Vatikán a sovětský komunismus 1917-1945 – Šmíd Marek (2020)

This Czech-language nonfiction book examines the diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Soviet communism from 1917 to 1945, from the Bolshevik coup in November 1917 to the end of the Second World War. In the context of international events of the 1920s through the 1940s, it removes blanket prejudices and inherited clichés surrounding Vatican–Soviet relations and focuses on their encounters and conflicts during wartime and the interwar period. The monograph presents important figures, turning points and sources of tension, while also discussing relations before 1917, religious conditions during the Bolshevik Revolution, negotiations in the 1920s, Vatican missions to the Soviet Union, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin and other communist leaders, the destruction of the Catholic Church in the 1930s, the 1937 encyclical On Atheistic Communism, proposals for a crusade against the Soviet Union, and religious conditions during the Second World War. Relations reached a freezing point when the long-standing hostility between the Holy See and Orthodox Russia combined with its opposition to materialist communism and militant atheism in the Soviet ideology created in 1917. Although the Holy See attempted in the 1920s to enter the Soviet Union and defend the Catholic Church and its believers, the Bolsheviks suppressed these efforts with great determination. In the following decade, hundreds of priests were executed, imprisoned or deported, churches were closed, the Christian press was banned and the influence of religion in society was drastically reduced.