Translated from Italian by O. R. Shchelokova, Moscow: Politicheskaya entsiklopediya, 2016, 582 p. (Series: Istoriya stalinizma).

In the series "The History of Stalinism", the ROSSPEN publishing house has published a translation of the book by the Italian historian, professor of modern history at the University of Rome III, specialist in Russian history, Adriano Roccucci (the book was published in Italian in 2011). It is worth noting the efforts of the publishing house, which seeks to acquaint the reader with both new Russian studies of the religious policy of the Soviet state as well as with translations of works by foreign scientists. For example, the History of Stalinism series includes several books by M. I. Odintsovo, a joint study by T. V. Volokitina, G. P. Murashko, and A. F. Noskova, a book by the American researcher S. M. Miner16, and now a book by A. Roccucci.

The publication of the book by an Italian historian is certainly an important event for the Russian reader. Roccucci has a rare author's optics-both a third-party and an" included " observer. Of course, the main recipient of this work is the Italian reader. So the author had to

16. Odintsovo M. I. Russian Orthodox Church on the eve and in the era of Stalinist socialism. 1917-1953 Moscow, 2014; Odintsovo M. I., Kochetova A. S. Confessional policy in the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 Moscow, 2014; Odintsovo M. I. Patriarch of Victory. The Life and Church service of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Alexy (Simansky). Moscow, 2015; Volokitina T. V., Murashko G. P., Noskova A. F. Moscow and Eastern Europe. Vlast ' i tserkva v period obshchestvennykh transformatsiy 40-50-kh godov XX veka: Ocherki istorii [Power and Church in the Period of Social Transformations of the 40-50s of the XX century: Essays on History]. Religion, Nationalism and Allied Politics / translated from English by V. Artemov, Moscow, 2010.

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it is necessary to explain to him the vicissitudes of Russian and Soviet history, the peculiarities of Orthodox consciousness and church practices... Each of the historical subjects is discussed in the book with an enviable thoroughness, relying on extensive literature, both Russian and foreign (and not only Italian-speaking), and archival sources. It is felt that for the author, Russian church history is not a curious, but still somewhat exotic, but a close and understandable part of world history. In addition, Roccucci is sensitive to religious motivation and the internal church aspects of the issues discussed. He is involved not only in Russian, but also in church-historical issues, and this is an important advantage for him as a researcher.

Here is just one example of related research acumen. It seems that Roccucci was the first to draw attention to the new position of the episcopate of the Russian Church, in which it found itself in the conditions of Stalin's "new course" of religious policy. In the 1940s, there was an over-centralization of church administration, in which the Soviet government was also interested. The episcopate was given broad powers that - for the first time in Russian church history, as Roccucci points out - were not limited to other church institutions. An Italian historian writes that the bishops now seemed to be in an airless space: their power was no longer balanced by a large and influential monastic community, a consolidated white clergy, or academic corporations of theological academies. All these ecclesiastical institutions were destroyed or severely weakened during the years of persecution. And now the only contractors of bishops were the patriarch and the secular authorities represented by their authorized or other bodies. It is hardly necessary to specify that this feature of the system of church administration, purposefully (as the author emphasizes several times) created by the Soviet regulatory authorities, had far-reaching consequences for church life.

The book consists of nine chapters, an extensive preface, which is essentially a separate introductory chapter, and a short afterword, which summarizes the results of the study and traces trends in the relationship between the authorities and the Church in the last three decades of the Soviet state. The division into chapters is based partly on chronological and partly on historical data.-

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the pale-themed principle. Chapters are divided into paragraphs, each of which is dedicated to a particular historical story, phenomenon, or problem. The author seeks to strike a balance between the description of Soviet politics and the life of the church in the context of this policy. The book covers the period from 1917 to 1958, but the main focus of the study is the period from 1939 to 1958, when the Soviet government gradually, first implicitly, and then openly, moved away from the course of destroying the Orthodox Church, which it had followed in previous years. The Stalinist policy of the "new deal" in relation to religion and the church is the main object of interest of the Italian researcher. Six of the nine chapters of the book are devoted to it.

The author begins with a description of the relationship between the tsarist and patriarchal authorities, relying on B. A. Uspensky's book "The Tsar and the Patriarch" - an allusion to the title of this work is also contained in the title of the reviewed work itself. Such a comparison may alert the reader who prefers specific historical research. But the Italian scholar convinces us of the validity of this comparison: Stalin did indeed compare his power with the power of the Russian tsars, his charisma with their charisma. However, the following narrative is constructed precisely as a concrete historical study, based on extensive historiography, publications of sources and the author's own research in Russian and foreign archives.

