Viktor Yelensky – who is he? A Leninist or a nationalist?

We live in an age when the crimes of the Soviet regime and communist ideology itself are being condemned. Streets are being renamed, monuments demolished, attitudes toward historical events reconsidered. This also applies to the Church. Today, there is ample documentary evidence proving that the Bolsheviks committed obvious crimes: executing tens of thousands of clergy and believers, destroying hundreds of churches, persecuting parishioners.

Lenin demanded of his subordinates “to put an end to priests and religion as quickly as possible.” According to the Bolshevik leader, clergy were to be “arrested as counterrevolutionaries and saboteurs, shot mercilessly and everywhere. And as many as possible.”

It seems that Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks’ crimes are now known to all. But what would you say if we told you that people who, under the USSR, propagated Lenin’s “church” ideas are now determining state policy in its relations with the Church? Not the Soviet state – but the Ukrainian one. And that they hold the highest posts. Absurd? Not at all.

“One cannot but marvel at the scope and depth of Lenin’s thought, his genius”

“Maoist-Leninist theory gives us tools for penetrating into humanity’s spiritual sphere,” this man tells us. “One cannot but marvel at the scope and depth of Lenin’s thought, his genius.”

The author of these lines is Viktor Yelensky, today’s head of the State Ethnopolitics Department (DESS). In the late 1980s, he was one of the most active mouthpieces of scientific atheist propaganda.

He denounced Jewish Zionists, spoke about the comfortable life of Protestants in the USSR, but one of his most notable works was “Implementation of the Decree ‘On the Separation of Church from State and School from Church’ in the Early Years of Socialist Construction in the Ukrainian SSR.”

In it, Yelensky sang praises to Lenin’s decisions to crush and plunder the Church, destroy its temples, and “deal with” the clergy.

And although today these theses sound outrageous, they strangely correspond to what Yelensky is putting into practice as Ukraine’s “chief in charge of religion.”

Clergy and monks – agents of imperialists

“After the Revolution, the reactionary clergy and monks became agents of foreign interventionists, and monasteries located in the rear of Soviet troops turned into strongholds of bands and centers of pogrom-style antisemitic agitation,” Yelensky wrote of the Church. His message was clear – churchmen were enemies of Soviet power, “counterrevolutionaries.”

Today Yelensky says much the same thing, though more diplomatically (the office demands it): “All collaborating priests come precisely from this environment, from this Church. But again, this is not the main problem. The main thing is what this Church has been poisoning minds with for a long time.”

Everyone today understands that a hundred years ago the Church in Ukraine was no “stronghold of interventionists.” And there is no doubt that in time it will be agreed that the UOC was no collaborator either.

It was believers themselves who wanted the Church destroyed

“In the People’s Commissariat of Justice a liquidation department was created. Party organizations and Soviets, in their practical work implementing Lenin’s decree on the separation of Church from state, relied on the anti-clerical movement of the working people, who in their majority accepted it favorably. Even churchmen in 1921 were forced to admit that the Ukrainian Orthodox population accepted with sympathy the idea of separation of church from state,” Yelensky wrote in 1988.

So according to today’s DESS head, the people themselves wanted the destruction of the Church. And the liquidation of priests, the destruction of temples (which the liquidation department carried out) was done at the request of the workers.

Doesn’t this remind you of present realities? Here is how Yelensky comments today on mass SBU searches in UOC churches: “I think these searches are primarily the result or consequence of the enormous outrage in society over the UOC’s position, the position it has maintained at least since 2014.” In another interview he says: “There is a demand in society for there to be no structures linked with Moscow.”

In Yelensky’s rhetoric only the historical scenery has changed. The principle remains the same: the state justly crushes the Church – allegedly because the people themselves demand it.

Clergy had the audacity to disguise themselves as cooperatives

From history we know that after the destruction of monasteries, many monks tried to adapt to Bolshevik reality and registered as communes and cooperatives. They worked honestly and posed no threat to the state. But Leninist Yelensky thought otherwise.

“Very common at that time were ‘communes’ and ‘cooperatives’ created by priests and monks. In reality, they not only preserved the monastic order but also became refuges for counterrevolutionary, bandit elements. Soviet authorities had to take decisive measures to oppose these pseudo-communes,” wrote today’s head of DESS.

Seizure of churches and valuables – “correct” actions of the Bolsheviks

Much has been written about the looting of churches in the 1920s. Archival footage shows Red Army soldiers carrying out chalices and crosses from altars, piling icons in heaps. The Bolsheviks justified it by “helping the starving.” Now it is known this was a lie. The Church itself gathered aid, but the Soviets’ real goal was its destruction. Lenin reported to the Central Committee: “We will obtain many valuables, large capital urgently needed by us, and at the same time inflame hatred, split the believers, set them against one another, begin repressions, destroy resistance.”

Now let us turn to Yelensky.

Here are his words: “The clergy resisted especially zealously the confiscation of their land and property. The struggle against the seizure of church valuables most vividly revealed the anti-people character of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy… The inhuman act of resisting the seizure of church treasures for the needs of the starving led to the disappointment of the workers in the ideas of Russian Orthodoxy.”

