Stalin's Holy War: Religion, Nationalism and Alliance Politics, 1941-1945 by Steven MerrittMinerReview by: P. C. BoobbyerThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 82, No. 3 (Jul., 2004), pp. 773-774Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4213985 .

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REVIEWS 773

European Jewish studies and the Holocaust, and the increasingly growing new field of Galician studies.

Department of Near Eastern & Judaic Studies JOANNA MICHLIC Brandeis University, MA

Miner, Steven Merritt. Stalin's Holy War. Religion, Nationalism and Alliance Politics, I94I-I945. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 2003. xxi + 407 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. f42.95.

IN this excellent and absorbing book, Steven Miner argues that the Moscow Patriarchate was primarily re-established in September I1943 for the purposes of consolidating power in the newly-occupied territories. This is not a new idea, but Miner brings a wealth of fascinating detail to the subject. The restoration of the Patriarchate did not occur immediately after the Nazi invasion; indeed, in some places church closings were still taking place after the German attack (p. 8i). The public celebrations of Orthodox Easter in 1942 were an indication that things were changing. However, it was not until the Germans were being driven back that the Patriarchate was restored. The regime was preparing itself for a 'looming conflict' with the Vatican, and it was also keen to present a more tolerant international image of itself as the war's endgame approached. However, a key political objective was the establishing of control in regions previously occupied by the Nazis, and a large portion of the newly-opened churches were located in those areas. The Russian Orthodox Church was the vehicle by which the Stalin regime sought to take control of potentially subversive religious opinion and channel it in a manageable direction. The church became an agent of Russification (p. i I).

Miner implicitly rejects 'great retreat' arguments suggesting that the revival of the Orthodox Church reflected the regime's growing conservatism. Instead, he states that 'materialist' ideology continued to be the unifying element in Moscow's belief-system (p. I96). Nor does Miner endorse the metaphor of 'negotiation' when it comes to church-state relations. The restoration of the Patriarchate was not a concession brought upon the regime by pressure from below, even though there was a wartime revival of religious belief. Miner, who clearly enjoys using metaphors in his work, uses instead the idea of cancer: the Stalin regime masked itself like a 'parasitic cancer' under a camouflage of nationalism and religious freedom in order to eradicate spontaneous religious activity (p. 320). On the other hand, from a detailed reading of Pravda o religii v Rossii, an account of the religious situation in the USSR published by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1942, Miner suggests that the Church entered into a 'Faustian bargain' with the regime; in return for its unquestioning support for the war effort, the hierarchy expected the state to make the Patriarchate the sole voice of Orthodoxy throughout the USSR and to eradicate splinter groups (p. i o i).

While the first two parts of the book are mainly devoted to domestic church history during the war, the third and final part focuses on Soviet propaganda campaigns abroad as they related to religion. Notably, Miner describes the way in which Moscow spread the message that freedom of worship was now

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774 SEER, 82, 3, 2004

endorsed in the USSR through the BBC, specifically through the influence of its agent Peter Smollett, who was director of the British Ministry of Information's Soviet Relations Division. Smollett, according to Miner, played a crucial role in softening British attitudes to the USSR. In addition, he helped to facilitate such propaganda stunts as the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett's visit to Moscow in I 943 and the mass rally at the Albert Hall to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution (p. 278).

Miner suggests that the Anglican hierarchy was influenced by Moscow's propaganda campaigns to a considerable degree. He also argues that there was a lot of wishful thinking going on. He suggests that William Temple, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in August I942, and Cyril Garbett, were duped into believing, or at least stating, that the religious situation in the USSR was better than it really was. For example, Temple declared in November I942 that he saw 'little or nothing' in the Stalinist system with which a Christian could quarrel (p. 255). Miner suggests that Temple was guilty of 'intellectual dishonesty' about the nature of Communism (p. 258), and that the silence of clerics like Garbett about the realities of life under Stalin involved a 'serious failure of moral nerve' (p. 33 I). According to Miner, Hewlett Johnson, the 'Red Dean' of Canterbury, went a step further down a road 'already charted' by Temple and Garbett. Miner describes Johnson's meeting with Stalin in May I945, which received prominent press treatment in the USSR and abroad, as the 'capstone' to the selling of the Holy Alliance between Moscow and the West. The ideological naivety of certain prominent Anglicans comes across very strongly here, even considering the peculiar circumstances of the wartime alliance.

Miner states that although the Stalin regime tried to manipulate Orthodoxy, it lost control of it in the process (p. I2). The deployment of traditional symbols and institutions led to a fusion of Soviet ideology and Russian nationalism that in the end could only alienate the non-Russian republics (p. 321-22). An 'atheist Messianism' was one of the many contradictory features of the new Stalinist mythology (p. 88). Miner also states that the regime was not as strong as it appeared in the West, and he opts for a middle- ground view of the origins of the Cold War somewhere between traditional and revisionist interpretations (p. 333).

On a different note, Miner suggests that Western historians have often neglected the Russian Church because they have assumed like the Soviets themselves -that religion was a relic of the past that was doomed by the forces of modernization (p. 4). He is surely right about that. His own book does a lot to rectify the problem. What Miner does not cover in detail although he emphasizes its importance is the social and cultural history of the wartime religious revival. There is plenty of scope for researchers to look further at the religious experience and spirituality of the war period, and the tensions between Church policy and popular religion. Miner's primary concern is with the political dimension of things. His book is thorough and well written, and it deserves to be widely read.

School of Histogy P. C. BoOBBYER University of Kent

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