Protestants behind the Iron Curtain: Religious Belief, Identity, and Narrative in Russia and Ukraine since 1945

1946年，当温斯顿·丘吉尔第一次提到铁幕时，25万苏联公民成为福音派基督教浸信会联盟的成员；到1991年铁幕揭幕时，这一数字已跃升至150万。苏联末期和后苏联时期的宗教复兴在很大程度上让世界措手不及：信仰是如何在无神论者的猛烈抨击中幸存下来的？为什么人们向教会自首的人数如此之多？关于“世俗化”的过程，这告诉了我们什么？在冷战期间，西方将苏联的基督徒视为反对共产主义政权的潜在盟友，特别是在英国、德国和美国有宗教根源的浸礼会和五旬节派。当然，苏联当局对海外宗教团体的示好感到不满，并将新教徒作为西方的走狗。尽管在斯大林统治下，新教团体的待遇并不比其他任何宗教团体都差(尽管这很糟糕)，但赫鲁晓夫时代给他们贴上了国家的标签，他们被狂热地妖魔化了。尽管受到这种迫害，新教社区不仅生存了下来，甚至还发展壮大了。谢尔盖·菲拉托夫在关于后苏联时期的著作中指出，共产主义政权对教会传统的破坏导致了连贯的宗教世界观的消失，到改革开始时，俄罗斯公民的宗教意识是不同信仰的无定形、折衷的混合体。这个项目从更长远的角度出发，探索了许多俄罗斯和乌克兰公民的宗教意识，不仅是在共产主义政权的晚年，而且是在整个苏联时期，尤其是在第二次世界大战的创伤之后，一种精神追求的感觉，而不是一种固定的宗教认同感。它问道，为什么新教成为越来越多的苏联男女的精神避难所，包括许多没有在宗教环境中长大的人。这对整个苏联项目具有重要意义，因为它探索了国家试图塑造“新苏联人”的局限性，以及其他世界观和信仰在美国境内存在甚至蓬勃发展的潜力。将采取创新的方法，将档案研究和在四个特定地区进行的口述历史相结合：莫斯科、基辅、切尔诺维西和沃罗涅日。在档案馆里，地方政府官员撰写的关于宗教状况的报告，涉及新教徒的法庭案件，以及关于宗教信仰的社会学调查问卷，提供了一大堆令人着迷的几乎没有使用过的材料。口述历史提供了更多亲密体验的途径，也让我们能够探索信徒在苏联政权解体20年后如何理解他们的经历。对极权主义社会的研究已经使用口述历史来批判性地反思记忆和经验之间的关系，但我们试图整合和比较口述和书面描述，以探索生活故事的变化和流动的性质，这将提供一种原创的方法以及关于信徒生活的丰富材料。该项目将产生三个主要成果：一个俄文和英文网站，允许用户查阅选定的档案文件和采访记录；一个关于苏联新教历史的文件集(面向俄罗斯观众)；一本英文学术专著。我们还将把我们的发现传播到英国、鲁西萨和乌克兰的浸礼会社区。

When Winston Churchill first spoke of the iron curtain in 1946, a quarter of a million Soviet citizens were reigstered as members of the Evangelical Christian-Baptist Union; by the time the curtain was lifted in 1991, that number had jumped to 1.5 million. The religious renaissance of the late and post-Soviet periods took the world largely unawares: How had faith survived the atheist onslaught? Why had people turned in such large numbers to the church? What does this tell us about the process of 'secularization'? During the Cold War, the West saw Christians in the Soviet Union as potential allies against the communist regime, particularly Baptists and Pentecostalists, who had religious roots in Britain, Germany, and the US. The Soviet authorities were, of course, displeased by the overtures of overseas religious groups and targeted Protestants as lackeys of the West. Although under Stalin, the treatment of Protestant groups had not been worse than for any other religious group (bad though this was), by the Khrushchev era 'sectarians', as the state labelled them, were passionately demonized. Despite this persecution, Protestant communities not only survived, but even grew. Writing about the post-Soviet period, Sergei Filatov has argued that the destruction of church traditions under the communist regime led to the disappearance of a coherent religious worldview and that by the beginning of perestroika 'the religious consciousness of Russian citizens was an amorphous, eclectic mixture of different beliefs'. By taking a longer-term perspective, this project explores how a sense of spiritual quest, rather than a fixed religious identity, might have characterized the religious consciousness of many Russian and Ukrainian citizens not just in the twilight years of the communist regime but throughout the Soviet period, and particularly in the wake of the trauma of the Second World War. It asks why Protestantism became the spiritual refuge of choice for growing numbers of Soviet men and women, including many who had not been raised in a religious milieu. This has important implications for the Soviet project as a whole because it explores the limits of the state attempt to shape the 'new Soviet person' and the potential for alternative worldviews and beliefs to exist and even thrive within the USSR.An innovative approach will be taken, combining both archival research and oral history conducted in four specific regions: Moscow; Kiev; Chernovitsi; and Voronezh. In the archives, reports on the religious situation written by local state offiicals, court cases involving Protestants, and sociological questionnaries about religious belief provide a fascinating and almost unused body of material. Oral history provides access to more intimate experiences and well as allowing us to explore how believers, twenty years after the collapse of Soviet power, make sense of their experiences. Studies of 'totalitarian' societies have already used oral history to reflect critically on the relationship between memory and experience, but our attempt to integrate and compare oral and written accounts in order to explore the shifting and fluid nature of life-stories will provide an original methodology as well as rich material about the lives of believers. The project will result in three major outputs: a website in both Russian and English allowing users access to selected archival documents and interview transcripts; a collection of documents relating to the history of Protestantism in the Soviet Union (for a Russian audience); and an academic monograph in English. We will also disseminate our findings to baptistic communities in the UK, Rusisa, and Ukraine.