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VI Religion in an Anti-Religious State When our group requested visas at the Soviet Embassy Washington, we stated as one of our major purposes the des to see something of religious life in the Soviet Union. It wot appear that this desire was culled to the particular attent! of the Evangelical Christian Baptists, for their leadership w comed us most warmly in Leningrad and Moscow, and la advised their provincial leaders of our itinerary, so that Bapt officials, usually bearing flowers, were almost a welcoming fixtt at the airports where we landed. We visited not only set individual congregations of the Baptists, but also several Ort! dox churches, a theological seminary for training the Orthoc priesthood, a church of the Old Believers, who separated fri the Orthodox Church 300 years ago, and two Jewish synagogu In addition, we had a number of extended conversatic ith Baptist leaders in different parts of the Soviet Union, n with Metropolitan Nikolai in Moscow and interviewed the s retary of the Council on Affairs of Religious Cults, the gove: ment agency responsible for relations with all religious grou in the Soviet Union (except the Orthodox Church). All of th contacts helped provide an impression of the status of relig in Russia today and the prospects for its future vitality. The various Christian churches in the Soviet Union hi had a dramatic history since the 1917 Revolution. In tsar times the Russian Orthodox Church held a privileged posit strikingly similar to that which is held in the Soviet Union toc by the officia! religion of Marxism-Leninism. Only the Ortho: Church had the right to carry on missionary work among ot! religious groups; and a government decoration, the third gr: of the Order of St. Anne, was granted to any Orthodox n sionary “who is so fortunate as to make, with the aid of police, 100 converts among the schismatics or infidels.”* It y ‘8 criminal offense, punishable by prison or exile, to criticize Orthodox Church or clergy, to convert an Orthodox follower any other faith or to publish or distribute any literature c sidered to advocate dissent from the established faith. "MM. Searle Bates, Religious Liberty: An Inquiry (New York: Hat and Brothers, 1945), pp. 245-46, 68