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 desire to look at the past in and of itself imposes an ''intellectual and ethical baggage.' You have probably recently been hearing, even when standing in line, about the ''permanent value of the cultural legacy.' I suspect that no none, including people with a ''higher education,' can provide a clear definition of these concepts. 14. It is as if everything were intuitively clear. I recall the shy servant Ivan Ivanovich Brilliantov, who late in the last century made known the long-since closed and almost deserted Ferapontov monastery. He not only drew attention to our ecclesiastical, historical and cultural holy things but in 1918 even traveled there from Petrograd so as to continue the work on its restoration despite everything. 15. The priests Pavel Florenskiy and Mikhail Shik, and Count Yu.A. Olsufev. We have no right to forget their role in the preservation of the Troitsa-Sergiyev Monastery. Professor I.Ye. Yevseyev of the Petrograd Theological Academy, who sponsored a scientific publication of the Slavic Bible and raised the question of a more perfect Russian translation of it. Academician N.K. Nikolskiy, who as long ago as 1902 embarked on the titanic work of preparing a collection of the works of Russian writers since ancient times. If historical circumstances made it possible to accomplish merely the undertakings mentioned, the question of the cultural legacy would be clearer for us. 16. However, this does not at all mean that in our times our culture does not have its devotees. Thus, for example, Marina Sergeyevna Serebryakova and her associates are heroically preserving the Cathedral of Our Lady in Vologda Oblast, with its frescoes of Dionysius--the only complete architectural and artistic ensemble dating from the 15th century. 17. The conference that I mentioned, which was attended not only by theologians but also philologists and historians from scientific centers abroad and from Moscow University and the USSR Academy of Sciences, showed that the tasks of preserving monuments of Russian national and general human importance can be resolved despite the obvious historical losses. 18. But let us return to the theme of "'prohibition." For the "'line of prohibition'" that you mentioned passed through the consciousness of many, and it now passes not only through the environment of social relations but also the field of spiritual relations. Here we are dealing with an unambiguous division between, if I may expresses it thus, "'the sheep and the goats,' typical both of a certain genre of atheistic studies of religion and of certain popular works on the history of ancient Russian literature and the arts. What I have in mind is the division between religious content
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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.