Decree on Separation of Church and State

The Decree on Separation of Church from State and School from Church[a] (Russian: Декрет об отделении церкви от государства и школы от церкви, romanized: Dekret ob otdelenii tserkvi ot gosudarstva i shkoly ot tserkvi) is a legal act adopted by the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on 20 January [O.S.

[6][7] The short edict is composed of 13 declarations regarding religion's role within Soviet sociocultural and political spaces.

The edict was first published in the Sobranie Uzakonenii i Rasporiazhenii Rabochego i Krestianskogo Pravitelstva (Collection of Legislation and Orders of the Workers 'and Peasants' Government) in 1918 and solidified that Soviet Russia was to be a non-religious or secular society.

12 and 13 denounced religious bodies from any type of land or property ownership in accordance with Soviet law at the time, while No.

4 through 8 further separated religious worship from official and public spaces, while also consolidating civic authority.

2 forbade state-sanctioned, special treatment of persons or Institutions based on religious affiliation, such a relationship called "Symphonia" or "Caesaropapism" and prior to the Soviet secularization campaigns, served as the premiere model for Church-State relations for Orthodox Russia.

The decree was created by a special commission which included: People's Commissar of Justice Pēteris Stučka, the People's Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, a member of the board of the People's Commissariat of Justice Pyotr Krasikov, Mikhail Reisner who was a well-known lawyer and professor of law at St. Petersburg University and a former Orthodox priest turned atheist, Mikhail Galkin.

[9] The edict was signed by Vladimir Lenin under his real last name Ulyanov who acted as Chairman of Sovnarkom, or The Council of People's Commissar.