V. Franchuk. Stalin Died, but His Work Continued
Until Stalin’s death there was less than a month left. Secret documents show that on February 10, 1953, the commissioner of the Council for Religious Cults P. Vilkhovy sent, as a document of special state importance, a report addressed to the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR D. S. Korotchenko and simultaneously to three secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In this report he communicated, with reference to the letter of the commissioner of the Council for Religious Cults for Vinnytsia Oblast dated February 6, 1953, No. 4‑ss, an extraordinary incident.
In the school of the village Katsmazovo, Stanislavsky District, when the class teacher read the leading article:
“Vile Spies and Murderers under the Mask of Professor‑Doctors,” the sixth‑grade pupil Nina Melnik loudly declared: “Poisoning them — they did a very good thing.” The other pupils were greatly outraged by such a hostile statement.
***The next day Nina Melnik and her friend Lyuba Kokhanyuk did not come to school, but went to the village Andreyevka, Shargorod District, to the relatives of Lyuba Kokhanyuk and stayed there for several days.***352
The statement of the sixth‑grader is not worth commenting on now. What is of interest is the further reaction of the authorities. Vilkhovy continues:
Nina Melnik’s father works on a collective farm and is supposedly an unbeliever, while her mother is a believer and a member of the religious community of Evangelical Christians‑Baptists in the village Katsmazovo. The parents and relatives of Nina Melnik’s friend Lyuba Kokhanyuk are also members of the Katsmazovo community of Evangelical Christians‑Baptists.
***I have instructed the commissioner of the Council for Religious Cults for Vinnytsia Oblast to check the activity of this prayer house with the aim of closing it.***353
Perhaps this instruction of Vilkhovy is also not worth commenting on.
But the conclusions are self‑evident: only a moment remained, only a shaky line remained before believers would be “declared enemies of the people” and “spontaneously arising meetings of workers everywhere” would demand — “with contempt and anger” — to settle once and for all not only the question of “remnants of the past” but also the question of the bearers of those remnants. Everything was ready to let the beast off the leash.
Everything was ready.
But there is a Lord in heaven — and He who keeps His people neither slumbers nor sleeps. And He is never late. He was not late in that terrible hour either.
In early March 1953 Stalin died. One needs to know the psychology of ordinary Soviet people of that time in order to understand what changes in their consciousness and thinking this could bring about. Gradually the mass faith in Stalin as a genius and leader changed: to a large extent people lost the sense of fear.
For a long time the shadow of Stalin would hover over the land of the Soviets — even after the terrible cult of personality was debunked by Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress.
And only in October 1961 would the CPSU at its 22nd Congress adopt a resolution stating:
*Recognize as inexpedient the continued preservation in the Mausoleum of the sarcophagus with the coffin of J. V. Stalin, since Stalin’s serious violations of Lenin’s precepts, abuse of power, mass repressions against honest Soviet people, and other actions during the period of the cult of personality make it impossible to leave the coffin with his body in the Mausoleum of V. I. Lenin.*361
The body of the other great villain in the Mausoleum on Red Square, however, continues to be carefully preserved to the present day.
Khrushchev’s Time After Khrushchev delivered his revelatory report at the closed session of the 20th Congress of the CPSU (they say he read it for seven hours!), in which terrible facts of the consequences of the cult of personality were pointed out, many people were simply in a state of confused bewilderment. Gradually people began to speak aloud about the mistakes made during the period of Stalin’s rule. Yet this was not of such a character as could fundamentally shake the established state system.
An amnesty was declared, and many prisoners returned home, including convicted believers. The time of the “Khrushchev Thaw” arrived. It seemed that now legality would be fully restored. People breathed with hope. The change in government did, after all, give some grounds for hoping for changes for the better. It was precisely at this moment that many Pentecostals believed that the moment had come when their church could obtain the possibility of existing legally. However, despite the death of the “leader,” the policy of repression against believers did not cease altogether.
Yes, it was formally noted that there were “isolated instances of violations of legality” against believers: illegal dismissals from work, closures of prayer houses, demands for lists of believers from church leadership, insulting believers’ feelings, censuses of those attending prayer meetings, and incorrect interpretation and insulting mockery of the subject of their faith. Meanwhile, documents can dispassionately testify to how matters actually stood.
