In the German long weekend of early October, 2024 the organizers invited fifteen international scholars to Berlin to discuss questions of religion, religious identity, and totalitarianism in East Central Europe in the mid-20th century.
The opening session included an engaging introduction to the German Evangelical Central Archives in Berlin by its director, HENNING PAHL (Berlin). The archives had graciously accepted to host our conference, which created a cosy and intimate atmosphere, very conducive to academic exchange. Thereafter, SEBASTIAN RIMESTAD (Leipzig) provided a general introduction to the topic of the conference. According to Rimestad, it is difficult to offer general remarks regarding the relationship between religion and ideology. For one, the two are not actors in their own right, but frameworks within which various actors draw inspiration to pursue their actions, and secondly, the historical, cultural, theological, and social contexts have an immense relevance and influence for each case, making overarching conceptualisations difficult or bland. Nevertheless, there is a case to be made for the general analysis of how religious actors and/or the framework of religious legislation reacted to the ideological switch between fascist ideologies until and during World War II and the communist regimes that succeeded the war. By bringing together expert scholars from a vast variety of these contexts, this workshop seeks to bring these contexts together for their mutual benefit, hopefully furthering the analysis of the interplay between religion and totalitarian ideologies, maybe even in contemporary contexts.
The first thematic session was about the Baltic states, with two presentations about Estonia and Lithuania. PRIIT ROHTMETS (Tartu) talked about how the continuously changing external political rulers in Estonian lands (Germans and Russians) had alienated Estonian society from organised religion to a certain extent, turning Estonia into one of the most secularised countries in Europe. Additionally, several waves of clergy deportation, migration, and repression between 1939 and 1945 ensured that the structures of the Estonian Lutheran Church after World War II had to be rebuilt from scratch and remained weak throughout the Soviet era.
ARŪNAS STREIKUS (Vilnius) presented the archival evidence for the communication between the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Lithuania and the Vatican during and after World War II. According to mainstream historiography, the Soviet occupation of 1940/41 had caused a break in this communication, which was quickly restored with the German occupation in 1941. However, as the recently opened Vatican archives reveal, the actual break in communication started much later and lasted a year into the German occupation, before stopping completely between 1944 and 1947. The sources show how Lithuanian actors tried to remain aloft from politics, focusing either on very specific religious requests or remaining very general. The official reports to the Vatican are not really useful sources for analysing everyday religious life in a totalitarian system in Lithuania, which apparently did not change markedly. The clergy was disappointed in the Vatican policies, regarding themselves as lone soldiers left on the frontline. Some of the Bishops fled Lithuania before the Soviet Red Army returned in 1944, thereby disappointing the Vatican in return.
The following section was devoted to Poland. Unfortunately, URSZULA PĘKALA (Saarbrücken) could not make it to Berlin, so the elephant of Polish Catholicism remained unaddressed, but a contribution to the conference volume is planned. Instead, BERND KREBS (Berlin) and THEA SUMALVICO (Halle) presented on the Polish (Protestant) minority churches. Krebs offered a very concise and compelling overview of the conundrums of Polish Protestantism, which was caught between the perception of being a German foreign element and traitors of the Catholic Polish nation. This conundrum from the interwar years was exacerbated by the German Nazi takeover, turning the previously valid hierarchy upside down. After World War II, this hierarchy was once again reversed, this time with serious consequences for those deemed on the wrong side. An effective policy of both Nazi Germans and communist Poles was to replace the churches in all kinds of national integration work. Whereas the churches had earlier been the main loci of nationalism, the political actors tried to wrestle this domain away from them.
Sumalvico focused in her presentation on the Christian Ecumenical Council (founded 1945), which from the beginning demonstrated considerable loyalty to the state. However, this loyalty yielded limited results as government scepticism persisted, with minority churches and the Polish Ecumenical Council suspected of being influenced by foreign entities. Thus, Polish minority churches found themselves in at least a dual confrontation: they had to continuously affirm to state authorities that they were not dependent on foreign churches, while also addressing the suspicion within the ecumenical community that they were simple outposts of communist propaganda.
