432 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 5 illus., 2 maps, notes, bibl., index

Likewise, when the tide of Communism receded in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s, the sudden disappearance of political structures once assumed to be durable revealed preexisting social patterns that had long been neglected, though, unlike the Roman forts, not entirely forgotten. Among such patterns emerging from the depths of pre-Communist history, perhaps the most important was the ancient gridwork of religious loyalties: the geography of confessional difference delineating Moslem from Christian Orthodox, Roman Catholic from Protestant, Greek Catholic from Ukrainian Orthodox, and so forth. As the proliferation of post-Soviet religious and ethnic conflicts has shown so strikingly, the end of Communism in Eastern Europe has not brought about an "end of history," but rather its vigorous, and often lethal, return.[1]

A fundamental conceit of the Communists had been their moral certainty that their new faith in "scientific atheism" would supplant what they believed to be mystical religious "mythologies," relics inherited from a bygone era of superstitions before Darwin, Marx, and electrification. Instead, despite the Communists' best efforts, religion outlasted the Communist era. In Russia itself, public opinion polls conducted after the fall of the Soviet state revealed that the institution most trusted by the average citizen was the Russian Orthodox Church.[2] This should not be too surprising, because the church was one of only a handful of Russian national institutions—and by far the most important one—to survive from tsarist times through the entire Communist period. Trust in the church may well dissipate with time, and interest in Orthodoxy often goes no deeper than a fascination with the color and architectural splendor of the Russian past—a beauty so manifestly lacking in late Soviet life. Certainly, public interest in Orthodoxy has not yet translated into high church attendance figures.[3] Nonetheless, the Russian Orthodox Church wields considerable political power and is even able to command overwhelming majority support in the Duma on legislation designed to restrict the activity of rival faiths.[4] The survival of religion, and its return as a publicly prominent political and social force in post-Soviet life, are in themselves sufficient grounds for a reexamination of its history.

It is the contention of this book that, despite decades of determined Soviet atheistic campaigns, religious belief, especially in combination with nationalism, remained a crucial social and political force throughout the Soviet era. This was never truer than during the war against the Nazis, when the Soviet system underwent unprecedented strains as it struggled to survive. Religion was not some marginal factor relegated to the periphery of Soviet leaders' concerns. Rather, the Kremlin was well aware of the fact that it had been unable to eradicate religious faith, and Soviet rulers continually took account of religion as a political factor while making policy in a surprisingly wide range of areas. Considerations of religion pervaded Soviet foreign and domestic policies to a degree not generally understood in histories of the USSR.

The Kremlin oligarchs did not enjoy the historian's luxury of being able to divide reality into discrete fragments; they had to deal with interconnected social and political forces as well as with rapidly changing circumstances over which they had only partial control. In order to understand the Soviet approach to religion, therefore, one must look at the problem in the widest possible context, taking into account not only Soviet rulers' intentions and actions but also the limits to their power. The image of Stalin as the master manipulator entirely dominating events, which is common in popular accounts of the Stalin era, cannot survive even the briefest acquaintance with Soviet archives.[5] Although Stalin may have enjoyed personal power greater than any other tyrant in the dictator-infested twentieth century, even he had to take account of concrete obstacles to the imposition of his will. Contrary to widespread belief, he was not free from the pressures of public opinion (even though admittedly these took quite different forms than in the United States or Britain); nor was he free of ideological blinkers. Moreover, even though Stalin wielded life-and-death power over his subjects, he could not always rely on his subordinates to enact his orders unchanged.[6] One very great barrier to his will was the persistence of religious faith among tens of millions of his mostly peasant subjects.

Stalin certainly sought to be the grand puppeteer, forcing his subjects to dance to his tune, and he succeeded in this more often than most dictators. It is a serious mistake to underestimate his power or political acumen, as so many of his rivals found to their cost. The strained efforts of certain revisionist historians to portray the dictator as almost a background figure, the impotent plaything of his advisers and of historical forces beyond his grasp, is even less persuasive than the image of Stalin-the-omnipotent.[7] This study is entitled "Stalin's Holy War," not because the dictator was in total control of events, but rather because his personality and his decisions were essential factors in the development of church-state relations during the war, something that cannot be said of any other individual.

This book is not simply a history of the Russian Orthodox Church during the war, much less a history of Soviet believers. Rather, it is an examination of the religious question in the broadest sense, as it interwove itself into Soviet politics, state security, diplomacy, and propaganda.[8] Owing to the diffuse nature of the subject, this study must be part political history, part traditional diplomatic study, and part social history. The evolution of the Soviet regime's wartime approach to religion can also only be fully understood in the context of Russian history and traditions, Soviet ideology and practice, the specific and shifting circumstances of the war against the Nazis, and the demands of the wartime alliance with the Western democracies.

