Moscow Manipulates the Millennium

...Whether this will be Moscow's final word on the matter will depend on what happens if Gorbachev meets with the Pope during his expected visit to Italy sometime this spring...

...I t is of course difficult to know precisely how many religious believers there are in the Soviet Union...

...In particular, they emphasize that the Muscovite state did not come about until the thirteenth century...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 17 The Ukrainian case is further complicated by the existence of the Ukrainian Eastern-rite, or Uniate, Catholic Church...

...Arrests of dissenting believers continue, if in smaller numbers than in previous years...

...The key objective will be to convince the world that today there is full freedom of religion in the USSR...

...He has sought to improve the status of the legally recognized Roman Catholic communities in Lithuania and Latvia, and has spoken out in defense of the rights of the banned Ukrainian Catholic Church while exhibiting concern for its large community in exile...

...In 1980 Partriarch Pimen went so far as to warn John Paul II that the Vatican's interventions threatened to negate all progress made in improving relations between the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches...

...The Kremlin hasn't helped itself any by ending the jamming of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America broadcasts into Poland, which will enable Soviet Catholic Ukrainians to follow closely any celebrations taking place in Czgstochowa...

...But that same week, the paper also carried a crude diatribe against Ukrainian Catholics...

...rr his year millions of Christians in the Soviet Union are celebrating a jubilee that makes the recent seventieth anniversary of Soviet rule pale by comparison...

...glasnost has encouraged activists to draw attention to the many ways religious freedom is curtailed in the Soviet Union and to press for the repeal of repressive religious legislation...

...The regime is unlikely to risk undermining its alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church by paying the minimal price for a papal visit—the granting of religious freedom to Ukrainian Catholics...

...This will not be easy...

...At a ceremony on October 17, the Polish primate, Cardinal Joseph Glemp, and the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Cardinal Myroslav Lyubachivsky, mutually pardoned past wrongs and pledged cooperation and solidarity...

...Under his predecessor Paul VI, Catholics in the Soviet Union had been written off as "a church of silence...

...that the name Russia (Rossiya) was not adopted until the time of Peter the Great...

...Since 1984, at least twenty-six issues of the samizdat journal A Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Ukraine have appeared...

...For their part, the Russian Orthodox hierarchs have made it clear that they will use every opportunity to extol the "peace-loving" nature of the Gorbachev leadership and its "benign" attitude toward their church...

...Pope John Paul II's strong support for the outlawed Ukrainian Catholic Church, his emphasis on the Ukrainian aspect of the millennium, and his avowed desire to visit the Soviet Union for the official celebrations have focused attention on the issue of religious freedom and implicitly challenged Moscow's approach to the anniversary...

...The situation is an anomaly: two of the major Orthodox peoples are not allowed their own national churches, akin to the autocephalous Orthodox church in Georgia, say, but are serviced by an institution that scarcely conceals its Russian nationalism and in practice acts as an agent of Russification...

...When Metropolitan Filaret recently told Polish and Western journalists that "conditions are not ripe to invite the Pope," he stressed that the main stumbling block remains the Vatican's position on the Ukrainian Catholic Church...

...More recently, the journal for agitprop workers, Argumenty i fakty, reminded Party members of their duty"to combat religious prejudices" and uphold atheism...

...By contrast, the first Slavic Pope has been a source of inspiration to the USSR's Catholics...

...Even though the hierarchy and many of the clergy were executed, the four-million-strong church refused to die...

...Because these dissenters have found allies within the Soviet intelligentsia, it will not be easy to silence them...

...It has not escaped the regime's attention that the number of baptisms (of young and old alike) has been rising, as has the number of religious wed16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 dings and funerals...

...Nonetheless, under Mikhail Gorbachev, worried as he admits to being about the ideological apathy and cynicism endemic in his country, has come open recognition of the enduring appeal of religion, and authorities are now intimating that a new deal with some religious groups may be in the offing: instead of aiming at the gradual eradication of religion, the emphasis might be switched to coexistence with it...

...This body has been an anathema to the Russian Orthodox Church ever since some of the Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchy joined with Rome in 1596...

...But again, none of this is keeping activists from speaking out and demanding concrete changes in the state's policy toward religion...

...Glasnost has been allowed to touch upon some aspects of religious life, resulting in the unprecedented appearance in the press of several reports about the infringement of believers' rights and the beginning of a public "dialogue" between believers and nonbelievers...

...They point out that the Ukrainians and Belorussians resent the way Russian and Soviet historiography has usurped their historical and cultural patrimonies, creating the false impression that the protonational Kievan Rus' state was simply ancient Russia...

