The most widely used word in official parlance during the NEP was smychka, the "bond" or alliance between the workers and the peasants. The workers supposedly played the leading role in this alliance; they were the embodiment of the dictatorship and of all progress. And yet their conditions deteriorated drastically during this time.
If the workers played the leading role, the peasants played the role of the led. Although they represented the "anarchic petit bourgeois element," their situation began to improve quickly, for agricultural products became the basis of the country's economic revival. Anastas Mikoyan wrote in his memoirs: "1922 was the first year after the revolution when not only the domestic requirement for grain was satisfied but grain began to be exported in substantial quantities."68 Mikoyan did not mention that these exports began at a time when the ARA was still feeding millions of starving people, but there is no question that the export of grain (and lumber) in the early 1920s was the only source of foreign currency, which the Soviet republic required in order to engage in foreign trade. The peasantry was the most important economic force in the country, although its political rights were restricted. Posters began to go up appealing to the peasants: 'Turn in your savings for a government loan, backed by gold, and after a while you'll be rich." But the peasants remained second-class citizens, as they were well aware. The Smolensk GPU recorded the moods among the peasantry, for example, a report covering the period May 15—31, 1922:
Among the peasants there are no limits to the grumbling against the Soviet government and the Communists. In the conversation of every middle peasant and poor peasant, not to speak even of the kulak, the following is heard: "They aren't planning freedom for us but serfdom. The time of Boris Godunov has already begun, when the peasants were attached to the landowners. Now we [are attached] to the Jewish bourgeoisie like Modkowski, Aronson, etc."69
ASSAULT ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT
Peasant discontent with the Soviet government and the policies of the Communist party increased as persecution of the church intensified. "Strange as it may seem," the religious historian Nikita Struve wrote, "the church was better prepared for revolution than the state."70 The process of preparing the church for reform, underway since 1905, culminated in the Holy Synod of 1917, which on November 5 elected Tikhon, the metropolitan of Moscow, to be the new head, or patriarch, of the Russian Orthodox church.
Conflict between the church and the Soviet state was inevitable because the Communist party, after taking power, undertook not only to transform the country economically, socially, and politically but to create a new kind of human being, the "new man." It sought spiritual power. A decree of January 23, 1918, proclaimed the separation of church and state, the confiscation of church property, and the suppression of its legal rights. In effect the church was outlawed. In reply Patriarch Tikhon pronounced an anathema against the open and secret enemies and persecutors of the church and called on the faithful to defend the church. In March 1918 the patriarch emphatically condemned the Brest-Litovsk treaty as a betrayal of commitments given to the Russian people and the Allies. On the first anniversary of the October revolution he sent a letter to the Council of People's Commissars listing the crimes of the new government and calling for the release of prisoners and an end to violence, bloodshed, and the persecution of the faith.
The difficult position the Soviet government found itself in at the time obliged it to modify its anticlerical policy. A December 1918 memorandum by the people's commissar of justice listed certain things that should not be done, although they were being done everywhere, for example, the arbitrary closing of churches, confiscation of religious objects for revolutionary use, police raids during church services, the arrest of priests, and the drafting of priests for compulsory labor. Local soviets were urged not to offend the feelings of religious people.71 This moderation did not last long. In March 1919 the commissar of justice suggested that local authorities "launch a war against superstition," invade the sanctuaries, take inventories, and subject all relics to scientific examination.
During the civil war Patriarch Tikhon withheld support from either side. Although he granted autonomy to bishops in areas under White control, he refused to place the authority of the church on the side of the Whites.
The famine of 1921 became the occasion for a harsh blow at the church. In August Patriarch Tikhon appealed to the heads of all Christian churches to aid the victims of the famine. A Church Famine Relief Committee was founded, and collections were taken at all churches. The government denied authorization for the church committee and ordered it dissolved. Kuskova recalled the patriarch's "tremendous energy," which "inspired all the faithful in Russia and abroad to come to the rescue." This display of energy greatly alarmed the Bolsheviks, she believed. In their eyes "the efforts of the patriarch and of our committee were nothing but an attempt to organize counterrevolution. "72
On February 19, 1922, the patriarch urged the diocesan councils to turn over all church valuables, with the exception of sacred objects, to a fund for famine relief. On February 26 a government decree confiscated all church valuables, including sacred objects. The faithful tried to oppose this confiscation. In the three months that followed, 1,414 bloody clashes between church people and government troops were recorded.73
Resistance by church people in Shuya resulted in the death of four and the wounding of ten. Lenin used this occasion to send a top secret letter to the Politburo demanding total suppression of any further resistance. "This crowd [publika] must now be taught a lesson so that they won't dare even dream of resisting again for years to come."74 Lenin gave orders to arrest as many "representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and reactionary clergy" as possible, to hold a public trial, and have "a very large number" shot.75 The trial was held in Moscow in April—May 1922; eleven defendants were sentenced to death. Five were actually executed. Patriarch Tikhon was subpoenaed as a witness and later was named a defendant. He was placed under house arrest and prevented from carrying out his church duties. A related trial in Petrograd in July 1922 involved eighty-six defendants, ten of whom were sentenced to death and four executed, including Metropolitan Veniamin. During 1922 a total of 8,100 priests, monks, and nuns were executed.
"Antireligious work" continued unabated, in particular the "exposure of superstition." Items such as the following one in Pravda, August 5, 1922, were common: "Petrograd—On August 2 the investigator for important civil cases, in the presence of clergy and experts, including professors from the Petrograd Medical Institute, examined the relics of [Saint] Alexander Nev- sky. Instead of relics the shrine turned out to contain fragments of bone mingled with rubbish."
The campaign against the church was greatly facilitated by a schism within it. A group of Petrograd clergy, headed by Aleksandr Vvedensky, visited the detained patriarch at his home and asked that they be placed in charge of the patriarchal offices, so that the church "would not be left without a directing body." The patriarch delegated his authority to Metropolitan Agafangel of Yaroslavl, but entrusted the patriarchal offices to Vvedensky and his supporters until Agafangel arrived. On May 18, 1922, they carried out a coup, announcing the abolition of the patriarchate and the formation of a "supreme" executive body of the church. This marked the birth of the Living Church, "to which the Soviet government gave its moral, material, and especially political support."76 Great hopes were placed in the Living Church. Zinoviev told Vvedensky it seemed to him that "your group could be the starting point for a great movement on an international scale."77 The head of the Comintern, who in 1921 had helped to found an international trade union organization, the Profintern (or Red Trade Union International), may have had in mind the formation of a religious international under the leadership of the Bolshevik party. While offering support to the Living Church and holding radiant international prospects up to its leaders, the Soviet authorities reminded them of the other side of the coin. The confirmation of death sentences for five of those condemned in the Moscow trial "was meant not only to sober up the hot-headed counterrevolutionary priests but also to give a lesson in the political ABCs to the new 'supreme' executive body of the church."78