In the issue of the journal devoted to religious aspects of the history of the Cold War, it is appropriate to pay attention to how the Italian researcher interprets issues related to the international activities of the Russian Church during the period under review. It seems that the key issues include the question of the reasons for the beginning of the "new deal", the question of the goals pursued by both sides-the Soviet state and the Church, and, finally, the question of the causes of the crisis of the "new deal" in 1948-1949, when a new government was being prepared in the depths of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) the attack on the church, stopped only by Stalin's personal instructions.

A. Roccucci, like most researchers today, sees the reasons for the turn of Stalin's religious policy during the Second World War in the interest of the Soviet leadership in the foreign policy activities of the Orthodox Church, aimed primarily at mutual cooperation between the two countries.-

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cooperation - in the interests of the USSR-with the Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In part, the author polemics with A. Dickinson, who suggested that Stalin's move also sought to "eliminate a potential enemy", the bearer of alien and uncontrollable values.17 Roccucci believes that the Soviet leader, declaring the beginning of the "new deal", no longer saw the church as a danger. If this were not the case, it would be more natural for him and the regime he created to resort to repressive measures in order to eliminate the enemy. As the author notes, "neutralizing the supposed enemy by co-opting him was not one of the traditions of Stalinist political culture" (p. 224). According to the Italian historian, it was the prospects of "imperial expansion" and the "geopolitical horizons" that opened up after the war that were the main reason for the turn in Stalin's religious policy. But by stating this, Roccucci goes further: he sees a certain ideological commonality that united the Stalinist leadership and the hierarchs of the Russian Church at that time, which consisted in the presence of a universalist imperial consciousness in both of them. This, the author believes, made it easier for both sides to move towards each other.

Another important feature of the "new deal", which A. Roccucci repeatedly draws attention to, was the coincidence of interests (although far from complete) of the church and the Soviet state. Both sides were interested in getting the Russian Church out of the international isolation it found itself in during the pre - war period of repression. But the motives of the parties were different. So, the government wanted to mobilize the "church resource" as part of its post-war expansion. The Church, on the other hand, sought to restore ties with other Orthodox churches and regain its former position as one of the leaders of universal Orthodoxy. For the time being, the difference in motives did not affect the relationship between the parties, but at some point it could lead to a crisis of the "new deal".

The question of the causes of the New deal crisis of 1948-1949 is considered by A. Roccucci in the context of the post-war evolution of the Stalinist political system, which was described by such authors as R. G. Pihoya, O. V. Khlevnyuk, I. Gorlits-

17. Dickinson, A. (2000) "A Marriage of Convenience? Domestic and Foreign Policy Reasons for the 1943 Soviet Church-State Concordat", Religion, State & Society 4.

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Cue 18. We are talking about building a new balance of power between the state and the party, which assumed the strengthening of the party's ideological wing. In this situation, the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, established in 1943. To ensure communication between the government (in fact, Stalin) and the church, he found himself in an ambiguous position. He belonged to the system of state bodies, but his activities directly concerned sensitive ideological issues - the existence of the church in the Soviet state as an ideologically alien organism. Therefore, the party authorities sought to establish control over the Council and adjust its religious policy in accordance with their own ideas. In this connection, A. Roccucci emphasizes that the fluctuations of Soviet religious policy in the late 1940s serve as an important symptom of changes in the entire political system for the historian of the Soviet regime. He's writing: "The study of religious life and religious politics is not limited to the analysis of one, albeit curious, but still marginal sphere of Soviet society and Soviet history... The history of the Orthodox Church and its relations with the state in the USSR can be perceived as the curve of a seismograph that recorded vibrations and underground faults that occurred deep under the crust of the Soviet planet " (p. 289).

