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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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1989 Document 2 of 3 be perceived as quite ordinary, even if interesting, as something healthy, or ultimately, with indifference. 63. Everything that I am discussing now is variations of the same phenomenon: violent alienation of religious culture and religious consciousness from the officially approved culture and the 'standard' social consciousness--an alienation that is not uniformly negative and mutually exclusive, like a plus or minus, but the kind that could be described by Jaspers' paradoxical phrase 'love-hate.' There is astonishment here, and rejection, and a permanent attraction to real values, and hope, and fear... But most of all there is an obedience: if it is said that there is no God then that means that there is: God is dead and everything is allowed. 64. It is impossible not to see in everything that is now happening and being retained in our minds the anti-values brought to us since the time of the journal BEZBOZHNIK. What is purely human, true and lucid, what lives always in the soul, or perhaps the conscience, coexists, sometimes quite peacefully, with the awareness of an obligation 'to deliver a rebuff.' It seems to me that when we have finished recording our conversation here and begin to pass it through the editors, from somewhere out of nowhere--at least for us--there will arise a desire (addressed at me, a Marxist) to deliver to you an ideological rebuff. In the dispute with you I am obliged to 'win,' and this is my social role. 65. It is too naive and simple to attribute the relapses of ideological bans to Stalinism and point the finger at the past. The past is being reproduced every day and the dead seize the living... You and Fr Boris Danilenko and other Christians--Orthodox and Old Believers-- recently met with junior scholars from a prestigious academy institute. I remember the atmosphere of real interest, trust and a desire for the truth, without the slightest hint of people trying to foist their opinions on each other. We wanted just one thing--to know! And after your departure a continuation of the discussion took place at a crossroads in Moscow under the street lamps with several young representatives of a high Komsomol organ. In the hall they had been observers rather than participants, but here they spoke out directly: defects had been permitted in the organization of the meeting and atheists had been unable to deliver a rebuff to the church people. We were unable to justify ourselves, and we included some experts on religion with doctorate degrees. 66. What did the Komsomol people have in mind? No matter what, deep in their young, clear thinking a scheme had been laid down, clear-cut, like an order: 'Us or them.' 67. The ''strange'' position of believers in society also
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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.