Some Questions of Responsibility for Violation of the Law on Separation of Church from State and School from Church

All the necessary conditions have been created in our country for the normal functioning of religious bodies. The legislation contains special provisions protecting believers, religious bodies, and clergy from infringements of their legal rights.     

The State and the Church

The history of the relations between church and state contains more than a few dramatic pages: rivalry and open opposition, attempts by church authorities to subordinate state power to themselves, and the state's struggle to extricate itself from the influence and control of the church.     

On the Nature of State Committees in the USSR

The reorganization of the structure of the agencies of state administration in accordance with the decisions of the November, 1962, Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee constituted a further development of the Leninist principle of administration of the economy with allowance for the "vast qualitative changes that had occurred in industry, construction, and agriculture, and with consideration of the gigantic increase in the volume of production." (1)     

The Belarusian Orthodox Church in the Shadow of the State

The Orthodox Church in Belarus tries to speak out in support of the state and at the same time uphold its own values. It can be effective in upholding its own values only if it participates in public dialogue.     

Church,State, and Society in the East

The articles in this issue of Russian Politics and Law review the role of religion in state-society relations in the former Soviet Union. They examine the role of the Church in several former Soviet republics and show that the Orthodox Churches in former Soviet states share many commonalities.     

Church,State, and Society in the East

The articles in this issue of Russian Politics and Law examine the role of religion in state-society relations in Russia, with a specific focus on the Russian Orthodox Church. They highlight the role of the Church in modern Russian society and its relationship with the state, showing that as the relationship between Church and state has become closer, hopes that Patriarch Kirill would rejuvenate the Church have proved largely unfounded.     

Church,State, and Society in the East

This issue of Russian Politics and Law concludes our series reviewing the role of religion in state-society relations in the former Soviet Union. This issue examines the role of the Church in Belarus and provides several analytical perspectives on the series' findings. The analytical findings highlight the distinction between the extent of popular identification with Orthodoxy and levels of active practice and belief among the population.     

The Church,Ethnonationalism, and the State

Although the process of the acquisition of independence by countries and large ethnic groups in the post-Soviet region and the Eastern Bloc as a whole is complete, over the next few decades Churches are hardly likely to become propagandists of peace and tolerance.     

Russia: The Official Church Chooses the State

The author argues that relations with the state are still much more important to the Moscow Patriarchate than relations with its own flock.     

Church,State, Resistance1

This article problematizes a separation of Church and State that is nevertheless identified as constitutive of politics. Democracy has come to manifest a tension between the ‘autonomy’ of the political and a ‘heteronomy’ that, exceeding rationalist or social contractarian accounts of our co‐existence, is here presented as an irreducible affect of our being together. Autonomy, it is argued, resists heteronomy through all representations of democracy; yet, by contrast, heteronomy resists autonomy, and does so with the force of this affect. So if civil religion is impossible – and if we know only too well where its realizations lead: by default, to republican celebration, or by excess, to fascism – then we must take up again, and from scratch, the question of the affect according to which we co‐exist.     

The Russian Orthodox Church as Part of the State and Society

The author analyzes how the relations of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Russian state and with Russian society have developed under Patriarch Kirill.     

The Development of Legislation on Safeguarding the State Security of the USSR

The implementation of the strategic course of the CPSU and the Soviet state toward a further development of Socialist democracy necessarily requires strengthening the legal foundations of the life of the state and society. This is one of the ways for developing Socialist democracy outlined in the Constitution of the USSR, and it is organically linked to other aspects of the general process of democratization in Soviet society.     

Union After the Union: Problems of Ordering National and State Relations in the Former USSR

The reasons for the demise of powerful states are never fully clear, either to contemporaries or to historians—the varied interpretations of the fall of Rome are only one case in point. But this applies especially to empires, i.e., state structures that, over an entire geopolitical region, come to dominate nations whose statehood has thereby been destroyed or partially preserved, albeit with some portion of sovereignty, large or small, having been lost. In this sense (but only in this sense), the USSR was an empire like the Russian tsardom. But in this sense as well, the United States of America is an empire—true, a modern one, ruling as if by remote control, indirectly. Understood in this way, empires are a function of the entire world system and will disappear not only, and not so much, by dint of internal turmoil, as simply because "the world has become different."¹     

The Russian Orthodox Church as the Church of the Majority

The author examines the evolution of relations among Church, state, and society in Russia over recent years in the light of comparisons with other predominantly Orthodox Christian countries.     

Conservation Law in the USSR

The extensive development of social production in the USSR, and the associated steadily increasing utilization of diverse natural resources in the economy, compel us to intensify our concern for the protection of nature. In recent years, measures have been developed in our country to assure rational utilization and protection of the land, its mineral wealth, waters, forests, and animal life. The protection of nature has become an important state task and the concern of all the people.     

Improving National Relations in the USSR

The problem of nationalities occupied a substantial place among the wide range of social problems raised at the Twenty-seventh CPSU Congress. The Soviet Union has been a pioneer in addressing the national question which, as V. I. Lenin wrote, is a worldwide phenomenon. It is one of the most acute questions in the history of mankind: the engendering of class antagonisms that inevitably entail national oppression, the lack of equality of nationalities before the law, and their inequality. Our country has convincingly demonstrated to the entire world that with the victory of socialism antagonisms in the sphere of national relations are being overcome. As noted in the new edition of the CPSU Program, "the Soviet Union has successfully resolved the national question that was left over from the past." In the course of socialist construction, the formerly backward national hinterlands have long ago vanished; socialist nations have joined to form an international community—the Soviet people—that is new in its social parameters; there have formed common cultural traits that are characteristic of Soviet people of all nationalities; national discord is a thing of the past; and the fraternal friendship of the peoples, forged in their common creative labor and tested in the most difficult of wars, has become the standard of life.