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Union means less than meets the eye. In the words of the constitution, believers may only "celebrate religious rites", but atheists may "conduct atheist propaganda". An article of the Soviet penal code prescribes imprisonment of up to five years and confiscation of property for any believing Russians who encroach on the rights of citizens under the guise of performing religious rites. The penal code sandwiches this offence between "main taining dens of depravity" and "preparation and distribution of pornographic materials".

What believers may and may not do in the way of worship is laid down in the constitution as well as in the 1929 law on religious associations (in its amended 1975 version) and in a mass of government regulations and party directives. All of these have the power of law, but most of them are unknown to Soviet citizens for the simple reason that they have never been published. Some regulations from the 1959-1964 period of particularly severe religious persecution under Khrushchev are still secret.

No such thing as the church

Soviet law does not recognise the church as a single body, but prefers to see it as large numbers of religious associations of citizens who, being 18 years of age or older, may, properly registered, "perform religious rites together and hold prayer meetings and ceremonies for the purpose of worship". So each of these bodies is an isolated entity subject to police regulations. Registration is not a formality, but a powerful weapon in the hands of the government.

On top of getting themselves regis tered, these associations need to provide an officially approved "prayer building". conclude a rental agreement with the authorities and hire a priest. The priest is not head of the parish, but an employee of the association. The election of members of the association's executive can be vetoed by the council for religious affairs in Moscow. The priest may operate only within the approved "prayer building". Conducting religious rites in the open air or in a private flat or anywhere else without special permission was expressly forbidden in 1975. But even within the approved "prayer building" the priest may not teach any kind of religious dogma; this is permitted only in institutions of higher religious learning.

Everything used by the priest and his community in practising their religion belongs to the state, which hands the items over to the association for "free use" but can take them away at any time. The "prayer building" itself can be taken back at short notice by a simple adminis

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the government to close about 10,000 Orthodox churches during 1959-64.

Compared with the early days under Lenin, the church is now having an almost free and easy time. Between 1917 and 1923, 28 bishops and well over 1,000 priests were "executed" by the Bolsheviks. Many believers were shocked when in 1927 Metropolitan Sergei, one of the few surviving bishops, made a carefully phrased declaration of loyalty to the Soviet regime. Most of the underground Orthodox congregations date back to that time. Further periods of religious persecution followed in 1928-1932 and again in the mid-1930s. But Stalin eased up in the early 1940s when he needed the church's influence to bolster the war effort.

"Only impractical dreamers", Sergei had declared, "can think that such an immense church as our Orthodox church with all its organisations may peacefully exist in the country by hiding itself from the government". The bargain between the Orthodox church (and other religious bodies in the Soviet Union) and the Soviet state requires these bodies' unqualified political support for the regime expecially in foreign policy matters-in return for permission to operate within carefully defined limits. Such support was given, for example, over the war in Korea in 1950, the Soviet interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Soviet detente policy and Soviet condemnation of Israel's "expansionist" behaviour. And Soviet churchmen vigorously defend Soviet foreign policy in bodies such as the World Council of Churches.

More controversially, Soviet churchmen have also sought to defend the Soviet government's human rights record. On December 5th Metropolitan

Filaret, a senior dignitary of the Russian Orthodox church, told a correspondent of the Soviet Tass agency:

As a churchman I think that among the most important rights which should belong to all people is the right to freedom of conscience, Including the right to profess a religion. In the Soviet Union, such freedom is guaranteed to every citizen by the constitution. This right is fully exercised by those practising Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism.

There have even been suggestions that the KGB has over the years infiltrated its agents into the Russian Orthodox church and other religious bodies and that some of these are now in top jobs. Whether this is true or not, the Orthodox church does at times look a bit like a "state church within an atheist state", as Mr Anatoli Levitin-Krasnow, a religious writer now living in the west, once called it.

This does not mean that the Soviet state has abandoned its intention of eventually rooting out religion. It spends large sums of money and uses up to 10m people as official atheist agitators in endless campaigns. Inculcating atheism into children from an early age is a top priority for every Soviet school. The only break in this campaign came during the second world war when Stalin needed the Russian Orthodox church's help to persuade people to fight for Holy Russia. But under Khrushchev religious persecution was soon rampant again.

It was during the Khrushchev era that the church leaders came under increasing criticism from within. Many congregations in the Baptist church refused to accept new and tighter rules forbidding them even basic Bible readings with children. Those who broke away, having vainly appealed to the official church

leaders to resist the regime's new policies, were and still are harshly punished. One of the unofficial Baptists' bestknown leaders, Georgi Vins, was sentenced to five years' imprisonment in 1975 for "damaging the interests of citizens on the pretext of religious activity".

