Break-Through

(See Cover)

"All religious ideas . . . are an unspeakable abomination:" Lenin.

"'Let God bless you with success, and with glory your great deeds for the sake of our country:" Sergei to Stalin.

The 1943 Christmas season in Moscow was the merriest since 1916--the last Christmas of the old war and the old order. It was also the most solemn. The thick snow, which makes every Moscow Christmas a white Christmas, lay heavy over a capital that is the heart of a nation. And that heart, in Russia's third wartime Christmas, beat strong and steadily with an enormous pride of achievement. It was as if the whole Russian nation, watching for the appearance of the first evening star that (according to the Russian Orthodox custom) breaks the absolute pre-Christmas fast, looked westward from Moscow, and could see the Russian armies, like a mobile wall, inch by inch fight back their age-old enemies--Nemtsi, the Germans.

But this Christmas season was solemn to the Russian spirit, for deeper reasons even than military victory. By its official restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church (TIME, Sept 13) the election and recognition of a Patriarch (TIME, Sept. 27), the Soviet Government had made Moscow once more the religious capital of some 100,000,000 Orthodox Christians (there are comparatively few dissenters in Russia), had bridged the crevasses that for 25 years Bolsheviks have tried to open between Russian believers and nonbelievers. Once more the peasant trudging in from the land and catching the sunlight flash on the gilt onion "domes of Moscow's remaining churches could utter the traditional invocation with the traditional tenderness:

Moskva! Moskva!

Zolotaya golova!*

But the Soviet Government's recognition of the Church has done more than restore Moscow as the capital of a religiously united Russia. It united Europe's Danubian and Balkan Slavs in a Slavic religious continent whose heartland is Rus sia, whose metropolis is Moscow.

Whether or not the new status of the Russian Orthodox Church was permanent (and there were many signs that it was), as a tactic of the Soviet Government the change was still big enough with political consequences to be a landmark in the history of Russia and of Europe, and therefore of the world.

Three men are directly responsible for this achievement:

1) Adolf Hitler. He believed that the Russian Orthodox priests and their congregations would flock to the side of Rus sia's Nazi invaders, who would free them from the persecuting Bolsheviks. What Hitler did not foresee was that his inva sion would turn Russia from a country in which a majority of defenseless Christians was ruled by an aggressive anti-religious minority into a nation in arms, in which the majority, though intensely patriotic, was no longer defenseless.

2) Joseph Stalin, Russia's No. i realist, who observed this fact with great interest, for he recognized with Lenin, whose "best disciple" he claims to be, that "facts are stubborn things." Stalin was also aware that restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church was roughly equivalent to Russian religious occupation of the Balkans.

3) Metropolitan Sergei of Moscow. One-of Russia's greatest theological scholars, no man ever looked less like a historical force. He was old (76), pudgy and short (5 ft. 5 in., the same height as Stalin), almost completely deaf, afflicted with a violent twitch of the left cheek. His benign brown eyes peered with ferret sharpness through thick spectacles above the folds of a beard like a Mother Hubbard.

Man from the Catacombs. But this venerable figure was no jack-in-the-box suddenly sprung on Russia by the Government's efficient finger. The son of a priest, Sergei was born (Ivan Nikolaevich Stragorodsky) at Arzamas (near Nizhni Novgorod) in 1867. He had been a missionary in Japan, which he reached via the U.S. (the Patriarch still likes to practice his fragments of half-remembered American: Hello, how are you, nice day). He had been rector of one of Russia's four great theological academies, Bishop of Finland, a great churchman at the court of the last Tsar Nicholas II. There he won the dislike of the Tsarina because he opposed Rasputin. But Sergei was unknown to most people outside Russia, in part because few Orthodox priests are known to the western world, in part because for 25 years he was buried alive by the Bolshevik Revolution. For Sergei is a man from the catacombs (of the GPU in whose political prisons he has served three terms) and of the church which suffered the same fate under Bolshevism that Bolshevism suffered under the Tsar: it was forced underground.

