“You Can Even Write to the Pope”. The Practice of Writing Letters to the Roman Pontiff by the Soviet Believers

Abstract

The authors examine the tradition of appeals to foreign religious leaders, primarily to the Pope, by the believers, mostly Orthodox, from the Soviet Union. The practice of appealing to the Pope for help goes back to the time of Civil War and went on through the entire Soviet period. In the late 1910s-1920s, the authors of such appeals were mainly Orthodox hierarchs. In the early 1930s, this practice became more widespread, and after World War II it was mostly continued by the activists and dissident groups. The reason for this tradition was the belief that pressure from Western religious and political leaders could force the Soviet leadership to change its policy of persecuting believers. In 1923, this belief took shape in a kind of “Curzon Ultimatum syndrome”, since it was with the appearance of this memorandum of the British government that believers associated the release of Patriarch Tikhon from arrest. The tradition was grounded on the belief that pressure from Western religious and political leaders could force the Soviet authorities to change its policy of religious persecu tions. The effectiveness of such appeals to the Vatican for the pre-war period was highly questionable, while appeals by activists and dissident groups in the 196o-198os proved to be quite efficient. A number of circumstances contributed to the fact that the Pope became, in fact, the main (although not the only) recipient of such letters: the Pope was one of the main moral leaders of the Western religious world; the Soviet counter-propaganda campaign against Vatican made the Pope a recognizable image in Soviet mass consciousness. In the Cold War context, the appeal to such a significant figure became one of the ways for religious dissidents to make themselves and their concepts visible and to join the international campaign for the protection of human rights, in which the Vatican was actively involved.