Religion in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was dominated by the fact that it became the first state to have as one objective of its official ideology the elimination of existing religion, and the prevention of future implanting of religious belief, with the goal of establishing state atheism (gosateizm).Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly Failed However, the main religions of pre-revolutionary Russia persisted throughout the entire Soviet period and religion was never officially outlawed. Christians belonged to various denominations: Orthodox (which had the largest number of followers), Catholic, Baptist and various other Protestant denominations. The majority of the Muslims in the Soviet Union were Sunni, with the notable exception of Azerbaijan, which was majority Shia. Judaism also had many followers. Other religions, practised by a small number of believers, included Buddhism and Shamanism.
The vast majority of people in the Russian Empire were, at the time of the revolution, religious believers. After the October Revolution saw the Bolsheviks overthrow the Russian Provisional Government and establish the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the communists aimed to break the power of all religious institutions and eventually replace religious belief with atheism.Why Stalin Tried to Stamp Out Religion in the Soviet Union As part of the campaign, churches and other places of worship were systematically destroyed,How churches in the Soviet Union were desecrated and repurposedHow did the Soviets use captured churches?10 beautiful Moscow churches destroyed in Soviet times and there was a "government-sponsored program of conversion to atheism" conducted by communists.Religion and the State in Russia and China: Suppression, Survival, and Revival, by Christopher Marsh, page 47. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011.Inside Central Asia: A Political and Cultural History, by Dilip Hiro. Penguin, 2009. "Science" was counterposed to "religious superstition" in the media and in academic writing. The communist government targeted religions based on state interests, and while most organised religions were never outlawed, religious property was confiscated, believers were harassed, and religion was ridiculed while atheism was propagated in schools. In 1925, the government founded the League of Militant Atheists to intensify the persecution.Geoffrey Blainey; A Short History of Christianity; Viking; 2011; p.494"
Marxism-Leninism and religion As the founder of the Soviet state, Vladimir Lenin, put it:
Religion is the opium of the people—this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion. Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.
Marxist–Leninist atheism has consistently advocated the control, suppression, and elimination of religion. Within about a year of the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, including the churches themselves, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed. Many more were persecuted. The Russian Orthodox Church also used its properties to aid the cause of the White Russians during this period, several closed churches were later reopenedCountry Studies: Russia-The Russian Orthodox Church U.S. Library of Congress, Accessed 2008-04-03
Christianity Orthodox Christianity
Orthodox Christians constituted a majority of believers in the Soviet Union. In the late 1980s, three Orthodox churches claimed substantial memberships there: the Russian Orthodox Church, the Georgian Orthodox Church, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (AOC). They were members of the major confederation of Orthodox churches in the world, generally referred to as the Eastern Orthodox Church. The first two functioned openly and were tolerated by the state, but the Ukrainian AOC was not permitted to function openly. Parishes of the Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church reappeared in Belarus only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but they did not receive recognition from the Belarusian Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, which controls Belarusian eparchies.N. S. Timasheff, Religion In Soviet Russia 1917-1942 (1942) online
Russian Orthodox Church According to both Soviet and Western sources, in the late 1980s, the Russian Orthodox Church had over 50 million believers but only about 7,000 registered active churches. Over 4,000 of these churches were located in the Ukrainian Republic (almost half of them in western Ukraine). The distribution of the six monasteries and ten convents of the Russian Orthodox Church was equally disproportionate: only two of the monasteries were located in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, with another two in Ukraine and one each in Belarus and Lithuania. Seven convents were located in Ukraine and one each in Moldova, Estonia, and Latvia.
Georgian Orthodox Church The Georgian Orthodox Church, another autocephalous member of Eastern Orthodoxy, was headed by a Georgian patriarch. In the late 1980s it had 15 bishops, 180 priests, 200 parishes, and an estimated 2.5 million followers. In 1811, the Georgian Orthodox Church was incorporated into the Russian Orthodox Church, but it regained its independence in 1917, after the fall of the Tsar. Nevertheless, the Russian Orthodox Church did not officially recognise its independence until 1943.
Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church The Ukrainian AOC separated from the Russian Orthodox Church in January 1919, when the short-lived Ukrainian state adopted a decree declaring autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Its independence was reaffirmed by the Bolsheviks in the Ukrainian Republic, and by 1924 it had 30 bishops, almost 1,500 priests, nearly 1,100 parishes, and between 4 and 6 million members.
