MOSCOW — Halting decades of state-sponsored atheism, the Soviet legislature Wednesday overwhelmingly endorsed a landmark law on religion that lifts a longtime ban on Sunday schools for children and home prayer services while explicitly prohibiting discrimination against believers.
"This bill has been won by our people through much suffering," Mikhail Kulakov, chairman of the country's Seventh-day Adventist Church, said in double-edged remarks showing both his sadness and joy. "It will end the persecution of people for their religious convictions."
President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church as a child but says he is not a believer, promised the law almost 2 1/2 years ago as a major element in his drive to humanize Soviet society. The Supreme Soviet approved it in principle, 341 to 1 with one abstention, as Kulakov, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei II, Chief Rabbi Adolf Shayevich of Moscow's Choral Synagogue and other spiritual leaders looked on.
Although protracted debate and the lack of a quorum delayed formal adoption of all of the bill's 31 articles, a process that is to resume Monday, the "Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations" mandates sweeping and revolutionary changes in Soviet church-state relations.
Scrapping Draconian restrictions on believers' actions contained in the 1929 Law on Religious Associations, the \o7 glasnost-\f7 era legislation permits collective or individual religious instruction for children and adults, religious services in private homes and the outright ownership by congregations of churches and other buildings for worship.
Recognizing for the first time the right of Soviet citizens not merely to "believe," but also to make public and share their faith, the new law says the government cannot "restrict the study, financing or propagandizing" of the many creeds practiced in the Soviet Union, which include Orthodoxy, Islam, Roman Catholicism, Buddhism, Protestantism and Judaism.
Although religious liberty has been safeguarded, in theory, by the 1977 Soviet constitution, the new law marks a major retreat from longtime Marxist-Leninist policy by also barring government financing of the "propaganda of atheism," which presumably includes the blatantly anti-religious institutions called "museums of religion and atheism" found in most Soviet cities.