An examination of the Kremlin's wartime handling of the religious question illuminates a great many crucial aspects of Soviet history. Among the more important are: the degree to which the Soviet public regarded the Communist regime as legitimate, and therefore worth defending; the shaping and definition of individual identities and loyalties among the Soviet populace; the responses of the Stalinist regime to widely held popular beliefs and social pressures; the regime's manipulation of traditional historical and religious images and the way this affected not only the Soviet public but also the Kremlin rulers themselves; the attitude of the regime to Russian and minority nationalism; the function and operation of terror in Stalinist governance; the variable balance, symbiosis, and clash between Russian traditions on the one hand and Communist influences on the other in the formation and conduct of Soviet domestic and international policy; the interaction between foreign and domestic policies; the role of morality, religion, ideology, and propaganda in the East-West wartime alliance; and the comparison and contrast between the goals and methods of the Nazi and Soviet regimes. It is argued here that religion was a significant factor in all of these areas, and a comprehensive history of religion during the war must address each of them.

This long list of important topics goes to the heart of the Soviet "experiment." It is not argued here that religion is the hitherto undiscovered key to Soviet history, the philosopher's stone that allows us to see Soviet reality in its entirety for the first time; nor do I pretend to provide definitive answers to the questions posed here. Rather, the history of religion in the USSR is more like the barium cocktail that a patient swallows before undergoing a body scan. By tracing the circulation of religious issues through the body politic of the Soviet Union, the historian can view more clearly how the Communist system operated on any number of levels. Because so many millions of common people retained their beliefs, and religious questions circulated through the major arteries as well as the veins and capillaries of Soviet life, a focus on religion provides the historian with an excellent, yet neglected, analytical tool.

The role of religion in Soviet life has seldom received its due from historians. During the Soviet years, when the USSR looked from the outside to be enormously powerful and stable, far too many Western scholars adopted unconsciously the Soviet assumption that the church was a "remarkably tenacious relic of the [tsarist] past," at best relegated to a twilight existence, at worst doomed by the powerful forces of urbanization, secular modernization, and Soviet repression.[9] In large-scale histories of the Soviet period, the church always warrants short mention but generally only as one of many victims of Soviet repression, or as just another branch of dissent, less significant than the more prominent secular forms.[10] Authors generally note, accurately enough, that the theological and institutional passivity characteristic of Russian Orthodoxy prevented it from playing the critical role that the Roman Catholic Church played in Poland; but this interpretive framework all too often causes them not to examine its history very deeply.[11] The treatment of church-as-victim is true so far as it goes, but this approach ignores the complexity of religious affairs, the nexus between religion and national identity, the intermittent congruence of interests between the Russian church and Soviet state, as well as the continuing importance of religion in the considerations of Soviet policy makers.

The relative neglect of religion may reflect in part the secular concerns of historians themselves.[12] The church is slighted even in histories of the Second World War, when the Russian Orthodox Church underwent the greatest revival in fortunes that it would experience during the seven decades of Soviet rule.[13] Fifty-seven percent of the Soviet population identified themselves as religious believers in the 1937 census, only four years before the USSR entered the war. Although accurate figures are lacking for the war years, every contemporary source indicates that the number of believers grew dramatically during this time. These facts should demand greater attention than they do from social historians.[14]

The tendency to downplay, or underestimate, the importance of religion in Soviet life is all the more striking given the fact that the Russian church defied the dominant trends of late Stalinist politics, actually growing in numbers precisely at a time when the Kremlin was circumscribing the rest of Soviet culture and intellectual life—reason enough, one might think, to spark historians' interest. Nonetheless, one recent history of "culture and entertainment" in the wartime USSR contains essays on radio, music, the stage, and the creation of "Heroes, Heroines, and Saints," among other subjects, but no chapter on—and almost no mention of—the role of religion.[15] Another new study of the "Soviet Home Front" mentions the Orthodox Church only in passing, ascribing its wartime revival to its "importance as a symbol of continuity with Russian tradition, and of its substantial contribution to mobilizing popular support for the war effort."[16] Although true enough, this is a tremendous simplification of a highly complex phenomenon; among other things, it ignores the crucial international and domestic ethnic dynamics that contributed greatly to the reappearance of the church in Soviet life.