From its inception, the Ukrainian AOC faced the hostility of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Ukrainian Republic. In the late 1920s, Soviet authorities accused it of nationalist tendencies. In 1930 the government forced the church to reorganise as the "Ukrainian Orthodox Church", and few of its parishes survived until 1936. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian AOC continued to function outside the borders of the Soviet Union, and it was revived on Ukrainian territory under the German occupation during World War II. In the late 1980s, some of the Orthodox faithful in the Ukrainian Republic appealed to the Soviet government to reestablish the Ukrainian AOC.
Armenian Apostolic The Armenian Apostolic Church is an independent Oriental Orthodox church. In the 1980s it had about 4 million adherents – almost the entire population of Armenia. It was permitted 6 bishops, between 50 and 100 priests, and between 20 and 30 churches, and it had one theological seminary and six monasteries.
Catholics Catholics formed a substantial and active religious constituency in the Soviet Union. Their number increased dramatically with the annexation of territories of the Second Polish Republic in 1939 and the Baltic republics in 1940. Catholics in the Soviet Union were divided between those belonging to the Latin Church, which was recognised by the government, and those remaining loyal to the Greek Catholic Church, which was banned in 1946.
Latin Church The majority of the 5.5 million Latin Catholics in the Soviet Union lived in the Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Latvian republics, with a sprinkling in the Moldavian, Ukrainian, and Russian republics. Following World War II, the most active Latin Catholic community in the Soviet Union was in the Lithuanian Republic, where the majority of people are Catholics. The Latin Church there was viewed as an institution that both fostered and defended Lithuanian national interests and values. From 1972 a Catholic underground publication, The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, supported not only Lithuanians' religious rights but also their national rights.
Greek Catholic Church
Western Ukraine, which included largely the historic region of Galicia, became part of the Soviet Union in 1939. Although Ukrainian, its population was never part of the Russian Empire, but was Eastern Catholic. After the Second World War, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church identified closely with the nationalist aspirations of the region, arousing the hostility of the Soviet government, which was in combat with Ukrainian Insurgency. In 1945, Soviet authorities arrested the church's Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj, nine bishops and hundreds of clergy and leading lay activists, and deported them to forced labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere. The nine bishops and many of the clergy died in prisons, concentration camps, internal exile, or soon after their release during the post-Stalin thaw, but after 18 years of imprisonment and persecution, Metropolitan Slipyj was released when Pope John XXIII intervened on his behalf. Slipyj went to Rome, where he received the title of Major Archbishop of Lviv, and became a cardinal in 1965.
In 1946, a synod was called in Lviv, where, despite being uncanonical in both Catholic and Orthodox understanding, the Union of Brest was annulled, and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was officially annexed to the Russian Orthodox Church. St. George's Cathedral in Lviv became the throne of Russian Orthodox Archbishop Makariy.
For the clergy that joined the Russian Orthodox Church, the Soviet authorities refrained from the large-scale persecution seen elsewhere. In Lviv only one church was closed. In fact, the western dioceses of Lviv-Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk were the largest in the USSR. Canon law was also relaxed, allowing the clergy to shave their beards (a practice uncommon in Orthodoxy) and to conduct the liturgy in Ukrainian instead of Church Slavonic.
In 1989, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was officially re-established after a catacomb period of more than 40 years. There followed conflicts between Orthodox and Catholic Christians regarding the ownership of church buildings, conflicts which continued into the 1990s, after the Independence of Ukraine.
Protestants
Protestant communities (particularly Lutherans) first appeared in the Russian Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries in connection with expatriate communities from western Europe. In the 18th century, under Catherine II (the Great), large numbers of German settlers were invited to the Russian Empire, including Mennonites, Lutherans, Reformed and also Roman Catholics. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, various heresies (sektanty: sectarians) and spiritual Christian new religious movements emerged opposing the Russian Orthodox Church (including Molokans, Dukhobors, Khlysts, Pryguny and to some extent, Subbotniks, and in 19th century Tolstoyan rural communes), and their existence prepared the ground for Protestantism's future spread. The first Baptist communities within the Russian Empire arose in unrelated strains in three widely separated regions of the Russian Empire (Transcaucasia, Ukraine, and St. Petersburg) in the 1860s and 1870s. In the early twentieth century, Pentecostal groups also formed. In the very early years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks focused their anti-religious efforts on the Russian Orthodox Church and it appeared to take a less hostile position towards the 'sectarians'. Already before Stalin's rise to power, the situation changed, however. And from the start of the 1930s, Protestants – like other religious groups – experienced the full force of Soviet repression. Churches were shut and religious leaders were arrested and convicted, often charged with anti-Soviet activity. One of the leaders of the Pentecostals movement, Ivan Voronaev, was sentenced to death in 1937, for example.