The presentation by PETER MORÉE (Prague) that followed concentrated on the developments among Czech Protestants. Czechoslovakia, as one of the few places in Europe that did not experience an authoritarian movement, except during the German occupation, the switch between totalitarianisms was not really an issue. Moreover, the communists only took over in 1948, making the case even more unique. Morée’s presentation thus focused on the reception of communism in the Czech churches, which was an ambiguous process. In general, the communist church repressions were met with a discourse of the dying organisational church and the emergence of a new type of church. This was most obvious in the theologian Josef Hromádka, who argued that the communist regime would allow the church to be free from institutionalism, ushering in an end of the Constantinian Age. This did not prevent his disciples from later becoming political dissidents, however, showing how religious logic and political logic were not always congruent.
At the end of the day, there was a session devoted to Croatia, with MARIO JAREB (Zagreb) talking about the run-up to Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac’s arrest and show trial in 1946. STIPE KLJAIĆ (Zagreb) followed with a broader view of debates about ideology among Croatian Catholic intellectuals. The two talks nicely complemented each other, with Jareb clarifying the actual developments and Kljaić explicating the discourses surrounding them. The Tito regime ordered Stepinac’s arrest for collaboration with the fascist Ustasha regime, but it was unable to collect sufficient evidence for such collaboration. Stepinac was offered a passport to leave Croatia for Rome, but he refused, and so the regime had to stage a show trial with fake evidence, something that was not lost on contemporary Catholic and diplomatic observers. Once Stepinac was removed, the regime could pass on to the second phase of repression, consisting of political infiltration on all levels of church government. For the Catholic Church and Croatian Catholic intellectuals, Ustasha was definitely seen as the lesser evil, compared to the socialist threat. Moreover, unlike in Slovenia, there were hardly any attempts in Croatia to conceptualise a Christian socialism. Instead, the communist party was banned, although its proponents continued to debate through art and literature critique, thereby unleashing a culture war against Catholicism.
The penultimate session on the second morning was devoted to Romania and the Soviet Union. IONUŢ BILIUŢA (Cluj) started off with a highly engaging and provocative presentation of the so-called Stăniloae-generation of interwar and post-war Romanian Orthodox theology, some 20 theologians that did not get along, but nevertheless are regarded as belonging to one school that emerged out of the Sibiu theological academy in the 1930s. Biliuţa argued that they were all disciples of the industrious and nationalist metropolitan Nicolae Bălan, who spent considerable funds for them to study abroad, most notably in Nazi Germany. They all embraced the “national ontology” of Orthodoxy and Romanian-ness and became members of the fascist Iron Guard for more or less prolonged periods of time. After World War II, these theologians went three different ways. They either a) collaborated intensively with the communists from the outset, b) were imprisoned and eventually were let go after succumbing to the pressure of the authorities to become collaborators, or c) retired into oblivion.
NADEZHDA BELIAKOVA (Bielefeld) took us to the Baptist and Evangelical communities in the Soviet Union, which counter-intuitively experienced a period of bloom in the 1920s and even saw the Soviet radical separation of church and state as a positive development, which was suddenly crushed when a new law on religious communities restricted all kinds of religious expression in 1929. The repressions were only lifted during World War II, leading to the establishment of a union-wide „Council for Evangelical Christians-Baptists“, a structure uniting most of the disparate groups from the Baltics to Siberia, thereby also making them easier to control. In these communities, the idea was held high that Lenin’s decree on religious freedom actually would enable a spiritual revolution that would bring the true believers closer to the Kingdom of God. There were some direct points of contact with fascism, which had left contradictory and “concealed” traces in the religious identity. On the one hand, there was the memory of the Germans allowing prayer meetings to resume during occupation. On the other hand, the historically close ties with Germany, in some cases, served as grounds for accusations of collaboration with the Nazis and further persecution of individual religious leaders after WWII.
In the last session of the conference, there were two fascinating talks about developments in Ukraine. ANDRIY MYKHALEYKO (Eichstätt) presented the first half of Johannes/Joseph Peters’ life, a German who was intimately connected with the fate of the Greek Catholic Church in (Polish) Ukraine ever since he entered a monastery there in 1934. In his (unpublished) memories, he argues that this was an attempt to escape Nazi Germany, but his activities during World War II as a courier, businessman, and undercover agent shows an ambiguous personality. It is, however, difficult to characterise him as opportunistic, for he remained true to his religious identity, which he cunningly used to navigate between the two “evil regimes” threatening the Ukrainians from East and West. His involvement with the Ukrainian church ended upon his internment in 1942, and he moved to Germany, where he lived until his death in 1995.
