Campaign in the Soviet press during the Khrushchev offensive on the Church and the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate

The main goal of the authors is to form a holistic view of the position and actions of the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church - Patriarch Alexy I (Simansky) and his de facto deputy Metropolitan Nikolai (Yarushevich) - in connection with the campaign to discredit the clergy, clergy and religion in general, which unfolded in the Soviet press from the late 1950s during the Khrushchev offensive against the church and was carried out under the guise of scientific atheistic propaganda. The position of the Moscow Patriarchate leadership is shown on the basis of documents of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Council of Ministers of the USSR, letters of Patriarch Alexy I to this institution and memoirs of the clergy, and 23 research works are also used.