The long climb from the catacombs to legal restoration of the church is almost wholly the work of Sergei--of his simple Christian faith, his understanding of the church's basic strength (the religious masses) and the Soviet Government's basic weakness (the religious masses), and his insistence that peace with the Bolsheviks was the prerequisite for survival of the church.

At first it was easy to direct revolutionary hatred against the Church because it had been so long a part of the Tsarist Government, and the ecclesiastical apologist for its political and social sins. Not that the Bolsheviks used only crude terror. Another Bolshevik tactic was a policy of divide and terrorize.

Rasstrel and Anathema.The Bolsheviks closed churches, destroyed chapels, liquidated 637 of Russia's 1,026 monasteries and convents, confiscated sacred vessels, vestments, ikons, church real estate and a church treasure of some $1,500,000,000, arrested (for resistance to the State) thousands of bishops, priests, monks, and pious laymen, many of whom suffered "the highest measure of social protection" (Rasstrel--shooting). Patriarch Tikhon, Sergei's predecessor,' gave the Soviet authorities a blunt piecer of his patriarchal mind in an anathema which read like a Pravda editorial: "That which you do is verily a satanic deed. For it you are condemned to hell fire in the future life and to awful curses by the coming generations in the present life. We adjure all faithful children of the Orthodox Church not to enter into any kind of association with these monsters of the human race."

The monsters promptly clapped the petulant Patriarch into jail. But none of this persecution made much change in the ingrained Christian faith of Russia's mystically minded millions of believers. Believers who harbored priests or attended worship might be deprived of their ration tickets, their jobs or might just disappear into jails or subArctic exile. They might not come together at all unless 20 believers risked registering with the local Soviet and received permission to worship. Still they came together for worship.

The Soviet Government was quick to note its lack of success, began to supplement its political fight against the Church with an educational campaign.

The League of the Militant Godless was organized. Headed by the late Emelyan Yaroslavsky (TIME, Dec. 13), the encomiast of Stalin, the Godless numbered more than 5,500.000 members at their heyday. They published two magazines, Bezbozhnik (The Godless) and Anti-religioznik (The Anti-religionist). In their lettuce days, the Godless organized anti-religious parades with floats burlesquing religious subjects such as the Immaculate Conception. These capers disgusted many Russians, made bad publicity abroad, and were finally called off. Public debates between priests and the Godless were also tried, also had to be called off. The priests held their own too well. Anti-religious museums, usually set up in former churches, were not much more successful. But the main campaign of the Godless was to educate an atheistic younger generation. With the slogans: "a Godless cell in every school" and "no religious schoolteachers," the Godless enrolled two million schoolchildren. But many more than two million did not join the Godless.

Undeceiving Census. Then (in 1937) the Soviet Government took a census. One question asked about religious faith. When the returns were in, the authorities took one look, gasped, ordered most of the census bureau liquidated as Trotskyists. The census is believed (since the figures were admitted by Godless Headman Yaroslavsky) to have shown that, after 20 years of intensive persecution of the Church, one-third of Russia's city population and two-thirds of Russia's peasants were still Christians, and would not conceal the fact from the official census takers.

This was a sad answer to the Soviet Government's anti-religious prayers. It was related to a heavy blow that had befallen the Government earlier, the full seriousness of which had not been realized at the time: acting apparently on the principle that if you can't lick 'em, join 'em, the Metropolitan Sergei of Moscow had joined the Bolsheviks. Not that he ceased to be a Christian or acquired a party-book (the Communist Party does not admit Christians to membership). What Sergei did was to take literally the Soviet Government's decree that the business of the Russian Orthodox Church was religion and nothing else (a revolutionary attitude in a country where for hundreds of years the Church had been part of the state). He also insisted on absolute loyalty to the Soviet Government as the price of the Church's survival.

