Stalin's Meeting with Three Orthodox Bishops
Georgii Karpov, Minutes of Stalin's Meeting with Three Orthodox Bishops. September 4, 1943
On September 4, 1943, Stalin met with Metropolitans Sergius, Aleksei, and Nikolai—after two decades of repression, a wartime pivot. He treated the church as a tool of national mobilization, authorizing a council to elect a patriarch and the reopening of church institutions. The transcript, prepared by NKVD officer Karpov, made revival inseparable from surveillance.
Original Source: GARF, L 6991s, op. 1, d. 1, pp. 1-10.
When war broke out with Nazi Germany in 1941 the Russian Orthodox Church had been quick to back the government and rally to the defence of the country. This heralded the biggest change in church-state relations since Lenin's decree on the separation of church and state in 1918. From now on the state worked together with the church in public, tolerating its existence and using it to support government policy, especially in the foreign policy sphere. The sudden wartime rapprochement between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Soviet regime was sealed with the meeting between the three surviving active bishops and Stalin in the Kremlin on 4 September 1943. The record of the meeting was drawn up by Georgy Karpov, a former NKVD officer who became the first head of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, set up in the wake of this meeting.
Source: Felix Corley, ed., Religion in the Soviet Union: an Archival Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1996), Doc. 89.