Seeking New Sanctuaries

In Gorky, Soviet Christians cry out for more churches Marxism may teach that religion must wither away, but the state is forever trying to help the process along. Though the new constitution, like the old, "recognizes" religious liberty in the U.S.S.R., the government decides exactly how many churches can stay open. Today there are only 7,500 Russian Orthodox churches, a tenth as many as before the 1917 Revolution, and 1,000 of these are not, in fact, in operation.

Particularly hard hit has been Gorky, a city on the Volga River about the size of Buffalo, N.Y. Gorky has only three small Orthodox churches in outlying areas to serve an estimated 150,000 active communicants. Last month, with considerable courage, 1,700 people signed a petition asking the regime to reopen one of Gorky's 100 or so closed churches; many are now in use as bakeries, museums or warehouses. According to the petition, the Gorky churches are so crowded on Sundays that their congregations overflow onto the streets and old people faint in the crush.

The believers pledged to use their own money and labor for renovations. Even so, prospects look dim. "They're afraid that if they open a church for us, they'll have to start opening churches all across the country," said Petition Organizer Benjamin Kozulin. Attempts are made to gather signatures in church grounds, but church employees who owe their jobs to the government break up the crowds and chase away the petitioners. When Kozulin and fellow church members made a similar effort a decade ago, he was threatened with imprisonment in a lunatic asylum and nine organizers lost their jobs.

Baptists in Bryansk, 250 miles southwest of Moscow, face a like problem. They had managed to acquire local approval to build a new prayer chapel, but last month the government suddenly halted construction. When a large group conducted a protest sit-in at the site, police and soldiers assaulted some 150 members of the congregation. The unusual incidents in Gorky and Bryansk, and repeated articles in Soviet journals lamenting the failure of government atheism campaigns, indicate that Soviet Christianity is not vanishing. It may be gaining spiritual ground.

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