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The monsters promptly clapped the petulant Patriarch into jail. But none of this persecution made much change in the ingrained Christian faith of Russia's mystically minded millions of believers. Believers who harbored priests or attended worship might be deprived of their ration tickets, their jobs or might just disappear into jails or subArctic exile. They might not come together at all unless 20 believers risked registering with the local Soviet and received permission to worship. Still they came together for worship.
The Soviet Government was quick to note its lack of success, began to supplement its political fight against the Church with an educational campaign.
The League of the Militant Godless was organized. Headed by the late Emelyan Yaroslavsky (TIME, Dec. 13), the encomiast of Stalin, the Godless numbered more than 5,500.000 members at their heyday. They published two magazines, Bezbozhnik (The Godless) and Anti-religioznik (The Anti-religionist). In their lettuce days, the Godless organized anti-religious parades with floats burlesquing religious subjects such as the Immaculate Conception. These capers disgusted many Russians, made bad publicity abroad, and were finally called off. Public debates between priests and the Godless were also tried, also had to be called off. The priests held their own too well. Anti-religious museums, usually set up in former churches, were not much more successful. But the main campaign of the Godless was to educate an atheistic younger generation. With the slogans: "a Godless cell in every school" and "no religious schoolteachers," the Godless enrolled two million schoolchildren. But many more than two million did not join the Godless.
Undeceiving Census. Then (in 1937) the Soviet Government took a census. One question asked about religious faith. When the returns were in, the authorities took one look, gasped, ordered most of the census bureau liquidated as Trotskyists. The census is believed (since the figures were admitted by Godless Headman Yaroslavsky) to have shown that, after 20 years of intensive persecution of the Church, one-third of Russia's city population and two-thirds of Russia's peasants were still Christians, and would not conceal the fact from the official census takers.
This was a sad answer to the Soviet Government's anti-religious prayers. It was related to a heavy blow that had befallen the Government earlier, the full seriousness of which had not been realized at the time: acting apparently on the principle that if you can't lick 'em, join 'em, the Metropolitan Sergei of Moscow had joined the Bolsheviks. Not that he ceased to be a Christian or acquired a party-book (the Communist Party does not admit Christians to membership). What Sergei did was to take literally the Soviet Government's decree that the business of the Russian Orthodox Church was religion and nothing else (a revolutionary attitude in a country where for hundreds of years the Church had been part of the state). He also insisted on absolute loyalty to the Soviet Government as the price of the Church's survival.