We ask you to put an end to lawlessness : Soviet believers letters of s as a form of communication with the government

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1 Available online at ScienceDirect Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 236 ( 2016 ) International Conference on Communication in Multicultural Society, CMSC 2015, 6-8 December 2015, Moscow, Russian Federation We ask you to put an end to lawlessness : Soviet believers letters of s as a form of communication with the government Nadezhda Beliakova a,b, * a Institute of General History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Lenisnskiy prospect, 32 A, , Moscow, Russian Federation b National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute), Kashirskoe shosse 31, Moscow , Russian Federation Abstract The article focuses on letters written by believers to representatives of bureaucratic structures as a form of communication between the population and officials of atheistic creed. Religious people use this legitimate medium and fill it with remonstrative content. A number of letters reflects the formation of Soviet civil consciousness, for example, individual and civil rights construct is used to demand freedom of religion. Letter writers resort to traditional ways of demonstrating loyalty towards the regime, but they invert the situation by construing themselves as lawful citizens who call for observation of their rights and by representing local authorities as law-breakers The The Authors. Published Published by Elsevier by Elsevier Ltd. This Ltd. is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( Keywords: Communication; religion in USSR; believers letters; Soviet ideological campaign; Soviet mass consciousness; others in Soviet society; religion and protest in USSR 1. Introduction Written requests of common people to the supreme authorities were an important communication channel between the government and the population. The party s professed care and keeping of Soviet citizens required a * Corresponding author. Tel.: ; fax: address: beliacova@mail.ru The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( doi: /j.sbspro

2 Nadezhda Beliakova / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 236 ( 2016 ) response from the people, which manifested itself in different ways of demonstrating loyalty, such as taking part in the elections, membership in Soviet public organizations or support for ideological campaigns (Fitzpatrik, 2008). Letter from citizens or from the Soviet public was a mastered way of the mobilization of the population and were widely used in foreign policy as well as in home affairs, for instance to eliminate ideologically hostile elements in Soviet society. The voice of the people was employed by the Soviet government to address the international community, e.g. to speak against the military expansion of the hostile capitalist bloc, against discrimination of ethnic minorities in capitalist countries etc. It could also be aimed at anomalous phenomena in Soviet society, for instance, to stigmatize others, such as black marketeers or religious bigots. A significant amount of Soviet campaigns, especially discriminating ones, commenced with mass letters and requests of the working class. Written requests and messages served to legitimize the official course of the party and were an inherent form of demonstrating loyalty to the party. For example, during the process of the inaction of the constitution in 1977 a body of letters from the clergy affiliated with different confessions was gathered, which praised the freedom of conscience exercised in the USSR. It seems that privatization of public institutions and meanings, which was recorded by researches of Soviet society (Jurchak, 2014; Zubok, 2011) extended to letters from the working class in the post-stalinist period. Common people used legitimate forms of demonstrating loyalty and filled them with personal content. Therein letters started to reflect the diversity of private life in the USSR. Nowadays we can cautiously presume that the main part of the letters to the authorities during the s was personal and can be referred to the precatory category, when the letter writer addressed the authorities with a personal request, asking to facilitate their inclusion into use of public goods for his or her personal services to the Soviet state. This category of letters included denunciations of anomalous network and local authorities, who were indifferent or unjust towards the author. A. Tikhomirov regards this discourse as an inherent part of the Soviet collective behavior model which revealed distrust toward bureaucratic structures, compensated for by personal address to the representatives of the country s supreme power (Tikhomirov, 2013). This genre was so customary for Soviet people that when a believer from Riga stared her letter to Gorbatschev in 1985 by I m not going to write about working conflicts with my administration, nor about my housing problems. My letter concerns moral issues (Beljakova and Dobson, 2015, p. 159) This study forms a part of the relevant research of day-to-day life of common Soviet people. Its original concept consists in analyzing texts produced in religious communities in terms of Soviet official discourse. The study is cross-disciplinary, as it used not only methods of social history, but also historical semantics for analyzing the texts given. 2. Data and methods All letters were included in the archives of state administration departments due to the existence in the USSR of a bureaucratic procedures of processing letters. Nowadays we are provided with an important opportunity to analyze the written heritage of common people, who were unafraid to publicly declare their religious views in atheistic society. The analysis was conducted using a body of letters from the archive of the Council for Religious Affairs under the jurisdiction of the USSR Council of Ministers. The letters concerning religion which arrived to Soviet bureaucratic echelons were all redirected there (about 1000 letters annually). Letters from believers began to be sent on a large scale from the beginning of the 1960s during the anti-religion campaign launched by N. Khrushchev. The letters vary in form and content, which at first made one assume that it would be impossible to study them as a mass source, however, gradually certain consistent patterns became clear, which included frames or forms, which letter writers filled with their own original content. 3. Results and discussion Subjects and topics of the letters written from middle 1960s to middle 1980s can be characterized as stable. For instance, the fact sheet concerning letters and complaints of believers to the 23rd Communist Party Congress, issued by the Central Committee in 1966 maintained that most of the believers appeals to the Congress were caused by the mass closure of churches and that the appeals contained requests for the opening of churches [A]. Twenty years later the stream of letters increased, and requests for the registration of religious communities still prevailed [B].

