Mr. Bourdeaux is convinced that there is the possibility of a religious renascence in Soviet society, particularly in the realm of ethical doctrine. Whether this possibility is realized depends above all on whether the church can make contact with Soviet life, with the real concerns of contemporary Soviet men and women. Yet he also reports the new pressures which have been exerted aginst the church since 1960, including some repetitions of the worst excesses of the early postrevolutionary period, and he does not explain how the church can make effective contact with the population under such circumstances.

Robert A. Feldmesser

WILLIAM C. FLETCHER: A Study in Survival. New York, Macmillan, 1965.

IN WRITING this book Dr. Fletcher has made an eminently worthwhile contribution to the political history of the Russian Orthodox Church. After briefly reviewing church-state relations during the first decade of Bolshevik rule, he presents a balanced account of the efforts of Metropolitan Sergei (later Patriarch from September 1943 until his death in May 1944) to find a modus vivendi with the Soviet state. Based on what the author terms the strategy of the "outstretched hand," these efforts were motivated by the conviction that the Church's sole hope of survival lay in loyal support of the Communist regime. In his famous proclamation of August 18, 1927, Sergei made such support a vital test of faith, and he thereafter sponsored an increasingly vigorous search for ways and means to serve the regime and to play a "useful" political role. He believed that if he could convince the regime of the Church's loyalty and show it that the Church's support could yield significant political advantages, then-and only then the Church might attain a measure of security and even a certain freedom of maneuver.

During World War II, the Church finally did win significant concessions in return for its active participation in the regime's effort to rally popular support. The "outstretched hand" was accepted, in fact frantically clutched, and at the time of his death Sergei undoubtedly believed that his controver

sial and much-maligned strategy had been vindicated by events. The Church had indeed been in imminent danger of complete institutional annihilation on the eve of the war. That it had managed to survive was certainly due in part to Sergei's stewardship, and it is also possible that a different orientation of Church policy would have precluded the wartime concordat. It is nevertheless clear that other factors, including the courage and tenacity of local church congregations, had also been instrumental in keeping the Church alive during the prewar period, and it is equally clear that Hitler's aggression, rather than the Church's "Soviet patriotism" per se, was the prime factor that led the regime to accept a temporary détente in 1941.

Many of the regime's wartime concessions to the Church proved illusory, and others proved short-lived. While the postwar years did not bring a complete return to the status quo ante, they saw a definite resurgence of "militant atheism," and the early 1960's witnessed a massive new campaign against religion and the Church. Throughout this period, the Church still had services to render-for example, in the propagation of Slavic solidarity, participation in the peace movement, etc.—and the regime for its part exercised a certain modicum of restraint. It nevertheless became increasingly clear that what the Church had won in 1941 was less a stable modus vivendi with the state than a temporary respite from persecution. The regime remained committed to the eradication of all institutional "islands of separateness" and all retrograde "survivals of the past," and this commitment became the more compelling as the legitimacy of the regime became progressively more dependent on the achievement of full-fledged communism.

It is to Dr. Fletcher's credit that he recognizes these limitations on Sergei's success—this despite his obvious sympathy for the Patriarch and his impatience with the latter's critics and detractors. Indeed, in his last chapter, he is at some pains to stress the tenuous character of the regime's concessions and the ambiguous quality of Sergei's victory. This makes it the more unfortunate that he does not go a step further and attempt to relate his conclusions to a broader analysis of the basic calculus of political collaboration in a totalitarian setting. Had he done so, he would have been forced to pose important normative questions of the sort so forcefully dramatized by Rolf

Hochhuth in the case of the Catholic Church under Nazism. If anything, these questions might assume an even more acute form in the Russian case, for here we are dealing with active support by the Church, rather than with non-opposition or passive collaboration. In terms of a refined realpolitik, the distinction may be largely irrelevant, especially in a totalitarian system where mere collaboration is likely to entail behavior that in other systems could only derive from positive commitment, if at all. However, raison d'église presumably entails the defense of values that transcend institutional survival, and positive support of a totalitarian regime may compromise these values in a far more radical way than mere compliance. Even though he does not venture into this realm of inquiry, Dr. Fletcher has nevertheless done a commendable piece of work that will be of interest and value to all scholars in the field.

Jeremy R. Azrael

WILLIAM C. FLETCHER AND ANTHONY J. STOVER (EDS.): Religion and the Search for New Ideals in the USSR, New York, Praeger, 1967.

THIS SYMPOSIUM grew out of papers presented at a gathering organized in Munich in April 1966 by the Institute for the Study of the USSR. Like most symposia, it is a mixed bag. It testifies to much searching for ideals, but in spite of its title there is nothing very new in them. It is the persistence of old ideals and their rejuvenation that is impressive.

These ideals are mostly though not entirely religious in the broad sense, if not in the conventional sense of worshipping in church, mosque or synagogue. Peter Reddaway writes that judging from his observations of Moscow students, searchers are "rather more concerned with Orthodox values than with the presently constituted Orthodox Church. Many regard the latter as in certain respects, especially that of its leadership, unjustifiably compromised." George van Stackelberg builds up an impressive picture of the tenacity of Islam in Central Asia. It is a pity that the weakest contribution to the book is Hans Lamm's essay on Judaism: so far as it goes, it gives the im

pression that religious Judaism in the USSR has become anemic, but that can hardly be the whole story. In the secular field, Heinrich Schultz gives interesting evidence suggesting a steady return to traditional values in medical ethics. But the book is chiefly concerned with various aspects of Christianity as the background religion of most Soviet citizens.

