When you travel the byroads of Central Russia you begin to understand the secret of the pacifying Russian countryside.
It is in the churches . . . they lift their bell towers-graceful, shapely, all different-high over mundane timber and thatch . . . from villages that are cut off and invisible to each other they soar to the same heaven. . . .
People were always selfish and often unkind. But the evening chimes used to ring out, floating over the villages, fields, and woods. Reminding men that they must abandon trivial concerns of this world, and give time and thought to eternity. These chimes, which only one old tune keeps alive for us, raised people up and prevented them from sinking down on all fours.67
At the very least, religious ideas have opened up new areas of the imagination to a substantial number of young people seeking release from boredom inside the contemporary USSR. The literature of the post-Stalin era contains an increasing number of themes and images borrowed from the Orthodox heritage. Biblical titles are often used, as in Dudintsev's novel, Not by Bread Alone. Names often have a symbolic value, as in The Shadow, where the idealistic hero who struggles with his shadow is named Christian Theodore, and the maiden who alone stays by him is called Annuntsiata. In the original version of Everything Depends on People (which was entitled The Torch) the Orthodox priest is represented not as a caricatured reactionary but as an ideal Soviet man-a mathematician and war hero-who converted to Christianity in order to serve humanity. Even after such details were stricken by the censor, the priest in the revised version still manages to explain his beliefs with some dignity. He does not attempt to refute the traditional anti-religious arguments of the atheistic scientist but rather counterattacks at a deeper level, insisting that "our young people are asking questions for which you have no answers."68
This very phenomenon makes the revival of interest in religion profoundly disturbing to the regime, whatever the extent of actual religious conviction. In calling "for more atheist books, good ones and varied!"69 Communist officials rightly complain that much of the literature ostensibly designed to expose religious sects in the USSR is dispassionately objective if not even sympathetic to the object of study. The bizarre life and beliefs
of the sects is more in keeping with the phantasmagorical and hypothetical world of the Soviet youth than the colorless world of bureaucratic atheism. Thus sectarian religion seems to have even greater appeal to the young than Orthodoxy or the ultra-Orthodoxy of the schismatics. Communist journals continually complain of fervid but elusive sects, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists. These sects are similar in many respects to earlier forms of apocalyptical sectarianism, which also grafted new Western religious forms into a long-standing native tradition.70
Far more important because of their impact in large cities and among educated youth are the Baptists, into whose ranks some of the more pietistic and less apocalyptical native sectarians (such as the "milk drinkers") have tended to merge. Communist journals have repeatedly told of young people resigning from the Young Communist League to join the Baptist youth group, popularly known as the "Baptomol."71 At the congress of the Komsomol in 1962, the head of this heavily subsidized, mammoth organization publicly beseeched his followers to emulate the enthusiasm and dedication of the harassed and indigent Baptist youth.
The biblical simplicity and fervid piety of the Baptists have had an impact on many more than their 600,000 active adult members. A Baptist appears as a leading positive character in N. Dubov's story "A Difficult Test," and as an admirable minor figure in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Conversions to some such simplified form of Christianity have taken place among a number of educated people. Even the leading Soviet pedagogical journal published an eloquent profession de foi of a university-educated teacher (together with a long refutation and an ominous notation that she lost her job in 1959):
I have recently read in the papers how various people have broken with religion. . . . Why may I not write and publish in a journal about how I came to Christianity, in what way and for what motives I have come to believe in God? . . .
I felt the need for answers to these questions: Whence came human suffering? Why does man live? and What does true happiness consist of? … I thoroughly worked through Indian philosophy, the gospels, etc. And as a result of all of this, I came to the conclusion that only religion, faith in Christ, gives meaning to human life, gives warmth and light to the human soul. Science then should be subordinate to religion, because when unchecked by religion as now, it works towards destruction. . . ,72
It is impossible to tell from these fragmentary printed excerpts from her letter what, if any, church or sect she has joined, just as it was difficult to determine the exact doctrinal allegiance of the thirty-two Russian Christians who asked in vain for asylum in the American embassy early in 1963.
What is clear is that there are still many anonymous Christians in Russia, and that genuinely pious families often face one of the crudest of all forms of persecution: the forcible removal of children from the home.
The ferment of the Khrushchev era may have represented only the passing unrest of peripheral intellectuals: foredoomed, if not ultimately meaningless. Certainly the young revokes were more certain of what they were against than of what they favored. They were, moreover, not revolutionaries in any meaningful political sense. The ability of the regime to sustain one-party rule and to anatomize opposition lent an air of unreality to any consideration of alternative forms of political and social organization. la any case, the younger generation in the USSR-in contrast to those of other Communist states, such as Hungary and Poland-did not generally relate communism with foreign domination but saw it as an irreversible part of their history. Communism has been made to appear less odious by the fact that Russia has emerged under its banner to a position of power unprecedented in Russian history. Since there was every material inducement for gifted youth to join the managerial structure of a state able to use and reward the talented, cultural unrest seemed to some observers little more than the passing malaise of a bohemian fringe on the periphery of a growing industrial society.
To the Soviet leadership, however, intellectual ferment was a subject of the most profound concern. The extraordinary amount of time and energy spent on artistic and intellectual affairs by Khrushchev-an earthy figure, who clearly had no personal interest in such matters-must be explained at least partly in terms of the omnipresent concern of insecure autocrats for the realities of power. The Soviet leaders have vivid memories of the extraordinary role played by the intelligentsia in the genesis of their own aging revolutionary movement. They also realize that Leninist governments-no matter how "liberalized" or "de-Stalinized"-are ultimately based on an ideology. Political power in a totalitarian state is not based either on the periodic popular elections of a democracy or on the religiously sanctified hereditary succession of more traditional forms of authoritarian rule. The stated rationale for Communist rule in the USSR has remained the metaphysical pretensions of that party to represent the vanguard of the historical process on the verge of moving "from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom." Although the USSR could shed its ideological pretensions and become simply another powerful state with a permissive, pluralistic culture, there is no reason to assume (as the history of Nazi Germany demonstrates) that such developments must necessarily result from growing education and prosperity.