Secret Aim For Legalizing MP Revealed

From the current issue of:

SOCIAL SCIENCES-
A QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

No. 1, 2009. Page(s): 28-42

Legalizing the Moscow Patriarchate in 1927: The Secret Aims of the Authorities

Aleksandr MAZYRIN

A. Mazyrin, priest, master of theology, Cand. Sc. (History), associate professor, lecturer, St. Tikhon Orthodox Humanitarian University (PSTGU). This article was first published in Russian in the journal Otechestvennaya istoriya, No. 4, 2008. The work was performed with financial support from the Russia State Scientific Fund, Project No. 07-10-00180a.

Historians pay much attention to relations between the atheist Soviet authorities and religious organizations. In the early 1990s, it became possible to study not only the official policies in respect of the religions and the Church but also some secret aims behind them. As a result, we have a number of fundamental studies on Church-State relations in the Soviet period. They, however, predominantly consider either the first years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution (till 1925 inclusive) or the war (1941-1945) and postwar periods.1 What failed to be studied in depth was the secret aims that the Soviet authorities pursued in allowing the legalization of the Moscow Patriarchate (1927), an organization that refused to accept the communist (atheistic) ideology. Read More...