Introduction

Communist persecution had been justified ideologically under the guise of class morality and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Totalitarian rule began with violence: churches were attacked from without in a campaign of terror and murder. When religious institutions still commanded a lingering popular allegiance, regimes attempted to subvert and control them from within. Historically the celebration of the millennium of Christianity in Russia in 1988 can be seen as a watershed event in which new freedom for religion began to be signaled even before the 1989 peaceful revolutions in the satellite countries. Popularly, religious faith has fresh appeal, as it comes from a long national but suppressed legacy. During the communist period, the Orthodox Church hierarchy in the Soviet Union was extensively under KGB state control and excessively manipulated and oppressed. One must hope that the twenty-first century will be more humane with all of its totalitarianism, and that religion, now freed from persecution, will play a positive role.