The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

The article is dedicated to the representation of the situation of the Russian Orthodox Church and believers in the USSR in 1949–1965, the characteristics of which were presented on the pages of the “Bulletin of the Russian Student Christian Movement”. The main sources for the analysis of church life in the Soviet Union were publications in the Soviet press, the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, books published outside the USSR, as well as memoirs of secular and ecclesiastical persons who visited the country, conversations with representatives of the second wave of Russian emigration, letters from believers from the Soviet Union. The editorial policy of the “Bulletin of the RSHD” was aimed at avoiding any ideologization associated both with justifying a compromise in church-state relations and with declaring the Orthodox Church in the USSR false Orthodox. 
Position of the Russian Orthodox Church in the late Stalinist period and during the so-called “collective leadership” was considered in the “Bulletin of the RSHD” in three main areas: the opening of Orthodox churches and limiting the growth of their number; anti-religious propaganda; the use of the church by the state to solve its foreign policy problems. Khrushchev’s persecution was revealed by the authors of the “Bulletin of the RSHD” in various aspects: persecution of clergy; mass closure of churches, monasteries, and religious schools; changes in the legal status of priests; the reaction of western public and church opinion to the persecution of the church in the USSR. 
Publications of the “Bulletin of the RSHD” make it possible to highlight the central problem in the Russian Orthodox Church during the period under study: the restoration of faith in man and the restoration of the integrity of man himself. According to the authors of the magazine, a solution to such a problem would hardly be possible without priests and bishops becoming real elders, that is, the best not only in social, cultural and educational senses, but also, most importantly, ready to inherit the true church tradition, free from any power enslavement, both external and internal. In the situation of extreme shortage of such tradition and such seniority in the “sub-Soviet” church, their bearer, at least for a small part of believers in the USSR, was sometimes the “Bulletin of the RSHD” itself, or more precisely, its authors.