The situation is little better in Russian-language historiography. Although many Russians have a renewed interest in the history of religion since the end of the USSR, historians trained in the Soviet era generally discount the importance of religious belief, even in accounts of the "spiritual life" of the Soviet people during the war.[17] Histories of Soviet foreign relations also ignore religious questions, despite the small but important role played by the Russian Orthodox Church in the conduct of Soviet diplomacy, especially in the critical western borderlands of the USSR, the focus of so many wartime inter-Allied disputes.[18]

Excellent histories of the Russian Orthodox Church are available, to be sure, and these studies treat religion in greater detail and seriousness than do political, diplomatic, or even social histories. Nonetheless, these works often suffer from the overspecialization characteristic of modern academic monographs, examining the history of the church as an institution while often neglecting the political, social, and diplomatic influences that shaped the Soviet state's policies toward religion.[19] Perhaps understandably, such studies concentrate on the overarching story of state persecution of the church and laity, but the more delicate questions of clergy collaboration with Soviet power are consequently neglected. If one reads the history of religion in the USSR purely in terms of the state as oppressor and the church as victim, then it is easy to overlook those instances where both sides' interests intersected, as well as how the Soviet state was itself influenced by the persistence of religion.[20]

A few outstanding studies of religion during the war exist, but these focus almost exclusively on the German-occupied regions, where churches underwent a "great revival."[21] The reason for this has been the relative paucity until recently of reliable documentary sources for the Soviet side of the front line. The only attempts to study the use of the Russian Orthodox Church for foreign policy goals were written before Soviet internal records became available, and they focus on the postwar years, mentioning the late-war period only by way of introduction.[22]

Virtually every history of the Soviet Union during the Second World War, whether scholarly or popular, mentions—if only in passing—the Soviets' adoption of a more conciliatory stance toward the Russian Orthodox Church, generally dating the change from the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in June 1941. The explanations offered for the Kremlin's change of course have varied over time. During the war, many Western observers believed that Stalin eased legal strictures against the Orthodox Church as a "reward" of sorts.[23] Although this was a widely held view at the time, it was not an accurate explanation, as informed people knew well enough. As early as 1927, Metropolitan Sergii, the patriarch locum tenens of the Russian Orthodox Church, had called on his followers to accept and obey Soviet power as divinely ordained.[24] This decision had been controversial at the time and was widely debated in religious circles both within Russia and abroad. Despite Sergii's pledge of loyalty, the situation of the church had dramatically worsened during the succeeding decade; so to view the wartime reappearance of Russian Orthodoxy as the result of some change in the church's attitude toward the state was misleading at best.

With the glow of wartime cooperation long since faded, and the avuncular image of Stalin a distant memory, historians are not inclined to attribute the Soviets' newfound tolerance of religion to the dictator's goodwill, or to the church's repentance of its earlier hostility to the Communist order.[25] Instead, the most common explanation holds that, whereas the Russian people would not fight for Communism, they would go into battle for Russia—the Holy Russia of Orthodox Christianity. As the great Russian author and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes with characteristic venom, "from the very first days of the war Stalin refused to rely on the putrid decaying prop of [Marxist-Leninist] ideology. He wisely discarded it … and unfurled instead the standard of Orthodoxy—and we conquered."[26] This familiar interpretation holds that, reeling from the German attack, the Soviet government immediately eased up on the church in a desperate effort to save itself.[27] Often cited in this regard is Stalin's comment at the end of the war that the Russian people fought for Russia, not "for us," that is, for the Communist Party.[28]

Some historians cite a further factor inducing the Soviet policy shift: Moscow's need to counter German propaganda. From the first days of their invasion of the USSR, the Nazis claimed to be leading a "crusade" in defense of Western civilization against Soviet atheistic atrocities.[29] Owing to institutional infighting, confusion of aims, and the sheer barbarism of Nazi ideology, however, the Germans failed to capitalize on the religious discontent of the Soviet peoples as effectively as they might have done. Nonetheless, so great was the religiously based dissatisfaction with the Stalin regime among average Soviet subjects that the Germans scored some important successes in this area almost despite themselves. A large American interview project of refugees from the USSR after the war suggested that "the church was overwhelmingly considered the sole area in which German rule brought decided improvement."[30] Certainly, Moscow knew of German-sponsored or -tolerated religious activity in the occupied territories, and this was the source of great anxiety. Many historians have therefore reasoned that Stalin's relaxation of strictures on Russian Orthodoxy resulted from the need to compete for the hearts and minds of his subjects—he "could hardly afford to be less generous than the Germans."[31]

