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Soviet Union



Main article: Religion in the Soviet Union

Although the Soviet Union was officially secular, it supported atheist ideology and suppressed religion, though according to various Soviet and Western sources, over one-third of the people in the Soviet Union professed religious belief. Christianity and Islam had the most believers. The state was separated from church by the Decree of Council of People's Comissars on January 23, 1918. Two-thirds of the Soviet population, however, had no religious beliefs. About half the people, including members of the CPSU and high-level government officials, professed atheism. Official figures on the number of religious believers in the Soviet Union were not available in 1989.

Christians belonged to various churches: Orthodox, which had the largest number of followers; Catholic; and Baptist and various other Protestant denominations.

Government persecution of Christianity continued unabated until the fall of the Communist government, with Stalin's reign the most repressive. Stalin is quoted as saying that "The Party cannot be neutral towards religion. It conducts an anti-religious struggle against any and all religious prejudices." In World War II, however, the repression against the Russian Orthodox Church temporarily ceased as it was perceived as "instrument of patriotic unity" in the war against "the western Teutonics". Repression against Russian Orthodox restarted from ca. 1946 onwards and more forcibly under Nikita Khrushchev. In 1914, before the revolution, there were over 54,000 churches, while during the early years of Stalin's reign that number was counted in the hundreds. By 1988, the number had decreased to roughly 7,000. Immediately following the fall of the Soviet government, churches were re-opening at a recorded rate of over thirty a week. Today, there are nearly 20,000.[citation needed]

Although there were many ethnic Jews in the Soviet Union, actual practice of Judaism was rare in Communist times. In 1928, Stalin created the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the far east of what is now Russia to try to create a "Soviet Zion" for a proletarian Jewish culture to develop.

The overwhelming majority of the Islamic faithful were Sunni. The Azerbaijanis, who were Shiite, were one major exception. The largest groups of Muslims in the Soviet Union resided in the Central Asian republics (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) and Kazakhstan, though substantial numbers also resided in Central Russia (principally in Bashkiria and Tatarstan), in the North Caucasian part of Russia (Chechnya, Dagestan, and other autonomous republics) and in Transcaucasia (principally in Azerbaijan but also certain regions of Georgia).

Other religions, which were practiced by a relatively small number of believers, included Buddhism (mostly Vajrayana) and paganism (which was largely shamanic), a religion based on spiritualism. The role of religion in the daily lives of Soviet citizens thus varied greatly.

Culture

Main article: Culture of the Soviet Union
Worker and Kolkhoz Woman over the northern entrance to the All-Soviet Exhibition Centre in Moscow (today the All-Russia Exhibition Centre)
Worker and Kolkhoz Woman over the northern entrance to the All-Soviet Exhibition Centre in Moscow (today the All-Russia Exhibition Centre)

The culture of the Soviet Union passed through several stages during the USSR's 70-year existence. During the first eleven years following the Revolution (1918–1929), there was relative freedom and artists experimented with several different styles in an effort to find a distinctive Soviet style of art. Lenin wanted art to be accessible to the Russian people. The government encouraged a variety of trends. In art and literature, numerous schools, some traditional and others radically experimental, proliferated. Communist writers Maksim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky were active during this time. Film, as a means of influencing a largely illiterate society, received encouragement from the state; much of director Sergei Eisenstein's best work dates from this period.

Later, during Joseph Stalin's rule, Soviet culture was characterised by the rise and domination of the government-imposed style of Socialist realism, with all other trends being severely repressed, with rare exceptions (e.g. Mikhail Bulgakov's works). Many writers were imprisoned and killed.[19]Also religious people were persecuted and either sent to Gulags or were murdered in their thousands[20] though the ban on the Orthodox Church was temporarily lifted in the 1940s, in order to rally support for the Soviet war against the invading forces of Nazi Germany. Under Stalin, prominent symbols that were not in line with communist ideology were destroyed, such as Orthodox Churches and Tsarist buildings.

Following the Khrushchev Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s, censorship was diminished. Greater experimentation in art forms became permissible once again, with the result that more sophisticated and subtly critical work began to be produced. The regime loosened its emphasis on socialist realism; thus, for instance, many protagonists of the novels of author Iurii Trifonov concerned themselves with problems of daily life rather than with building socialism. An underground dissident literature, known as samizdat, developed during this late period. In architecture Khrushchev era mostly focused on functional design as opposed to highly decorated style of Stalin's epoch.

