5 - Russia and the Baltics

Summary

Having turned our faces east and west, our wish and prayer now is that the state leadership will at last turn its face to God.

– Romanian Archbishop Lucian Muresan responding to the election of President Emil Constantinescu

Nineteen hundred and seventeen was a busy year for governments turning their faces from God, at least for the institutional representations of His Word here on earth. Not only did the constitutional council in Mexico effectively outlaw the Roman Catholic Church and other religious denominations but also a group of even more radical state builders seized power in a country halfway around the world. The political and ideological goals of the Russian Bolsheviks revealed an ominous future for religion. By ruthlessly crushing the ROC (even more than what Mexican revolutionaries could ever fathom doing to the Catholic Church), the resulting revolutionary government of the Soviet Union drove institutional religion into an emaciated state within a matter of a decade. Although the nationalistic Orthodox Church was allowed to survive throughout the Soviet era, its power and influence was greatly reduced and rigorously monitored. Russia was not the only nation to be affected, though. Upon concluding a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, Josef Stalin's Soviet Union gobbled up the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania at the outset of World War II. The end of that war brought Soviet influence over most of Eastern Europe; the Soviet-dominated states of that region adopted a similar attitude (to varying degrees) toward institutional religion – churches were a rival source of social influence that needed to be controlled tightly.