The Vologda ‘club of culture’ was packed: a visiting propagandist, a former priest, was lecturing on the non-existence of God and the lies of churchmen. It was 1962. Speaking was Aleksei Chertkov, a former priest from Riga and a third-generation clergyman (both his father and grandfather were priests in Riga diocese) who had successfully graduated from the Moscow Theological Academy. In the 1960s, he broke with religion and became the chair of atheism at Moscow State University, authoring several books on godlessness for children and adults. A confident lecturer, he was, however, baffled at the Vologda Club of Culture when a young woman started to defiantly argue with him. He lost his poise. The woman who challenged the visiting lecturer later joined a convent and was tonsured as a nun with the name Magdalena. The public at the club was disappointed: “the ex-priest was so handsome and spoke so well, but some foolish woman spoilt it all”.
This is one of the stories from Galina Sedova’s (nun Efrosiniia) book, Riga Diocese 1944-1964. From the History of Orthodoxy, which was defended as a doctoral dissertation in November 2020 at the University of Daugavpils. A scrupulous researcher and prolific writer, Sedova has studied the history of Riga diocese for many years, accumulating an impressive body of evidence from the state archives and private collections. The study is divided into three parts: state-church relations in 1944-1964; Orthodox religious life in Riga diocese; and, finally, forms of repression against the Church during the early Soviet period. The study complements existing studies of the Orthodox Church under Stalin and Khrushchev by Tatiana Chumachenko and recent books by Victoria Smolkin (A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism), Robert F. Goeckel (Soviet Religious Policy in Estonia and Latvia) and Andrei Sychov.
The first chapter, which deals with the development of Soviet policy towards the Orthodox Church, provides comprehensive biographical surveys of the commissioners for the Orthodox Church in Riga: the NKVD/KGB officers N. P. Smirnov (1944-1949) and A. A. Sakharov (1949-1987). Since Sakharov clearly built his career in Riga, it is definitely worth learning about his background: a beneficiary of Komsomol recruitment into the NKVD after the purges of 1937, he served in SMERSH on four fronts during the Second World War and was appointed to Latvia after service in Manchuria. In other words, Sakharov was not someone to be messed with. Sedova deduces that Sakharov served as an intelligence agent in Latvia even before his appointment as a commissioner because he studied at the agents’ school in Leningrad and knew Latvian. He personally interrogated members of the Pskov Mission, the mission of the Orthodox Church in Pskov region during its occupation by the armies of Third Reich in 1941-44.[1]. After his retirement from the NKVD in 1948 (no doubt with a good pension), Sakharov received an appointment as a commissioner.
Control and surveillance over the activity of the Orthodox Church in Riga diocese is analysed with attention to detail. In particular, the participation of churches in the ‘struggle for peace’ was one issue riddled with tensions. As the Soviet regime sought ‘to mobilise world public opinion for peace’ (Goeckel, 60), the authorities wanted to use the Church’s leadership in this ideological struggle. The party did not easily accept the unwillingness of some Orthodox leaders to play along and support the ‘struggle for peace’: Metropolitan Veniamin (Fedchenkov), for instance, once famously said that the Church should not struggle for peace but pray for peace. In general, Sedova maintains, the churches used the peace issue in order to safeguard their position. As the growing ecumenical movement and its institutionalised forms such as the Conference of European Churches actively participated in establishing connections between East and West, the Soviet authorities faced increased openness and exchange between churches of all confessions. Church leaders attended conferences abroad and the representatives of western churches visited the Soviet Union. The foreign delegations allowed to come to Riga were shown ‘normal’ religious life in the USSR, were given presents and met with representatives of the Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox clergy. Sedova emphasises that Orthodox prelates such as Archbishop Filaret (Lebedev) capitalised on this opportunity to use monasteries and diocesan summerhouses to entertain foreign delegations, which allowed the Church to keep these properties from being expropriated. This is reminiscent of a similar tactic adopted by Bishop Aleksei (Ridiger) of Tallinn, who nominated the Pühtitsa convent as a place for receiving foreign visitors, thus preventing it from being closed in the 1960s. Yet, it is obvious from the book that the author regards the uncompromising position of Metropolitan Veniamin, who refused to involve himself in the ideological activities of the ‘struggle for peace’, as more exemplary than that of Filaret or the Lutheran bishop Gustav Turs, who actively played along with Soviet ideology.