3 312 Nadezhda Beliakova / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 236 ( 2016 ) The statistical data gained from the research show that most of the letters (70%) written over the span of twenty years amounted to requests for registration of religious communities and for the opening/permission for restorative works of churches or prayer houses. The requests themselves seem to imply disapproval of the Soviet atheistic policy, which considered the decrease in the number of registered churches to be an important index of eradication of religious superstitions. Thus the appeals were a protest against the Soviet ideological system. Did the authors agree with such supposition? A numerous amount of letters is not constructed in accordance with the patterns typical for the remonstrant genre. The authors present themselves as functioning members of Soviet society, who regard the Soviet government with attention and loyalty and are responsive to the policy of care and keeping proclaimed by the party. In the run-up to the 26th Party Congress working people of our country, partisan as well as non-partisan, would like to address the coming Congress with our acute and pressing problems and requests. We, affiliates of the Eastern Catholic Church from the Lvov region, have also decided to turn to the supreme State of the whole people with the issues which trouble us [D] this is a quotation from the address of western Ukrainian Greek Catholics to the supreme authorities in Believers constantly stress that they form part of Soviet society and often call themselves Soviet working people. A considerable amount of letters mentions the Great Patriotic War, which has an inexhaustible legitimizing potential, which present days also confirm. Bryansk believers ended their letter which contained a request for registering a second Evangelical Christian community in the town, with the following: Many of us are old. We have seen the atrocities of the war, we have seen peaceful people die, we have seen houses burn and people suffocate from smoke and gas! Among us are war veterans and disabled people, participants of the partisan movement. And we are filled with sorrow when we realize that we have no opportunity to pray in peace. We call on you once more to facilitate the registration of our community [E]. The concept of special categories of citizens deserving inclusion into the use of public goods was so deep-rooted in the minds of Soviet people that the discrepancy between personal experience and clichés did not seem to matter. We, the church council, disabled veterans, Red Army men and all the orthodox Christians of Nizhnaya Stinova village are writing to you asking to appoint a priest for the congregation of Nizhnaya Stinova village. This is a quotation from the letter written in the middle 1980s by believers of the Lvov region [F]. Believers are trying to present themselves as loyal Soviet people and ignore traditional distrust of the Soviet government towards Western Ukrainians and the controversial interpretation of the Second World War by the population of Western Ukraine. Believers from a village in Chechen-Ingush Soviet Socialist Republic considered themselves to be loyal Soviet citizens as well and needed special attention: Religious people are USSR citizens, many of them participated in the October revolution, in the civil and the Great Patriotic wars, working and retired people. Where is it written that they can be lied to and their rights can be violated [G]. An important constituent part of the letters was an appeal to constitutional and legal provisions. Religious people strove to show that their actions were in accordance with the current law. I am writing to you not only out of need, but also drawing upon the Constitution of the USSR, Clause 12 freedom of worship and freedom of antireligious propaganda is secured for all citizens, also Clause 125 runs: freedom of assembly is guaranteed to USSR citizens by law. Chapter 7 of Section 2 of Part 1 (1a VII) of the momentous Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe passed in August, 1975 and signed among other 34 countries by Secretary General L.I. Brezhnev is called Respect of human rights and freedoms including freedom of thought, of conscience, faith and opinion. It reads that countries will recognize and respect freedom of an individual to profess alone or with other people any religion or faith in accordance with the individual s conscience. The Soviet state endorsed the Final Act and viewed it as the biggest step forward in the history of humanity [H]. Thus Ya. Zavadskiy, the author of a public letter gave strong arguments to support the demand of his fellow believers from Kyrgyzstan to register a community of Mennonite Brethren in Novo-Pavlovka village. A year and a half later believers from the Chechen-Ingush Soviet Socialist Republic employed similar argumentation when they wrote to the journal Religion and Law asking to register their Muslim community [G]. References to the Constitution, to the article and the books written by Kuroedov occur in believers letters from all Soviet republics. Affiliates of different confessions coming from different regions of the USSR perceive their requests in terms of principles of law, which prove the correctness and consistency of their appeals. It is noteworthy