The Soviet-era Marxist dissident-historian Roy Medvedev disagrees with such explanations. He denies that the Soviet government relaxed its repression of the church in order to tap Russian nationalism, calling this argument "mistaken." Medvedev points out that, whereas Stalin's speeches, and Soviet propaganda generally, began to feature Russian national themes immediately after the German invasion, the church did not figure in the Soviet press or propaganda until late 1943. "Nobody in Moscow gave [the Russian Orthodox Church] a second thought throughout the whole of 1942," he claims erroneously. He offers an intriguing alternative explanation for Stalin's "concordat" with the church hierarchy in 1943: this was "in effect a cosmetic operation" designed to ease American and British concerns about the Red Army's advance into the center of Europe. In the autumn of 1943, the Soviet army was rapidly recovering Ukraine and looked poised to pour into the Balkan peninsula. Many people in Britain, and even more in the United States, feared that the Kremlin would impose its own Communist system on countries in the path of the victorious Red Army. Stalin thus carefully timed the restoration of the Patriarchate precisely to still such Western fears in advance of the Teheran Conference, where the "Big Three"—Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt—were scheduled to meet for the first time. Although the reopening of Russian churches may well have given comfort to Russian believers, Medvedev writes confidently, "to Stalin this was of secondary importance."[32]

Other Russian historians have also made the connection between the restoration of the Moscow Patriarchate in September 1943 and the dynamics of alliance politics, though their analysis differs somewhat from Medvedev's. Stalin biographer Dmitrii Volkogonov argues that both the demands of the war effort and of international realities convinced the dictator to act. "The [Soviet] High Command," he writes, "valued the patriotic role of the church and wanted to widen its activity." But international considerations were even more important: in the months leading up to the Teheran Conference, Stalin "faced not only the task of accelerating the opening of a second front [in Western Europe] but also the increase in the quantity of military assistance." The prominence in organizations supporting material assistance for the USSR of sympathetic Western church leaders, such as the so-called Red Dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson, persuaded Stalin to make the "publicity gesture" of restoring the Moscow Patriarchate. "It was not the vanity of a former seminary dropout that moved the Soviet leader," Volkogonov concludes, "but rather pragmatic considerations in relation with the Allies."[33]

The Russian Orthodox priest and historian Sergii Gordun also sees the "change in character of [state] relations with the church" as resulting from the approaching Teheran Conference and the Soviet need to bolster sympathetic forces in the West. He claims that Hewlett Johnson had long been agitating for permission from the Soviet government for a visit of a high-ranking delegation of the Anglican Church to Moscow.[34] The Kremlin finally gave its consent in September 1943, not coincidentally only two months before the meeting at Teheran, and the archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, duly visited the Soviet capital. In order to receive him appropriately, Gordun argues, the Russian church needed a leader of proper status; the elevation of Sergii to the patriarchal throne was the result.[35]

The historical arguments outlined here, though not entirely wrong, miss many of the subtle motives underlying Soviet religious policy. They also fail to answer certain questions and indeed raise further ones. For instance, if the Soviet government eased up on the church primarily in order to channel Russian religious nationalism into the war effort, then why did the new spirit of church-state cooperation take so long to come to fruition? Not until September 1943 did the Soviets allow the Russian Orthodox Church to select a new patriarch; only in that year did the state permit the restricted publication of church literature within the USSR, the restoration of churches, and the publication of statements by Orthodox clergy in the Russian-language Soviet press.[36] In other words, true rapprochement between church and state, insofar as it happened at all, did not come about until almost two years after the outbreak of war. The Soviets had been far more hard pressed—and thus in need of support from all domestic groups, including Christians—in the years 1941-42. And yet, during these two years, although the situation of the Orthodox Church did not deteriorate further, and may have even improved slightly, the Soviets kept religious activity on a very tight rein. The first public hints of a religious thaw appeared only after the Soviet victory in the Stalingrad campaign during the winter of 1942-43; and the church only became publicly prominent following Moscow's triumph in the battle of Kursk in July 1943. It would appear on the face of things, therefore, that the church benefited not from hard times, as historians were inclined to argue, but rather from the sharp improvement in the Kremlin's military fortunes from 1943 onward.

