Authors

Nadezhda Beliakova¹;  ¹ Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sci, Russian Federation

Discussion

The organization „Glaube in der zweiten Welt“ (G2W) was founded in 1973 in Zollikon, in German-speaking Switzerland by the reformed pastor Eugen Voss. Its goal was to collect and critically analyze primary sources about the religious life beyond the Iron Curtain. Founded on the model of the organization Keston College, G2W went through several stages of development and created a series of important international networks. Can we consider G2W anticommunist and an ideological opponent of the USSR in the Cold War? Indeed, the organizations and actors with whom the founder Eugen Voss was in contact at first gave grounds to characterize G2W as an anticommunist organization. For instance we know about contacts with the “Ostinstitut” in Bern (Peter Maser), the international organization of diplomats “InterDoc,” the publisher Possev (Frankfurt-am-Main), the mission “Licht im Osten.” However, Voss’s orientation towards the human rights’ field led to G2W’s inclusion in the Helsinki process, and the organization began to position itself as the representative of the interests of Soviet believers, who were deprived of the possibility of defending themselves. Besides a range of publications on problems of religious freedom in countries of the Eastern bloc, Eugen Voss succeeded in making marginal groups of believers more visible in the international human rights movement.