Moore 1 After the Bolsheviks stormed the fortress of Nicholas the II in 1917, they did their duty as Marxists and stormed the fortress of God. Revolutionary leaders like Lenin and Trotsky sought to create something the world had never seen; an atheist state that deified Man and crucified the Deity. Although most intellectuals in the party spoke of religion quietly withering away upon the birth of socialism, they still actively sought to undermine and attack religion for nearly a century, often resulting in hypocrisy, terror, and violence. However, the party leaders never accomplished their goal of achieving a truly godless state. When a census was taken in 1937 Soviet leaders were dismayed to learn that nearly two decades of anti-religious propaganda had not eradicated religion and "56 percent of the population [were still] religious believers. ” 1 Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union religious revivals spread across the country. 2 The atheist dream was gone. The failure of the Soviet Union’s anti-religious campaign can be reexamined if it is analyzed as a religion itself; one that exhibited all of the traits that are driving people away from organized religion today: a close relationship with politics, hypocrisy among members and leaders, a loss of spiritual authority, and a detached and impersonal relationship with the believer. Lenin and Trotsky were part of a “priestly caste” that dictated vivid visions of godless progress, but enacted anti-religious policies that repelled the majority of the population. At the same time, because of their vanguard philosophy they closed themselves off to constructive criticism and compromise. 3 By speaking for the people and not to the people, the Communist leadership missed out on the personal dialogue and connection that is critical for any religion or faith to flourish and grow. The Soviet Union’s forced atheist campaign isolated and repelled 1 Froese, Paul. "Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly Failed.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43, no. 1 (2004): 38. 2 Froese, Paul. “After Atheism: An Analysis of Religious Monopolies in the Post - Communist World.” Sociology of Religion 65, no. 1. (2004): 57 3 Heimann, Eduard. "Atheist Theocracy." Social Research 20, no. 3 (1953): 326
Transcript
Moore 1
After the Bolsheviks stormed the fortress of Nicholas the II in 1917, they did their duty as
Marxists and stormed the fortress of God. Revolutionary leaders like Lenin and Trotsky sought
to create something the world had never seen; an atheist state that deified Man and crucified the
Deity. Although most intellectuals in the party spoke of religion quietly withering away upon the
birth of socialism, they still actively sought to undermine and attack religion for nearly a century,
often resulting in hypocrisy, terror, and violence. However, the party leaders never accomplished
their goal of achieving a truly godless state. When a census was taken in 1937 Soviet leaders
were dismayed to learn that nearly two decades of anti-religious propaganda had not eradicated
religion and "56 percent of the population [were still] religious believers.”1 Upon the collapse of
the Soviet Union religious revivals spread across the country.2 The atheist dream was gone.
The failure of the Soviet Union’s anti-religious campaign can be reexamined if it is
analyzed as a religion itself; one that exhibited all of the traits that are driving people away from
organized religion today: a close relationship with politics, hypocrisy among members and
leaders, a loss of spiritual authority, and a detached and impersonal relationship with the
believer. Lenin and Trotsky were part of a “priestly caste” that dictated vivid visions of godless
progress, but enacted anti-religious policies that repelled the majority of the population. At the
same time, because of their vanguard philosophy they closed themselves off to constructive
criticism and compromise.3 By speaking for the people and not to the people, the Communist
leadership missed out on the personal dialogue and connection that is critical for any religion or
faith to flourish and grow. The Soviet Union’s forced atheist campaign isolated and repelled
1 Froese, Paul. "Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly
Failed.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43, no. 1 (2004): 38.
2 Froese, Paul. “After Atheism: An Analysis of Religious Monopolies in the Post-Communist World.” Sociology of Religion 65, no. 1. (2004): 57 3 Heimann, Eduard. "Atheist Theocracy." Social Research 20, no. 3 (1953): 326
potential converts, while ignoring a large unbelieving section of the population that did not seek
a war with religion, but tolerance and respect between atheists and believers. Soviet leaders were
too busy listening to the roars of the future to hear the whispers of the present, and as a result
they missed an opportunity at peaceful secularization.
