthropic activity - yet the Soviet government had accepted aid from foreign religious groups.32 The need for cash vied with a fear of allowing the Church too prominent a role. On 8 December 1921, the government and the Church eventually reached agreement on joint action. Yet less than three weeks later, on 27 December, another decree stipulated that property in churches was to be surveyed and assigned to three categories (of museum value, of monetary value and everyday), and this was followed by a third decree, on 2 January 1922, ordering the removal of all objects of 'museum value'. Trotsky, the coordinator of famine relief, was pressing hard for action against the Church, and had moved to expedite confiscation (with the piquant detail that his wife, Natalia Sedova, in charge of government heritage policy, had apparently been able to lobby on her own agency's behalf). Yet the sense that the Church had particular or exclusive responsibility for funding famine relief had not yet taken general hold. Rather, in January and February 1922, the press rammed home the responsibility of all Soviet citizens to surrender valuables, reporting tales of party members who had handed over their own gold objects.33 Into January, February, and even March, some officials and clerics, in some places at least, were still trying to thrash out a compromise.34 On 14 February 1922, Petrograd Pravda published an article, 'The Contribution of the Orthodox Clergy to Aid for the Starving', which reported Church-led initiatives and used a neutral or even approbatory tone. Even after the 16 February decree was passed, Metropolitan Veniamin and the Petrograd Soviet engaged in dialogue, holding a meeting on 5 March to review the situation. Efforts were, reportedly, halted by an order from central government. At a second meeting 'a few days later', the officials from the Petrograd Soviet retreated to a hard-line position.35 Within the country's ruling group, there were also divisions, as well as a general sense of uncertainty. The secret police chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, mainly pushed for a hard line against the Church leadership, and mocked a December 1921 proposal by Anatoly
Lunacharsky to attempt cooperation with liberal clergy. Yet even Dzerzhinsky could waver: in April 1923, he expressed concern that undue use of force against Patriarch Tikhon might threaten international relations. At times, ideological rectitude was less important than pragmatic considerations.36
There was no question of sympathy for believers. Rather, the fear of goading them into outright rebellion (and losing political capital with the working classes generally) was offset by the fear of encouraging 'reactionary forces'.37 What finally resolved the situation against compromise was a serious riot in the textile town of Shuya, just over 150 miles from Moscow. Both the effects (four deaths, as opposed to minor injuries) and the closeness to the capital rattled the authorities badly. A famous letter by Lenin, penned on 19 March, just after news from Shuya had reached the centre, claimed that 'the clerical black hundreds' were plotting 'a decisive confrontation'. Referring obliquely to Machiavelli's words, 'For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so as being tasted less, they offend less', Lenin called for all-out action to crush religious resistance. Published as an isolated document in a Russian emigre journal in 1970, this letter seemed to bespeak the existence of a master plan.38 But in broader context, preceded as it was by lengthy wrangling in the Politburo, it is clear that the shift to the hard line was a rush decision; Lenin's politics were of a less reflective and methodical kind than those of the thinker he suggested emulating.39
It was, however, this letter that precipitated the marked acceleration of action against religious groups, and surge of anti-clerical rhetoric in the press, that became palpable in the last ten days of March 1922, and lasted until the early summer. If Lenin's letter about Shuya immediately preceded the start of the all-out anti-church campaign, then the scal- ing-down of this campaign in the early summer immediately followed another important event in Lenin's biography - his first fully incapacitating stroke, on the night of 26-27 May. Had this stroke, requiring intensive rehabilitation, happened just two or three months earlier, no other member of the Politburo would have had the personal authority to push through the hard line.40
Throughout late March and April, the Soviet press was in a condition of hysteria. Reports of outrages by 'Black Hundred' groups, supposedly orchestrated by 'the princes of the church', vied with indignant letters from members of the public about the slowness in surrendering valuables. Action by the clergy was now uniformly represented as 'too little, too late', where it was not actually obstructive, and the show trials against them were lovingly detailed.41 In the wake of the confiscations, Soviet Russia for the first time acquired a properly organised (though still small and limited) atheistic establishment, with the founding of the League of the Militant Godless, whose newspaper, Bezbozhnik (The Militant Atheist), began publishing in December 1922. The famous Communist rituals - Red Christenings and funerals, celebrations of Communist Christmas and Easter - also date from the post-confiscation period, 1923-24, rather than characterising the post- revolutionary years in a broad sense.42
All-out strife against religious groups in February-June 1922 was not, therefore, the culmination of a well-planned policy. Confrontation with the Church was at some level predetermined, in that the Bolsheviks were radical atheists, and that attitudes to the status of church buildings and church vessels were irreconcilably different (on the one hand they were material objects best put to some more practical purpose, on the other, earthly symbols of the heavenly kingdom).43 But it did not have to happen at this precise point. So, what if some kind of compromise with a church leader who enjoyed respect both among reformists and among traditionalists, such as Metropolitan Veniamin, had been reached?
There were formidable obstacles to any such compromise, to begin with on the church side. With Patriarch Tikhon set against confiscation of communion vessels, there was limited room for manoeuvre by any senior cleric who wished to remain in the patriarchal system, given that action without the 'blessing' of a superior was entirely unac- ceptable.44 For their part, many believers, even those sympathetic to Bolshevism, had a profound attachment to church property. While the Soviet press constantly dredged up cases of 'Christians' who wrote in to urge rapid surrender of communion vessels, verbatim records of public meetings sometimes give a different picture. At a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet on 20 March, one speaker vehemently opposed the confiscation policy. 'Right before the Sebastopol campaign, Nicholas I forced the Kiev Cave Monasteries to hand over 20 million worth of stuff like that,' he recalled. But given the consequences of the Crimean War, 'it didn't do him any good'. As this speaker concluded: 'I'm the son of a former serf, I'm not going against Soviet power, I wish it well, but I keep saying: don't go against God.'45