...We are not seeing a mass departure from religion such as occurred in the first years of Soviet rule," Nauka i religiya acknowledged...

...What further complicates matters for Moscow is the Vatican's close interest in the millennium and its recognition of the Ukrainians and Belorussians as legitimate parties to the jubilee...

...These developments, however, are only one side of the coin...

...At a time when the entire population is being exhorted on behalf of perestroika, the authorities appear to have suddenly realized, as Metropolitan Aleksei of Leningrad and Novgorod reminded Moscow News in September, that "the overwhelming majority" of the USSR's religious believers "are conscientious toilers" and are due some consideration...

...Add to this a sizable part of the almost 20 percent of the population with a Muslim background, and another five to eight million Roman and Eastern-rite Catholics, and the number of believers climbs to at least 75 million...

...Apart from drawing attention to the general predicament of Soviet Christians, the millennium is bringinginto the open as never before the continuing suppression of the Ukrainian and Belorussian churches...

...Faced with this challenge from a church that officially no longer exists, the Moscow Patriarchate and the Kremlin may be forced to review their inflexibility...

...Likewise, in the first week of this millennial year Izvestia announced that a number of former churches and other historic religious buildings in Kiev are being restored for the jubilee...

...What has made things all the more vexing is the recent resurgence of activism by Ukrainian Catholics and their skill in publicizing their church's grievancesand demands...

...As if to signal what can be expected, late last year Izvestia cited Ukrainian Party boss Vladimir Shcherbitsky to the effect that the millennium has led young Ukrainians to display a growing interest in their nation's cultural past...

...Last summer, a Soviet journal confirmed that the Russian Orthodox Church's "strongest" eparchy, with "over a thousand functioning churches," is Lvov-Tarnopol, which is the very heart of Catholic Ukraine...

...As word spread, the local population was galvanized to such an extent that even the Soviet press could not remain silent...

...The prospect of emigre Ukrainian hierarchs concelebrating the millennium in Poland's holiest shrine while just over the border their coreligionists remain an outlawed church now threatens to detract from the official ceremonies being planned by Moscow...

...In a remarkable recent article in Sotsiologicheskie issledovanya, a Russian Orthodox priest even took an American specialist to task for relying on Soviet sources that underestimate the number of religious believers in the USSR and their educational and social level...

...The Kremlin's current ambivalence is highlighted by continuing anti-religious propaganda in the media and in statements by Soviet leaders...

...Although Gorbachev has been reticent on the subject, on the one occasion when he did speak out, in Tashkent in November 1986, he demanded "a decisive and uncompromising struggle against manifestations of religion and a strengthening of political work with the masses and of atheist propaganda...

...In November, the journal Nauka i religiya conceded that as much as 20 percent of the population, or 60 million people, believes in God, which is probably a conservative estimate...

...Not surprisingly, both within and outside the Soviet Union there are groups seeking to set the record straight...

...One of John Paul II's first public acts, in March 1979, was to issue a letter to the exiled leader of the Ukrainian Catholics, Cardinal Osif Slipyi, commending his flock for its devotion to the faith and calling on the Ukrainian Catholic hierarchy to prepare for the "millennium of Christianity in the Ukraine...

...Not surprisingly, representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church have repeatedly criticized the Vatican's support for the Ukrainian Catholic Church...

...Meanwhile, the campaign for the legalization of the Ukrainian Catholic Church took a new turn last August when part of its clandestine hierarchy and clergy came out into the open, and, referring to the approaching millennium, appealed to the Pope to press their case...

...Needless to say, any such arrangement will have to be on the Kremlin's terms...

...Behind the scenes he brought to Rome the leaders of the Polish and Ukrainian Catholic churches in order to resolve longstanding tensions between the Polish church and the estimated 300,000 Ukrainian Catholics who ended up in Poland after the warand whose separateness the local Church authorities have not always recognized...

...Significantly, Glemp spoke of "the few altars" open to Ukrainian Catholics in the USSR and invited Lyubachivsky and his bishops to participate in Polish celebrations of the millennium in Czgstochowa...

...Furthermore, foreign religious figures such as Mother Teresa have been welcomed to the Soviet Union and their visits publicized...

...In some regions, there is even a rise in the number of believers...

...Moscow, not Kiev, is to be the center of official celebrations...

...Many of the "former" Uniates who attend Russian Orthodox churches, it seems, still secretly harbor an allegiance to Rome...

...Small wonder, then, that the Moscow Patriarchate is so touchy about the issue of the Uniate Church...

...The Pope has remained undeterred...

...The millennium also threatens to exacerbate national tensions between the Russians and their two Slavic neighbors, the Ukrainians and the Belorussians...

