In some respects, this was an opportunity missed. A more 'docile' church would also have been - as some Soviet leaders had argued in 1922 - a more manageable one. Part of this lesson seems to have got through: 1922 was the last time that religious believers were subjected to show trials, and where the equation of religious belief and counter-revolutionary sympathies was openly made in procuratorial and press disquisitions. Thereafter, local soviet officials and the police, while working assiduously to enforce the laws on secularisation, did all they could to emphasise that clerics who happened to be arrested were guilty of ordinary 'civil' crimes (including political offences such as spying). As a pro-Soviet pamphlet published in London in the early 1930s put it: 'It is in the capitalist countries that religious persecution must be sought.' The followers of the Holy Name movement (Imya- slavtsy) had got into trouble 'because of an unnatural vice too revolting to be mentioned', while the Feodorovskoe Concord of Old Believers was comprised of 'former gendarmes, white guards etc.'. Catholic priests had been arrested solely because they were spies of 'fascist Poland'.57 This gambit - to pass off victimisation as legal reprisal - was partly aimed at the outside world. Just as in the 1920s, Soviet politicians were aware that the treatment of religious believers was a major stumbling block to diplomatic relations with the Western countries whose goodwill was essential for technology transfer and trading relations. But the accusations were meant to have a home audience as well.
The extent to which they had traction in this context may be doubted. While campaigning atheists regularly pilloried believers as political subversives (as well as reactionaries, ignoramuses, etc., etc.), a majority of the pre-war Soviet population self-identified as religious, even in the forbidding context of the official Soviet census of 1937.58 Certainly, there was a strong inverse correlation between belief (or readiness to admit this to census officials) and levels of literacy, as well as a weaker positive one with advancing age.59 But this did not necessarily go with an overall social tendency to regard believers as 'the enemy'.
For their part, though, church congregations themselves were prepared to espouse the propaganda images of 'enemies'. However, they employed these for their own ends. In the words of a group of believers from St John Baptist Church on Mokhovaya Street, writing in March 1938: 'We firmly believe it is enemies who are closing the churches, in order to excite dissatisfaction with the Government. The elections to the Supreme Soviet are approaching and the enemy is doing his ghastly work[,] he is playing on people's sacred feelings.'60 As this example suggests, a Soviet Union where believers were more fully integrated into society would not necessarily have been a more democratic and tolerant place. More likely, it would have been one in which fear of 'outsiders' was differently configured, resting on a traditionalist, rather than universalist, model of national identity. It would probably have been something like the emigre circles guyed in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin, 'for whom an ideal Russia consisted of the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, anthroposophy, the Russian Church, and the Hydro-Electric Dam'.61 The animus of the late 1930s would then have been directed against 'foreign' religions, in particular Lutheranism and Catholicism, seen as the havens of spies and subversives.62
The struggle with religion was about cultural, as well as political, cohesion. 'Soviet values' were supposed to exclude benighted religious belief, which was uniformly presented as a sign of ignorance and lack of 'culturedness', and a key form of social 'backwardness'. This type of perception was far more widespread than the view that all churchmen were spies. For instance, the confiscation of church goods was given a guarded welcome by heritage officials, since it removed them (supposedly) from the category of 'cultic objects' to the category of 'art', and made it possible to strip out items that were aesthetically unpleas- ing. The official polarisation of 'science' (more broadly, 'science and scholarship', nauka) and 'religion' as manifestations of 'enlightenment' versus 'backwardness' had plenty of adherents.
But representing science as enlightened to an at best semi-literate population would have been far more effective if objects had been removed from their church settings in a less vandalistic way. Through their actions in 1922, members of the Soviet government obligingly supplied the Orthodox Church, and indeed all the main 'cults' operating on Soviet territory, with an entire cohort of suffering saints, the so-called 'new martyrs' (novomucheniki). Even some non-believers, such as the famous scientist Ivan Pavlov, were thoroughly alienated by the hounding of the Orthodox Church.63 In turn, the moral authority leant by social and political stigmatisation (a sign of glory in
Christian tradition) persisted through the late Soviet period - indeed, was enhanced as the history of Soviet oppression became familiar to a wider audience. Thus, while winning a decisive short-term victory in 1922, the Soviet government also stored up long-term defeat. For, had a church-state concordat - the sacrifice of communion vessels as the price of lighter regulation - actually taken place that year, it would have done much to strip the oppositional lustre of Orthodoxy. The faith could, in due course, have been integrated in the 'National Bolshevism' of the late 1930s, which recuperated for modern Soviet culture many artists and cultural forms previously considered 'reactionary'. In actual fact, even once judicial murder ceased, repression continued, and it always remained uncertain how 'Soviet' the Orthodox Church actually was - a fact that could only increase its appeal as a moral alternative among those who were hostile to Soviet power.64
At the same time, a failure to confront the Church would have left the Bolshevik government significantly weakened in terms of its central political project as of 1922. The long-term consequences of persecution were hardly of moment compared with the necessity of pushing through policy with 'implacability' (neprimirimost) and dealing with immediate political threats. In turn, this first successful assault on traditional Russia provided a vital lesson for the later campaign to col- lectivise Russian villages. Disaffection among the regime's opponents was a fact of life, but such disaffection was ephemeral, and it could be contained. Would Stalin, without the all-out campaign of 1922, have so confidently approached the question of how to impose his will on the Soviet countryside? The confiscation of church goods, after all, had not just shown how to conduct an effective campaign of mobilisation and use this as an instrument of social solidarity. It had also illustrated that the ruthless suppression of potential subversion and of social difference, a process believed to be essential to the construction of a socialist future, might be a near and achievable objective, rather than one lying on the far horizon.
THE RISE OF LENINISM: THE DEATH OF POLITICAL PLURALISM IN THE POST-REVOLUTIONARY BOLSHEVIK PARTY
1917-1922 richard sakwa
I
n 1917, even as Vladimir lenin sought to consolidate power after 25 October, a group emerged that warned of the consequences of the premature attempt to build socialism in a relatively backward country. The 'coalitionists' were made up of leading figures in the party, including Lev Kamenev, one of Vladimir Lenin's long-standing associates. Their worries re-emerged in various forms in later years, notably in the arguments of the Democratic Centralists in 1919 and the Ignatov movement and the Workers' Opposition in 1920. The central concern of these groups was the defence of some sort of pluralism within the revolution, although they were only marginally less harsh than mainstream Leninists in repressing opposition to the revolution. The defeat of these early attempts to establish some form of pluralist democracy within the party set the country on a course that was to endure to the very end, and which peaked in the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. Nevertheless, the aspirations of those in favour of intra-party pluralism periodically resurfaced, notably in the attempts to establish 'socialism with a human face' during the Prague Spring in 1968, and Mikhail Gorbachev's struggle to create what he called a 'humane and democratic socialism' twenty years later.