The Soviet Union's 1941 Religion Statistics: the Hidden British Hand

The Soviet Union’s 1941 Religion Statistics: the Hidden British Hand Felix Corley ©Felix Corley/2020, 2021 The Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union began in the early hours of 22 June 1941, and made rapid progress that left Stalin and his associates reeling. In need of international allies, the Soviet Union abandoned aggressive anti-religious propaganda and sought to woo Western states which had long been concerned about repression of religious communities in the Soviet Union. Not least, these Western states needed to demonstrate to their own populations that supporting the Soviet Union’s war effort did not entail support for repression of fellow believers. Perhaps sensing that the Soviet regime needed to provide outsiders with a credible overview of religious life in the country, a report was produced giving statistics on the numbers of religious communities, places of worship and clergy of various faiths as of 1 June 1941. The two-page report is on blank paper and is undated. However, the Soviet decision to give statistics for the number of religious communities – however incomplete and, at times, misleading – seems to have had its origin in an attempt by sympathetic British officials to help burnish the Soviet Union’s image. ‘Soviet and British publicists quickly formed a symbiotic relationship, disseminating Soviet propaganda throughout the world via British media while masking its origin,’ the historian Steven Merritt Miner notes in Stalin’s Holy War (2003, p. 234). On 16 July 1941, three and a half weeks after the Nazi German invasion and the abrupt Soviet change of sides in the war, an unknown official of the British Ministry of Information telephoned a colleague, the St Petersburg-born, Russian-speaking Dr Elizabeth Hill, who was the Ministry’s Slavonic specialist. ‘I discussed with her the best means of obtaining information about the present situation with regard to religion in Russia,’ a minute of the conversation notes. ‘She said that she would take an opportunity of collecting information from the Russian Embassy in London and would also secure information by telegram from our Embassy in Moscow. She quite saw the point and promised to communicate with us as soon as possible.’ (Documents cited here are in the Ministry of Information Religions Division records, The National Archives, London, INF 1/790.) Hill then visited Konstantin Zinchenko, second secretary of the Soviet embassy in London, to request the information. Reverend Ronald Williams, head of the Protestant Section of the Ministry’s Religions Division, wrote to Hill on 24 July expressing gratitude that ‘we may expect a report on the Russian religious situation from the Soviet embassy in the near future’, but warning that it would need to be balanced by information ‘of a confidential character from a reliable source e.g. our THE SOVIET UNION’S 1941 RELIGION STATISTICS/Felix Corley own Embassy in Moscow. The difficulty about the religious situation is that the position on paper may be very different from the actual state of affairs, in fact we are pretty certain this is so,’ Williams added. On 26 July Hill prepared a telegram to the British embassy in Moscow asking for the latest information on the religious situation, asking what could be seen as leading questions. ‘Are there signs of greater official leniency; is the Anti-God campaign active; what signs of popular religious revival have been manifested.’ An addition to the telegram, possibly added by the Ministry’s Leigh Ashton, asked: ‘In reporting please differentiate between what should [and] should not be used for publicity purposes.’ The 30 July response from Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador, dismissed any suggestion that the Soviet regime had changed its ideological attitude to religion or that a significant religious revival was underway, noting that ‘I question the wisdom of any British officiallyinspired propaganda purporting to show – even if it were true – that the regime was going back on its principles (with the inevitable implication that it was doing so for reasons of self-preservation)’. The Soviet authorities – who closely monitored all diplomatic communications – knew by now how important providing credible information was to the propaganda effort in Britain. On 28 July, Zinchenko sent Hill a two-page text (apparently prepared by VOKS, the All-Union Society for Cultural Links with Abroad) giving a bland recitation of the legal position of religious communities in the Soviet Union. ‘Further details and figures are being prepared,’ Zinchenko added, ‘and I shall send these to you immediately they are ready.’ Hill appears to have translated the text herself the following day, the day she had received it, and sent a copy to Williams. Back in Moscow, a decision had been taken to provide further texts, which would include the detailed statistics. It remains unclear when the report was compiled, but its first known use was in mid-August 1941, when information from it was handed to a Moscow-based foreign journalist (journalists were allowed to use only statesupplied information in their reports, which were censored before being sent). It is also unclear who compiled the report, but it seems clear that the report was in response to a request by the Soviet embassy in London, and the fact that a copy remains in the Russian Foreign Ministry archive indicates that the Soviet Foreign Ministry had it available for use. Presumably the Ministry sent the report abroad also for use by other Soviet embassies when they needed material on religious life in the Soviet Union. In London, the information with statistics was used as the basis for an article in the 22 August issue of Soviet War News, published by the London embassy. Curiously, given that Hill’s original request to Zinchenko a month earlier appears to have been the impetus for the production of the statistical report, Zinchenko seems to have passed it on only after Soviet War News had published the information on 22 August. ‘I am very pleased to be able to send you some material I have received from the U.S.S.R.,’ he wrote on 26 August, ‘on particulars of religious bodies and religious toleration in the U.S.S.R.’ He also sent her some unspecified material from VOKS, which probably was not related to religion. Zinchenko expressed the hope that the Ministry of Information would be able to distribute it to the press. Hill responded on 29 August, telling him that the three articles he had sent had been distributed to 2 THE SOVIET UNION’S 1941 RELIGION STATISTICS/Felix Corley 1,500 periodicals in Britain and abroad ‘so that we hope they will receive the utmost publicity’. Williams was far more sceptical about the content of these reports distributed by the Soviet embassy. ‘The material was published by their Press Agency at a time when they were anxious to prove the existence of religious freedom,’ he wrote to leading Baptist Thomas Dunning on 14 January 1942. ‘I do not think there is any reason to doubt the truth of these statements as far as they go. The problems arise in the area which is not covered, e.g. the number of churches which have been closed, permission to teach the young, the possibility of evangelism, etc.’ The Soviet Union did not establish its public agencies to control religious communities for another few years (Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Council for the Affairs of the Armenian-Gregorian Church in 1943, Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults in 1944), but the NKVD secret police had a special department to control religious communities in secret (which soon became the 1st Division of the 4th Department of the 3rd Directorate), and it must have supplied the information for the statistical report. Sections of the report covered the Orthodox (of both the patriarchate and the Renovationists), the ‘Sects’ (the derogatory official term for Evangelical Christians, Baptists, Adventists and Old Believers), Muslims, Catholics, the Armenian Church and the Jews. The report gives more information than expected about the Armenian Church and its international links, a surprise given that the report reveals that the Church had only nine functioning places of worship in the entire Soviet Union. Other religious communities – notably the Buddhists – went unmentioned. Given that the Soviet Union had already invaded and annexed large swathes of territory in 1939 and 1940 – including large parts of Poland, the Baltic States and Romania – the figures the report cites for the number of communities, places of worship and clergy may be credible. The numbers of active Orthodox churches claimed in Moscow Region, Yaroslavl Region and Ivanovo Region look inflated, given the annihilation of so many priests and churches in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The figure of nine functioning Armenian Apostolic churches looks credible. A summary of the report’s