Orthodoxy and the Soviet Regime: From Conflict to Adaptation

ABSTRACT The Soviet authorities applied the most rigid model of state–confessional relations—segregation—to the Russian Orthodox Church. They emphasized the complete exclusion of the church from public life and its subsequent liquidation. By 1919 the Church was already publicly avoiding conflict with the Soviet authorities; its attempts at adaptation, however, were unsuccessful. By 1939, the church organization in the Soviet Union was practically eliminated, though the majority of the population still believed in God. This fact, as well as foreign-policy interests and the loyalty to the state exhibited by the majority of believers during the war, led to a softening of the segregation model and to the church’s adaptation to operating within the Soviet state.