Today, nations that are seeing secularism and atheism rise are polar opposites of the early
Soviet Union, being democratic, technologically advanced, and uninterested in forcing any one
religious belief on anyone. They have no history of long and violent anti-religious campaigns,
leading to the conclusion that true atheism is not something that can be arrived at by force, but
must be chosen after a personal intellectual journey.
In 2011, a study carried out by Northwestern University and the University of Arizona
found that religion is on track to become extinct in nine "modern secular democracies" such as
Australia, Canada, and Finland.4 These extreme cases are part of an overall decline in organized
religion among Western countries, even "in places where it once dominated everyday life.”5 Bob
Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba in Canada, cited "hypocrisy" as one of the main factors
driving people away from organized religion.6 The same conclusion was reached by a study on
American “Nones” (people with no religious affiliation) conducted in 2012 by the Pew Forum on
Religion and Public Life. The Pew study found that the main factor pushing Americans away
from religion was its close relationship with politics, which resulted in a
4 “Faith no more! From New Zealand to Canada, religion ‘to become extinct’ in nine countries.” The Daily Mail, March 22, 2011.
5 Altemeyer, Bob. “The Decline of Organized Religion in Western Civilization.” The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion. 14, no 2 (2004): 79. 6 Ibid. 77
Moore 3
"judgmental...hypocritical, and too political" religious body.7 These same words could be used
to describe the atheist religion of the Bolsheviks, which was intimately intertwined in politics,
making it cold, detached, impersonal, and impatient; all a result of a vanguard philosophy that
could not navigate the subtleties and complexities of faith and spirituality, but demanded a rigid
and unforgiving allegiance to the future.
The vanguard philosophy that corrupted the Bolshevik’s atheist religion was the product
of Lenin's interpretations and additions to Marxist theory from 1901 to 1917, first emerging in
his work What Is To Be Done?, and later crystallizing in The State and Revolution. If an
oppressed people could not carry out revolution themselves, Lenin surmised, then an elite
vanguard party must arise to lead the people to accomplish their revolutionary goals. This
outlook stood in contrast to that of the Mensheviks, a more liberal Socialist faction, who believed
in allowing the people to democratically participate in the party. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
eventually split the Socialist party over this issue in 1903, and when the Bolsheviks obtained
absolute power in 1917 so did the vanguard philosophy; the autocracy of the past was reborn in
new skin.
Although in 1901 Lenin had boldly spoken of the great Russian proletariat "[as]the
vanguard of the international revolutionary proletariat," the ordinary Soviet worker never played
as large of a role as the party in decision making or goal setting.8 In 1917 Lenin declared "a party
is the vanguard of a class, and its duty is to lead the masses and not merely to reflect the average
7 Lugo, Luis, Alan Cooperman, Cary Funk, Gregory A. Smith, and Eric O’Connell.
“Nones on the Rise: One-in-five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation.” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. (October 9, 2012).
8 Lenin, Vladimir. What Is To Be Done? “Criticism in Russia.” 1901.
Moore 4
political level of the masses."9 It was the British Socialist Sidney Webb who offered one of the
most interesting definitions and metaphors for the vanguard philosophy, justifying its
paternalistic and militant viewpoint. Webb wrote:
The Communist party in Soviet Russia…does not seek, and is not intended, to include the whole of the people, or even all of the faithful adherents of the new religion. It represents
the deliberate establishment of a select body, for the performance of a specialized social service; undertaking onerous responsibilities from which the mass of citizens of free….and this peculiar companionship is unexpectedly reminiscent of the class of
‘Samurai.10
Lenin believed that it was the role of the party to be a few steps ahead of the proletariat,
showing them the bright future they had seen to encourage the ordinary Soviet man or woman to
keep pushing, keep working, and sacrificing for the utopian paradise that was so close they could
almost touch it. But by always looking to the future and dictating its unalterable decrees, the
Bolshevik leadership missed out on a conversation that they could have had on religion, atheism,
and science. They spoke to a crowd that wasn’t there, and were deaf to real voices with real
concerns.
