Introduction Soviet society was seen as an atheistic society. This was explicitly mentioned in the Second Program of the Party (1919) and detailed in the Third Program adopted at the Twenty-first Congress of the CPSU (1961) at the peak of Khrushchev's struggle for communist "renewal of society"1. The" new man "of such a society should be stripped of all the "birthmarks of capitalism", among which "religious superstitions", manifested primarily in religious rites, were considered as the most tenacious and undesirable 2. "Typical religious people "(as it was imagined - only old grandparents and sometimes grandfathers) could continue to believe in God, go to church and take part in religious ceremonies until their death. With their physical disappearance, both religion and the Church had to disappear as a relic and unnecessary attribute of religiosity. This was the ideal, partly drawn from a peculiarly interpreted Marxist understanding of the"communist paradise." In the post-revolutionary years, the period of the "great turning point", the forced implementation of the Soviet modernization project in the late 1920s - 1930s. 1. See the texts in the publication: Programs and Charters of the CPSU, Moscow: Politicheskaya literatura Publ., 1969. 2. Ibid., pp. 48, 198-200. page 380an attempt was made to speed up the inevitable process of religion's demise. The religious revival during the Second World War showed the futility of such forceful actions. In the post-war period, the leaders of the state revised tactics without abandoning or modifying the strategy in any way. They realized that dealing with a fully loyal church institution is much more profitable than dealing with "uncontrolled manifestations of spontaneous religiosity of the masses"3. Therefore, the existence of the Russian Orthodox Church - as the sole legal representative of all Eastern Rite Christians - was allowed, its hierarchy was used to achieve certain - mainly foreign - policy goals. At the same time, the ... Читать далее