...The Moscow Patriarchate intends to observe the millennium, as Patriarch Pimen has specified, as a celebration of a thousand years of Russia's "historical existence," "statehood," and "culture" With the Ukrainian and Belorussian autocephalous Orthodox churches (and the Ukrainian Catholic Church as well) long since banned in the Soviet Union, no provision has been made to acknowledge the specifically Ukrainian or Belorussian elements of the jubilee...

...Groups that refuse to put up with state interference in religious life, such as unofficial Islam, and dissenting Baptists, Pentecostalists, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses, are likely to remain outside the law and subject to persecution...

...Thus, while ostensibly distancing itself from the jubilee, the regime has in fact entrusted the compliant leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church—the Moscow Patriarchate—with the organization of the celebrations planned for this summer...

...In early September, Moscow News acknowledged that "some halfa-million people had dropped everything and rushed" to the site of the apparitions, a locked-up Uniate chapel in Hrushiv...

...Also of interest is that the above-cited Moscow News report, though avoiding the Uniate question, did criticize local officials for thinking that "they can 'defend' atheism only by violating the law and trampling on the believer's rights...

...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988...

...After all, religion has always been viewed by Marxist-Leninist ideology as a reprehensible vestige of the past and the refuge of the uneducated...

...For now, the prospects of a papal visit to the Soviet Union appear very slim...

...The Kremlin has even provided the Russian Orthodox leadership with a new base of operations for the occasion—the restored Danilovsky Monastery in Moscow...

...For the Kremlin, though, the millennium comes at a curious time...

...For one, Bohdan Nahaylo writes frequently on Soviet affairs for the London Spectator...

...And lest the Pope be accused of simply playing politics, it is worth noting that the Vatican has a legitimate historical interest in the millennium: the actual baptism of the Kievan state occurred sixty-six years before the split of the universal church in 1054...

...At the same time, another unexpected development drew international attention to the western Ukraine...

...The dissident Russian Orthodox priest, Father Gleb Yakunin, for instance, puts the total of Orthodox believers alone at 30-50 million...

...Their demands threaten to expose the subservience of officially recognized church leaders who deny there are any such restrictions or any problems generally in church-state relations...

...Persecuted under the czars, it was officially liquidated in 1946 through forcible incorporation into the Russian Orthodox Church after its western Ukrainian stronghold came under Soviet control...

...Government officials appointed to oversee religious affairs have openly admitted that "mistakes" were made in the past and have even suggested that restrictions on religion may be softened...

...Having withstood the trials and tribulations of living in the world's first militantly atheistic state, they are proudly observing the thousandth anniversary of the Christianization of the medieval state of Kievan Rus' from which the Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Russians all trace their historical and religious heritage...

...A few days later, a courageous Russian Orthodox bishop, Feodosy of Astrakhan and Yenotayevka (actually a western Ukrainian who was moved in the 1970s from a more prominent post in central Ukraine, as punishment for dissent), broke ranks to stress in an unofficial religious publication that restoration is not enough...

...The Moscow Patriarchate has additional reason to worry: according to estimates, around half of the USSR's functioning Russian Orthodox churches are located in the Ukraine, and over a quarter of these are to be found in the traditionally Uniate regions...

...A major player in the Uniate revival has been Pope John Paul II...

...The most sensational development came in September, when Literaturnaya gazeta published an outspoken attack on official policy by one of the country's most respected scholars, Dmitry Likhachev...

...The close restrictions on religion remain in place, and it is clear that any new tolerance will be extended only to the more docile religious believers...

...Beginning last April, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported near Lvov...

...Even though Soviet authorities blocked his visit to Lithuania, which last year celebrated 600 years of Christianity, he continues to express a desire to travel to the USSR for the millennium celebrations—but only on two conditions: that he be allowed to make pastoral visits to Lithuania and the Ukraine, and that the Uniate church be recognized by the Soviet government...

...The semblance of a new official attitude toward religion has been fostered in a variety of ways...

...In November, Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev and Halych admitted to Western journalists that perhaps there are "a few thousand" Ukrainian Catholics in the western Ukraine afterall...

...To this day it survives underground as the Soviet Union's largest banned denomination...

...Christians want churches and monasteries not just repainted and kept up as museums of atheism, he said, but returned to them...

...The millennium is bringing into the open as never before the continuing suppression of the Ukrainian and Belorussian churches...

...The octogenarian historian not only called for an end to state interference in religious life, but also argued that "enmity toward believers comes from ignorance" and "from a lack of culture of democracy...

...Last fall, while Moscow procrastinated over whether to invite the Pope, John Paul II took a bold step of his own...

...and that Kiev, the center of Kievan Rus', is today the capital of the Ukraine...