A Long Walk To Church by Nathaniel Davis

Author:Nathaniel Davis [Davis, Nathaniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780429975127
Google: xpZNDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-08T03:40:01+00:00

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Publications and Finances

IN THE BEGINNING THE WORD of God was proclaimed without the use of written materials, but Christian disciples soon used holy scriptures to teach the faith to new generations. Church servers use liturgical books; Christian scholars use publications and journals; the Russian Orthodox community uses printed materials to bind it together and enlighten its thought.

In 1926, the Soviet authorities withheld all authorizations to publish Bibles and other religious materials; this was part of the Bolsheviks' effort to suffocate the church. Not until thirty years later, in 1956, did they grudgingly permit an edition of 25,000 Bibles.1 According to Deacon Vladimir Rusak, who worked in the publishing department of the Patriarchate, only 10,000 of these copies were distributed to parishes in the USSR. Of the remaining 15,000, the theological schools received 3,000, the Patriarchate kept 2,000 as a reserve, and the authorities sent 10,000 Bibles abroad.2 The Four Continents Book Shop in New York received fifty of these volumes, while millions of believers in the Soviet Union went without.3 The state did not permit another edition until 1968, when the church published 40,000 Bibles; two years later it published an additional 30,000 copies. The Patriarchate had to share these Bibles with the Baptists. Rusak stated that ten Bibles were distributed to each Moscow church, but many village churches received none.4 The 1970s brought some loosening of government restrictions, and the church published 220,000 copies of the Bible between 1976 and 1983. In sum, roughly 300,000 Bibles were printed in a fifty-seven-year period.5

Until 1988, however, the slight relaxation of restrictions on printing did not affect the ban on importing Bibles. A foreigner could take only one copy of the Bible into the USSR, and had to register it on his or her customs declaration to ensure that the Bible was taken back out. I well remember leading a group of students on a train from Helsinki in May of 1985. The woman on duty in the railroad car interrogated me about the possibility that the students were bringing in Bibles; she ended her admonitory lecture by saying that it would be a far, far better thing, indeed, for the students to cast their illegal Bibles out of the train window before the border than to be apprehended with those forbidden books.

According to reports that filtered to the West over the years, these restrictions created a thriving black-market trade in Bibles; they were sold for 100-160 rubles (then $200), a large sum for a Soviet worker or pensioner in those days. Observers speculated that customs inspectors and personnel of the Council for Religious Affairs enriched themselves by supplying this black-market trade.6

The prohibition against importing Bibles began to crack in March 1988, when the Soviet authorities announced an easing of the customs ban. Apparently, the new rules allowed a private citizen to receive by mail two religious texts per calendar year.7 In November of the same year, the customs authorities at the border relaxed their vigorous searches for contraband Bibles.8 The Soviet

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