Thus, according to the Italian historian, the reasons for the crisis of the "new deal" were rooted in structural contradictions between the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) and the government, and not in the failures of the international activities of the church, not in the fact that the Meeting of Heads and Representatives of Orthodox Churches held in Moscow in July 1948 did not fulfill, from the point of From Stalin's point of view, its task is to endow the Moscow Patriarchate with the status of ecumenical, the first in honor among other Orthodox churches. Moreover, Roccucci suggests that the decline in the church's international activity since 1948 was a foregone conclusion. He believes that in the context of the Cold War and the block confrontation between the powers, the sphere of international activity of the Russian Church was inevitably limited to the zone of Soviet influence - the Orthodox churches of Eastern Europe, while the churches of the Middle East were in the zone of influence of England

18. Pihoya R. G. Sovetskiy Soyuz: istoriya vlasti [The Soviet Union: History of Power]. 1945-1999. Novosibirsk, 2000; Khlevnyuk O. V., Gorlitsky Y. Kholodny mir: Stalinist and the End of the Stalinist Dictatorship, Moscow, 2011.

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and the United States. If in 1945-1948. The Russian Church could have made attempts to include the Eastern patriarchates in its sphere of influence, but now such attempts automatically faced opposition from Western powers.

In addition, according to the Italian historian, in this situation, the Soviet leadership was confused. It could not determine exactly what goals should be set for the "external" activities of the church. After the task of turning Moscow into an "Orthodox Vatican" and making it the center of universal Orthodoxy turned out to be unattainable, and also after the expansion of the international activity of the Moscow Patriarchate in the context of the confrontation between the western and eastern blocs reached its limits, new directions of this activity were not visible. The inclusion of the church in 1949 in the international movement for peace was not quite an equivalent substitute, since it did not imply the achievement of any specific goal. A. Roccucci shows that all the attempts of the Chairman of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church G. G. Karpov in this situation to get new instructions from the "decision-making authorities", from the top leadership of the country discussions on the preferred areas of activity of the Council and the Moscow Patriarchate in the international arena ended without success. The crisis of the church's foreign policy activity in the context of the post-war turbulence of the Stalinist political system led to a crisis of the entire "new deal" in state-church relations.

There is, however, one nuance that, as it seems to us, escaped the attention of the author. This is Stalin's personal role in the cooling of state-church relations in 1948-1949. The fact is that it was he who gave the signal to the central authorities and local authorities about the attack on the church in 1948, under the formal pretext of refusing to approve the list of churches intended for transfer to the faithful. 19 In this connection, we can raise an additional question about the motives that guided the Soviet leader in taking this step. Did he thus support the covert offensive of the party apparatus against the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, which began in 1947, and the line of religious propaganda pursued by this body?-

19. See, for example: Chumachenko T. A. State, Orthodox Church, believers. 1941-1961 Moscow, 1999, p. 127.

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politicians? Or was he really disappointed with the results of the July Meeting of the Heads and Representatives of the Orthodox Churches and considered it necessary, even if only indirectly, to point this out to the Council and the church? In any case, there is no doubt that Stalin played a central role in the adjustment of religious policy in 1948-1949. He was not only a "guarantor of the stability of the system" of state-church relations, which took shape in 1943, because in May 1949 he vetoed an anti-religious resolution prepared by the Central Committee staff (A. Roccucci specifically mentions this episode on pages 308-312). He was also the one who in the autumn of 1948 gave the local authorities an unequivocal sanction to continue the pressure on the church. For her, he acted as a "monarch" who executes and pardons.

But we would not like the reader to get the impression that the Italian historian pays attention exclusively to the political aspects of state-church relations. The author systematically addresses (though only based on materials from the central Russian archives) various aspects of church life, and considers them in the context of social processes that resulted from Soviet modernization. In particular, he draws attention to the role that urbanization played in the life of the Russian Church, which already in the 1950s gave rise to a new type of believer-a city dweller. According to A. Roccucci, "cities were the main challenge to Russian Orthodoxy, which was not going to give up its presence in the Soviet world" (p. 340). The researcher believes that the church leadership understood this and accepted the "challenge of cities", for example, when appointing clergy, giving preference to urban churches.

Thus, A. Roccucci's book sums up the research of Stalin's religious policy. At the same time, the Italian historian makes the most of his position as an outsider, but" included " observer, making important observations based on sources that domestic researchers have passed by. Thus, it deepens and clarifies our vision of a number of aspects of the Soviet church policy of this period. The book's characteristic thoroughness of analysis and accurate assessments make it valuable for the Russian reader as well. If the reader is not an expert in the field of Stalin's church policy or is an expert in other areas-

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Anyone who wants to delve into the problems of state-church relations in the first half of the 20th century might be advised to start with the book by A. Roccucci. After getting acquainted with it, you can be sure that you have not missed the key problems of this period.

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