Book Review: Dissent on the margins. How Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses defied Communism and lived to preach about it.

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Dissent on the margins. How Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses defied Communism and lived to preach about it. By Emily B. Baran. Pp.xvi + 382 incl. 2 maps. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. £51. 978 0 19 994533 5

Reviews

Emily B. Baran's book on the Jehovah's Witnesses in the Soviet Union is one of the most revelatory books on religion in the USSR, the quality of her research being truly astonishing. She has not only recovered information from Soviet state archives, but she even learned Romanian in order to gain access to the local sources in Soviet Moldavia. As a result, this book reveals a great deal about Communist policy towards religious minorities in general, a subject which has not been fully researched before.

The period covered is relatively recent, because the Witnesses did not appear on Soviet soil in any significant numbers until the end of the Second World War, when territorial gains incorporated them into Transcarpathia (Western Ukraine), where they had flourished under an earlier regime. For a time, the policy to contain them was deportation to Siberia, where those that survived, not unlike Lithuanian Catholics, were convinced that God was directing their missionary efforts under persecution. It took some time before Soviet practice took this into account and prison camp after summary trial became the preferred option.

Even here the bravery of the Witnesses often came to the fore. By the early 1960s the infamous Dubravlag became a kind of seminary. Baran writes: 'One man, sent to Mordovia in 1963, described the camp as a "school for studying his faith"... Dubravlag made it much easier for elders to minister to their imprisoned flock and convert new members.' They even formed their own choir there.

Although always small in numbers (45,000 in the whole Soviet Union at the time of its collapse, according to an official publication from the Brooklyn headquarters of the Jehovah's Witnesses), their bravery and determination won out time and time again over brutal persecution. Baran's research bears testimony to the quality of their organisation, whether in the 'underground' (though this is truly a misnomer for their activities) or in prison. It has always been thought that the Baptists led the way in establishing clandestine and home-made printing presses in the early 1960s, yet in the 1950s, when control was more lax in Poland, men swam across the River Bug and back to obtain Polish copies of The Watchtower, which were then translated and secretly printed in the USSR.

Not all Witnesses held firm to the faith. A feature of the Soviet anti-religious campaign, which intensified under Nikita Khrushchev after 1959, was the printing of testimonies of believers who renounced their beliefs under interrogation and torture. Such a man was Konstantin Potashov, who was converted to the faith while in prison for hooliganism and theft. He oversaw major printing initiatives, but was arrested in Mukachevo, Western Ukraine, in December 1962. At his trial he buckled and betrayed many Witnesses by name, before continuing for years as their public critic.

His infamy was nothing compared to that of Aleksandr Dvorkin in the present day. This unspeakable practitioner of religious repression - a key figure in Putin's Russia who attempted to turn the clock back to Communist malpractice - coined the expression 'totalitarian sect'. Baran unmasks him, though eschewing words such as those in the previous sentence. She quotes him as leading the campaign against religious minorities, being encouraged so to do both by the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian State. For him, the Jehovah's Witnesses are a leading organisation that 'violates the rights of [its] members and inflicts harm on them through the use of certain methods known as "mind control"'. Thus Dvorkin led the way to yet another round of systematic repression of the Witnesses, an attempted reversal of the registered status which they acquired in the early '90s. Thus, in recent years, articles have appeared in the press accusing them, in true Soviet style, of ritual murder (p. 214). This book bears testimony to their lawyers' fighting such accusations in court.

Turning her attention away from the Moscow courts, Baran lifts the curtain on some less well-known corners of Europe. The accessible archives in the West Ukrainian region of Transcarpathia bear eloquent testimony to the vigour and fearlessness of the Witnesses in the post-war years, when this region fell under Soviet rule - and therefore violent political and religious repression - for the first time. Her attention moves on to Moldova, a former Soviet republic and now an independent country, another region where Witness activity has been strong. Here, as in Russia in post-Soviet times, they gained their freedom under the law, but this did not prevent attempts by clergy of the Orthodox Church to prevent them from preaching.

Much worse was what happened in Transnistria, that region of long-frozen conflict, where a thin strip of the original Soviet Moldavia is still occupied by Russian troops, forming a mini-state which has no outside recognition beyond Russia itself. Baran describes Petr Zalozhkov here as the 'Dvorkin of Transnistria', which is surely enough said. Not satisfied by persuading the state to violate its own registration laws, he even wrote a section on the Witnesses in the standard school textbook on religion, claiming that they were operating a 'pyramid scheme' to fleece converts of their money. Here, again, the Witnesses won in the courts, but they could not enforce their own decisions. To his credit, the local Orthodox bishop publicly excommunicated Zalozhkov, but disputed cases remain before the courts.

In her conclusion Baran quotes a story related by the exiled Vladimir Bukovsky. Wandering through the streets of London, he came across a simple sign outside a modest building saying 'Jehovah's Witnesses'. He required nothing more to prove that Western democracy offered true freedom of conscience.

Are there, then, no faults in this book? It is superbly written, entirely void of sociological jargon and beautifully produced by Oxford University Press. The reader would have been additionally enlightened by an account of what typically happened in a Kingdom Hall, at the times when such communal worship was possible. While not sharing their faith, as Emily Baran tells us, she cannot but admire the dedication and selflessness of generations of heroic figures whom she depicts in her pages.

AuthorAffiliation

Keston Institute, Oxford

Word count: 1056

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