Paul Goble
Staunton, November 29 – In a book newly translated into Russian, Viktoriya Smolkin of Wesleyan University in the United States argues that the Brezhnev regime, faced with increased interest in religion among the population adopted two strategies that unintentionally contributed to the rise of Russian nationalism.
Having seen that Khrushchev’s direct attack on religion had not worked and that interest in religion was growing, especially among the intelligentsia, the CPSU leadership decided to try something new, the historian argues in an excerpt of her book published today by the Polit.ru portal (polit.ru/article/2020/11/29/ps_smolkin/).
Its first approach was to try to coopt those who were interested in religion and get them involved in historical preservation, Smolkin says. Yury Andropov wanted to involve Russian nationalist artist Ilya Glazunov in official activities, and the Kremlin created the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments.
And its second tactic was to “nationalize” religion, making it part of the national culture in the hopes that this would promote patriotism and undermine unwelcome “’idealization’ of religion. But both the one and the other backfired, leading more people to pay attention to religion and also to become religious.
The CPSU recognized it was fighting a losing battle – one of its ideological stalwarts warned that the higher the standard of living in the USSR became, the more people would want to explore other values, including religious ones, with some who did so deciding to turn to religion and away from the party.
The Kremlin hoped it could mobilize the intelligentsia against this trend. But religion had become fashionable among Russian intelligents, and even those who had worked to promote communist atheism under Khrushchev left the ranks of government and party propagandists under Brezhnev, giving the regime’s ideology another black eye.
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