The Bolshevik rhetoric on how to deal with religion never matched the reality of what
atheistic propaganda actually looked like, and since they were closed to feedback a failed system
persisted for years. So while Lenin and Trotsky spoke of religion melting upon contact with
socialism an aggressive and abusive anti-religious campaign was carried out at the same time
that practically canceled out any of their messages. The face of atheism was the mocking
propaganda magazines, the obscene parades, and the random attacks on priests and believers by
9 Lenin, Vladimir. “Speech on the Agrarian Question.” November 14, 1917.
10 Webb, Sidney. "On the Emergence of a New World-Religion." International Journal of
Ethics 1, no. 48 (1933): 177
Moore 5
atheist agitators and Komsomol members. However, the Bolshevik anti-religious campaign first
unfolded in a legalistic assault that ran parallel to the chaos of the Russian Civil War.
The Bolshevik anti-religious campaign came at time when the Soviet Union had suffered
through “years of war, revolution, famine, and civil war [that] had reduced the country to the
condition of a man beaten within an inch on his life.”11 Many of the first anti-religious actions of
the Bolshevik party can be seen as attacks on religion and the conservative base of the White
Army. The 1918 Decree on Freedom of Conscience, Church and Religious Societies was in
effect, the first shot fired in the Bolshevik’s war on religion. This law separated “church, state,
and school,” and nationalized church property.12 Religion was further stifled in 1929 when, as
William Husband explains, the Soviet Law on Religious Associations “severely
[restricted]…rights of worship and proselytizing.”13 Over time, the Bolsheviks legally erased
religion from the social life of the Soviet Union. At the same time that Soviet laws were
suffocating religious expression, a party sponsored propaganda campaign preached atheism
through a variety of unsuccessful methods.
The official party organization charged with spreading atheist propaganda was the
League of Militant Atheists, founded in 1925. Leon Trotsky originally led the group, but for the
majority of its existence Yemelyan Mikhailovich Yaroslavsky was in charge. Daniel Peris, a
historian of the Soviet Union, informs one that Yaroslavsky was interested in building a
11 Scott, John. Behind the Urals. Bloomington: Bloomington and Indiana Press, 1942. 62
12 Husband, William B. "Soviet Atheism and Russian Orthodox Strategies of Resistance, 1917-1932. The Journal of Modern History. 70, no. 1. (1998). 78 13 Ibid., 79
Moore 6
“publishing empire” to disseminate atheist propaganda.14 One of the League’s primary mediums
for proselytizing atheism was through the magazine Bezbozhnik u Stanka (Atheist at the
Workbench).15 While the magazine certainly had a dedicated following, many believers found
the images appalling and sacrilegious. Overall, atheist propaganda tended to be mocking,
offensive, crude, and in many cases dehumanizing. Soviet writer Mikhaíl Bulgakov visited the
editorial office of Bezbozhnik in 1925, and was horrified. After Bulgakov returned home with a
copy of the godless magazine, he recorded in his diary:
In the evening when I leafed through the issues of Bezbozhnik I was shaken. Not by the
blasphemy, of course it knows no limits, but it is only an external feature. The heart of
the matter lies in the idea, which can be proved with reference to actual documents: Jesus
Christ is depicted as a swindler and a scoundrel: the attack is directed at him. It is not
hard to see whose work this is. This is a crime like no other.16
Both the atheist magazines and propaganda posters depicted religious prophets, saints,
and believers as sub-human and always aligned with capitalist powers. When the Komsomol
would conduct one of their atheist parades they would often dress as priests that resembled
monsters, or they would be carrying the effigies of saints that were more animal than human.
