God and Politics in the USSR

...The campaign against religion as such, which has been largely abandoned for all other religions in the Soviet Union, continues to be waged against the Jews with singular ferocity...

...The Witnesses' stress on the Old Testament, their rejection of Jesus' divinity, their Judaizing tendencies in general, their very use of the word "Jehovah," are all familiar features of Russian sectarianism...

...Kolarz maintains that Tsarist policy alienated the Georgian Church from the people, and thus prepared the ground for the influence of Marxism on young seminarists like Stalin...

...Religion in the Soviet Union is a massive and well-documented study, engagingly written, that encompasses practically everything a non-specialist might like to know about its subject—and for that matter, far more...

...The author also supplies a somewhat simple-minded explanation of Stalin's conversion to Marxism, which he blames on the Tsarist responsibility for the decay of the Georgian Church...

...Communist fanaticism itself, for instance, is not as simple a matter as it appears in his book...

...Despite these reservations, Kolarz's range of material makes his book valuable for all students of the Soviet Union...

...Stalin's splendidly fatuous remark to Pierre Laval in 1935, "Has the Pope a strong army...

...The original fervor of the Bolsheviks' anti-religious preconceptions—a gross application of their "materialism,' rooted in Marx's celebrated sneer at religion as the "opiate of the people"—collided almost immediately with the de facto impossibility of changing people overnight, or, for that matter, changing them at all...

...In the case of the USSR, however, especially in the way policy finally interacted with the traditional popular institutions, the undercurrents of mystic emotion must at least be sketched in before the movements on the surface become comprehensible...

...As the Communist party was itself transformed overnight from a group of doctrinaire intellectuals into the practical administrators of a large, complex and dynamic society, so the Soviet leaders' attitude toward the population they were manipulating for their own ends was also radically altered...

...But without some penetration into the deeper sources of behavior, a mere survey of institutional politics in so vast a society as the Soviet Union—especially in so turbulent a period as the past half-century—tends to become a rather arid compilation of facts...

...The case of Soviet Jewry, which has once again begun to generate sustained headlines in the daily press, is an even more striking and poignant illustration of the debasement of a general attitude toward religion into an unscrupulous political means...

...Because of Hitlerism, which for a while seemed anti-Catholic and thus put the Kremlin on the Pope's side willy-nilly, and later because of the acquisition of so many Catholic territories after World War II, a modus vivendi had to be achieved...

...It would indeed be nice if life were that straightforward...

...He seems, for instance, to take the somewhat old-fashioned view that Christ actually founded the Christian Church, in contrast with Mohammed, who merely gave birth to a faith...

...Since there are only a few million Jews in the Soviet Union the balance is, of course, somewhat uneven...

...I do not mean to repeat the old cliche that any movement based on zeal is, ipso facto, religious...

...Not only has Kolarz avoided theology...

...Ever since the Great Schism in 17th century Russia, the wall of tradition has been vulnerable to attacks of one form of "protestantism" or another...

...The classic position of the Jew as scapegoat has been demonstrated by the practice of the Soviet regime ever since its inception, and with special virulence during the past decade...

...contributor, "Commentary," "Midstream" Walter Kolarz, who has written a number of careful works on the nationalities of the USSR, here carries on his exploration of Soviet society with an extremely comprehensive survey of its religious institutions...

...The primitiveness of Soviet explanations of religion indicates a basic weakness in the understanding of alien institutions...

...The original hostility to religion, expressed with admirable simplicity in such official organs as the "League of the Godless," was almost instantly overlaid by considerations of expediency— though without any admission that the change had ever been made...

...The ensuing zigzags, advances, retreats and compromises between the Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church are an illuminating example of mutual accommodation...

...Thus in a way, Kolarz's study of religion simply omits religious feeling...

...Kolarz is extremely fair throughout, though a slight bias, appropriately enough of a religious nature, occasionally makes itself felt...

...By now, I suppose, that means practically everybody...

...did not guide Soviet policy for long...

...Yet, though it may be unfair to complain that an author has not written the book a reviewer would like, there seems to me something shallow about approaching the subject, as Kolarz does, almost exclusively on the plane of institutional life...

...Indeed, the very messianism that constituted the motor force of generations of Russian rebels must have had very deep religious roots...

...The switch from messianic to practical politics, against the characteristic Bolshevik background of systematic cant, is also aptly illustrated by the Kremlin's shifting attitudes toward the Vatican...

...Back to the Bible," after all, really means by-passing the Church—becoming, in fact, like Mohammed...

...By making a private religion possible, the return to the Bible threw the door open to all sorts of eccentric extravagances, some of them leading to the liquidation of Christianity altogether...

...Or rather, the anti-Christian campaign has been balanced by a campaign of still greater vindictiveness against the Jews...

...In "scholarly" discussion the analysis of every great religion is a masterpiece of that vulgarization of dialectical exposition which under Soviet rule has supplanted both Marxism and scholarly integrity...

...In another sense, of course, Kolarz's approach actually reflects the Bolshevik reaction to the situation the Party found itself in after it assumed power...

...This is the same view that many Protestant dissidents, notably in Russia, have historically rejected...

...The uprooted plebians who came to dominate the intelligentsia during the last third of the 19th century were, after all, deeply religious in motivation...

...It is still being sought today...

...Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, have a deep-rooted similarity to a number of Russian sects...

...When the Communists realized that the Church could not be entirely uprooted, they turned it into an instrument of civil policy...

...Religion in the Soviet Union contains a particularly entertaining chapter on the various sects in Russia, some of them—such as the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses — transplanted from America...

...On the whole, Russian sectarianism has been inherently receptive to many American sects...

...The celebrated Dukhobors, too, believe neither in the unique divinity of Jesus nor in the Christian interpretation of the Trinity...

...And in assessing the real interrelationship of religious currents in the Soviet Union it would have been helpful to indicate the mystical element in the formation of the intelligentsia that laid the groundwork for the Soviet state...

...Though numerically of no great consequence, they serve to point up the restlessness of huge strata of Soviet society, now chafing under the strains of the planned society as they once did under Tsarist oppression...

...he deliberately seems to have ignored the more profound motivations behind both the religiosity of the people and the zeal of the Communists...

...One major reason why the Soviets found it difficult to estimate the true power of the Roman Catholic Church is the traditional Communist view of the Vatican as a purely political organization...

...It would doubtless be impossible to sound out the Russian people's real thoughts and feelings about religion...