Furthermore, if the Soviet government's motive in reactivating the Russian church was to harness specifically Russian nationalism, then why did the overwhelming majority of church reopenings occur in Ukraine and other western border areas, rather than in Russia itself? Most of the regions that underwent German occupation during the war contained only minority Russian populations.[37] The non-Russian inhabitants did not always rejoice at the opening of Russian Orthodox Churches, often in places of worship that had previously housed Greek Catholic or independent Ukrainian Orthodox congregations. In addressing this paradox, it is inadequate simply to argue that the Soviets were countering German propaganda. Berlin's promises of religious freedom made their strongest impact during the opening stages of Barbarossa, before the Soviet population learned firsthand the murderous designs of the invaders. Yet, Soviet religious policy flowered from 1943 through the end of the war, at precisely the same time that German liberationist claims had lost whatever appeal they might once have exercised and as the Red Army was finally driving the Wehrmacht out of the USSR.

Nor can one accept in their entirety the arguments of those who stress foreign policy motives for the change in Soviet religious policies. Although Medvedev makes an excellent point about the diplomatic uses for which the Soviets could employ the Russian Orthodox Church, it is clearly wrong to claim that nobody in Moscow's ruling circles paid any attention to the church until 1943. Whereas the public profile of the Orthodox Church remained very low until that year, even at the time of the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland in September 1939, and again following the Soviet seizure of the Baltic states in the summer of 1940, the church supplied important services for the Soviet state. Moscow used pliant church hierarchs, such as Metropolitan Nikolai and Archbishop Sergii (Voskresenskii)[38], to assist the forcible imposition of Soviet rule in the areas annexed to the USSR as the result of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and successive German-Soviet agreements.[39] From 1941 to 1943, although the church's role was distinctly limited, it was far from inactive; Russian Orthodox hierarchs routinely issued appeals to believers designed to meet the changing demands of the Soviet war effort.

As for the argument that the Kremlin used the Orthodox Church to allay Western fears about the export of Soviet Communism to Western Europe, this is largely true. But Moscow's international religious propaganda began well before 1943. In the summer and autumn of 1941, the Soviets worked hard to dispel the widely held—and entirely accurate—image of themselves as oppressors of religion. They did this in order to cement the anti-Hitler coalition with Britain and the United States, as well as to ensure the flow of Lend-Lease supplies from Washington. Not only did Soviet religious propaganda commence from the very first days of the war, but also Moscow employed a much wider range of tools than just the Orthodox Church to project its image overseas as the protector of Christian civilization; it deployed the full range of its propaganda apparatus, from Moscow radio to Soviet embassies abroad, to members of foreign Communist parties, leftist sympathizers, as well as moles in Western governments.

The Soviet Union's wartime religious policy is easy to misunderstand, because it was a moving target. There was no single Soviet approach to the church; rather, the Kremlin's policies continually evolved in response to developments in the war, within the alliance, and among the populace. At times, the Soviet rulers drove events; more often events drove them. The variability of Soviet policy, as well as the complex fashion that religious considerations interacted with many other political and social factors, helps to explain the confusion and variety of historical explanations that historians have offered for Stalin's restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church. Each approach outlined here grasps only a portion of a much larger story.

The purpose of this book is to explain the complexity and subtlety of the relations between the Soviet state and religion as these changed during the war years. In order to understand the historical context, the balance of this introductory chapter briefly examines the legacy of the tsarist government's relation to the Orthodox Church, especially the ways successive tsars used the church to enhance St. Petersburg's control over the fluid western frontiers of the Russian empire, as well as to advance Russian foreign policies. Stalin's wartime religious policy would mimic this traditional pattern. It also outlines the two decades of Bolshevik antireligious policy before 1939 and how these set the stage for wartime developments.

This book is divided into three parts. The first, "Rediscovering the Utility of Tradition," (chapters 1 and 2) explores the Soviets' initial wartime use of the church during the Red Army's occupation of the western borderlands [a] from 1939 to 1941, as well as the limited revival of religious themes and the church during the first year and a half of the war against Germany. I argue that Moscow's religious policy at this time can only be understood in the context of Soviet security considerations, especially Moscow's concerns about the disaffection of non-Russian nationalities. The Kremlin saw the church not only, and perhaps not even primarily, as a tool for mobilizing and harnessing Russian nationalism throughout the union, but rather as one of several instruments for countering and disarming non-Russian, and anti-Soviet, nationalism. As most tsars could have told Stalin, the Russian Orthodox Church was an effective agent for the Russification of the ethnically diverse and contentious western regions.

