Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

accuracy of the believers’ complaints.°2 Following the meeting, local abuses were reduced and it seemed that the ouster of Khrushchev in October 1964 might lead to further easing of the pressure: ae The Brezhnev-Kosygin Appro Phase V: Year of Drift, 1965 - sary - The. official legal journal, Sovetskoie Gosudarstvo i Pravo in: its January 1965 issue called for a more correct interpretation of the laws on re- ligion, officially condemning the crude administrative measures which had been taken during Khrushchev’s personality cult. The level of atheist propa- ganda continued (about 300 titles were published, and 738,188 lectures sponsored), but there was a significant change in tone.5# The January 1965 issue of Nauka i religiia (Science and Religion) received a more colorful format to make it more appealing, and the Ukrainian counterpart changed its name from The Militant Atheist to Man and the World (Liudynai svit) There was also a virtual moratorium on slanderous attacks against believers in the press, ts uae In March 1965 a letter from the editors of Nauka i religiia attacked the atheist propagandist Alla Trubnikova for the reprehensible methods she employed in her investigations and also-for the substance of her articles which depicted believers ‘as scoundrels or vagrants or mental. and moral cripples” and had argued that “religious practice is a form of criminal be- havior” and thatbelievers were enemies of Soviet society. Instead the edi- tors argued that. believers were loyal citizens and that patient dialogue, not slander, would win them away from their foolish ideology. This attack on Trubnikova was supported by other well-known atheist activists such.as the former theologian Osipov. Trubnikova: herself wrote a sharply defensive reply, which Nauka i religiia also printed. In short, during the early part of 146 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il 1965, there were the beginnings of a debate in the press about religious policy. Another very significant event was the dismissal in January 1965 of the chief ideologue against religion, N. F. Iichev. Not only was he dismissed, but the ideological commission that he had headed was dissolved and its duties divided among a number of other bodies. In August both state coun- cils for religious affairs called meetings of their local officials where they, too, called for a halt in administrative abuse. Chairman Puzin, however, did inform his listeners that their task had been to “isolate the Orgkomitet from the basic mass of Baptist congregations, so that the leaders of this commit- tee lose the trust and respect of the believers.”*4 Other parts of his speech also warned against administrative abuse but still urged interference in local church affairs. As far as the Baptists themselves were concerned, there were almost no arrests, Aida Skripnikova being a notable exception. A number of persons were releas