Religion was so deeply embedded in the daily life of Russians that this sudden dehumanization
felt like an attack on their very identity. The prophets being mocked were sacred and holy to the
people, and the believers being demonized were not some abstract idea, but family and friends. If
there had been adequate channels of communication between the party and the people these
ineffective techniques could have been rectified, but the vanguard mindset told the party that
14 Peris, Daniel. "The 1929 Congress of the Godless." Soviet Studies 43, no. 4 (1991). 713-714
15 Rowley, Alison. "Some anti-religious cartoons and articles in Bezbozhnik, 1924-1927." cyberussr.com.
16 Bulgakov, Mikhail. "Bezbozhnik." Master and Margarita (1925)
they knew what was best for the people, so they continued this destructive atheist propaganda
blindly.
17
18
17 Ross, Wolfe. "Bolshevik anti-religious carnival. (circa. 1920s)" The Charnel-House
Moore 8
19
From interviews taken at Harvard in 1951 of former residents of the Soviet Union, one
area of overwhelming agreement was that the propaganda was hurtful and despised. One man
remembered a distasteful anti-religious parade in Moscow where “trucks drove through the
streets with people dressed up as priests and nuns. They were fat, with bottles of Vodka and they
18 Moor, Dmitri. “The Defender.” Saint Louis Universal Libraries Digital Collection.
1926
19 Ross, Wolfe. "Fifth anniversary issue of the journal Godless (1927).” The Charnel-
House.
Moore 9
were shown in indecent and obscene and vulgar scenes.”20 Another interviewee, a 45 year old
Ukrainian railroad worker, provided a more descriptive account of these disastrous and
embarrassing episodes:
[in 1927, during Easter, when] in our church the Easter bread, eggs, cheese, and other agricultural products were being blessed by the priest, the Komsomol and other stupid youth
indoctrinated by the Communist propaganda entered the church by force with music and yelling and tried to stop the blessing of the agricultural products. It was not good, it was bad.21
A similar event occurred in 1929 that was a barely veiled assault and robbery. Soviet
historian William B. Husband explained how one morning “the Rykov militia, local Komsomol
members, and the secretary of the local party cell burst into the church, smashed the iconstasis,
defiled the icons, and carried off all church goods on two trucks.”22 Lenin had repeatedly warned
that “it is necessary to take care to avoid hurting the religious sentiments of believers, for this
only serves to increase religious fanaticism.”23 However, the anti-religious activity continued to
be offensive and alienating, driving many back into the arms of religion as Lenin had foreseen.
Party rhetoric spoke of a beautiful and exciting new age, but atheism on the ground was nothing
more than a bizarre circus, full of mockery, belligerence, and hypocrisy. As proselytizers, the
atheists failed. They never were able to build the strong body of militant atheists they desired,
because they never spoke to the people, but at them.
20 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule A, Vol. 11, Case 136
(interviewer A.P., type A4) Male, 47, Great Russian, Army officer. Widener Library, Harvard University. 21 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule A, Vol. 34, Case 148
Lenin certainly did not consult with the people when he was constructing his religious
policies, and perhaps more than any other Soviet leader save Stalin, he understood that what he
had created could be mistaken for a new religion that possessed terrible and exciting powers.
Even though Lenin objected to out-right Socialist "God-building," he would have been the first
to admit that there were those who saw "socialism as [their] religion."24 Although this was a
deviation from orthodox Marxism, Lenin believed it could "form [a] transition from religion to
socialism.”25 However, Soviet Socialism quickly became a religion and it was the Bolshevik
leaders who defined its dogma.
This new godless religion was infused with religious language and themes. Russian
scholar Irina Nikolaevna Donina explains: "the consciousness of these 'godless' individuals
remained essentially religious and was primed to accept new dogmas provided that they were
phrased as theological doctrine."26 This link with religion was both a hangover from the past and
a stepping stone to the future. The new Bolshevik lexicon and worldview burst forth with
untamed religious fervor, instilling old symbols with new meanings. Those who went against the
"orthodox" party attitude and the proletarian "spirit" were "sinners" who could only appeal to the
"god of history."27 Scientific achievements, the tools for combating religion, "were elevated to
24 Ramet, Sabrina Petra, ed. Religious Policy in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993. 127; Lenin, Vladimir I. "The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion." Proletary, May 13, 19
25 Ibid. 26 Donina, Irina N. ""Autobiographies of the Godless" as a Source on Mass
Social Psychology in the Late 1920s and the Early 1930s." Russian Studies in History 46, no. 2 (2007): 78.
