Rude & Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History and Culture in Honor of Robert O. Crummey

Old Believers and the Soviet State in Riga, 1945-55

Old Believers and the Soviet State in Riga, 1945-55 Roy R. Robson In the past few years, our understanding of popular religious life in the Soviet Union has undergone a significant change. Once only the interest of emigre believers or militant atheists, Orthodoxy after 1917 is finally receiving sophistica ted analysis by professional historians. The resultant picture is quite nuanced . Believers were persecuted, even martyred by the Soviet authorities. The communist state nationalized religious property, razed thousands of churches, and relegated religious servitors to the level of social parasites, the last to receive rations when food was scarce. However, religious life did continue : sometimes in exile, sometimes covertly, and sometimes quite openly. Often, belief and atheism existed on a continuum, with believers and Soviet authorities jockeying for control. The believers themselves developed strategies to use the Soviet system to their own advantage, pursuing legal recognition in the USSR1 The next step in understanding the phenomenon of religion in the USSR is the analysis of religious communities in detail2 How did they respond to changing conditions in the USSR? How did they interact with the Soviet bureaucracy? What tactics did they use? Were tl1ere differences between Orthodox and Old Believer experiences under Soviet rule? This essay attempts to expand the research on local communities to that of the Old Belief. It will focus on the relationship between religion and communism on a local level by 1 See William B. Husband, "Soviet Atheism and Russian Orthodox Strategies of Resistance , 1917-32," Journal of Modern History 70 (1998): 74-107. Even wider ranging is William B. Husband, 'Godless Commun ists': Atheism and Society ill Soviet Russia, 19171932 (DeKalb: Northern minois University Press, 2000). Also see Edward E. Roslof, Red Priests: Renovatil1g Russian Orthodoxy al1d Revolution, 1905-1946 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); and T. A. Chumachenko and Edward E. Roslof, Church and State in Soviet Russia: Russiarl Orthodoxy from World War II to the Khrushchev Years (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002). 2 There are some articles focused on one region or parish in the Orthodox church. See Chris j. Chulos, "Peasants' Attempts to Reopen Their Church, 1929- 1936," Russian History /Histoire Russe 24: 1 (1997): 203-13; and Daniel Peris, '''God is Now on Our Side:' The Religious Revival on Unoccupied Soviet Territory during World War II'" Kritika: Explorations il1 Russian al1d Eurasian Histon) 1: 1 (2000): 97-118. Rude & Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History and Culture in Honor of Robert 0. Crummey. Chester 5. L. Dunning, Russell E. Martin, and Danie l Row land, eds. Bloomington, IN: siavica Publishers, 2008, 287-99. 288 Roy R. ROBSON studying the Riga Grebenshchikovskaia Old Believer Community (RGSO) in the period 1945-55. Riga Old Believers and Secular Authority Founded in 1760, the Grebenshchikovskaia Community was one of the most highly developed Old Ritualist groups in former Imperial lands. As the largest of the Baltic Old Believer communities, the Grebenshchikovskaia Obshchina was the de facto leader of the Old Belief in the Baltics. The magnificent church with its mammoth iconostasis, its school, charitable activities, printin~ press, and library all served tens of thousands of Old Believers in the region. Except for closure during the mid-19th-century repression of Nicholas I, the community had experienced notably good relations with the Imperial government. Latvian Old Believers offered little formal response to the atheist regime that had taken over Russia in 1917. For example, published minutes of the first Spiritual Council of Old Believer Preceptors, held in 1922, never mentioned the Bolshevik revolution. Instead, the community leaders promised to lead a more general "struggle with unbelief and sectarianism.,,4 Unofficially, though, some Old Believer leaders were anxious about the threat of communism . M. A. Vlasov, both preceptor (l1astavl1ik) of the Grebenshchikovskaia community and president of the Latvian Old Believer Spiritual Commission, kept copious notes from works by Marx, Lunacharskii, and related authors. He laboriously copied out quotes from a number of publications: Nauka i tekhl1ika , Kommul1izm i religiia, Izvestiia VTsIKa, Kapital, Al1tireligiozl1ik, Religiia i sotsiaiizm, and others. Though he may not have spoken publicly about the threat of communism (no sermons on that topic have been found at the RGSO archive), Vlasov lamented that "in our time, we live in all but complete breakdown of our religious-moral life. And therefore, we may not have time to think about how to hold back ourselves and other infirm Christian brothers 3 For histories of the Grebenshchikovskaia Obshchina, see I. N. Zavoloko, Staroobriadtsy g. Rigi (Riga...