Question of the Return of the Power of the Saints of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Context of the Stalinian Religious Throat

Abstract

The main purpose of the article is to present a comprehensive view of the fate of relics of Orthodox saints in the context of state-church relations between 1943 and 1948, when a partial revival of the traditional forms of church life took place. The policy of the Soviet government aimed at normalizing state-church relations raised hopes among the believers and the hierarchy of the Moscow Patriarchate for the return of the holy relics which survived during anti-religious campaigns and were kept in various museums of the country. However, the Council for the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church did not intend large-scale return of the relics to the Church, confining itself to only a few relics which were supposed to symbolize the improvement in the position of the Church in the Soviet Union. On the basis of the archival materials, primarily, the documents of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the letters of Patriarch Alexis I, the article shows how the relics of ten Russian saints were returned to the Church thanks to the persistent petitions of the clergy and believers who applied to the highest bodies of state power. In addition to these historical sources, 20 research papers were used in the article. Unlike the confiscation of holy relics in 1918–1920 accompanied by a “revelatory” anti-clerical propaganda campaign, the partial return of the relics in the second half of the 1940s occurred as if secretly from the society and was mainly witnessed by regular Orthodox church-goers. The atheistic authorities did not want to attract public attention to individual cases of return of the holy relics to the Russian Orthodox Church since it once again meant a partial revision of the previous religious policy carried out in the 1920s and 1930s, contributed to the influx of pilgrims and worshippers to the returned relics, and, consequently, to the strengthening of the position of the Church in the Soviet society. A change of the attitude of the Soviet state towards the Russian Orthodox Church in the second half of 1948 stopped the process of returning the relics of the saints.