those over age 14 declared themselves believers. That impelled the regime to redouble its efforts. In 1937-1941, hundreds of thousands were arrested and large numbers executed.
Although World War II forced the Stalinist regime to tolerate the reestablishment of many religious organizations, these encountered growing pressure that continued past Stalin’s death in 1953. The post-Stalinist regimes proved indefatigable in efforts to efface the remnants of superstition. They did achieve a reduction in organized religion: the number of religious organizations in the USSR declined by a third (from 22,698 in 1961 to 15,202 in 1985).
Even if religious organizations had dwindled, the government proved far less effective in combating religious observance. Indeed, data from the latter period of Soviet rule showed clear signs of religious revival. In the case of baptism, for example, even if the aggregate figures between 1979 and 1984 decreased (by 6.7%), authorities could not fail to notice increases in some non-Russian republics (19.9% in Georgia, for example) and even in the RSFSR (1.5%). Baptism rates, moreover, skyrocketed among non-Orthodox Christians, with increases of 43.6 percent among Lutherans, 33.3 percent among Methodists, and 52.1 percent among Men-nonites. Data about monetary contributions-an increase of 17.8 percent between 1979 and 1984- gave the regime further cause for worry. These funds allowed established religions to bolster their central administrations (45.9% of funds), expand support for clergy (14.3%), and spend more on religious artifacts and literature (17.4%).
Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika in the mid-1980s brought a significant improvement in the
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status and activism of religion. That, doubtless, was a key factor behind the stunning 36.6 percent increase in religious groups in the Soviet Union (from 12,438 in 1985 to 16,990 in 1990); in the RSFSR, the rate of growth was only slightly slower-32.6 percent (from 3,003 in 1985 to 3,983 in 1990). The expansion of organized religion hardly abated after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991: In the Russian Federation, the number of registered religious organizations rose fivefold (to 20,200 on December 31, 2000).
That growth has been somewhat troubling for the Russian Orthodox Church. Although a majority of the citizens in the Russian Federation profess some vague allegiance to Orthodoxy, observants are relatively few (4.5%), and still fewer attend services on a regular basis. Still more alarming has been the exponential growth of non-Orthodox religious groups, especially Christian evangelical and Pentecostal movements. In an effort to contain cult movements, the law on religious organizations (October 1997) posed barriers to the registration of new religious groups, that is, those that had emerged within the last fifteen years, chiefly from foreign missions. Nevertheless, by the closing deadline for registration on December 31, 2000, Russian Orthodoxy claimed only a slight majority (10,913) of the 20,200 religious organizations in the Russian Federation; the rest consisted of Muslim (3,048), Evangelicals (1,323), Baptists (975), Evangelical Christians (612), Seventh-Day Adven-tists (563), Jehovah’s Witnesses (330), Old Believers (278), Catholics (258), Lutherans (213), Jews (197), and various smaller groups. See also: CATHOLICISM; HAGIOGRAPHY; ISLAM; JEWS; MONASTICISM; ORTHODOXY; PAGANISM; PROTESTANTISM; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; SAINTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, John. (1994). Religion, State, and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Corley, Felix. (1996). Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader. New York: New York University Press. Geraci, Robert P., and Khodarkovsky, Michael. (2001). Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hosking, Geoffrey A. (1991). Church, Nation, and State in Russia and Ukraine. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lewis, David C. (1999). After Atheism: Religion and Ethnicity in Russia and Central Asia. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
RENOVATIONISM See LIVING CHURCH MOVEMENT.
(1844-1930), Russia’s most celebrated realist painter.
The future master of realism, whose genius with the canvas put him on par with the literary and musical luminaries of Russia’s nineteenth century, Ilya Yefimovich Repin arose from truly inauspicious surroundings. His father, a peasant, was a military colonist in the Ukrainian (then, “Little Russia”) town of Chuguev. His talent manifested itself early, and at age twenty, he entered St. Petersburg’s Academy of Arts. His first major piece, The Raising of Jarius’s Daughter, won him the gold medal in academic competition, and with it, a scholarship to study in France and Italy. Although the Impressionists at that time were beginning their critical reappraisal of representation, Repin remained a realist, although his use of light shows that he did not escape the influence of the new style. Upon his return to Russia, he developed a nationalist strain in his paintings that reflected the political mood of his era. In this work, he connected the realism of style with that of politics, bringing his viewers’ attentions to the arduous circumstances under which so many of their fellow citizens labored, reflected in his first major work beyond the Academy, Barge Haulers on the Volga.
Although Repin was never specifically a political activist, he was nonetheless involved with other artists in challenging the conservative, autocratic status quo. For example, he joined with other painters who, calling themselves the peredvizhniki, or “itinerants,” revolted against the system of patronage in the arts and circulated their works throughout the provinces, bringing art to the emergent middle classes. Moreover, they chose compositions that depicted their surroundings, as opposed to the staid classicism of mythology; Repin shifted from Jarius’s Daughter to Russian legends, exemplified by several versions of Sadko, a popular figure from medieval, merchant Novgorod. More impressive, though, were those among his works that evoked the reality of all aspects of contempo1284
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rary life, from the revolutionary movement to Russia’s colonial enterprise, from The Student-Nihilist to The Zaporozhian Cossacks.
Repin also excelled as a portrait painter because he was able to communicate the psychology of his subjects. For example, his portrait of the tortured Modest Mussorgsky stuns with its ability to bring out varied aspects of the composer’s personality. Repin’s oeuvre includes portraits of most prominent liberals of his era, from Leo Tolstoy to Savva Mamantov, as well as the archconservative Kon-stantin Pobedonostsev. His paintings of historical figures, Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan and Tsarevna Sophia Alexeevna in the Novodevichy Convent, likewise stand out for their capacity to evoke the emotional.
Repin returned to the Academy of Arts in 1894, directing a studio there until 1907 and serving briefly as director (1898-1899). In 1900 he moved to an estate in the Finnish village of Kuokalla, outside of St. Petersburg, where a constant stream of visitors engendered a famously stimulating atmosphere. When Finland received its independence from the Russian Empire in 1918, Repin chose to remain there. The reacquisition of Kuokalla by the Soviet army in 1939 resulted in the renaming of the village to “Repino,” a museum to the artist. See also: ACADEMY OF ARTS; NATIONALISM IN THE ARTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Parker, Fan and Parker, Stephen Jan. (1980). Russia on Canvas: Ilya Repin. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sternin, Grigorii Iurevich, comp. (1987). Ilya Repin. Leningrad: Aurora Publishers, 1987. Valkenier, Elizabeth Kridl. (1990). Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art. New York: Columbia University Press.
The Soviet State Price Committee (Goskomtsen) set prices for 27 million products during the post World War II era. It compiled data on the unit labor and capital cost of each good, and added a profit mark up. The resulting prime cost-based prices were supposed to be permanently fixed, but many were revised every decade or so to reflect changes in labor and non-labor input costs. These adjustments should have been small, because the state raised wages gradually, and improved technologies reduced material input costs. Some sectors like machine building, where productivity growth was especially rapid, even reported falling unit input costs, creating a condition called “repressed deflation” during the interval between the establishment of the initial price and its revision. Had
