Introduction: The Communist Legacy and the New Religious Landscape

Nihil obstat—nothing stands in the way. These words, signed by the Catholic diocesan censor, once were inscribed on the reverse of a book's title page, thereby signifying, to the faithful, that the volume in question contained no doctrinal or moral errors. This inscription was followed by the word, imprimatur—let it be printed—which was signed by the archbishop or bishop.

In affixing nihil obstat as the title of this book, I do not imply any guarantee that its contents are "doctrinally without error." Rather, the words are employed to suggest that, with the collapse of the communist power monopoly throughout what used to be called the Soviet-East European region, literally nothing stands in the way of new religious movements, groups, and associations, including many previously illegal.

In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s the religious landscape throughout the region gave the striking impression that traditional religions, generally organized on a hierarchical basis, clearly predominated. Here, one found the Roman Catholic Church of Poland, headed by the primate and supported by archbishops and bishops, the Romanian Orthodox Church, headed by a patriarch and supported by metropolitans and archimandrites, the Lutheran Church of Hungary headed by its bishop, and so forth. The processes of secularization and religious innovation which had spread throughout North America and Western Europe seemed unable to penetrate the communist domain, while traditional religions seemed to flourish. Communism in its own brutal way ultimately protected the religions of which it approved, crushing rival religious associations that failed to obtain its sanction.

A comparison with the precommunist era is revealing. In Russia, for example, the communists should be credited for eradicating the Flagellants (the Khlysty) as well as the so-called Sect of the Castrated (the Skoptsy), which split off from the Flagellants in the late eighteenth century in the province of Oryol. The Sect of the Flagellants, centered in the city of Kostroma, was created in the mid-seventeenth century by Danilo Filippovich, a Russian peasant who claimed to be an incarnation of God. At first, the sect displayed marked tendencies toward political protest, but these evaporated in the course of the nineteenth century. The Castrates, also known as the "White Doves," broke away from the Flagellants in the 1770s. They were largely inspired by Andrei Ivanov Blokhin, a runaway serf, and Kondratii Ivanovich Selivanov, a peasant from the village of Stolbov—Selivanov claiming to be the reincarnation of both Jesus Christ and the murdered Tsar Peter III of Russia. The Bolsheviks did not object to the sect's practice of self-mutilation, but they abominated its members' antiestablishment attitudes; after 1929 the Sect of the Castrated was subjected to stiff repression. In its abomination of radical, antihierarchical sectarian movements, the Bolshevik regime displayed attitudes that paralleled and underpinned those of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Bolsheviks were especially suspicious of mystical and occult groups, and as early as February 1918 they issued an order to local Theosophists, Anthroposophists, and other unorthodox societies to terminate their activities by year's end. Although the Bolshevik government disbanded Moscow's Free Academy of Spiritual Culture, closed presses that had been publishing occult and mystical materials, confiscated occult books from libraries, and exiled almost all of the leading intellectual figures associated with these currents, accompanying these actions with a barrage of volleys in the party press, occult societies continued their work in Russia until 1929, when a dramatic escalation of antireligious campaigns (including the arrests of members) wiped out almost all traces of them. The Bolsheviks also were responsible for the suppression of the Old Believers, the True Orthodox Church, the Belorussian Orthodox Church, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and they erected formidable barriers to the continued work of various Protestant groups, not to mention the Sufi (Islamic) orders, while some believers, such as the Mennonites, fled Russia at that time. Some pockets of sectarianism remained (e.g., small groups of priguni (jumpers), nostoiannie (insisters), and maksimisti (maximalists) in Armenia in the late 1970s), but most Soviet-era writers on religion expressed confidence that the general trend was toward the eventual extinction of these groups.

In Romania, Baptists, Pentecostals, and other evangelical Christian groups enjoyed relative freedom from 1928 until 1937 before being repressed under Marshal Antonescu. But after the communists seized power, these groups were seen as "posing very serious internal security problems, and great vacillation and perplexity always have existed among state authorities regarding the wisest ways to deal with them."

Or again, in Czechoslovakia the Jehovah's Witnesses, who began their activity in the Czech lands in 1907, were a registered religious community from 1934 until 1939. Banned by the Nazis in 1939, they resumed their activity in 1945, only to be outlawed for a second time by the communists in 1949.

The most celebrated case of suppression involved the Greek-Rite Catholics, banned in Ukraine, Romania, and Czechoslovakia after World War II. But in one or more communist countries other groups also were denied legal registration—among them, Christian Science, the Christ Believer Nazarene Congregation, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon), and the Jehovah's Witnesses. Newer religious associations, such as the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and the Krishna Society, likewise were denied legal registration—in most cases until 1988 or 1989.

But communism sometimes worked in the opposite direction, offering certain groups degrees of latitude and equality to which they had been unaccustomed. In Poland, for...