USSR anti-religious campaign (1958–1964)

Khrushchev had long held radical views regarding the abolition of religion, and this campaign resulted largely from his own leadership rather than from pressure in other parts of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

The state carried out forced retirement, arrests and prison sentences to clergymen who criticized atheism[7] or the anti-religious campaign, who conducted Christian charity or who made religion popular by personal example.

Examples of article names that appeared in this time period are: "The Howls of the Obscurantists", "The Vultures", "The Wolfish Fangs of 'God's Harmless Creatures'", "Swindlers in the guise of Holy Fathers", "A Theologian-Fomenter", and "Hysteria on the March".

Osipov also said that Science and Religion should focus on educational material since the journal was largely unread by lay believers, but that such attacks should rather occur in the general mass media.

One of the most vicious examples of these was written by a woman named Trubnikova entitled 'Hysteria on the March' that described a pilgrimage to a spring in the village of Velikoroetskoe [ru] in the diocese of Kirov, where there was supposedly an apparition of St. Nicholas centuries earlier.

She claimed that they were alcoholics, hysterics, hypocrites and swindlers who faked trances and miracles (there were people who dipped themselves into the spring and then shed their crutches, which she assumed was a deceitful act).

[28] The anti-religious propaganda was largely unconcerned with objectivity and truth, but rather to build up a negative image of believers as fanatics, disseminators of disease, social pests or criminals, in order to justify the persecution to the public.

Education, scientific knowledge, and the study of the laws of nature leave no room for belief in God.Foreigners who travelled to the USSR had their visits tightly controlled so that they did not see anything that would have led to bad press for the regime.

It called for the introduction, beginning in 1961-62 of special courses of basic political education in senior high school grades (which included atheistic instruction).

This was the high point of the church hierarchy's resistance to the campaign, and it resulted in the forced retirement of the speech writer (Bishop Nikolai) and his mysterious death a few months later, as well as the Patriarchate's later submission to the new pressures.

[49] The Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs (CROCA) relentlessly and arbitrarily appointed and removed priests through abuse of its registration and de-registration function.

Under state pressure priests even found themselves coerced into making sermons against the presence of beggars on church steps (since the 1929 legislation had made Christian charitable efforts to be illegal).

[52] In January 1960, a high level Znanie conference on atheism, encouraged attacks on the church and returning to Lenin's legacy that had been discarded in World War II.

For example, Pentecostal pastor, Kondrakov, in the Donets Basin mining area was accused of causing reactive psychosis in his congregants and was sentenced to eight years of imprisonment.

[51] The Baptists cooperated with the state and the central leadership of their community called on its membership to try to reduce the baptism of young people between the ages of 18 and 30, and forbade children from attending services.

[55] The experience with the Baptist community prompted the state to be more cautious when it attempted similar measures against the Orthodox Church by banning priests from conducting services in the presence of children or youths.

[55] These measures were not applied uniformly, and numerous priests in the country continued to administer the Eucharist to children and even conduct special Te Deums for schoolchildren on the eve of the first school day in September.

Further methods were used to limit funds for churches, including banning sales of candles according to 1929 legislation that forbade obligatory payments to religious organizations.

At the same time, local Soviet executives were charged with making sure that the 'groups of twenty' that held legal rights over churches were filled with reliable people who would not care for the spiritual life of the parish.

Then the Provincial Executive Committee would declare the church closed and hand over the building to the local collective farm or town soviet for other uses, often without informing the religious association, which would then be officially de-registered.

He claimed that many reports and delegations were sent to CROCA in Moscow that gave evidence that the religious association still existed or that the collective farm in question did not require the church building for any purposes.

Never would the text of de-registration decisions be shown to believers (which Soviet law in fact required), and the liquidations themselves often took place with the protection of militia and in the middle of the night.

[65] Talantov recorded a story about a popular priest Fr TG Perestoronin, who was arbitrarily deprived of his registration in 1961 which was followed by the arbitrary closure of his church soon after.

Perestoronin, having heard this, was forced to leave his post in Kirov and take up a job as a plumber, which the authorities rewarded by ending the harassment against his family and they were allowed to go back to their old house.

Many protests and pleas to the authorities followed these events, but were ignored, and the believers who made them were subject to intimidation, shouts, insults, beatings, and other methods that resulted in some physical injuries, several deaths and nervous breakdowns.

[71] Boris Talantov, a mathematics teacher in Kirov diocese in the north-eastern part of European Russia was one of the first voices to sound the alarm of the mass closures of churches.

The very popular Archbishop Veniamin (Novitsky) of Irkutsk underwent a campaign of character assassination in the Soviet press in connection with a church warden who had accidentally killed a juvenile thief.

In order to enforce this, the militia began to raid the monastery at night, throwing out pilgrims sleeping in the yard or the main cathedral which the monks had kept open for devotions 24 hours.

It underwent a vicious campaign in the press where its inhabitants were depicted as a nest of fat, greedy, lustful loafers that were raping young female pilgrims and robbing people of their money.

A public official in Moscow commented to the petitioners:[56] In my opinion all believers are psychologically abnormal people and it is entirely natural for them to be sent into mental hospitals ... it is our aim to liquidate religion as quickly as possible; for the time being we partially tolerate it for political reasons, but when a favourable opportunity arises we shall not only close down your monastery but all churches and monasteries.On 12 June 1964 a 33-year-old woman who had sworn an oath of virginity named Marfa Gzhevskaia was attacked by the militia, who raped her and gave her injuries that resulted in her death the following day.