Part II, "Fighting the Holy War" (chapters 3 through 5) examines church-state relations as these came to full fruition from 1943, when Stalin entered into his so-called concordat with the Moscow Patriarchate, until the end of the war. I argue here that Stalin decided to employ the church, and specifically to reestablish the Patriarchate as a functioning institution, in order to deal with the complex political problems he and his government faced as the tide turned in the war and Soviet forces began to recover regions formerly occupied by the Germans, and later as the Red Army advanced into Eastern and Central Europe. One of the most serious tasks for the Kremlin at this time was the reestablishment of Soviet power in non-Russian areas, where anti-Soviet nationalists and guerrillas resisted the Red Army, often supported by local clerics. The Russian Orthodox Church could help the Kremlin by bringing order to the chaos of religious affairs in the region. It could tame or remove rebellious clerics while preserving the facade of religious toleration; it also assisted in the Russification of the borderlands. Additionally, the church would be used to contest the influence of the Vatican, which wielded considerable authority among the populace of the western borderlands as well as among the people of East Central Europe.

This was a masterful policy, but Moscow had not counted on the possibility of a spontaneous grass-roots religious revival among the USSR's subjects; this development is examined in the fourth chapter. As the Soviets sought to manipulate Russian Orthodoxy, as well as other Russian national symbols, they began to lose control of the process. Whereas the Kremlin restored the Moscow Patriarchate in order to keep dangerous religious forces in check, this had the unexpected and—for the Soviets at least—alarming effect of fueling the revival of active religious practice at the local level throughout the USSR. The experience of war and the revival of Russian historical themes also changed the Soviet approach to governance in important ways, causing Soviet rulers to define themselves ever more strongly in Russian national terms rather than in the "heroic" Bolshevik tradition.

Part III, "Selling Stalin's Holy War," examines the international propaganda dimensions of the Soviet religious question. The Red Army could not defeat the Germans on its own; Moscow desperately needed Western material and military assistance. (The same was true in reverse, of course, but the Soviet military situation was far more desperate than that of its Western allies.) In order to secure these things, Moscow had to overcome a deep, and entirely justified, legacy of Western popular suspicions about atheistic Communism. Throughout the war, therefore, Moscow and its agents abroad would work tirelessly to eradicate the memory of prewar Soviet religious repression and to replace it with a new image of the USSR as the defender of Christian civilization. For reasons to be explained, they proved surprisingly successful in doing so. The history of this almost entirely forgotten propaganda campaign tells us a great deal about international imaging; differences in Soviet, British, and American cultural perceptions of the USSR; the dynamics of alliance between a totalitarian state and Western democracies; the difficulties faced by reporters working in dictatorial systems; as well as the way wishful thinking, ideological commitment, careerism, and venality can shape the flow of information in wartime.

This international context is vital for a full understanding of the evolving Soviet religious policy, because at several important points religion influenced Moscow's diplomacy, and international affairs often altered Moscow's approach to religion. I argue that an examination of religion's role in the wartime USSR can help us understand the initial Soviet domestic conditions that would go far toward shaping the early Cold War. Yet, the history of the Soviet Union's wartime international use of religion has never been written, nor understood.[40]

In the conclusion I argue that the history of religion during the Second World War tells us a great deal about Soviet domestic circumstances at the outset of the Cold War, of the changing nature of Soviet identity in the postwar world, and indeed about political and social patterns that have persisted into the post-Communist period. The Soviet system passed through an intense and testing fire during the war, and the experience wrought lasting changes. The alchemy of war brought about the seeming reconciliation of opposites: it transformed the lead of Bolshevik internationalism, if not into gold, then at least into the curious alloy of Russian nationalist Communism that is such a visible presence in post-Soviet Russia. Only by first grasping this can one understand the jarring juxtaposition of clashing symbols present in contemporary Communist-nationalist public demonstrations, where people march side by side carrying portraits of Lenin next to those of Nicholas II (whose murder the former ordered), photographs of Stalin beside Orthodox icons that the dictator would gladly have thrown onto the rubbish heap.

Russian national themes had been steadily creeping into Soviet discourse since 1934.[41] But, in order to survive the Nazi onslaught, the Communist regime was forced to meld Russian nationalism with Bolshevism in a much more unrestrained fashion, creating a new, unstable compound. Soviet leaders did not abandon Communism between 1941 and 1945; instead, they tried to reconcile ultimately irreconcilable forces, aggravating the internal contradictions that would in the end help to implode the USSR. To employ Marxist terminology: if Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism were the thesis, and Bolshevik atheism and internationalism the antithesis, then the dialectical synthesis between the two, brought about by the war against Germany, was a flawed and unsteady form of National Bolshevism.