The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

This publication presents petitions written in early 1945 by members of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Pskov, requesting that the cathedral be reopened. These documents are a striking example of the active participation of lay people in church life during the period of utmost development of the “new course” in the religious policy of the Soviet leadership. This story was particularly poignant because during the German occupation (August 1941 — February 1944), the cathedral was the organisational and spiritual centre of the church for the entire occupied north-west of Russia. After Pskov was liberated from German troops in July 1944, it was not until autumn 1945 that religious services could resume in the cathedral. Not least, credit for this belongs to the persistence of the members of the cathedral’s twenty-member council. In their letters to Archbishop Grigory (Chukov) and the Leningrad Diocesan Administration, the petitioners proposed the candidacy of a Pskov clergyman for the cathedral, boldly defending their position on the need to begin services in the cathedral as soon as possible, and criticising the indecisiveness and inertia of the dean of the Pskov district. Active lay members of the cathedral’s twenty were prepared to allow the closure of one of the city’s parishes in order to begin liturgical life and repairs to the cathedral as soon as possible. In addition to party and Soviet authorities, the Pskov Regional Museum showed particular interest in this subject, hatching plans to open a museum exhibition in the cathedral. In the pre-war years, the cathedral housed an anti-religious museum, which gave rise to such claims. The documents proposed for publication confirm the thesis that many of the promises made by the Soviet leadership as part of its “new course” religious policy, including plans to open Orthodox parishes, were in practice fulfilled to a rather modest extent.