According to Sedova’s calculations, 54 churches and prayer houses were closed between 1945 and 1965 in Riga diocese, most of them between 1960 and 1964. This number does not include chapels in cemeteries and public places. In comparison with Catholic churches, which were much less affected, the Orthodox Church suffered severe losses. There are parallels with Andrei Sõtšov’s study on Khrushchev’s anti-religious policy in Soviet Estonia, which argues that about 20% of parishes were closed during the Khrushchev period.[2] There is a need for a comparative study between Latvia and Estonia to assess the impact of Khrushchev’s policy on Latvian- and Estonian-speaking Orthodox parishes.
While most studies of Soviet policy focus on heroic resistance against it, Sedova’s monograph addresses instances of clergy collaboration with the authorities, providing examples of the methods used by commissioners to bring the clergy to heel: these include vilification in the newspapers and blackmail. Yet, the cases of Iakov Legkikh, Dimitrii Okulovich, Savelii Danilov and A. B. Chertkov suggest that the choice to collaborate or not depended not on the methods, but on personal integrity. Danilov and Chertkov renounced their membership in the Orthodox Church and became active atheist propagandists. Sedova believes that they were influenced by the former priest Aleksandr Osipov, professor at Tartu University and then the Leningrad Theological Academy. Sedova is right that the activities of the security forces in anti-religious campaigns in Soviet Latvia, as well as in other regions of the USSR, have not been well studied in Russia. Due to lack of access to operational documents even in Latvia, where the secret police archives are available to researchers, the story of the Soviet organs of state security and religion has to be reconstructed with the use of personal evidence where available. The work of scholars in Ukraine, for example, suggests that the involvement of the KGB in the surveillance of, control over and even direct interference in religious communities was omnipresent.[3] In Sedova’s book, the vignette on priests turning into atheist propagandists and then back again is quite novel, in my view: apart from Firsov’s popular book on Aleksandr Osipov, we lack discussions on turncoats among the Orthodox clergy and their devastating impact on religious life.
Sedova provides interesting characteristics of the hierarchs who served in Riga diocese from 1944 to 1964. There was Kornilii (Popov, 1945-48), a former Renovationist eager to demonstrate his loyalty to the Soviet authorities; Veniamin (Fedchenkov, 1948-51), a Russian émigré who had a particular spiritual impact on his parishioners; and Filaret (Lebedev, 1951-58), whose main achievement was to secure financial support from the Moscow patriarchate, which allowed him to maintain churches and pay taxes. After the short-lived appointments of Aleskei (Ridiger) and Filaret (Denisenko), in 1962 Riga diocese received Nikon (Fomichev), who stimulated liturgical life in the diocese, leading to increased income for churches.
What I found missing in the book is an analysis of the impact of Soviet policy on the ecclesiological status of Riga diocese, which had been an autonomous church between 1920 and 1940 within the independent state of Latvia. I wonder whether this independent status was in any sense preserved in church practices, including forms of self-government, or whether it was suppressed entirely during the Soviet period. I also wonder how the emigration of a large number of priests affected Latvian Orthodoxy. The book is very rich in detail and based on solid research, but the story of the Riga diocese is not been placed in a comparative context vis-à-vis other dioceses in the Soviet Union, including neighbouring Estonia.
Nonetheless, the book is undoubtedly an important contribution to the religious, political and social history of the Soviet western outposts period following the end of the Second World War.
Review by Irina Paert
[1] Konstantin Oboznyi , Istoriia Pskovskoi pravoslavnoi missiii 1941-1944 (Moscow, 2008).
[2] Andrei Sõtšov, Eesti Õigeusu Piiskopkond nõukogude religioonipoliitika mõjuväljas 1954-1964 (Tartu: Tartu University Press, 2008).
[3] Tatiana Vagramenko, ‘“KGB Evangelism”: Agents and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Soviet Ukraine’, Kritika; Tatiana Vagramenko, ‘Visualizing Invisible Dissent: Red-Dragonists, Conspiracy and the Soviet Security Police’, in The Religious Underground and the Secret Police in Communist and Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe, edited by James Kapaló and Kinga Povedak (Routledge, forthcoming in 2021).