For many ordinary members ofthe public, the line that church property was theirs, to do what they liked with because it was made by them, resonated loudly. This kind of attitude underpinned the arguments used by working-class congregations against the closure of churches and seizures of their contents. The faithful of St Pitirim's Church, Kievs- kaia ulitsa, Petrograd, felt able to assert, in summer 1922, 'Our church is little, and was made not by the efforts and capital of the burzhui, but by our calloused hands alone, and we have collected the essential vessels as and when we could.'46 Yet there was also sympathy for the plight of the starving and uncertainty about what might properly be surrendered. The swithering of an ordinary member of the clergy recorded in the reports of the Petrograd trial of churchmen - first he had thought that removing church property was intolerable, later that it might in fact be tolerated - was a natural response, given the way in which religious believers were hectored by advocates within the church itselfwho held polarised views.47 After all, in 1918 the Local Council (Pomestnyi Sobor) of the Orthodox Church had concluded that 'the sacred vessels may be quite without decoration, and the vestments of plain cloth', since 'the Orthodox Church treasures its sacred things not for their material worth'.48 The fact that there were disturbances at a mere thirteen of the hundreds of churches still open in Petrograd during March and April 1922 suggests the lack of a 'general line'.49 A governing desire was to keep out of conflict: in the words ofVeniamin after his election as Metropolitan in 1918, 'I stand for church freedom. The church should keep clear of politics, since previously politics caused her much suffering.'50
As the reaction to the advice, 'don't go against God', from the speaker at the Petrograd Soviet suggested (shouts of 'Enough!' and general uproar), compromise with the clergy would have been extremely unpopular with many members of the Bolshevik rank and file. But as the hesitation over whether to close house churches shows, vehement anti-religious (as opposed to anti-clerical) feeling was by no means universal. The participation of believers in the confiscations might have been swallowed by many officials if a command to allow this had come down from above.
The possibility of an alternative path may be suggested by the aftermath of the legislation on which the Bolsheviks based the 20 January 1918 decree - the December 1905 law on the division of church and state passed by a socialist-majority French government under Clem- enceau. This law was divisive in much the same way as the Soviet decree imitating it was to prove. In 1902, an official of the Department of Religious Affairs told the lawyer Louis Mejan, one of the architects of the 1905 law, that 'to separate Church and State would be as foolish an act as to release wild beasts from their cages in the Place de la Concorde to pounce on pedestrians', since there would no longer be a moral restraint upon governance and social relations.51 In France too, virulent anti-clericalism in some sections of society - among the urban working class, for instance - was offset by tenacious attachment to religion and to the material fabric of church life, and there was a sturdy tradition of often foul-mouthed anti-clericalism. Congregations in France were far from delighted with the state property grab for 'their' churches, and bitterly resented the interruption to their life rituals.52 Conversely, some of the ground on which compromise was enacted in France did exist in Russia - for instance, there too, a substantial proportion of churchgoers and clergy saw disestablishment as a chance to concentrate on spiritual matters and to assign more control in the parishes to the laity.53
There were of course significant differences. France had more fully developed property rights (so that cultes given access to historic buildings had better defined rights of usage) and a much better established history of heritage preservation. There was no question of using congregations as a cheap way of paying for the upkeep of historic buildings, as in Soviet Russia, and congregations were not cast into a comparable legal and economic limbo. But the most crucial difference may lie in the fact that the measures in France always anticipated a gradual transition to the new order, permitting an intervention of the unanticipated. With the nation swept by patriotism once the First World War began, hostility to the Church diminished, and much of the impetus behind the new legislation ebbed away.
Soviet history in the first years after the revolution, on the other hand, offered no counterbalancing event of this kind. Rather, the narrowly won civil war of 1918-21 had left a sense that the country was beleaguered by precisely the kind of reactionary forces that the Church was held to represent. With concessions made to other representatives of the old order, such as industrialists and traders, under the New Economic Policy, it was vital for the Bolshevik leaders to show their supporters that they had not 'sold out' to every kind of 'former person'.54 It was only two decades later, during the so-called 'Great Patriotic War', that an alternative and far more life-threatening conflict brought about a full rehabilitation of nation-state patriotism. With this came a softening in attitude to religious practice, and particularly Orthodoxy, as manifested in the concordat contracted between Stalin and the Church's Moscow leadership in 1943.
Even this concordat offered the Church only limited concessions, mainly to do with property management, greater autonomy for parishes, and an approved procedure for the opening of closed churches. Without the stimulus of an external threat (the 1943 concordat was primarily a response to the widespread opening of churches in areas held by the Nazis), any compromise enacted in 1922 would certainly have been still more circumscribed. And it would at most have led to a slowing of pace in the assault on the Church, not to an abandonment of hostilities. In the wildest counterfactual dream, it is impossible to imagine a rehabilitation of the majority faith akin to that which took place under Franco (or, indeed, in post-Soviet Russia), with, say, Stalin watching proudly as his daughter Svetlana and her betrothed stood under the bridal crowns at the Cathedral of Christ Redeemer.
As a non-Soviet organisation, the Church would anyway have been subject to more and more stifling regulation in the mid 1920s, and to intense pressure in the years of cultural centralisation (one can compare the dissolution of independent literary organisations and the formation of the Union of Writers in 1932). In conditions of mass industrialisation and urbanisation, church closures would hardly have been avoidable, both because any useable buildings were pressed into service to house workspace and storage, and because they were alien to the landscape of the 'model socialist city' assiduously propagandised in the planning of the day. The most one can say is that the process of resolving demolition proposals might have worked differently, with congregations induced to believe that they themselves were exercising an important social role, and 'helping' society and the Church by moving from church A to church B. One might compare the way in which the Soviet government reached accommodation, during the early 1930s, with 'bourgeois specialists' in academia and with the literary and artistic establishment, after which a mildly antagonistic, but also mutually advantageous, relationship resulted. Professionals were aware that the receipt of state funding required that government agendas were honoured; party leaders withdrew backing from militant lobby groups such as Proletkul't and from the 'Red Professorate'.55 This alternative path is not at all fantastic: in the post-war years, believers proved willing to use official channels to get churches open, and they rapidly acquired a sense of how to operate in the relevant bureaucracies.56