None of the contributors takes Marxism seriously as a para-religion that now has any appeal to the Soviet peoples. Max Hayward calls it a dinosaur that died: "A dinosaur, just as any other animal, needs air, and Marxism died of suffocation in Russia." Stalin choked it, and in consequence “a terrible vacuum was formed." Western Marxists, however, were only indirectly affected by this, and consequently their approach can be altogether more sophisticated. For example, Gustav Wetter describes a conversation he had with an Italian Communist intellectual, Professor Geymonat, in 1946. The professor termed it a gross misconception to think that communism necessarily involves atheism. In his view, Marxism was merely "a positive science, like medicine, biology or mathematics, but dealing with the transformation of society. . . . Just as a man could be a good doctor and hold any one of a variety of philosophies of life, so it was

possible to be a Marxist and subscribe to any philosophy, any religion, or to none at all." This may perhaps be the wave of the future, but the future has not yet come.

Soviet ideologists are surprisingly easily put off their balance by any intellectual challenge. Max Hayward writes that "the editors of Voprosy filosofii were evidently horrified (when the Zhurnal Moskovskoi Patriarkhii quoted Berdiaev) because they had always counted on a low level of philosophical thinking in the Russian Orthodox Church." It should be added that one such reference in the Church organ might have passed unnoticed, but the background to this is a revival of interest in Berdiaev and other religious writers of his generation among the non-churchgoing intelligentsia.

Dmitri Konstantinov quotes, from the atheist journal Nauka i religii, a description of young boys and girls making their first acquaintance with the Orthodox faith and being "kindly instructed by old women, but not by those backward grandmothers whom the atheists gave up as hopeless a long time ago." Also from Nauka i religiia comes the classical story of the head of the atheist department at Volzhsk, in the Mari ASSR, who could not be found because he was studying for his exams. "What exams?" "For admission to a

seminary." The Mari ASSR is, of course, the sort of country area where going to church is felt to be the necessary corollary of religious belief, just as Peter Reddaway's friends in Moscow come from circles where one would expect to find a less churchy interest in religious ideas.

Perhaps the most interesting contribution is that of William C. Fletcher on the Russian Baptists. They are evidently increasing in strength, but any discontent there may be among adherents of the Orthodox Church with their own leadership is nothing by comparison with the revolt that has developed against the Baptist leaders. Evidence that has accumulated since this symposium was written indicates that the majority of Baptists, perhaps the overwhelming majority, are in schism from the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists. ready in 1966, the dissident group, the Initsiativniki, was getting far more than its share of attacks in the Soviet press. Evidently it has gotten under the skin of the party. Why? Dr. Fletcher makes the interesting suggestion that "the segment of society most likely to be attracted to the (Baptist) movement is not the Russian Orthodox, but people of the sort who would be attracted to the Communist Party itself."

Al

John Lawrence

This year the Soviet Union is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the "Great October Socialist Revolution." Various events, such as festive meetings, academic gatherings, and special books, articles, plays and songs written for the occasion, are already in full swing, and will culminate on November 7, a half century after the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government of Russia and established themselves in power.

To define the contents and set the tone for the celebrations, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party published a 20,000-word document (Pravda and Izvestia, June 25, reprinted in The Current Digest of the Soviet Press, New York, July 12 and 19, 1967), called "Fiftieth Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution: Theses of the CC of the CPSU." The "Theses" are essentially an elaboration of a shorter Central Committee "Resolution" on the same subject, published on January 4. It is a curious document. In tracing the history of the USSR and the significance of the anniversary, it manages to avoid mentioning almost altogether the name of the person who ruled the Soviet Union for nearly half of its 50-year span. Of the two references to Stalin, one is “neutral” (his chairmanship of the State Defense Committee during World War II), and one decidedly pejorative ("at the 20th Congress the party firmly condemned Stalin's personality cult"). Stalin's successors Malenkov, Bulganin and even Khrushchev are passed over in silence. Nor do the "Theses" contain any references (except for an elliptical mention of the "political rout of Trotskyism") to the many Bolsheviks who with Lenin led the party both before and after the Revolution and who later fell victim to Stalin's purges such as Leon Trotsky, Grigori Zinoviev,

Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, and countless others. It would seem, indeed, as if for half a century the people of Russia had labored, suffered, fought and achieved its great victories and successes without any leaders whatever, save for Lenin (who died in 1924) and the anonymously collective "Central Committee" of the party, or "the party" itself.

To correct this lopsided historical record, Problems of Communism will publish, in its next (November-December) issue, a series of appreciations of some of the (officially) forgotten figures of the Bolshevik past: Bukharin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and the "Left Opposition" of 1920-21 (Aleksandr Shliapnikov, Aleksandra Kollontai, and others). In addition, two powerful movements--the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries which were instrumental in bringing about the downfall of Tsarism and which in fact enjoyed far greater popular support than the Bolsheviks, will also be given their due. By doing so, we hope not only to fill in a few missing pages in current Soviet historiography, but also to examine the various alternatives that faced the Russian people in 1917; to do the same for the 1920's when the Soviet Union was being torn by a violent struggle for power whose outcome was to determine the future course of the country; to consider the theory-implicitly and explicitly stated by the party "Theses" that the victory of Bolshevism in 1917 or of its special variety ten years later was somehow "inevitable;" in brief, by providing an important historical dimension, to contribute to a fuller and more objective understanding of a momentous historical

event.

-The Editors