A long walk to church

Despite its problems, the Russian Orthodox Church manifests a luminous faith. It has achieved great political influence and is Russia's most important vehicle for spiritual and ethical renewal. Nevertheless, it is still a long walk to church in that tormented land. Making use of the formerly secret archives of the Soviet government, Nathaniel Davis offers the first complete account of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church from the Bolshevik revolution to the present. Twice in the past sixty years, the church hung on the brink of institutional extinction. In 1939, only four bishops and a few score widely scattered priests were still functioning openly in the entire Soviet Union. Stalin could have arrested them all in a single night. Ironically, Hitler's invasion and Stalin's reaction to it rescued the church - parishes reopened, new clergy and bishops were consecrated, a patriarch was elected, and seminaries and convents were reinstituted. After the war, Stalin reverted to his earlier policies of repression; after his death, Khrushchev resumed the onslaught against religion. Davis reveals the full scope of Stalin's last assault, the limited extent of the reprieve, and the relative continuity of policy in those brutal years of repression. Under Brezhnev, the erosion of church strength was greater than the world has been told, and those decades ushered in the church's second great crisis of survival. One could travel a thousand kilometers on the Trans-Siberian railway without coming to a single functioning church. It was none too soon when the Soviet government changed policy in anticipation of Russia's Millennium of Christian Conversion.