4 Nadezhda Beliakova / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 236 ( 2016 ) that Soviet people, accustomed to follow the changes in the party policy reflected in leading Soviet press perceived Kuroedov s article in the newspaper Izvestia as a sign of the changes in policy concerning religion. In believers letters local authorities are represented as law-breakers. They are accused of cruelty towards common people. We have eighteen responses to our complaints and no one deigned to listen to us From 1983 up to the present time we have visited many institutions and people, who went to Moscow to ensure justice were fined On June, 25, 1984 the chairman of the District Executive Committee held a meeting in the field with us, collective farmers. He threatened to expel us from the communal farm and he threteaned with criminal liability from 2 to 7 years those who went to Moscow to ensure justice; he called us rascals [I]. Believers from the Donetsk region reported that local authorities stealthily closed the church [J]. The letters always stress that non-performance of obligations would lead to a crisis of confidence to the Soviet state in general. Sometimes religious people even dare to compare old pre-soviet practices with contemporary reality, and this juxtaposition is not in favour of the present-day reality. So during the Czech, Hungarian, Romanian occupation our church did not present any threat. And now Soviet authorities not only closed our orthodox church, but also eviscerated our relics. Why are we forced to pray in another church, which we consider to be Uniate? This church personifies for us, Orthodox Christians, the times of occupation. The congregation of this church is supposed to be Orthodox, but why then does everything Uniate remain?! [K]. This is an excerpt from a letter written by religious people from Transcarpathia, where multiconfessional community and proximity of frontiers were felt rather acutely in the 1980s. The fault of local authorities lies not only in causing a credibility crisis. They display a tendency towards separatism by refusing to take orders from the centre. Believers from Uzhinets village in the Chernigov region complained about the authorized representative from the Council for religious affairs P.G. Podolskiy: here is what he says at a meeting in the at the regional party committee, where he was invited for talks on July, 23, He shouted at people: I am Moscow and I will do whatever I want, but I will not let you open the church! [K]. Thus religious people use common and legitimate channel of communication with the authorities filling it with new remonstrant content. In the case of this letters we cannot speak about a paternalistic relationship between a common person and a representative from the authorities. It is demonstrated in the article that a form of communication approved by the government and designed for demonstrating sympathy towards the regime was privatized by common people and filled with a new meaning. The adoption of the new Constitution and the beginning of the propaganda campaign following signing of the Helsinki agreements resulted in ideas which were supposed to be used in foreign policy starting being used in home affairs. The tragedy of the situation was that the display of freedom of conscience in the USSR was primarily demonstrative and was aimed at Western countries so that lies about restrictions on religion in the USSR were exposed. However, the texts oriented at the foreign public were also appropriated by the population of the country. Unexpectedly, Counterpropaganda resonated greatly inside the country, and people addressed the authorities demanding the fulfillment of the obligations. Basically the Soviet government fell into the trap of proclaimed humanism. The discrepancy in the policies was acutely perceived by believers. Threats to draw the attention of international institutions toward the problem (and even demonstrative redirecting of copies of letters to the UN and other international organizations) are found in many letters. One of the letters has a postscript: In case you do not satisfy our request, we will have to resort to the World Council of Churches [F]. 