27 Ginzburg, Eugena S. Journey into the Whirlwind. New York. A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1967. 36, 17, 11; Kuromiya, Hiroaki. Stalin: Profiles in Power. New York.
the rank of divine miracles, and science itself was to be duly idolized."28 In the 1930s, when true
believers looked at Stalin "an expression of religious fever [came over their face]," and when
"some visitors [went] to Lenin’s mausoleum [they] crossed themselves in reverence to the author
of Soviet Communism."29 One of the greatest ironies in history is that the man who tried so hard
to create a godless state eventually became a god himself.
The Soviet anti-religious campaign sought to supplant religion by offering secular
alternatives that often mimicked their religious counterparts. Therefore, atheist holidays were
invented that involved gift giving and even decorated trees, one was no longer baptized they
were "Octobered," godless marriage and funeral rites were constructed, and instead of an icon in
the corner of the room there was a "Red Corner" with portraits of Lenin and Stalin replacing the
saints of old.30 Even when trying to stamp out religion the Communists could not escape its
overbearing influence and had to work within its confines, but instead of capturing the best
aspects of religion, such as emotional power, community, and spirituality, the atheist religion
remained a hollow shell that could offer only offer social mobility, but nothing for the soul. Even
though Soviet intellectuals could see that “[religion] is a feeling, and you cannot fight it without
28 Donina, Irina N. ""Autobiographies of the Godless" as a Source on Mass
Social Psychology in the Late 1920s and the Early 1930s." Russian Studies in History 46, no. 2 (2007): 83. 29 Ginzburg, Eugena S. Journey into the Whirlwind. New York. A Harvest/HBJ Book,
1967. 27; Froese, Paul. The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 139
30 Powell, David. "The Effectiveness of Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda." The Public Opinion Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1967): 375; Donina, Irina N. "Autobiographies of the Godless" as a
Source on Mass Social Psychology in the Late 1920s and the Early 1930s." Russian Studies in History 46, no. 2 (2007): 85
instilling counter feeling,” they offered nothing of substance to their potential congregation, and
ran their religion militantly and bureaucratically, to the detriment of their secular dream.31
Sociology professor Paul Froese described Soviet "scientific atheism" as a "religious
competitor" with the Orthodox Church. 32 Others like German social scientist Eduard Heimann
put it more aggressively, saying "Marxism, anti-religious in intention, becomes pseudo-religious
in essence and...embodies itself in atheist theocracy."33 Some who visited the Soviet Union
certainly believed they were witnessing the birth of a new religion, for better or worse. One such
spectator was Sidney Webb, who along with his wife Beatrice traveled to the Soviet Union in
1932. Webb observed that:
The Communists are establishing, in the vast Soviet territory, a new world-religion and this religion idolizes the common man, as all religions have done. It claims his whole life. It cannot be neutral. Its relation to life is all-embracing. It decides all important questions,
not excluding art and music, and even science and technology. It has its own dogmas and catechisms, and the works of Marx and Lenin are coming to be treated as Holy Writ. There is even the beginning of a ritual.34
Webb gave a succinct account of what a vanguard Marxist religion looks like. It is all
consuming and dictatorial on every account of life. He traced the fervent devotion to this religion
to the “scriptures” of Lenin and Marx. Webb believed that “the voluminous writings of Marx and
Lenin are…the subject of much the same exegesis and are already receiving in Soviet Russia the
same sort of unquestioning adoration as the devotees of other religions have given to their Holy
31 Powell, David. "The Effectiveness of Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda." The Public
Opinion Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1967): 37 32 Froese, Paul. “After Atheism: An Analysis of Religious Monopolies in the Post-
Communist World.” Sociology of Religion 65, no. 1. (2004): 65.
