Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader

Drawing on previously secret documents from the KGB, Central Committee, Council for Religious Affairs, and local agencies, Felix Corley reveals how policy was applied to religious questions in many different areas of Soviet life. Fully aware that religion had to be controlled if the totalitarian state was to function, Soviet bureaucrats took the religious threat very seriously. The book illuminates the varying responses of these policymakers to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Old Believers, Catholics, Protestants, the Armenian Church, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists as well as to newer groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Hare Krishnas. Even as the Soviet empire crumbled around them in the early 1990s, Russian authorities still toiled away, gathering information and reports for the day when their services would again be required, all the while trying to manipulate what was left of their power, often with no greater ideological purpose than to retain the control to which they had become accustomed. This bureaucrat's view of religion in the Soviet Union from its founding to its collapse will be of interest to students of political science and religion, as well as to Kremlinologists and historians of the Soviet era.