Stimmen aus Jerusalem. Die Macht der Gerüchte und die religiöse Renaissance in der Sowjetunion,1941–1948

Voices from Jerusalem. The Power of Rumours and the Religious Renaissance in the Soviet Union, 1941–1948

Soviet state and party leaders claiming the opinion leadership and the monopoly of the press had an extremely ambivalent attitude towards all alternative media facilitating any kind of public opinion shaping. However, within a state where news could not be spread by independent press institutions, rumours unavoidably assumed the function of substitute media. The Bolsheviks’ single-party state, always cautious not to lose news control, was therefore also forever producing new rumours.

Using the example of the resurgence of religious practices and widespread religious interpretations of the German invasion in the time after 1941, the author analyses this ambivalence. Because of its manoeuvering and its religious policies during the war, the regime slid into a very delicate situation. Two factors opened the door to oral interpretations and rumours concerning the framework, duration and reasons for the new church policy: on the one hand, the government tried to use the Russian Orthodox Church as an instrument for its own purposes; on the other, there were only a few guidelines that ruled religious life. As a result, it was precisely this ambivalent framework that offered much more scope for popular religiousness. Especially in the religious sphere, the Bolshevist state did not succeed in breaking the power of rumours.