Russian Revival

The big, beige-painted stone building which was once Isadora Duncan's Moscow home now has new tenants. The gold-lettered black plaque on the gateway reads: Council for Religious Affairs.

Joseph Stalin, onetime choirboy and theological student, now an apostate, created the Council for Religious Affairs last month. Last week in a pastel-green-walled suite, still smelling of paint and plaster, thick-lipped, bespectacled Ivan Vassilyvich Poliansky was busy considering and passing on the requests of all Soviet churches except the Russian Orthodox.* At work on the floor below was Georgi Gregorievich Karpov, chief liaison agent between the government and the Orthodox Church.

Thus far the Council's prime concern has been with petitions for the building of new churches. It does not often turn them down.

It also arranges permission for purchase of supplies for church repair (Moscow's St. Louis' Roman Catholic Church is now having its roof patched), gets priests released from Army service, gets printing presses for religious publications.

The Council further passes on plans to open theological schools, nonexistent in Russia since 1917. The first one, Moscow's Theological Institute in the 400-year-old Novodyevichi monastery, was reopened three weeks ago. More recently the Council has granted Gregorian Armenians permission to open a seminary near Erivan, is now considering a request from Moslems in the Uzbek Republic who want to open a school for mullahs. Poliansky concedes that religious freedom would be an empty slogan if churches could not recruit clergy, declares there is "no objection" to any faith having religious schools for clergy.

Says Karpov: "Priests may go to their parishioners and may engage in proselytizing work either in church or outside without any restriction except those placed upon any orderly citizen of the U.S.S.R. . . . They may officiate in private homes if they so desire, may perform baptismal, marriage and funeral services in or outside churches."

* Best available statistics (1937) indicate that the U.S.S.R. has 94,400,000 Russian Orthodox; 1,660,000 Roman Catholics; 1,000,000 Baptists; 1,000,000 Lutherans; 8,170,000 Moslems; 2,700,000 Jews.

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