On the Persecution of the Old Spirituality
The confrontational ideological campaigns launched repeatedly by the Soviet propaganda machine throughout the 1920s and 1930s served to create an image of an internal enemy and build social tension. This mechanism was used to justify the state’s repressive policies, which had been in operation since 1918 and peaked in 1937/1938. The image of the “enemy of the people” was not fixed but evolved alongside the repressive apparatus. The only thing which did not change was opposition to Soviet power (whether real or imagined). This opposition could be political (Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, anarchists, and later Trotskyists), physical (White Army), class-based (the aristocracy, the clergy, kulaks) or otherwise. According to Soviet propaganda, as well as social groups that were in open conflict with the regime, the country’s industry and agriculture were infested with saboteurs, wreckers, and terrorists. The late 1920s and early 1930s saw two major show trials against counter-revolutionary saboteurs in coal mining (the Shakhty Trial in Donbass, 1928) and wreckers in industry and transport (the Industrial Party Trial, 1930). Science and culture were not far behind. In the late 1920s, the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU) fabricated a criminal case against the members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (the Academy Trial, 1929–1931), which led to the arrest of the well-known historians Yevgeny Tarle, Sergey Platonov, and Nikolay Likhachev. Alongside political and economic factors, the peak in political repression was based on changes to the law made in the 1920s. The introduction of the infamous Article 58 (Political Crime and Counter-Revolutionary Activities) to the Penal Code in 1926 and its lack of clarity gave the secret police carte blanche to arrest virtually anyone. The article opened with a definition of counter-revolutionary action as “any action aimed at overthrowing, undermining or weakening the power of the workers’ and peasants’ soviets or the government founded in accordance with the Constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.” This was followed by a curious clause, according to which “any action not directly aimed at the above-mentioned goals but implying a conscious attack on the key political and economic achievements of the proletarian revolution” was also considered counter- revolutionary. Then came a list of political crimes with corresponding punishments. Crimes ranged from armed uprising (punishable by execution) to the spreading of rumors (six or more months in prison). According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, 4,060,306 people were arrested for counter-revolutionary crimes between 1921 and 1953, and 799,455 were sentenced to death. An integral part of Soviet politics since September 1918 (when the Council of People’s Commissars issued the decree “On Red Terror”), repression was seen by society as an organic element of the political life of the state.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the state’s repressive apparatus targeted various social organizations, groups, creative and spiritual associations, and religious institutions. In fall 1922, the Anti-Religion Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party was created to guarantee the separation of church and state. It defined government policy in religious affairs until 1929. However, according to historian Igor Kurlyandsky, the real aim of the Commission was “not to implement the principle of the separation of church and state, as its official name hypocritically stated, but to weaken all religious organizations with a view to destroying religion as such in future and expelling the remains of religious thinking from the minds of the people.”1 Most esoteric groups and philosophical and religious associations fell into the category of sects and were considered anti-Soviet organizations. On April 8, 1929, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars issued the decree “On Religious Associations,” which remained in force (with certain alterations) until October 1, 1990. Article 17 of the decree banned any non-liturgical activities by religious organizations. These included all education and economic activities, as well as running groups or societies. Members of such groups were usually accused of anti-Soviet propaganda and imprisoned. Among those persecuted were many representatives of Russian Cosmism (Amaravella group, Alexander Chizhevsky, Alexander Yaroslavsky, and others). One of the biggest “sect” trials took place in 1928–1929 and involved members of Voskresenie (Resurrection), a philosophical and religious group run by Alexander Meyer.
Ilya Udovenko
1. Igor Kurlyandsky, Stalin, vlast’, religiya (Moscow: Kuchkovo pole, 2011), 190–191.