33 Heimann, Eduard. "Atheist Theocracy." Social Research 20, no. 3 (1953): 33
34 Webb, Sidney. "On the Emergence of a New World-Religion." International Journal of
Ethics 1, no. 48 (1933): 175
Moore 13
Writ!”35 Even Webb and his wife would be swept up in the religious romance and see Stalin as
some kind of noble, religious crusader.
While some were open to the idea of a new godless religion, others feared where a
fanatical worship of it might lead. Webb's open minded attitude stands in direct contrast to that
of Bertrand Russell, who visited the Soviet Union in 1920 and met with Lenin himself. Russell
was unimpressed with Lenin, finding him dictatorial; his hearty laugh somehow grim. He
thought Lenin was an "embodied theory" and concluded that "the materialistic concept of history
is his life-blood."36 Lenin had a "religious faith in the Marxian gospel, which [Russell claimed]
takes the place of the Christian martyr's hope for Paradise."37 It was the religious element of
Marxism-Leninism that eventually repelled Russell. After his visit to the Soviet Union he
confessed that "I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has
intensified a thousand fold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom
of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery."38 In a
book Russell wrote on his experience in the Soviet Union, he offered a chilling and prescient
assessment of what Marxism as a religion could lead to. Russell proclaimed:
I cannot share the hopes of the Bolsheviks [which I regard as a tragic delusion], destined to bring upon the world centuries of darkness and futile violence. The principles of the
Sermon on the Mount are admirable, but their effect upon average human nature was very different from what was intended. Those who followed Christ did not learn to love
their enemies or to turn the other cheek. They learned instead to use the Inquisition and the stake, to subject the human intellect to the yoke of an ignorant ant intolerant
35 Ibid., 73
36 Russell, Bertrand. The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. London: George Allen and Unwin LTD, 1920. 87; Russell, Bertrand. Lenin, Trotzky and Gorky.” The Nation, published
February 2008, from essay “Soviet Russia-1920.” 36 Ibid.
37 Ibid. 38 Russell, Bertrand. The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. London: George Allen and
Unwin LTD, 1920. 42
Moore 14
priesthood, to degrade art and extinguish science for a thousand years. These were the inevitable results, not of teaching, but of fanatical belief in the teaching. The hopes which
inspire Communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they held as fanatically, and are likely to harm.39
To understand what motivated and drove the "true believers" or "fanatics" of Soviet
atheism, one can first turn to a definition of faith given by Russia's own, Leo Tolstoy. In his
Confession, written from 1879 to 1880, Tolstoy declared that, "faith...makes it possible to
live...whatever the faith may be, and whatever answers it many give...every such answer gives to
the finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not destroyed by sufferings,
deprivations, or death."40 Adolf Abramovich Yoffe, the Bolshevik politician and close friend of
Leon Trotsky, displayed this same type of faith in Marxism in his suicide letter, in which he
wrote:
It is more than thirty years since I embraced the view that human life has sense only insofar as it is spent in the service of the infinite—and for us mankind is the infinite. To
work for any finite purpose—and everything else is finite—is meaningless. Even if mankind’s life were to come to a close this would in any case happen at a time so remote that we may consider humanity as the absolute infinite. If one believes, as I do, in
progress, one may assume that when the time comes for our planet to vanish, mankind will long before that have found the means to migrate and settle on younger
planets…Thus anything accomplished in our time for mankind’s benefit will in some way survive into future ages; and through this our existence acquires the only significance it can possess.41
In both cases one is living for the infinite, but for a Marxist that infinity exists in man on
earth, not in God in heaven. This was a dream and vision of atheism that stood in direct contrast
to the ugly reality of the anti-religious campaign. This dichotomy could be described as a result
of the struggle between the Power and the Dream, a paradox Isaac Deustcher utilized in his
39 Ibid., 15-16 40 Tolstoy, Leo N. Confession. 1882. Kindle edition. Loc. 510-530
41 Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky: 1921-1929. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. 381
biography of Trotsky.42 There was a dream of what an atheist state could be, but when the
Bolsheviks came to power their atheist religion suffered from all of the drawbacks of a political
and philosophical doctrine that was authoritarian, dictatorial, and closed to communication with
the Soviet people.
