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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University I, and the overwhelming majority of my fellow students, and perhaps even the teachers, had only a quite vague idea about priests in the church. The view of priests as tricksters and disseminators of spiritual narcotics, a unique kind of 'spiritual raw brandy'--a view traditional for the proclaimed ideological stereotypes--could be clearly discerned in this vagueness. This idea prevented us from any dialogue with you in the press. For a long time an invisible but quite rigid line of prohibition was drawn between me, a sociologist, and you, a pastor of the Russian Orthodox Church. It also seemed to me that you were separated not only from the state but also from the usual life of laymen, or at least that you had no contact with our daily problems. Only once did I think about this line, when the now late Valentin Ferdinandovich Asmus, the teacher of my teachers, for some reason put aside his exercise books and talked to us, the second-year students, about the meaning of the words 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' The meaning of the words from the Sermon on the Mount has not been reduced and it set down roots through the millennia. And each day, including today, we face the eternal problems. One of them is the search for truth. In this regard our dialogue today is extremely topical and essential for the process of renewal, because apart from anything else, renewal also means a return to values that are eternal but subject to doubt. Dialogue is essential for joining the strength of believers and non-believers in solving urgent and vital question. And we have many believers in the country--from 15 percent to 60 percent of the population in various regions. 4. Today, in the atmosphere of glasnost and democratization we are learning to deal with voluntarist stereotypes that have compelled us not only to accept the inevitable as the reality but also pretend that many of the processes that do not fit into the ideological mold of the "'new man'" somehow do not exist at all. This also applies in full to the reproduction of religious values--the so-called individual vestiges. I think that we rightly talk about the coexistence of a religious culture and a secular culture in Soviet society, and a diversity of types of perceptions of the world--a diversity that cannot be reduced to some scheme of "'the scientific and the nonscientific.'" How can this very complex sociological problem be resolved? First and foremost by not dramatizing the differences in views that are well known and by seeking out what it is that unites us. And what unites us is responsibility for the future, the desire to preserve the cultural heritage, and belief in the need to renew life and general human spiritual values. 5. The restructuring is not easy. Even recently, when the editorial office of the journal SOTSIOLOGICHESKIYE ISSLEDOVANIYA asked you to enter into discussion with the well-known American Sovietologists and religious expert William Fletcher about believers in the USSR, it was
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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.