4. Conclusion The texts analyzed together with the practice of their composition are a long-standing cultural norm, which comprises traditional Russian cultural forms of request and the new discourse of Soviet civil consciousness. The analysis conducted showed that the location and the religious affiliation of letter writers did not have to affect the form, the lexis and the contents of letters. Believers employed clichés typical for the Soviet official discourse. Many letters dwell on civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the law. It is obvious that in the religious community the individual and civil rights construct was used to demand enjoyment of freedom of conscience. As in the case of Soviet holidays the genre was privatized, as letters are a means of expressing personal attitude towards state affairs. Through the use of traditional forms of demonstrating allegiance to the regime letter writers reverse the situation and present themselves as loyal Soviet citizens, striving for observance of the law, while local authorities seem not

5 314 Nadezhda Beliakova / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 236 ( 2016 ) just to abuse their power but also to ignore or to refuse to obey the Soviet/party centre. The discourse of distrust towards authorities is manifested vividly in the letters analyzed. It is expressed by detailed description of the activities of local authorities which undermine the allegiance towards the regime. At the same time the unique case of appropriation of Soviet ideological clichés and their employment to the benefit of believes is observed, which is revealed in the demand for the improvement of the daily life of loyal citizens of the Soviet Union. Acknowledgements This research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation. Project # Individual, ethnos, religion in intercultural communication: history of shaping of the civil identity in Russia and internationally. References Beljakova, N.A., and Dobson, M. (2015). Zhenshini v evangelskikh obshinakh poslevojennogo SSSR e gg. Issledovanije i istochniki [Women in Evangelical communities in the post-war USSR in the s. Research and sources]. Moscow: Indrik. Fitzpatrik III. (2008). Povsednevnij stalinism. Sotsialnaya istoria sovetskoy Rossii v 30-e godi [Everyday stalinism. Russia s social history in the 1930s]. Moscow: Rosspen. Jurchak, A. (2014). Eto bilo navsegda, poka ne konchilos. Poslednee sovenskoje pokolenije [It was forever until it ended. The last Soviet generation]. Moscow: Novoje literaturnoje obozrenije Tikhomirov, A. (2013). Regim prinuditelnogo doverija v Sovetskoj Rossii, godi [ The regime of forced trust in Soviet Russia, ]. Neprikosnovennij zapas [Reserve Stock], 92(6). URL: (accessed on ). Zubok, V.M. (2011). Neudavshajasja imperija: Sovetskij Sojuz v holodnoj voine ot Stalina do Gorvatchjeva [The failed empire: The USSR during the Cold War from Eltsin to Gorvatchev]. M: Rossijskaja politicheskaja entsiklopedija, Presidentskij tsentr B. N. Eltsina [Moscow: Russian encyclopedia of politics, Presidential centre of Boris Eltsin]. Archives A. Gosudarstvennij arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [Russian state archive]. F. R Op. 6. D. 73 [Fund 6991, Inventory 6, File 73]. B. Gosudarstvennij arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [Russian state archive]. F. R Op. 6. D 2723 [Fund 6991, Inventory 6, File 2723]. C. Tsentralnij gosudarstvennij arkhiv goroda Moskvi [Moscow s central archive]. F Op. 1. D. 74 [Fund 3004, Inventory 1, File 74]. D. Gosudarstvennij arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [Russian state archive]. F. R Op. 6. D [Fund 6991, Inventory 6, File 1998]. E. Gosudarstvennij arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [Russian state archive]. F. R Op. 6. D [Fund 6991, Inventory 6, File 2036]. F. Gosudarstvennij arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [Russian state archive]. F. R Op. 6. D. Д [Fund 6991, Inventory 6, File 2952]. G. Gosudarstvennij arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [Russian state archive]. F. R Op. 6. D [Fund 6991, Inventory 6, File 1891]. H. Gosudarstvennij arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [Russian state archive]. F. R Op. 6. D. 954 [Fund 6991, Inventory 6, File 954]. I. Gosudarstvennij arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [Russian state archive]. F. R Op. 6. D. 928 [Fund 6991, Inventory 6, File 928]. J. Gosudarstvennij arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [Russian state archive]. F. R Op. 6. D.2989 [Fund 6991, Inventory 6, File 2989]. K. Gosudarstvennij arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [Russian state archive]. F. R Op. 6. D.3496 [Fund 6991, Inventory 6, File 3496]. L. Gosudarstvennij arkhiv Rossijskoj Federatsii [Russian state archive]. F. R Op. 6. D.3498 [Fund 6991, Inventory 6, File 3498]. M. Rossijskij gosudarstvennij arkhiv novejshej istorii (RGANI) [Russian State Modern History Archive]. F. 5. Op. 33. D. 91. R.4792 [Fund 5, Inventory 33, File 91, Leaf 4792].