lasnost through a history of distrust

ON April 29 thi year an unprecedented meeting took place between Mikhail Gorbachev and six hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church. This meeting, a reflection of Gorbachev's "new thinking", had a number of objectives.
Firstly, the Russian Orthodox Church is again strongly identified with Russian history and nationalism, as a "unifying" factor for "the whole of our (Soviet) people". Secondly, in line with attempts to improve their image of persecution of religion Gorbachev stated that "errors which occurred with regard to the church and believers in the 1930s and subsequent years are being corrected". Finally, the meeting aimed to harness a union of church and state suited to the strategic goals of the new Soviet leadership both at home and abroad.
Although the Russian Orthodox Church has won important concessions for itself since 1985, such as the return of some monasteries and churches and the release of only half of religious prisoners of conscience, the authorities are evidently looking for an opportunity to change their approach without departing from Lenin's legacy. An editorial in the party journal Kommunist in April surveyed Soviet religious policy since 1918 and talked only of "distortions" and "local excesses" in party policy during Stalin's day.
But this neglects to mention that repression of religion began immediately two months after the Bolshevik revolution, and therefore any suggestion of a return to "Leninist principles" would omit the terrible period of persecution that all churches in the USSR underwent before Stalin's historic reconciliation in 1943. By 1939 99 per cent of the clergy of the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches had been annihilated.
Under Lenin himself, over 8000 Orthodox clergyment were murdered. From a low of 1000 open Russian Orthodox churches in 1943 this increased to 25,000 by Stalin's death (which represented half the pre-1917 level). Although glasnost today permits criticism of Stalin with respect to his religious policies, it still neglects to mention the vicious anti-religious drive under Khrushchev, which reduced the number of open Russian Orthodox churches to 8000,
because today Khrushchev is praised as a "reformer" in Gorbachev's mould.
Any "return to Leninist norms" in church-state relations also does not solve the problem of the status of the Soviet Union's two largest religious illegal denominations the Ukrainian Autocephalic Orthodox and Ukrainian Catholic. Both of these churches were destroyed during Stalin's day, but the Soviet leadership and the Russilr Orthodox Church are at one lii denying that any "local excesses" were committed against them.
Since 1943, when Stalin turned to the decapitated Russian Orthodox Church for support in the war effort and to promote national unity, it has remained a pliant pawn of the Soviet state apparatus. Indeed, the samizdat journal Glasnost recently published documents showing the long-term involvement of the KGB with the Russian Orthodox Church. Although not in the same desperate position as was Stalin, Gorbachev's new symbiosis with the Russian Orthodox Church will mean that come the millennium celebrations in June it will again play the part written for her by Stalin.
The complete application of glasnost to Stalin's crimes cannot exclude the Ukrainian churches, who were the only churches slated for total destruction. The Committee in Defence of the Ukrainian Catholic Church (CDUCC) in a long document entitled "The Ukrainian Catholic Church: Catacombs and Alternatives" last December stated quite forcefully that, "we think that the liquidation of the Ukrainian people, politics begun by Stalin in the 1920s. Officially, Stalin's criminal methods have already been denounced. Still, in reality, justice has not been reestablished; Stalinism's spirit and terrible tradition are still alive. Our Church is still forced to live in the catacombs".
The lack of glasnost towards
,Ile Ukrainian Catholic Church is also evidenced in the use of the same smear tactics as previously. Soviet propaganda still churns out the allegation that the Ukrainian Catholic Church "collaborated" with the Nazis, that it does not exist as a church in the USSR but only abroad, and that western support for it is both "interference in the internal affairs" of the USSR as well as part of the "anti-communist crusade" launched with the help of Ukrainian emigre nationalists.
The approval by the US Senate of a resolution condemning religious persecution in Ukraine and calling for a boycott of the Moscow millennium celebrations was typically labelled by the Soviet News Agency Tass as, "nothing other than a monument to the crass incompetence of hose who drew it up".
In addition, despite some new concessions made to Russian Orthodox believers in the USSR, the CDUCC claim that repression of their Church has actually increased under Gorbachev (witness Ivan Hel, their chairman, on Panorama on May 23: "For the time being, the arrests have stopped, but the repressions continue: pressure, blackmail, detentions, illegal searches, confiscation of church goods, and defamations in the press").
Despite repeated denials to the contrary, Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev and Galicia was forced to admit last October that yes, the Ukrainian Catholic Church does indeed have "a few thousand faithful", the first de facto admission by a Russian church official of her existence, but tremendous growth and vitality, is there for all to see. In a secret survey conducted by the Ukrainian Acadamy of Sciences of the strength of religious belief in Ukraine last year, published in the samizdat journal Ukrainian Herald, 20 per cent of the respondents in one region of western Ukraine alone stated that they were members of a church that did not officially exist.
Whether the Ukrainian Catholic Church will be legalised is a litmus test for Gorbachev and glasnost. In addition, Ukrainians of all religious denominations are troubled by the Russian Orthodox monopolisation of the millennium celebrations.