Word: orthodox
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Ever since Christianity first reached it 1,100 years ago, the Ukraine has been strongly religious. Located southwest of Moscow, the region, with a population of 50 million, is agriculturally rich and deeply nationalist. In the 1930s Stalin all but crushed the autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church and in 1946 expunged Eastern-rite Roman Catholicism in favor of the more easily controlled Russian Orthodox Church. Even so, the Ukraine by official count still has 4,000 of the 11,000 Orthodox churches now open in the U.S.S.R.-only a fraction of the 53,000 churches in Russia before 1917. Protestant Ukrainians...
...Protestants in the Ukraine are a divided minority, while the Orthodox Church seems to be thriving. Orthodoxy's well-being is partly the result of a new nostalgia for the past apparent in the Soviet Union today. Along with all folk art, architecture and antique mementos, there is a great vogue for icons, church music and church history...
...most affecting Orthodox display is in Oster, a 1,000-year-old town some 70 miles from Kiev. This is the diocese where Prince Vladimir proclaimed Christianity the state religion in A.D. 989. The bells of the Byzantine Church of the Resurrection are ringing. There is a red carpet. People offer flowers. Father Vladimir Shtepa, apologizing for his parish's lack of important icons, says: "The people are our treasure." The 5,000 parishioners are mostly farmers and seem old, though again some 30% are young. Shtepa professes a religious relativism: "The main principle of Christianity and Marxism...
...What Orthodox priests feel personally no doubt varies, but they clearly know the rules. Says Igor Sokolov, the Council for Religious Affairs spokesman on the tour: "The Orthodox Church is completely loyal to the state. It is good that its priests go to a seminary where they see the relationship clearly-the archbishops on one wall and the Soviet leaders on the other. Without this training, priests might be uneducated village people, perhaps fanatics. It is better this...
From this sophisticated state point of view, seminaries can be useful-if properly supervised. That may explain why the Soviet Baptists are supposed to get a seminary soon, their first since 1928.' The Baptist faith, the main Protestant group, was often persecuted by the Czars because of Orthodox dominance so that when Lenin suppressed Orthodoxy after the Revolution, he was at first lenient with Baptists. But since the late 1920s Baptists have not fared well. They number 200,000 in the Ukraine, about half the official total in the U.S.S.R...