“The Church leadership developed a program of large-scale opposition to Lenin’s decree, which fully coincided with the plans of the counterrevolution to destroy Soviet power.”

Thus Yelensky condemned the Church for refusing to agree to being plundered by the state, for refusing to be driven from its own churches and monasteries. And in that he saw its “crime.”

Let us think: is not the same happening now? Are not the Ukrainian authorities – like the Bolsheviks a century ago – driving the Church out of the Kyiv-Pechersk and Pochaiv Lavras? Are they not breaking leases with other churches that the Bolsheviks seized a hundred years ago? And is not the refusal of Lavra monks to abandon their shrine presented to society as an “inhuman act of resistance”? Including with Yelensky’s help.

“I know of no other country where man breathes so freely”

The Bolshevik repressions against the Church are obvious to all. Tens of thousands of facts prove it. Even in 1988 at least some of them were accessible to a Party scholar like Yelensky. And here is what he wrote: “Fabrications about ‘barbaric destructions,’ ‘closure of churches’ and the like were already then (in the 1920s–30s) refuted by progressive figures of the Soviet Union.”

Refuted, Karl!

Yelensky angrily denounced representatives of the decaying West who dared to doubt religious freedom under the Soviets: “What cunning did the defenders of the forgery about ‘persecutions of faith in the USSR’ not show, what lies anti-Soviet propagandists did not invent!”

Has Yelensky’s rhetoric changed since? Not in the least. Although in Ukraine today there is abundant evidence of repressions against the UOC, the head of DESS “does not see them.” He declares that Ukraine is “the country with the greatest religious freedom in Europe.” Accordingly, anyone who says otherwise is working for anti-Soviet Russian propaganda.

Renovationists – the “good guys” who supported the revolution

With his “state” mindset, Yelensky spoke approvingly of the Renovationists – precisely for what the Church rightly condemned them: for schism and opportunism.

“Within Orthodoxy there appeared the Renovationist movement. In Ukraine it found significant support among believers. By the end of the recovery period, 17.2% of all Orthodox communities were Renovationist. The Renovationists tried to save the Church by revising its political and social orientation, establishing normal relations with the Soviet authorities,” Yelensky wrote, praising them.

There is no doubt that if Yelensky had been in charge of religion in those years, he would have promoted the Renovationists as the “right” confession – just as he now promotes the OCU.

Autocephalists – bourgeois henchmen

In post-Soviet Ukraine we know many cases when convinced Bolsheviks and fighters against nationalism quickly reinvented themselves as ardent patriots. The brightest example is Filaret Denysenko. But Viktor Yelensky is not far behind.

Today he presents himself as a staunch supporter of an autocephalous national Church. But it was not always so. In the late 1980s, he denounced the autocephalists with the same zeal as Filaret did.

Here are a couple of quotes: “Created by ardent bourgeois nationalist henchmen, the UAPC after the defeat of the counterrevolution turned into a center around which hostile nationalist elements consolidated against Soviet power.”

“In the eyes of thousands of peasants, the UAPC became a legal cell of nationalist yellow-blue counterrevolution, which for a decade parasitized on their feelings and sentiments. It was precisely this, not neglect of the canons, that led to the collapse of the UAPC.”

Harsh criticism, isn’t it? But the USSR collapsed, and Yelensky’s convictions underwent radical changes. He went to the USA for training, became a Fulbright scholar in Ukraine. And within a decade Yelensky was writing articles about how important it was for Ukraine to gain autocephaly. He forgot that the autocephalists were “nationalist henchmen” and “parasitized on the people’s feelings.”

Atheism as a state of soul

Reading such contradictory statements from Viktor Yelensky – both “Leninist” and “nationalist” – leaves one perplexed: when was he genuine?

In one of his works on Protestants, Yelensky proclaimed his life credo: “We, atheists, believe that the scientific-materialist worldview of the individual fosters these qualities because it liberates his essential forces, allows him to adequately perceive the surrounding world, and to orient himself correctly in it.”

Listening to Yelensky today, we see no indication that his credo has changed, that he has become different.

The convictions and principles a person internalizes from the start do not change in his later life. They may be expressed differently, take different forms, but in essence remain the same. Only the subjects to whom these principles are applied may change drastically. In Yelensky’s case it is clear that he always served the ideology, the propaganda, the powers in authority. That is his principle.

If earlier it was the Communists in power, he justified communist ideology, however monstrous and inhumane. Now he participates in persecuting the UOC. But if tomorrow the authorities were suddenly to change course and, for example, decide to make the UOC the state’s favored religious structure (if only because it is the more numerous), then most likely Yelensky, with the same zeal and using the same “scholarly” arguments, would propagate that project too.

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The conclusion is simple: Soviet atheist functionaries remain Soviet atheist functionaries. They can change only their “skin,” swaying with the party line. And we cannot even condemn them for it.

But we should pay attention to this: Ukraine has adopted laws on decommunization, on rejecting the Soviet totalitarian legacy. In this regard, it is quite logical to ask: why are loyal servants of Marxism-Leninism, who proved this loyalty with countless scholarly works, now the ones defining Ukraine’s religious policy?