Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

s broken up, fines, and so on, one’s stomach ulcers demand some peace and quiet: After all, they say, the Word of God is preached in the registered church, people are converted, and God is blessing there too. This has meant that the CCECB remnant has become more purist and exclusivist.: Documents in recent years. convey a sense of futility.”9 Evaluation : -What did Administrirovanie achieve?’ As one rather frank atheist pointed out in the pages of Komsomolskaya Pravda in 1965, “the-closing of a parish does not make atheists of the believers. On the contrary, it attracts people all the more to religion and in addition embitters their hearts.”*° The rapid expansion of a “religious underground’ was without question the most unacceptable result for.a regime that fears anything it cannot control. The brutality and violation of “socialist legality” not only alienated believ- ers but also produced sympathy for believers from the general public. The administrative measures: especially awakened a world opinion that has.had at least some impact on the ability of the Soviet Union to conduct foreign relations, at. least after. the Helsinki Agreement of 1975. The regime itself had obviously not itself anticipated a:dissent that would prove to be as crea- tive and persistent as its persecutors. a : ~ Even an evaluation of vospitanie must be more negative than positive. Standard propaganda campaigns with their slander strained the credulity of even the most gullible. The average Soviet citizen today claims that .no one except atheist activists reads Soviet propaganda. Instead, during the past decade, experienced observers have been reporting a growing. interest in re- ligion, particularly among the young and the intellectuals.. Positively speak- ing, however, since approximately 1966 there has been steady improvement in the quality of atheist research. Sociological studies actually demonstrated greater religiosity than expected. The sociology of religion can now claim the results of. a number of thorough field studies but sociological theory is still rather limited: and heavily dependent on the standard dictates of Marxist ideology. ° ee 4 : ‘During the past two decades of the antireligious emphasis, instead of observing a transformation from socialism to communism, the reverse has been the case. There has been:widespread loss: of commitment to commu- nism as ideology and it is quite apparent that communism is further away The Khrushchev Campaign Against Religion 153 now than it was in 1959. Closely related to this loss of faith in communism has also been a loss in cohesiveness of the population. In short, for'the So- viet leaders, it has been a very costly campaign. ce But it was'also a very costly campaign for the evangelicals. It produced a major split in a union that has always been threatened with dissension. Some of the AUCECB’s most experienced and able leaders were badly compromised in the eyes