Dissent has also been voiced in the Orthodox church and particularly by Orthode laymen. In a famous letter to Patriarch Pimen in 1972, Alexander Solzhenitsyn attacked the church leaders for expressing concern about injustices in distant Asia or Africa while completely neglecting those at home, particularly during the period of religious persecution between 1959 and 1964. In reply, one of the patriarch's closest advisers argued that the church leaders had no choice. Since it was unthinkable that the church should go underground, all it could do was to make the most of the opportunities offered to it, however limited.

But this line is becoming less and less acceptable to many religious believers, Orthodox and others, in the Soviet Union. They have probably been affected by the hopes for human rights raised by the adoption of the 1975 Helsinki final act. The samizdat (self-published) documents reaching the west now cover cases of discrimination against religious believers.

One such document describes a confrontation in November, 1977, between Roman Catholics, mostly of Polish origin, and the authorities in the village of Rashkovo in the Soviet republic of Moldavia. The believers in that village had made 10 journeys to Moscow before being given permission for a priest to visit

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their parish. Since they had nowhere to congregate, they tried to hold meetings in private homes, but fines were imposed. In the end the villagers started to build a church with their own hands. But the police turned out with large numbers of men and an array of equipment, and razed the nearly finished church to the ground. The local people are still sending telegrams to the authorities asking permission to build another church. But their chances seem slim.

Still, dissent is likely to continue. Lithuanian Catholics, who are close to the Polish Catholics across the border, have been much encouraged by the election of the outspoken Polish Cardinal Wojtyla of Cracow as Pope John Paul II, and their optimism seems to have permeated through to believers elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

You can't keep them down

There are several reasons why religion in the Soviet Union has survived against the odds. One of them is the failure of the official Marxist-Leninist ideology to come up with a convincing moral creed for ordinary people busy not with making a revolution but holding down a job, raising a family and going about their daily business. Many people, especially intellectuals, are looking to the churches for the solace and inspiration offered by the liturgy. Others are attracted by the strong moral code and moral solidarity provided by the sects, notably the Bap tists. For some, the church opens up an escape route from the official (boring) atheistic ideology which is constantly being rammed down their throats. The

THE ECONOMIST DECEMBER 30, 1978

strength of the religious bodies in the Soviet Union, however hemmed in, is that they are the only non-Marxist-Leninist bodies in the country.

The recent rise of nationalism (both Russian and non-Russian) in the Soviet Union is bound to benefit the churches because of the historic link between nation and religion in eastern Europe. The Orthodox church has always been a repository of Russian nationalism. Up to a point, it might even suit the regime to encourage this. It is claimed that old Slavophile ideas about Holy Russia's special mission in the world have many sympathisers in the ranks of the Soviet intelligentsia, and even the army and the KGB. But the close link between, for example, Catholicism and Lithuanian nationalism is most unwelcome in Moscow, and so is the possibility that papal encouragement of eastern-rite Catholics in the Ukraine might fan Ukrainian nationalism.

But the greatest religious worry in store for the Soviet leaders is likely to be not militant Christians, or trouble from the country's 2m Jews, but militant Moslems. Most of the Soviet Moslems live in Central Asia,, and they are increasing fast. Between 1959 and 1970 their number increased by 45%-50%, while the number of Russians went up by only 13%. On present form, by the year 2000 there will be 100m Soviet Moslems compared with 150m Russians (and there is very little intermarriage, or cultural or linguistic mingling). Even now there are more Moslem 10-year-olds in the Soviet Union than Russian ones.

At the moment the Soviet Moslems are still prepared to go along with their docile official leadership of some 100 "regis tered clerics" who operate some 300 working mosques (compared with 24,000 in the tsarist empire before 1917). But there are signs of restiveness. A recent article in the Keston College publication, Religion in Communist Lands, reported a steady growth of the so-called Sufi brotherhoods (or secret societies) in all parts of the Soviet Union. The Soviet government officially describes them as "fanatical". Members of these orders perform their religious rites, run their own clandestine religious schools where Arabic is taught, and have their own clandestine mosques, which are more numerous than the official mosques.

Official Soviet information puts the numbers in the republic of Azerbaijan, where only 13 official mosques are operating, at "many hundreds". The rise of militant Islamic fundamentalism outside the Soviet Union is beginning to instil fears in Soviet leaders that they may soon have to face militant mullahs within their own borders.