In the second half of 1980s, Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost significantly expanded freedom of expression in the media and press, eventually resulting in the complete abolishment of censorship, total freedom of expression and freedom to criticise the government.[21]

The following articles contain information on specific aspects of Soviet culture:

Audio

See also

Main article: List of Soviet Union-related topics

References

  1. ^ Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Britannica
  2. ^ (Russian)Voted Unanimously for the Union
  3. ^ (Russian)Creation of the USSR at Khronos.ru
  4. ^ 70 Years of Gidroproekt and Hydroelectric Power in Russia
  5. ^ (Russian) On GOELRO Plan—at Kuzbassenergo
  6. ^ The consolidation into a single-party regime took place during the first three and a half years after the revolution, which included the period of War Communism and an election in which multiple parties competed. See Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase 1917–1922. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955, 1966.
  7. ^ Matthew White according to Matthew White's research
  8. ^ W. Tompson, The Soviet Union under Brezhnev, (Edinburgh, 2003), p. 91
  9. ^ The red blues—Soviet politics by Brian Crozier, National Review, June 25, 1990
  10. ^ Origins of Moral-Ethical Crisis and Ways to Overcome it by V.A.Drozhin Honoured Lawyer of Russia
  11. ^ Robert L. Hilliard; Michael C. Keith (2006). The Broadcast Century and Beyond: a Biography of American Broadcasting. Elsevier, p. 271. ISBN 0240805704. 
  12. ^ a b c Main Intelligence Administration (GRU) Glavnoye Razvedovatel'noye Upravlenie - Russia / Soviet Intelligence Agencies
  13. ^ a b The SVR Russia’s Intelligence Service
  14. ^ Country Profile: Russia Foreign & Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom
  15. ^ Memorandum of Understanding, AcqWeb, 7 February 2007
  16. ^ a b 1990 CIA World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved on 2008-03-09.
  17. ^ Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, "Demographic Sources of the Changing Ethnic Composition of the Soviet Union," Population and Development Review 15 (December 1989): 609–656.
  18. ^ Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver. 1984. "Equality, Efficiency, and Politics in Soviet Bilingual Education Policy, 1934–1980," American Political Science Review 78 (December): 1019–1039.
  19. ^ Rayfield 2004, p. 317-320.
  20. ^ Rayfield 2004, p. 121-122
  21. ^ "Gorbachev, Mikhail." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2 Oct. 2007 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9037405>. "Under his new policy of glasnost (“openness”), a major cultural thaw took place: freedoms of expression and of information were significantly expanded; the press and broadcasting were allowed unprecedented candour in their reportage and criticism; and the country's legacy of Stalinist totalitarian rule was eventually completely repudiated by the government."

References

  • Armstrong, John A. The Politics of Totalitarianism: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1934 to the Present. New York: Random House, 1961.
  • Brown, Archie, et al, eds.: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
  • Gilbert, Martin: The Routledge Atlas of Russian History (London: Routledge, 2002).
  • Goldman, Minton: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (Connecticut: Global Studies, Dushkin Publishing Group, Inc., 1986).
  • Grant, Ted: Russia, from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, London, Well Red Publications,1997
  • Howe, G. Melvyn: The Soviet Union: A Geographical Survey 2nd. edn. (Estover, UK: MacDonald and Evans, 1983).
  • Katz, Zev, ed.: Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities (New York: Free Press, 1975).
  • Moore, Jr., Barrington. Soviet politics: the dilemma of power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950.
  • Rayfield, Donald. Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him. New York: Random House, 2004 (hardcover, ISBN 0-375-50632-2); 2005 (paperback, ISBN 0375757716).
  • Rizzi, Bruno: "The bureaucratization of the world : the first English ed. of the underground Marxist classic that analyzed class exploitation in the USSR" , New York, NY : Free Press, 1985.
  • Schapiro, Leonard B. The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase 1917–1922. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955, 1966.

External links

This article contains material from the Library of Congress Country Studies, which are United States government publications in the public domain.

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Republics of the Soviet Union
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Autonomous Republics of the Soviet Union
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Autonomous oblasts of the Soviet Union
Coat of arms of the Soviet Union




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