ABSTRACT
Study of church life in the Soviet Union during the Cold War was almost impossible. Persecuted, secretive and operating in an atheist state, there were no reliable statistics on the number of believers, working churches, monks, baptisms, or any leakage of the sorts of policy restrictions the state imposed on church leaders. Any information was heavily censored, and the state’s laws relating to religion often remained unpublished. Parishioners’ concern for their jobs and other political pressures during the Cold War meant that the workings of the church were invisible to the outsider. In some cases – the Armenian Gregorian Church and the Lithuanian Catholic church, for example, – the absence of inside information was balanced by a vigilant Diaspora that highlighted religious life in the homeland. In the Georgian case, however, the Diaspora was too small to play such a role, and this combined with two other factors – the lack of Western scholarship and the domination of the Georgian Orthodox Church by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) – led to particular isolation for the Georgian church. Yet in the 1970s, church life emerged from the catacombs. In Georgian samizdat (self-published underground literature) and in the few contemporary church publications, including Georgian church calendars and a biannual church journal, we could glimpse the inner life of the church.2 The ecumenical activities of Ilia II further improved our knowledge of Georgian church activities during the Cold War. Since the collapse of the USSR, things have opened up: memoirs have been published, the Orthodox Church of Georgia has published its own materials on the period, and newspapers and TV have exposed church life under the Soviet regime.3 However, the opening is partial. The church’s own archives remain closed and journalistic sensitivities about the church’s collaborationist role in the Soviet period have led to frequent silences and omissions.
