Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS translation reproduces an interview published in the Soviet journal Sotsiologicheskiye Issledovaniya, signed to press on 8 July 1988. In it, deputy chief editor Gennadiy Batygin talks with Innokentiy, a teacher at the Leningrad seminary. The conversation takes place during the millennium of the Christianization of Russia. They discuss religion under glasnost and perestroyka, ideological prohibitions, the shortage of Bibles, preservation of church monuments and the position of believers in Soviet society. The document contains no UFO material.
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## Document 2 of 3 reason and turn the people into a mob. There is no place for the individual here. The monolithic massif discards and destroys individuality and 'differentness.' And all the same, religion is the main thing that enables a person to find within himself the strength not to follow the majority to evil and manage to retain his faith. Even the daily expectation that they will force him to silence by knocking away the stool from under him or by some other method does not stop him. In this sense Pavel Florenskiy, Sergey Bulgakov, Andrey Platonov, Osip Mandelstam and millions of other people suffered the same fate. Was it a matter of religiosity? Even today under conditions of democracy in the ascendant, public opinion is polarized: we can in no way become accustomed to the existence of a different position or recognize pluralism of opinion and evaluations. It would seen that we have no other way than to remain homogeneous and monolithic to the point of impermeability. But the times are changing. The process of revival of the cultural legacy and of the historical memory of the people is under way. We are also observing a revival of religious values, even if in the form of the attraction of neophytes. Here it is important to see the ground on which the fruits of freedom of thought are growing--'by their fruits ye shall know them.' This is not simply because now in the social atmosphere there is too much that is superficial, some kind of cursory parboiling; it is also benighted calm deep down. 37. Let me give you an example. Various kinds of debating clubs, societies, associations and circles are now springing up like mushrooms after the rain. A huge hall is filled to overflowing, and the social scientists and journalists stand there on the stage. A professor explains how to combine the plan and the market, how the predictions have been made. He is given a few minutes up there on the stage, with the lamp burning, and when th public gets bored the speaker looks around cautiously... And already the hall is impatient and someone whistles from somewhere. But although the professor is a experienced person he does not know how to control the audience. And then it is all over: disruption! Disruption of the economy, disruption of the family, disruption of the school, disruption of science, disruption of culture, disruption of atomic power... Let the Ministry of Defense take it all under public control! The hall explodes with applause, eyes water, hearts beat--'let's do it!' 38. Under the conditions of perestroyka and freedom of thought combined with a shortage of information, we would very much like to hear, even from the side, 'what is all this?' Tell us about things under Yezhov, under Trotskiy, who killed Kirov? why did you not write this in Kaganovich's time? where is the full text of the Khrushchev report? the masonic Jews burned the Troitsa-Sergiyev monastery, let us have the 'Pamyat'' sociological center, the keepers of the faith are the vanguard of perestroyka... Enough! The following analogy
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 19 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.