Shoshana Keller calls Lenin the "prime mover behind Soviet anti-religious policy," in her
book, To Moscow, Not Mecca. Likewise, Trotsky witnessed Lenin's great concern for anti-
religious activity and recalled in his autobiography My Life that "among the some odd-dozen
jobs that I was directing as part of the party work – that is, privately and unofficially – was the
anti-religious propaganda, in which Lenin was very much interested. He asked me insistently not
to let this work out of my sight."43 When Lenin discovered that it would be Yaroslavsky, and not
Trotsky, directing anti-religious propaganda, he hissed with his usual venom, “Yar-os-lavsky?
Don’t you know what Yar-os-lavsky is? Why, it would make a hen chuckle. He will never be
able to manage this work."44 In Lenin’s war on religion, only a man familiar with the ways of
war would do.
Lenin never minced words when explaining the role of religion in a Marxist revolution.
Marxism is "positively" and "relentlessly hostile" to religion" he said in 1909.45 However, his
view on how to combat religion was more complex. In 1905 Lenin stated that "the religious
42 Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky: 1921-1929. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.
43 Keller, Shoshana. To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1914. Praeger. 2001. 51; Trotsky, Leon. My Life. New York. Pathfinder
Press. 1970. from the Marxist Internet Archive
44 Ibid. 45 Lenin, Vladimir I. "The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion." Proletary, May
pushed forward with full speed, learning as he went, and when writing to Maxim Gorky he
justified himself by saying “the cruelty, which the conditions of our life made necessary, will be
understood and vindicated. Everything will be understood, everything.”51 Unfortunately, this
didn't turn out to be true, and the cruelty that Lenin displayed against priests in Shuia in 1922 for
obstructing the collection of church valuables, did more to harm his cause than help it, "resulting
in popular riots, the arrest of Church leaders, including Patriarch Tikhon, and the execution or
imprisonment of numerous churchmen.52
By ordering the execution of priests in public spaces and the robbery of churches and
monasteries, Lenin seemed to contradict his idea that to combat religion was to passively wage a
war of education and knowledge. Moreover, many of the people were on the side of the priests.
A Soviet book keeper who witnessed the worst of the atheist campaign said, "I regarded the
liquidation of churches and the exile of priests as unjust. I knew priests children when I was a
child and I went to school with them, and I was in their homes."53 When Soviet leaders executed
priests or depicted religious officials and believers in their propaganda as inhuman ghosts, they
never understood that the people they were stripping the humanity from were husbands, sons,
brothers, and neighbors. The attack on priests wasn’t an attack on religion, but an assault on
family and community.
Leon Trotsky, like Lenin, could see an atheist future around the corner, but neither could
see the absolute necessity of including ordinary atheists and believers in the conversation on how
to build it. However, if Lenin is the Soviet messiah, Trotsky is certainly, as his biographer Isaac
51 Hill, Christopher. Lenin and the Russian Revolution. New York. Penguin Books. 1971. 166 52 Peris, Daniel. "The 1929 Congress of the Godless." Soviet Studies 43, no. 4 (1991): 712
53 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule A, Vol. 27, Case 527 (interviewer J.R., type A4). Male, 42, Great Russian, Book keeper. Widener Library, Harvard
Deutscher dubbed him, the Soviet prophet. Out of all of the Bolshevik leaders, Trotsky alone was
able to speak of atheism in a profound and meaningful way that created the prospect that atheism
was not just about tearing something down, but about building something up. Humankind truly
replaced God in Trotsky's mind, and the continuing perfection of the human being and human
society took on religious proportions.