information was given to Reuter’s Moscow correspondent for an article of 15 August 1941 (published in Rand Daily Mail, Johannesburg, 16 August 1941, p. 1). Although no author is given, a shorter rewrite of the article in the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (16 August 1941, p. 3) refers to a view of Moscow from the Sparrow Hills. Reuter’s special correspondent Alexander Werth (who had been born in St Petersburg and spoke Russian) mentioned such a visit on 11 August 1941 in his account of his work in Moscow (Moscow ‘41/Moscow War Diary, 1942, pp. 135-6). His book did not mention the officially-released statistics. A more extensive re-write of the report came in an article ‘Religious Communities in the Soviet Union’ in Soviet War News, the weekly publication of the press department of the Soviet embassy in London, on 22 August 1941, two months to the 3 THE SOVIET UNION’S 1941 RELIGION STATISTICS/Felix Corley day after the Nazi German invasion of the Soviet Union. (Curiously, the report was not picked up by the Information Bulletin of the Soviet embassy in Washington.) The Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, quoted the figures and information on religious leaders (from the report or from the Soviet War News article is not clear) at an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon in London on 23 September 1941. ‘In spite of what is thought by so many, religion in my country is not persecuted,’ he claimed, citing the figures to back up his assertions (The Times, London, 27 September 1941, p. 3). Analysts generally regarded the statistics as broadly reliable, despite their source. ‘Naturally these figures, contributed by an official organ of the London Soviet Embassy, must be regarded with some hesitation,’ wrote the St Petersburg-born scholar Serge Bolshakoff in The Month (London) (September/October 1941, p. 410). ‘The present policy of the Soviet authorities is to persuade the Western conscience that religious persecution has been greatly exaggerated in Soviet Territories. With this warning, the figures will probably be found to have some basis in facts.’ The information from Soviet War News was subsequently used in the wartime crop of serious if brief analytical books on religious life in the Soviet Union and those that followed later, as such detailed statistics were rarely given in later years. ‘The Soviet Press Bureau in London published in the Soviet War News on August 22, 1941, very interesting statistics about the religious denominations in Russia in 1940,’ wrote Bolshakoff in The Christian Church and the Soviet State (1942, p. 59). Nicholas Timasheff cited information from the article in his book Religion in Soviet Russia: 1917-1942 (1942, pp. 92, 94). Stanley Evans cited the article extensively in his book The Churches in the U.S.S.R. (1943, pp. 87-9). ‘We are indebted to the Soviet War News of 22 August, 1941, for some statistics regarding the status of religion in the Soviet Union, presumably as of the year 1941,’ the veteran observer of religious life in the Soviet Union Paul Anderson wrote in People, Church and State in Modern Russia (1944, p. 119). The Soviet War News article even saw an appearance on the other side of the world. The Australian Communist Party leader Lance Sharkey reproduced it at the end of his pamphlet A reply to Father Ryan (Communist Party of Australia, Sydney, 1943, pp. 30-2), as evidence to undermine the denunciations of the Soviet persecution of religious communities by a Catholic priest Paddy Ryan. More than five decades later, the scholar of the Russian Orthodox Church, Nathaniel Davis, looked back on the Soviet embassy’s decision to issue the report (A Long Walk to Church, 1995, pp. 16-7). ‘Apparently the Soviets did this to counter criticism of Soviet religious suppression voiced by their newly acquired British allies,’ he observed, ‘but the press release backfired because Westerners were impressed with the paucity of the numbers rather than their magnitude. Little did they know how low pre-September 1939 figures would have been.’ Another decade later, Miner commented: ‘In itself, these figures, even if inflated, testified powerfully to the devastation wrought by the Kremlin’s anti-religious policies.’ He added: ‘For those who knew anything about the Russian Orthodox Church, these new Soviet figures 4 THE SOVIET UNION’S 1941 RELIGION STATISTICS/Felix Corley provided sad testimony to the attrition of the Soviet years. But, of course, few people outside Russia knew how large that country’s church had been before the Communists had set to work, though a moment’s reflection on the small figure of 8,338 churches in an empire covering one-sixth of the earth’s land mass should have given readers pause’ (Stalin’s Holy War, p. 235). A copy of the two-page document – translated here and in full below - is in the Russian Foreign Ministry archive, Moscow, in a file on religious issues in the documents of the British department: AVP RF, f. 69, op. 31, d. 17, papka 108, pp. 1-2. REPORT on religious organisations of the USSR as of 1 June 1941 In the USSR there are 8,338 churches, [Catholic] churches, mosques and synagogues, and 58,442 religious cult servants, not including the Armenian-Gregorian church and preachers of various sects. In 1940, 30,000 religious associations with 20 or more believers in each association were registered. ORTHODOX CHURCH The Orthodox church is represented in the USSR by two movements, the old church and the renovationists; at the head of the first stands the deputy patriarchal locum tenens Metropolitan Sergy; at the head of the second – the first hierarch Metropolitan Vitaly [Vvedensky]. The church headquarters have in Moscow free-standing buildings which house their governing administrations. Making up the senior hierarchy of these church headquarters are 28 metropolitans and bishops, of which the most important are: metropolitan of Leningrad Aleksi Simansky, metropolitan of Kiev Nikolai Yarushevich etc. The Moscow Patriarchate (old church) extends its influence over several foreign churches, which includes American Orthodox churches. Based in the USA is the exarch of the Moscow patriarchate Veniamin Fedchenko, who reports regularly to his church headquarters in Moscow. The church headquarters subsist on the voluntary donations (offerings) of believers and have savings accounts. According to the reports of the council of Yelokhovsky cathedral in 5 THE SOVIET UNION’S 1941 RELIGION STATISTICS/Felix Corley Moscow, where metropolitan Sergy Stragorodsky serves, this cathedral has savings of more than 1,000,000 roubles. There are in the USSR: Active churches: 4,225 Monasteries: 37 Priests: 5,665 Deacons, psalm readers: 3,100 Of the total number of active churches, there are on these territories: Yaroslavl Region: 346 Moscow Region: 225 Ivanovo Region: 187 SECTS The sectarian movement in the Soviet Union is numerous and is made up of various movements. The strongest of these are the evangelicals, old believers and adventists. All of these have their governing bodies in Moscow: the All-Union council of evangelical christians (ACEC), led by the preachers: [Mikhail] Orlov, [Aleksei] Andreev, [Vladimir] Urshtein and [Aleksandr] Karev. This sectarian union brings together about 1,000 communities and groups. The All-Union council of adventists is headed by preacher [Grigory] Grigoryev. At the head of the old believer headquarters is archbishop Irinarkh Parfenov. MUSLIM RELIGION The Muslim religion in the USSR is governed by a spiritual centre located in the town of Ufa, headed by mufti Abdurakhman [Gabdrakhman] Rasulev. There are active mosques: 1,312 Mullahs: 8,052 Sheikhs: 282 Ishans: 528 Myurids: 35,947 CATHOLIC CHURCH There are: Churches: 1,744 Priests: 2,309 6 THE SOVIET UNION’S 1941 RELIGION STATISTICS/Felix Corley ARMENIAN-GREGORIAN CHURCH At the head of the Armenian-gregorian church stands the deputy catholicos, archbishop Kevork Chorekchyan. It has a [supreme] spiritual council (SSC) elected by a church assembly. The last elections took place in April 1941, when the membership of the council, alongside Chorekchyan, was joined by: archbishop of the American diocese [Karekin] Hovsepian (New York), archbishop of Romania [Husik] Zohrabyan and others. Also subordinated to the catholicos of Echmiadzin, who is the spiritual head of all Armenian believers, are the foreign dioceses of the Armenian-gregorian church (Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, French, Egyptian, Syrian, Irano-Indian, American and others). On the territory of the USSR are 9 functioning Armenian-gregorian churches. JEWISH RELIGIOUS ORGANISATIONS There are: Synagogues: 1,011 Rabbis: 2,559 Moscow has 3 functioning synagogues, of which one is the Great choral synagogue, which has its governing body. In the USSR, 414 different religious books were published by various religious organisations up to 1941. 7 THE SOVIET UNION’S 1941 RELIGION STATISTICS/Felix Corley 8 THE SOVIET UNION’S 1941 RELIGION STATISTICS/Felix Corley 9