churches were closed and more than 40,000 clergy were arrested.
Many of these clergy and their families were shot or imprisoned in
the gulagduring the Yezhovshchina.
Joseph Stalinallowed the Orthodox Church greater freedom dur-
ing the war years to rally popular support. Nikita Khrushchev, how-
ever, moved against the Orthodox and Baptists churches in the early
1960s. The KGBarrested scores of church leaders, and the state
closed more than half of the Christian churches. About 200 Baptist
and Pentecostal believers were sent to the camps every year for re-
fusing to obey the regime’s rules on church policy.
Following the incorporation of the western Ukraine and western
Byelorussia into the Soviet Union in 1939 and the annexation of the
Baltic states in 1940, the security services targeted the Roman
Catholic leadership. This campaign intensified with the return of the
Red Army to the Baltic and the Ukraine in 1944–1945. One Lithuan-
ian bishop was murdered in a Vilnius prison in the 1950s, and others
remained in jail or under house arrest for decades. An aggressive
anti-Catholic policy was followed by the KGB in the Baltic and west-
ern Ukraine until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Islam and Judaism also were targets for antireligious campaigns.
Stalin mandated vicious anti-Semitic campaigns in the late 1940s, for
example against the Anti-Fascist Committee. Jews were purged from
the security service, the Communist Partyleadership, and the pro-
fessions. Only Stalin’s death in 1953 prevented a larger pogromand
the deportation of Jews to forced exile. While Khrushchev ended this
campaign, the KGB continued to prosecute “Zionist” groups until- By the late 1970s, there were only 60 Jewish houses of worship
operating in the Soviet Union.
In Central Asia, the Cheka cracked down hard on Islam in the early
1920s to break political opposition. Mosques and Islamic shrines
were destroyed or turned into museums. Religious leaders who re-
fused to be co-opted were arrested or silenced. These campaigns con-
tinued through the late 1980s, as even Mikhail Gorbachevpushed
anti-Islamic campaigns in Central Asia. The KGB and the party’s ef-
fort to destroy organized Islam may have backfired, forcing many
Muslim believers to seek more radical forms of religious expression.
The growth of militant Islam in Chechnya and other parts of the Cau-
casus and Central Asia is the heritage of 60 years of persecution.
ANTIRELIGIOUS CAMPAIGNS•1506-313 A-G.qxd 7/27/06 7:54 AM Page 15