How did Soviet policies toward the Orthodox Church differ from those toward Protestants and Catholics?
Executive summary
Soviet policy toward religion was uniformly repressive in principle, but implementation varied: the Russian Orthodox Church was targeted heavily early on yet later co-opted and granted a privileged, monitored role; Protestants faced harsh repression especially from the 1930s onward but sometimes benefited from wartime relaxations; Catholics—particularly Eastern-rite (Greek) Catholics in western Ukraine and Catholics in Poland—were treated as especially suspect and often subject to forcible liquidation or harsher controls because of perceived ties to foreign authorities (Rome) and national resistance movements [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. The ideological starting point: atheism made all churches enemies, but numerics and history mattered
The Bolshevik project set state atheism as policy and declared organized religion an enemy of the new order, producing campaigns of church closures, arrests and property confiscation across denominations [1] [5]; nonetheless scholars emphasize that the Orthodox Church’s numerical dominance and historical entanglement with Russian statehood made it a special case that drew more sustained attention from Soviet planners [6] [5].
2. The Orthodox dilemma: destruction early, control later, and eventual co-option
In the revolution’s first years and under Stalin the Orthodox hierarchy and clergy were purged, imprisoned and executed in large numbers as part of brutal anti-religious drives [2] [7]; but from World War II the Kremlin reversed toward tactical accommodation—reviving and controlling a docile, state-managed Orthodox structure to mobilize patriotism—so the ROC became an instrument of governance as much as an object of repression [1] [4] [8].
3. Protestants: initial relative tolerance, then equal persecution, then sporadic easing
Early Bolshevik policy sometimes treated Protestant sectarians (the “sectants”) with comparatively less hostility than the institutionalized Orthodox Church, but by the 1930s Protestants faced the same scale of repression—leaders arrested, congregations closed and some leaders executed—though Protestants occasionally benefited from wartime and late-Soviet relaxations alongside Orthodox communities [1] [2].
4. Catholics: treated as politically dangerous and often forcibly dismantled
Catholics were singled out as particularly suspect because of transnational loyalties to Rome and because Catholic institutions in annexed western territories were linked to national resistance; Soviet authorities liquidated the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church after 1944—arresting and deporting bishops and forcing many parishes into the Russian Orthodox orbit—and fought to neutralize Catholic influence in places like Poland and western Ukraine [1] [2] [3] [9].
5. Instruments and variations: law, co-optation, forced transfers and selective toleration
The Soviet toolkit combined legal restrictions on religious life, arrests and gulag sentences, co-optation of compliant clergy, administrative forced transfers (as in western Ukraine’s absorption of Greek Catholics into Orthodoxy), and selective registration regimes that advantaged state-aligned Orthodox structures while squeezing nonconforming Catholic and Protestant bodies [5] [3] [8].
6. Competing narratives and political agendas in the sources
Contemporary and later accounts disagree on emphasis: Western and émigré sources highlight martyrdom and Polish/Catholic resistance [9] [7], Soviet-era or pro-ROC narratives stress order and patriotism in wartime accommodations [4], and academic studies underscore continuity with imperial practices when the state reassigned confessional belonging for political ends [6] [3]; each source carries implicit agendas—religious, national or ideological—that shape which abuses or accommodations are foregrounded [10] [11].
7. Bottom line: one policy, multiple treatments shaped by utility and fear
Though the USSR pursued an overarching anti-religious program, the practical approach differed: the Orthodox Church was crushed then instrumentalized because of its domestic centrality; Protestants suffered sweeping repression but sometimes benefited from ad hoc liberalizations; Catholics were often treated most harshly where their allegiance to Rome or national resistance made them political threats—resulting in forcible liquidation, deportation and efforts to erase institutional ties to Rome [1] [2] [3] [4].