of the sects is more in keeping with the phantasmagorical and hypothetical world of the Soviet youth than the colorless world of bureaucratic atheism. Thus sectarian religion seems to have even greater appeal to the young than Orthodoxy or the ultra-Orthodoxy of the schismatics. Communist journals continually complain of fervid but elusive sects, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists. These sects are similar in many respects to earlier forms of apocalyptical sectarianism, which also grafted new Western religious forms into a long-standing native tradition.70
Far more important because of their impact in large cities and among educated youth are the Baptists, into whose ranks some of the more pietistic and less apocalyptical native sectarians (such as the 'milk drinkers') have tended to merge. Communist journals have repeatedly told of young people resigning from the Young Communist League to join the Baptist youth group, popularly known as the 'Baptomol.'71 At the congress of the Komsomol in 1962, the head of this heavily subsidized, mammoth organization publicly beseeched his followers to emulate the enthusiasm and dedication of the harassed and indigent Baptist youth.
The biblical simplicity and fervid piety of the Baptists have had an impact on many more than their 600,000 active adult members. A Baptist appears as a leading positive character in N. Dubov's story 'A Difficult Test,' and as an admirable minor figure in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Conversions to some such simplified form of Christianity have taken place among a number of educated people. Even the leading Soviet pedagogical journal published an eloquent profession de foi of a university-educated teacher (together with a long refutation and an ominous notation that she lost her job in 1959):
I have recently read in the papers how various people have broken with religion. . . . Why may I not write and publish in a journal about how I came to Christianity, in what way and for what motives I have come to believe in God? . . .
I felt the need for answers to these questions: Whence came human suffering? Why does man live? and What does true happiness consist of? … I thoroughly worked through Indian philosophy, the gospels, etc. And as a result of all of this, I came to the conclusion that only religion, faith in Christ, gives meaning to human life, gives warmth and light to the human soul. Science then should be subordinate to religion, because when unchecked by religion as now, it works towards destruction. . . ,72
It is impossible to tell from these fragmentary printed excerpts from her letter what, if any, church or sect she has joined, just as it was difficult to determine the exact doctrinal allegiance of the thirty-two Russian Christians who asked in vain for asylum in the American embassy early in 1963.
What is clear is that there are still many anonymous Christians in Russia, and that genuinely pious families often face one of the crudest of all forms of persecution: the forcible removal of children from the home.
The ferment of the Khrushchev era may have represented only the passing unrest of peripheral intellectuals: foredoomed, if not ultimately meaningless. Certainly the young revokes were more certain of what they were against than of what they favored. They were, moreover, not revolutionaries in any meaningful political sense. The ability of the regime to sustain one-party rule and to anatomize opposition lent an air of unreality to any consideration of alternative forms of political and social organization. la any case, the younger generation in the USSR-in contrast to those of other Communist states, such as Hungary and Poland-did not generally relate communism with foreign domination but saw it as an irreversible part of their history. Communism has been made to appear less odious by the fact that Russia has emerged under its banner to a position of power unprecedented in Russian history. Since there was every material inducement for gifted youth to join the managerial structure of a state able to use and reward the talented, cultural unrest seemed to some observers little more than the passing malaise of a bohemian fringe on the periphery of a growing industrial society.
To the Soviet leadership, however, intellectual ferment was a subject of the most profound concern. The extraordinary amount of time and energy spent on artistic and intellectual affairs by Khrushchev-an earthy figure, who clearly had no personal interest in such matters-must be explained at least partly in terms of the omnipresent concern of insecure autocrats for the realities of power. The Soviet leaders have vivid memories of the extraordinary role played by the intelligentsia in the genesis of their own aging revolutionary movement. They also realize that Leninist governments-no matter how 'liberalized' or 'de-Stalinized'-are ultimately based on an ideology. Political power in a totalitarian state is not based either on the periodic popular elections of a democracy or on the religiously sanctified hereditary succession of more traditional forms of authoritarian rule. The stated rationale for Communist rule in the USSR has remained the metaphysical pretensions of that party to represent the vanguard of the historical process on the verge of moving 'from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.' Although the USSR could shed its ideological pretensions and become simply another powerful state with a permissive, pluralistic culture, there is no reason to assume (as the history of Nazi Germany demonstrates) that such developments must necessarily result from growing education and prosperity.
There are, nevertheless, at least four reasons for believing that the
ferment of the post-Stalin era may represent the beginnings of something new rather than a finished or passing episode. First is the sheer number of people involved in the ferment. Previous ideological unrest in Russian history was invariably confined to a small minority which discussed issues in relative isolation from the populace as a whole. Many more people read Katkov's chauvinistic Russian Herald than Mikhailovsky's Annals of the Fatherland, the sensationalist illustrated Niva than the World of Art. In the USSR of the sixties, however, ideological controversy was waged in the most widely circulated journals-and among a populace which has acquired elementary literacy and some schooling in ideological terminology. The monopoly of the Communist party on the organs of communication seemed of decreasing importance in a time when the exact line on many questions remained either unclear or unenforced.
Khrushchev's denigration of Stalin in 1956 opened a Pandora's box of critical questions about where and how things went wrong. The petulant explanation ad hominem that the trouble began with Stalin's 'cult of personality' in the mid-thirties and his institution of purges against the party did not answer the question or even provide the kind of 'profound Marxist analysis' that loyal Leninists were seeking. Some apparently view forced collectivization as the fatal departure; others blame the entire Leninist conception of a totalitarian party and compression of the two revolutions into one. The 'Aesopian' tradition of discussing unmentionable political questions in terms of past history has been revived; and the great increase in the late fifties and early sixties in the number of students studying history in effect bespeaks a more lively interest in public affairs among the younger generation.
The party devoted a special Central Committee meeting early in the summer of 1963 solely to ideological and cultural matters. Indications of unrest (even including occasional strikes) in the industrial and agricultural sector point to the fact that the vague desires and rising expectations of the young intellectuals probably correspond more closely to the grass roots attitudes of workers and farmers than in any previous period of intellectual ferment inside Russia.
Even more important than the numbers of people involved is the fact that this ferment is the product of something necessary for Soviet construction itself: expanded contact with the West and increased education. Though the intention of the Communist leadership is clearly to use travel and education as subordinate weapons in the development of Soviet strength, the effects of its policies may prove more far-reaching. Vasily Kliuchevsky, the great historian of the late imperial period, put the case
well in his classic study of the effects produced on Russian culture by increased Western contact in the
