Suchergebnisse

Lecture.

Russians are now one of the national minorities of the USSR. In 1969 or 1970 the non-Russian birthrate, together with a fillip of immigration of Muslims across the Sinkiang border, finally tipped the balance, and the Great Russians became, not the majority nationality, but the plurality nationality with less than 50 per cent of the population. In statistical terms, at least, the problem of nationalities within the USSR, far from being solved, has become more acute. To, be sure, the Russians are still the leaders in the population statistics and, of greater importance, they seem to maintain absolute command of the economy, all the while their culture is growing more and more dominant.

Easter comes in Russia later than in the West. The Russian Orthodox Church, conservative to its depths in so many respects, has never relinquished its ancient loyalty to the Julian calendar—and, indeed, twice in this century it has forcefully resisted efforts to abolish the embarrassment of the thirteen-day lag in that out-of-date schema. Easter of 1972, for peculiar reasons connected with the lunar cycle, came only a week after the Western churches had celebrated the feast, but if 1972 is to be signaled out for any particular note when the histories of our times are written, it will not be for this. Instead, a single letter, circulated from hand to hand and reaching the West in April, 1972, will mark this particular Lenten season as worth remembering.

With some justification, the 1960s may be called the decade of dissent. This is true even with regard to the Soviet Union, where broad sectors of the population have resorted to increasingly vociferous expressions of dissatisfaction with present conditions. If, when the decade began, overt alienation from the system was a relatively unusual phenomenon, the past ten years have given rise to an increasing stream of dissent in the Soviet populace. Among the intelligentsia, almost every rank and profession has been involved in oral, written, and organizational protest. Considerable attention has been devoted to this development by Western scholarship and journalism, and rightly so, for the voices of dissent provide an immediate insight into the tensions and conflicts within the rapidly changing society. One area of dissent, however, has received rather less attention in the West. This paper will attempt to survey the religious portion of the Soviet population, in an endeavor to illustrate the degree to which religious dissatisfaction during the past decade has been consonant with the general current of dissent within Soviet society.