NATALIIA SHLIKHTA (Kyiv) presented the immensely complex history of the fate of the Greek Catholic clergy and communities after they accepted the formal “reunion” with the Orthodox Church in 1946. While those remaining in the underground have been quite well researched, Shlikhta highlighted that there was not necessarily a clear-cut line between the two groups, who retained mutual contacts and influenced each other continuously. Very importantly, the “reunited” communities remained distinct from the Orthodox mainstream in terms of identity and tradition throughout, a fact that was even repeatedly acknowledged by ecclesiastical and Soviet authorities. However, due to the large number of Orthodox clergy candidates in the Soviet era coming from Western Ukraine, the church was reluctant to crack down on these developments, which would have only strengthened the underground church anyway. Shlikhta convincingly argued that a more thorough reappraisal of the developments in both parts of the Soviet time Greek Catholic Church requires a less preconceived view.
Unfortunately, the building was closing down, so there was no longer time for an extensive general discussion. I will therefore here just raise some of my own impressions, hoping that they resonate with the general mood of the conference participants. First, the conference was balanced and covered many issues in a variety of contexts without creating factions. The absences (most importantly Hungary) were acknowledged and lamented, but probably would not provide much new insights beyond the additional context. Second, the idea that there is a relationship between religion and ideology that can be comprehensively analysed was questioned by most presentations. Nevertheless, they were able to apply insights from the other presentation to their own, creating a fruitful web of cross-references. This was for example the realisation that it is impossible to clearly separate ideological and religious ideas in the motivation of individual actors, who are much too complex. Moreover, the distinction between the level of declarations and the level of practice must be upheld, and finally, the attempt to suppress religion on ideological grounds often resulted in unexpected reactions from religious actors.
With these general themes in mind, we look very much forward to a planned conference volume, which promises to exploit all these cross-references and paint a comprehensive picture of the way the transition from a political regime dominated by fascism to one dominated by communism in East Central Europe at the end of World War II can be analysed in relation to religion and religious actors.
Conference overview:
Sebastian Rimestad (Leipzig): Religious life and political regimes – universal, transcendental, and unchanging?
Session I – Baltic States
Priit Rohtmets (Tartu): Collaborators or dissidents? The history and reception of collaboration of Estonian Lutherans during the Soviet period
Arūnas Streikus (Vilnius): Catholicism in the Baltics under challenges of totalitarianisms: the view from the Vatican hill
Session II – Poland and Czechoslovakia
Bernd Krebs (Berlin): Protestantism in Poland 1933–1965. A typology of church action in two dictatorships
Thea Sumalvico (Halle): Brotherly Cooperation for the Spiritual and Moral Rebirth of the Polish Nation: Polish Protestants in Ecumenical Dialogue (1945–1961)
Peter Morée (Prague): The post-Constantinian Church, the Dying Church and the Catacomb Church: How the communist rule changed the identity of Christians in Czechoslovakia
Session III – Croatia
Mario Jareb (Zagreb): Between God and Earthly Idols: The Fate of the Catholic Church in Croatia/Yugoslavia at the End of World War II and After It
Stipe Kljaić (Zagreb): Reflections of the Catholic church and intellectual elites in Croatia on totalitarian ideologies (1917–1945)
Session IV – Romania and Soviet Union
Ionuţ Biliuță (Cluj): Surviving Totalitarianism: The Fate of the Fr. Stăniloae Generation in Contemporary Romania
Nadezhda Beliakova (Bielefeld): Sectarians or Spies? Constructing Evangelical Identity under Antireligious Totalitarianism in the Republics of the Soviet Union
Session V – Ukraine
Andriy Mykhaleyko (Eichstätt): The Metropolitan’s “Secret Secretary”. Johannes/Josef Peters (1905–1995) between National Socialism and Communism
Nataliia Shlikhta (Kyiv): How to Survive in the Soviet State: Case of the West Ukrainian ‘Reunited’ Community in the 1940s–1960s