Heise's book is essentially a history of the Lutheran church in Russia from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution to World War II. After reading Veith's review I read the book and found it to be just as gripping an account of the Soviet state's efforts to crush the Lutheran church as Veith said it was.
The Soviet atheists were as brutal and cruel as one could imagine, not just to Lutherans but to all Christians, Catholics, Orthodox and protestant. Their cruelty also extended to Jews and Muslims. No religious person or organization was exempt, but Heise's research focused on the fate of Lutherans.
Veith's summary of Heise's very well-researched book begins with a brief period of freedom after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that deposed the Czar:
At first, with the czar’s restrictions lifted, the Lutherans flourished. They managed to organize themselves into one church body, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Russia, with two bishops. They opened a seminary in Leningrad. They worked with American government and church-related relief agencies in the famine and food shortage that followed the revolution.Despite enormous hardship, the church still managed to cope and survive, but the came Joseph Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, in 1929, one of whose goals was the complete elimination of Christianity in Russia. The main target, Veith writes, was the very belief in God, which violated the Marxist tenets of “scientific materialism.”
Then the Bolsheviks began to implement their anti-religion policies. They proclaimed freedom of religion but only as a private matter; all religion had to disappear from the public square. They confiscated church property, took over all schools, and censored religious publications.
Priests and pastors were labeled “non-productive elements,” since they engaged in no physical or other productive labor, and so were excluded from the “workers’ paradise.” They were described as “former persons,” along with czarist aristocrats and functionaries of the old regime.
As such, they had no rights of citizenship, could not vote, were given no food rations, lost their parsonages, and had to pay higher taxes. In addition, their children were not allowed to attend universities.
In response, church members, many of whom also lost their homes and farms, tithed like never before to support their pastors and their congregations. Lutherans from other countries, especially the Russian Germans who had migrated to the American Midwest, sent contributions.
He continues:
But the Communist Party sought also to erase Christian ethics. “Love your neighbor” violated the Marxist principle of “class struggle.” Thus, pastors could be charged with “preaching class peace.” Lutherans had an extensive network to help the poor and the disabled, but this was held to compete with the state and to keep the deprived “in thrall to their exploiters.” Consequently, the church was defined as an enemy of the state.The only way to achieve this was to ratchet up the persecution. The Soviets devoted an astonishing amount of effort to destroy the church:
One of the Lutheran bishops summed up the goal: “Everything that is connected to the Christian faith or reminds one of it must disappear from the life of the people and its individual citizens.”
It wasn’t just a matter of punishing church leaders and other religious believers for “anti-Soviet activities” or for being “counter-revolutionaries.” Communists assumed that religion would simply die out if they could prevent it from being transmitted to children. But even more than that, the very reminders of religion—the very memory that there used to be a religion—had to be erased.
In an effort to make religion disappear, the Party imposed a new, five-day week, with four days of work, then one day off. The cycle was staggered so that the day off fell on different days for different individuals. The purpose was to eliminate Sunday. The day set apart for worship ceased to exist. But churches responded by meeting once a week at night.All churches had been considered state property, but when the bills couldn't be paid congregations lost the right to meet in them.
Taxes were weaponized. Exorbitant taxes were levied on religious workers and institutions, including a special tax “to support atheist culture.” Heise records a church in 1928 having to pay taxes of 393 rubles; in 1931, it had to pay 3,609 rubles. Other economic sanctions were designed to force churches out of existence.
Churches had to pay up to 22 times the normal rate for utilities.
When a congregation could no longer pay its taxes and other fees—and eventually none of them could—its building would be taken over by the state, to be converted to a factory, a theater, or, in the case of St. Peter’s in Leningrad, an indoor swimming pool.
The new policy also forbade churches from holding religious instruction for children. So pastors met in their apartments with Sunday school teachers to go over the lessons for the week. The Sunday school teachers then met with children in their apartments.The hatred of the communists for Christians is inexplicable in a secular worldview. Why would they condemn good people to hard labor in the bitter cold of Siberia? There's no naturalistic explanation for so many people being infected with such irrational hatred and barbarism.
But informers from the League of the Militant Godless uncovered this work-around. The pastors responsible were arrested. So were the elderly women and teenage girls who taught Sunday school.
They were sent to penal labor camps for as long as 10 years. Seventy-year-old pastors and aged church ladies were given picks and shovels to dig out Stalin’s arctic canal. The elderly died in the brutal conditions, but the younger pastors and young women who survived completed their sentences, after which they returned to their church work.
Despite the cruelties inflicted by the Stalinist communists they failed to extirpate Christianity:
In 1937 a government poll was taken designed to measure the success of the anti-religion policies. Citizens were asked, “Do you believe in God?” Despite the elimination of Sunday worship, the restrictions on religious teaching, and the suppression of the church, a majority of Russians—56.7%—not only said yes but were bold enough to admit it despite the consequences, as some respondents lost their jobs or their university enrollment because they professed their belief in God.The savagery was just beginning. We'll continue Veith's summary of Heise's book tomorrow.
The Communists were flabbergasted. So they launched a more thorough wave of persecution, targeting not only pastors but also choir directors, organists, and ordinary laypeople. And they increased the use of the death penalty.
