I. Savin A.

Many “Doesn’t Even Consider the Possibility, that the Cultist Could be an Honest Man” Brezhnev’s Turn in Anti-religious Policy and Russian Protestantism (1964–1966)

Authors

I. Savin A.

Keywords:

religious politics, Protestantism, liberalization, Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Committee for State Security of the Soviet Union, Brezhnev’s era, religious dissidents.

Abstract

This article focuses on liberalization of state policy considering religious organizations and on its scale and boundaries during first years of L. I. Brezhnev’s rule. Special attention is paid to the phenomena of reli-gious dissident’s movement, which consisted of Russian protestants and was headed by Evangelical Christian-Baptist’s Council of Churches. Con-clusion was made on the basis of the reports of Committee for State Security of the Soviet Union, Department for Propaganda and Agitation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Council for the Affairs of the Religious Cults, during 1964–1966, that in the mid-1960s a fundamentally new model of interaction between Soviet State and religious organizations was forming. Protestants actively and publicly stood for their rights. However, rejection of mass repressions of the church during Brezhnev’s era, led to the fact, that struggle against religion transformed into futile bureaucratic routine.

Many “Doesn’t Even Consider the Possibility, that the Cultist Could be an Honest Man” Brezhnev’s Turn in Anti-religious Policy and Russian Protestantism (1964–1966)