“Religious organization is functioning without permit”: illegal praying houses during the late Soviet era

The article describes how illegal praying houses belonging to the supporters of the Council of the Churches of evangelical Christian-Baptists banned by the government were functioning in the Soviet Union during the 1960s1980s. Using the documentation of the Council for Religious Affairs and its regional representatives, discovered in the State Archive of the Russian Federation and the State Archive of the Altai region, the article researches the practices used by the believers to create the so-called “house churches”, which allowed the commune to avoid governmental interventions into its religious life. The paper characterizes the main components of this specific activity, such as conspiracy, pursuit of the autarky by religious dissidents and the readiness to “suffer” for the freedom of conciseness. Another part of the article describes and analyzes repressive practices of the government aimed at dismantling the “house churches”, on one hand, and demolishing illegal stationary praying houses, on the other. The author concludes that the government was not able to solve the problem of the “house churches” up until the dissolution of the USSR. The main reason for that, other than the “headstrong stubbornness” of the believers, was the low efficiency of repressive mechanisms, such as administrative fines and dispersal of praying meetings in the light of the dominant “socialistic legality” in the Brezhnev era.