ABSTRACT
Communist government and the Vatican, 1921-1924 Although Catholic leaders in the Soviet Union were pessimistic about the future of the Catholic Church in the USSR, Pope Benedict XV and Catholic leaders connected to Rome were optimistic. To be sure, the Vatican and Catholic leaders were deeply disturbed by Moscow’s anti-Catholic and anti-Western policies in Soviet Russia and elsewhere, but they hoped that the Communists, with the Civil War behind them, would relax their stand against religion and busy themselves with the task of government and return to the path of Westernization that Nicholas II and the Provisional Government had been on. After all, Lenin reversed Communist core doctrine when in March 1921 he announced the New Economic Policy, which was a major concession to the peasants that gave them the right to control private property.
