Simplification of the Communist Past as the Source of the “Political Religion”

Abstract

Two problems dominate the debate about the role of the Orthodox church
in the Bulgarian society: first is the declassification of the archives of the
communist State Security related to the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, the
second is the recent threat Orthodoxy to be transformed into “political religion”,
similar to the development in Russia. The article argues that those two
problems are mutually related and that the deeper and complex knowledge
on the Communist past becomes an impediment for transformation of the
Orthodoxy into political religion. In the 1990s Bulgaria and Russia shared
many common characteristics with regard to dealing with the Communist
past. Although late, the declassification of the State Security archives in Bulgaria
led to intense discussions on the Church-State relations and indirectly
contributed to the effective separation between Church and state. The new
knowledge does not allow the relativisation, normalization and simplification
of the communist past as well as the reinvention of biographies of clerics
and security officers, which paved the way to the transformation of the Orthodoxy
into political religion in Russia.