Stalin's Concession in Freedom for Protestants at the Demand of America and England

September 12, 2011 · Adam Bondaruk, Baptists, Victor Belykh, AUCECB, Persecution, Interview, KGB, Books, Unregistered Pentecostals, Nikolay Kotyakov, On Emigration, United Church of Evangelical Christians, Vestibule, Petr Saenko, Pentecostals, Religious Mafia, Slavik Radchuk, Contemporary Persecution, Security Services

Even now, not many people know that the condition for opening the second front set by the Allies—the Protestant countries, the USA and Great Britain—was the demand to grant religious freedom in the USSR. Precisely because of the USSR’s dependence on American military aid under Lend-Lease and on their opening of a second front against Germany, Stalin resorted to deception regarding freedom of worship for Protestants in the USSR. But the temporary easing of the Protestants’ plight came to an end when Stalin lowered the Iron Curtain after the war, manipulating believers through the “church religious” authority — the VSEKhB.

Gradually, the mass faith in Stalin as a genius and leader changed: people largely lost their sense of fear. It must be said that the war itself, for all its horror as the greatest tragedy of mankind, especially for the peoples of the Soviet Union, partly contributed to debunking the authoritarian state, its regime and its ideology.

We should agree that “the war put totalitarian thinking to a severe test; unable to withstand the collision with reality, it began to partially crumble. The power of ideological mystifications was greatly shaken. Something also grew that morally undermined the Stalinist regime.

People more deeply felt, and some clearly realized, how severely their free self-activity, the true foundation of social existence, was being restricted or even suppressed by the framework of the repressive regime.” “The people have become wiser, that is indisputable,” Marshal L. L. Govorov told writer Ilya Ehrenburg.”355

Undoubtedly, those who returned from the war could see the difference that existed between the two systems: the socialist and the “decaying” capitalist one. It was enough for people to see the standard of living in the places through which the Soviet Army passed to draw conclusions. Moreover, after the opening of the second front, people’s mood and attitude toward the Western countries began to change. England, America and Russia united against a common enemy, which meant they became allies. People hoped that after the war these countries would provide effective support to the Land of the Soviets. However, these hopes were not destined to come true. People pinned certain hopes on cooperation with the USA and England, but “Stalin urgently needed to turn yesterday’s allies into the image of a new enemy.”356

All this was done systematically, beginning with the conference of the heads of state of the USA, England and the USSR in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam. And already in March 1946, Churchill stated that an “iron curtain” had descended across the European continent.

It remains a rhetorical question whether Stalin and his entourage could have made concessions to the people and given freedom to private enterprise, which would have helped overcome the post-war crisis more quickly. Sweden and, especially, Finland emerged from the war as very poor countries with destroyed economies, but even they, not to mention Western Europe, were able to rise very quickly, restore their economies, and become prosperous countries.

Could the Soviet system really have given land to the peasants by disbanding the collective farms, as the rural population had hoped? Why did it give neither one nor the other, blindly following its delusional ideas of building communism? These are questions for political scientists and historians. Could genuine freedom of religion have been given to the people, and not a forced show staged for the sake of opening the second front? Even now, not many people know that the condition for opening the second front set by the Allies—the Protestant countries, the USA and Great Britain—was the demand to grant religious freedom in the USSR. The thing is, “the Bolsheviks always regarded religion not only as a competitor in the field of ideology, but also as a direct enemy; therefore, they did not intend to expand the concessions they were forced to make to it during the war.”357

When it came to class struggle, religion was the primary enemy. And along with it, its adherents. The most eloquent illustration of the Soviet government’s attitude throughout its existence is the following statement: “Our country, having come forward under the leadership of the Communist Party as the vanguard of the forces of revolutionary renewal of the world, has become an arena of theoretical and practical struggle against religious ideology, of implementing the Marxist-Leninist teaching on the ways of overcoming it.”358

Religion was always viewed by the Soviet government as an alien ideology. Only one ideology had the right to exist in the country: Marxism-Leninism. In 1929, a law on religious cults was issued, which “regulated the activities of all religious organizations.” Since 1930

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