HAVE you any churches in Podolsk?" I ask the town daily's editor.
Yes, we have one, a big cathedral. Would you like to see it? Never having been there, either, I'm also curious. Come, let's go." Getting into our heavy top-coats we cross the main avenue, along side-streets, finally coming upon an alleyways which leads up a small hill. Around us, a fresh snow shimmers. Behind us, the hum of the city's noonday. Ahead rise lonely white columns topped by onion-shaped towers, peculiarly typical of old Russian churches. The rotund, green cones are pierced by golden spires which glitter with the fading glamour of a bygone day.
The cathedral stands in the midst of what in summer must be a fine garden. Remote, a thing apart. There are few tracks in the snow before us. The pathway can have few travellers.
"Once Podolsk had several churches," Traubi says, "for no matter how poor or small a town, the priesthood managed to thrive. After the revolution, these places grew more and more empty." The population began demanding, at union and public meetings, that those falling into disuse be taken over, and converted into club houses and museums. That was done. Those who still wanted to go to church came to this cathedral. It is the only one remaining--but the largest and best.
The church doors refuse to open to out knocks, or yield under our pressure. The place is securely-bolted, deserted. Wading knee-deep through the snow we encircle the building, peeping in through the windows at the altar at pictures of saints, high archways, and spacious marble floors. There is a smell of must about the place, that seeps even from the outer walls, making me sneeze.
Finally we locate a caretaker. A young woman not long from the country who lives in a small house in the sideyard. We ask her how many come to services here. She replies indifferently, that on Sundays maybe forty or at most fifty come. All old ones. When she speaks of the priest she sniffs audibly. A parasite. At least she cleans the place, shovels snow. But what does he do, mumbling in his beard, to earn the right to the people's money! No, she never goes to services herself. "Though I earn my living hare, I agree with the talk about town. This place should be closed."
"What about your job!"
She is unmoved. "Oh, I'd go to the factory to work. Or, if this became a club or something, I might stay on here." We start back down the path. I, too, am put out. What a waste! A place that was built to accommodate fifteen hundred, used once in seven days by a half-hundred people. And tire place so badly needed for other purposes.
My companion agrees, "Sure, some day it will make a fine community building. Then you'll find the route here more traveled. Many resolutions have been passed by every kind of organization, demanding that our soviet take it over, making it into an auditorium for concerts and large meetings. It would be the biggest hall in town."
Nevertheless, the soviet is willing to wait a few years longer. True, there are only a few who come here. yet it is the last church not only in Podolsk itself, but in the whole region. If taken over, the old people would have nowhere to say their prayers, and the scheming kulaks could seize upon this as a means of spreading all sorts of rumours, stirring up trouble. Better wait a few years more, until the old ones die off or tire of feeding the priest for nothing. There is no danger that the younger generation will fall under the church's influence.
In Podolsk, as in other Soviet communities, any adult may go to church or not, as he pleases. Yet, the church is obviously a dying institution. In Kharkov, Moscow, Baku, the Donbas, it is the same: emptying citadels, finally transformed into public buildings. In the villages, the priest's hold is going the way of the kulaks'. The tractor and collective farm life are teaching peasants to laugh at old superstitions which once led them every spring to give their best pig or chickens to the priest in exchange for his exhortation to the saints that they send a good harvest.
It is fifteen years since the revolution. The spread of science, absorption in creating a new world, and many bitter experiences with the church (which supported the tsar's cruelty, shared in his ill-gotten riches, and always harboured enemies of the masses and Soviet power) has turned the population away from religion. Not all, but the great majority.
A people fashioning socialism: what have they to do with black-robed, shifty-eyed creatures in droll hats, preaching a witch-craft magic? With blank crows that caw about the belfries, frightening blind bats into dashing their brains out against the moulding stones!
The Communist Party and Soviet Government, frankly looking upon the church as a dealer in harmful, unsound doctrines, as a dead hand of the past, are determined that it shall not lay its hold on the young. It is forbidden in the U.S.S.R. to give formal religious instruction to those under eighteen years of age. There is no psalm-chanting in Soviet schools, as there is in New Jersey, Virginia, and many other states. As a result, the approach of Soviet youth to the
At the same time, the Party and Government are considerate of the older people's beliefs. It is the institutions that must be undermined. With the individual who clings to his old ways, it is possible to argue, to explain, but rarely to ridicule.
This general attitude finds its reflection also among the youth, tempering intolerance natural to their age. Recently in Moscow, I witnessed such an incident. An old man, passing a church, crossed himself, lifting his hat. A boy, also passing, smiled broadly. "Don't laugh at me, my son," the old man reproached him, "the time comes when we all must die, and go out to god knows what." The youth sobered instantly. "Citizen, it was not at you I was smiling. I was thinking," he pointed towards the church, "what a leftover it is, that soon we'll be rid of it altogether."
Another day. A group of fifty of us were on our way from a rest home for Party members to put in a morning's volunteer work on a collective farm nearby. A woman farmer was leading us, two wooden rakes over her shoulder. We matched through the small village of Ilyich, in semi-military fashion, singing revolutionary airs, and joking among ourselves. Suddenly, up the dirt street appeared another procession heading towards us--silent, mournful, as we were gay.
In the front walked a huge peasant, bearing the gilded lid of a coffin. Behind him came two others, carrying an open casket. The tiny body of a grandmother, hands folded on her shrunken, chest, jolted hack and forth with the motion of her bearers. In the rear walked the family. A religious funeral, headed for the village church.
Our brigade leader called softly, "Halt!" Fifty Communists, avowed atheists, stood silently, while the pitiful procession went by. Only after we were some way down the road, did we take up our singing. The warm, brown fields had come into view, with the peasants ploughing, and waving us greetings. In groups of three, we began planting and watering long rows of sugar beets. Sugar beets grown and marketed collectively, bringing a fresh life to Ilyich which the poor old woman buried today had never learned to comprehend. The sun beat down on our backs and bare legs. The farmers laughed to see how fast the rows grew, with fifty extra pairs of hands.
Traubi and I continue our way back to the heart of the city. We pass three men slumped up against the wall, drinking. Ashamed, they turn their backs, hoping we will not notice them. "Relics also of she past, those bottles," my companion remarks. "And passing as surely, although not as rapidly, as their partner, the icon."
Once more we enter the current of life flowing through the city. In the background rise the factories, smokestacks puffing. Men and women stride down the thoroughfare, freedom and security in their steady gait. Boys and girls, out of school, skates under their arms, are racing toward the rink. On the billboard we notice large posters. On the evening of the coming free day a Moscow theatre will present the new pig "Bread." A youth, wearing a red scarf, elbows his way In among those lining the bookstall counters.
Phrases reach us from those passing: "And did our meeting give it to that bureaucrat!" "Yesterday our foundry opened its new restaurant." "You should have gotten a slant at Sasha's face, when the brigade gave him his udarnik pin!"
This is Main Street. Soviet Main Street. Today it runs from Podolsk, through Moscow, south to the Caspian, east to the Pacific. Being one-sixth of the earth's surface. Its blocks resound with the firm tread of a hundred and sixty million, swinging in unison to the battle-cry, "Five-Years in Four" and "Forward to the World October." Their march echoes in Paris, Tokyo, Chicago, in Bombay, London. Berlin, Shanghai, New York, thunder with masses pressing forward to the day when Soviet Main Street shall encircle the globe.