A SOVIET ATTACK ON RELIGION/A Focus OF THE SOVIET ATTACK

DESPITE concessions made to the Russian Orthodox Church in order to win World War II, the Soviet Union maintained a stranglehold  on the church's activities. Therefore, as The Sword and the Shield, a book written in 1999 about the history of the KGB (the Soviet Security Committee), observed, "the KGB was far more concerned by the 'subversive' activities of those Christians over  whom it had no direct control." Which religious groups were these?

The largest was the Greek Catholic  Church of Ukraine, which now is the Ukrainian Catholic Church.  It had some 4,000,000 adherents. According to The Sword and the Shield,  "all but two of its ten bishops, along with  many thousands of priests and believers, died for their faith in the Siberian gulag [work camps]."  Other targets of the KGB were the unregistered Protestant churches, which were also outside direct State control.  In the late 1950's, the KGB estimated that these Protestant groups had a combined total of some 100,000 members. 

The KGB considered Jehovah's Witnesses to be a Protestant group, whom they estimated in 1968 to number about 20,000 in the Soviet Union. Up until the beginning of World War II in 1939, the Witnesses had been small in number. Thus, little or not note had been taken  of them. But the situation changed dramatically when thousands of Witnesses suddenly appeared in the Soviet Union.  How did this occur? 

Next time: A SOVIET UNION ATTACK ON RELIGION/A Focus OF THE SOVIET ATTACK - Dramatic Increase Begins 

From the jw.org publications