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.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## UNCLASSIFIED ## Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1989 Document 2 of 3 Page 14 inappropriate. But what social reasons, not necessarily class reasons, should be here? We shall not understand the situation if we explain everything by intellectual darkness and ignorance. 52. [Innokentiy] The issue is broader: what actual trends in public life gave rise to "'Pamyat''? The process of renewal is, apart from anything else, also the overcoming of totalitarian, "'dichotomous'" consciousness, when people perceive a lie not as a deviation but an objective reality made aware in our sensations; closing the gap between word and deed, and word and word. "'Pamyat'" is trying in its own way to close this gap and it it therefore a certain social force that cannot be ignored, the more so since some of its supporters appeal to Orthodox values. 53. [Batygin] I am also deeply in consonance with ``Pamyat's'' initiatives aimed at preserving the culture of the homeland. Other people who declare themselves representatives of the association are taking an obviously chauvinist position. The impression is being created that we have several quite different ``Pamyat'' associations. These issues must be discussed in the press and the leaders of the movement given an opportunity to speak, and then perhaps what is secret will become clear. However, in my opinion, there is no religiosity as such in the ``orthodox'' initiatives of ``Pamyat.'" There is merely a form of hidden social conflict that is being transformed over time under conditions in which the criteria delineating the secular consciousness from the religious is, as it were, being dissolved. 54. For along time I had no doubt at all that the growth in education and secular culture would little by little supplant religious belief--'prejudices''--in people's life. Today I am ready to testify to an increase in true believers among quite well educated people. I remember the situation when the fact that the cosmonauts recorded nothing resembling heaven in orbit around the Earth was considered a serious argument in favor of atheism. Today these kinds of 'arguments'' can elicit only a smile or puzzlement. Obviously education and faith are things that are at least not mutually exclusive. Again I must recall the name of Pavel Florenskiy's father. Mathematician, philosopher, linguist, electrical engineer and mechanic, a researcher on permafrost, he was a true Christian, an Orthodox priest and theologian. He perished anonymously in the GULAG among the millions of martyrs, both believers and nonbelievers. 55. One way or another science no longer regards itself as the apex of the ''pyramid of knowledge,'' at least it finds shifting sand in its own foundation and is turning hopefully to ''metaphysical'' values and to ''human'' truths.
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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.