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.
“National Academy of Sciences”1 page
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## Document 2 of 3 Page 4 testifies to the revolutionary intentions of the questioner. The trouble is that almost everyone is for perestroyka... Including those who are for coercive assertion of the ''ideal.'' I have a cause for complaint: I read in one newspaper that there is no class struggle in our country, nor, consequently, class enemies, but in numerous commentaries I have been categorized as an enemy of the people, and there have been demands for my repression. Is this also today's method of polemic? Again we see how the destructive forces are growing, how some people want to find ''the enemy,'' how they try to exhume from the underground the ideology of pogrom. 10. We have become accustomed to living by creating within ourselves a wordy mythical set of scenery and we fear to look there behind the scenery bathed in artificial light, into the shadow cast by the scenery, into the unlighted and gloomy space where we find the 'kitchen'' of the play being performed: into the semi-darkness quite different from the nuances of the producer and the technical and rhetorical equipage. Now it is becoming obvious that we are simultaneously the audience and the actors in this spectacle of life, and that it serves no purpose to point the finger at anyone. The devil often turns up behind the most desperate 'fighter.' 11. However, the process of renewal is irreversible. The link of time is being restored and we are beginning to look into history for the real causes of human tragedy. A re-evaluation of values is taking place, including the values of the past, and it is difficult and painful. Obviously this is the way it should be: memory is ambiguous; it depends on what we want to see in the past and on the kind of intellectual and moral baggage with which we move into the past. 12. [Innokentiy] When preparing our students at the theological schools in the Moscow Patriarchy, for a number of historical reasons the task of giving them a serious philosophical training has not been brought up. Therefore although you recalled the definition of free will, what came to mind for me was a definition of freedom in general, one that I heard from one of the church bishops at a recent international scientific conference in Moscow on problems of theology and spirituality devoted to the millennium of the Christianization of Russia: "'Freedom is an attitude of perfect love between two beings, between God and us.'" In this context talk about class enemies is hardly apropos. Why cannot the break in the link with time be restored by human hands? The real reasons for human tragedies are now clear to many, and perhaps they were earlier. 13. You talk about the irreversibility of the renewal of life in our country. Here, it would seem that boundless prospects are being opened up for the unsophisticated gaze. Just the mere formulation 're-evaluating the cultural-historical legacy'' is worth it. For a
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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.