Vilkhovy’s report written in 1956 states that “a certain portion of Pentecostals did not join the AUCECB and continues to operate on an unauthorized basis.“362 This document notes that from that year a systematic extermination of churches and believers began. That policy did not change over the course of many years. Regardless of who came to power, the state’s policy was guided by the interests of the Communist Party. This applied both to the foreign and to the domestic policy of the state. There was only one permissible ideology — the ideology of the “builder of communism,” to whom “old wives’ tales” and “imperialist tricks” were alien. Faith in anything else was taken as a terrible dissent, as a hostile disposition; any dissent was seen as malicious slander against the Soviet system. Many were simply carried away by this struggle. Many revolutionary and military terms passed into the ordinary speech of people. And the expression “struggle against religion” became one of those ordinary expressions. People were given an image of another enemy against whom they could direct their forces. And it worked. This had a double result: it rooted out any opposition, and also united people against an imaginary enemy and made them an obedient tool in the hands of the government.
When Stalin died, my father and both my grandfathers were in prison. My father told me that the camp commanders in Vorkuta, where he was exhausted from backbreaking work in the mine, lined up the prisoners to announce an event of national importance. Seeing the confused and saddened faces of the camp administration, the prisoners began to guess what had happened. Their suspicion was further heightened when an advance order was given that after the message was read, all were to remove their hats and bare their heads in silence. At last, the announcement of Stalin’s death rang out. This provoked an explosion of delight and rejoicing. The prisoners’ hats flew into the air amid enthusiastic shouts…
A time of hope for change began. On March 9, 1953, Stalin was buried on Red Square. For many it was a time of sincere mourning and personal tragedy, for some it was a time when one could say: “We ought to erect a monument to death. No one but it could have delivered us from him.”359
Brothers from the AUCECB also had their say—in their telegram to the government, which read verbatim:
On behalf of the believers of the Evangelical Christians-Baptists of the Ukrainian SSR, we express our profound condolences on the grievous loss of the greatest standard-bearer of peace, the leader of all progressive humanity, the creator of the great Stalin Constitution, our own dear and beloved Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. The believers and the leadership will manifest the greatest unity and cohesion around the Government of the Soviet Union.
Assistants to the senior presbyter of the AUCECB for the Ukrainian SSR Ponomarchuk, Mitskevich 360 incomplete data of the Council, “there are still up to 12,000 Pentecostals” who operate in such a spontaneous manner.
Vilkhovy continued:
In order to counteract to some extent the harmful, anti-state activities of the Pentecostals, we coordinated measures with the Committee for State Security under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, and, with the sanction of the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults, we gave the senior presbyter of the ECB for the Ukrainian SSR the opportunity to carry out work among Pentecostal groups with the aim of detaching them from the Pentecostal cult and attaching them to the registered ECB congregations363
This was a definite tactic based on the principle of “divide and rule.” The doctrinal differences that existed between the Pentecostals’ and Evangelical Christians-Baptists’ understanding were used to “control” some and “neutralize” others. It turned out that with the assistance of certain workers from the AUCECB leadership, Pentecostal leaders were accused and sentenced to many years of imprisonment. (This does not, of course, give grounds to divide people into two camps at the present moment. Each will give an account to God for himself, for his deeds. Both those who informed and those who were in prison knew why they were doing it. The right of judgment belongs to the Lord.)
At that time, the proud slogan was: “The building of socialism in the USSR became a time of unprecedented growth of godlessness in the country.”364 And this growth, naturally, was carried out by means of various “special” methods. The resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU of July 7, 1954, “On Major Shortcomings in Scientific-Atheist Propaganda and Measures for Its Improvement” contains such paragraphs.
“The Central Committee of the CPSU notes that many party organizations are unsatisfactorily directing scientific-atheist propaganda among the population, as a result of which this most important sector of work is neglected. At the same time, the church and various religious sects have considerably enlivened their activity, strengthened their cadres, and, flexibly adapting to modern conditions, are intensively spreading religious ideology among the backward strata of the population. Churchmen and sectarians are seeking out various methods to poison the consciousness of people with religious intoxication, paying special attention to attracting young people and women to the church. They make wide use of their press, preaching and charitable activities, and carry out individual processing of citizens. Religious prejudices and superstitions poison the consciousness of a part of Soviet people, hinder their conscious and active participation in the construction of communism.”365
“‘A position of neutrality and passivity toward the activity of the church and the growth of the influence of religion on our people is taken by many trade union and Komsomol organizations, which have effectively withdrawn from work on the atheistic education of workers, employees, and young people.’”366
“The Central Committee of the CPSU resolves: to oblige the Central Committees of the Communist Parties of the union republics, the krai and oblast committees of the CPSU to put an end to the neglect of antireligious work, to unfold scientific-atheist propaganda. It is necessary to decisively put an end to passivity toward religion, to expose the reactionary essence of religion and the harm it causes by diverting part of the citizens of our country from conscious and active participation in communist construction.”367
This was said already after Stalin’s death, in 1954.
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