Almost his first act when he was made Patriarch in 1925 was to proclaim that the main job of the Church is the salvation of souls and not politics. He also assured the Soviet Government of his Church's loyalty. Success has not ended all the criticism of Sergei. Here & there are still sceptics who call him a stooge of the Soviet Government. His policy lends itself easily to this charge. But the most intelligent members of the Russian-Orthodox Church agree that few patriarchs in history have done more for the Church than Patriarch Sergei.

Patriarch at Work. Success has made little change in Sergei. He now lives in former German Ambassador von der Schulenburg's house on Chistyi (bright or clean) Street in midtown Moscow. Sergei's second floor room is of monastic simplicity. His ground-floor office is a blend of old & new Russia. The walls are covered with age-old ikons and the latest war maps.

Sergei rises at seven, prays until nine --alone in his room or in the special little Patriarch's chapel which was blessed last fortnight. At nine, Sergei drinks his break fast -- tea -- and reads the newspapers. Then he studies his personal Bible, which is in Hebrew (Sergei also reads Greek, old Slavonic, some Latin and Finnish).

From ten till two, Patriarch Sergei sits in his office, attends to Patriarchal busi ness, gives interviews. Then, if the weather is good, he walks in his garden for an hour. Dinner consists of a dish of mushrooms or fish. His only known eating vice is a pas sion for boiled onions. As he receives the same food rations as a commissar, there is usually enough left over for other mem bers of his household.

Despite a weak heart (two Russian specialists attend him), Sergei is very severe with himself, practices the ascetic customs of the Russian monks. But his associates consider him warm and friendly, almost saintly. He is even-tempered, loves to talk and joke. During the air raids on Moscow two years ago, he refused to go to an air raid shelter, but sat and read through the bombing. "At my age," he said, bomb." "a cold Later is he much was more evacuated serious to than Ulyanovsk. Last fall he moved back to Mos cow in time for the Government's recognition of the Church, his own confirmation as Patriarch and the visit of the Arch bishop of York (TIME, Sept. 21).

Patriarch Sergei is also obliging. Since the Russian Orthodox Church uses the Julian calendar, so that Christmas Day comes during the first week in January, Sergei celebrated a special Christmas service for TIME'S Correspondent Lauterbach just to show him how it goes. For two and a half hours Correspondent Lauterbach stood (Russian churches have no pews) and shivered (Russian churches are unheated during the war) in the Bogoyav-lensky Cathedral. The service was sumptuous. The cathedral was packed with 5,000 worshippers, including many men, many young people. But though Patriarch Sergei wears heavy underwear under his gold velvet vestments brocaded with red and green flowers, last week he was in bed with the grippe.

Ally: Eternity. The Soviet Government is famed for the Sierran ups & downs of its policies. Will Patriarch Sergei's work last? Has the Russian Orthodox Church come back to Russia to stay? Or will another wave of persecution sweep it away? No answer could cover all contingencies. But Patriarch Sergei might have pointed out from his sick bed last week that the first 25 years of persecution are likely to be the hardest. He could also point to some definite signs of that relative permanence which is the only kind that (philosophically) Marxism admits:

>Fortnight ago the Soviet Government permitted the Church to open a seminary for training priests. Hitherto the training of priests was prevented by the State, so there is an acute priest shortage in Russia.

> Russia's President Kalinin exhorted citizens not to laugh at soldiers who wear religious medals. >The Bible is being printed for the first time since the Revolution. ^ At the same time Bezbozhnik and Anti-religioznik had to suspend publication due to a sudden paper shortage.

> The Society of the Militant Godless was disbanded.

> Its president, Emelyan Yaroslavsky, died.

But Patriarch Sergei did not need these facts to buttress his policy. It was based upon a simpler and less mutable fact: political policies change, governments come & go, but man's need for religion is eternal. For as long as an ikon hung in the corner of a Russian izba, Patriarch Sergei would always be right. That was his Christmas message, a message which, couched in the proverbial idiom of the Russian peasant, was understandable far beyond Russia's borders: even in totalitarian darkness, God sits in the corner-but waits.

* Moscow! Moscow! Golden-head!

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