As early as 1901, Trotsky expressed an atheistic vision of society that did not focus on
the absence of God, but the presence of a new kind of Man. Trotsky poetically mused:
"Dum spiro spero! [While there is life, there’s hope!] ... If I were one of the celestial bodies, I would look with complete detachment upon this miserable ball of dust and dirt ... I would shine
upon the good and the evil alike ... But I am a man. World history which to you, dispassionate gobbler of science, to you, book-keeper of eternity, seems only a negligible moment in the
balance of time, is to me everything! As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future, that radiant future in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizon of beauty, joy, and happiness!"54
Trotsky's "spirituality" was derived from the secular, but infused with the sacred. Where
Lenin spoke on the ways that an atheist could combat religion, Trotsky envisioned the ways in
which an atheist could transcend religion and perfect himself and society. Isaac Deutscher
believed that “[Trotsky] led…the Society of the Godless....in a spirit of philosophical
enlightenment which was least likely to produce those excesses, offensive to the sentiment of the
believers, which marred the Society’s work under Yaroslavsky."55 Through Trotsky's words, one
can see how he gave a voice to atheism and sought to tie godlessness to education, progression,
and ultimately, human perfection. Trotsky’s atheism did not focus on the absence of God, but a
radical refocusing on Man. In the 1920s Trotsky envisioned a godless world:
54 Trotsky, Leon. "On Optimism and Pessimism On the 20th Century and on Many Other
Issues." 1901.
55 Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Unarmed, Trotsky: 1921-1929. New York:
At last man will begin in earnest to harmonize his own being. He will aim at bringing higher precision, purposefulness, economy, and consequently beauty into the movements
of his own body at work, on the march, and at play. He will discover to master the half conscious and unconscious processes of his own organism: breathing, blood circulation,
digestion, reproduction…
These prospects follow from the whole of man's development. He begins with expelling
darkness from production and ideology…with breaking by means of technology, the barbarous routine of his work and defeating religion by the means of science...Man will
strive to control his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of his conscious mind, and to bring clarity into them, to channel his willpower into his unconscious depths; and in this way he will lift himself to new eminence, grow into a superior
biological and social type-- into the superman, if you like.
Man will grow incomparably stronger, wiser, subtler; his body will become more
harmonious; his movements more rhythmical; his voice more musical. The forms of his existence will acquire a dynamic quality. The average man will rise to the stature of
Aristotle, Goethe, Marx. And above these heights new peaks will rise.56
From this passage one can find many connections between other world religions and
Trotsky's vision of an atheist society that defies Man. First, Trotsky's vision of mastering "the
half conscious and unconscious processes of his own organism: breathing, blood circulation" is
something that Buddhists have done for centuries, and Trotsky's implicit view that each man will
become their own God is a well known idea to Hinduism, where Brahman is atman, and atman is
Brahman (the soul is God, God is the soul). Sidney Webb also compared the Marxist religion to
Buddhism, claiming both were examples of religions without Gods.
The vision Trotsky lays out is essentially that of the apotheosis of man. Mankind literally
takes on the qualities of God and becomes omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. Like the
Soviet People's Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Trotsky believed that
"driven by emotional fervor, the proletariat would become God, save itself and create a new
56 Ibid., 196-197
Moore 20
world.”57 Therefore, Trotsky's atheism is not negative like Lenin's, where the focus is on what to
get rid of, but positive and always searching for something to improve and build upon.
In words like those above Trotsky borders on becoming a Soviet Diderot, but Trotsky
was no stranger to committing acts that would have a negative effect on the anti-religious
campaign and cause a religious backlash. He was directly involved with the confiscation of
church valuables and the closure of churches, both policies that disgusted the people and turned
many back into the arms of religion. Soviet anti-religious propaganda, which he directed for a
time, was not influential, not taken seriously, and viewed indifferently by the majority of
believers and atheists. A Soviet woman told how “the excesses of that propaganda, its
sacrilegious character…returned me to the fold of the Church.”58 What leaders like Trotsky and
Lenin could not see were these daily grievances that their policies were causing. When the
churches were shut down, sacked, and the priests shot, an atmosphere of fear and terror
developed for the believers who were suddenly ostracized from their community and looked at as
“pariahs.” People were afraid to go to church, wear a cross, or have an icon in their home.
Trotsky’s “pragmatic” policies during a time of war, uncertainty, and strife resulted in aiding in
an environment of fear and violence. The people were hardly open to listening to his grand
sermons about the future’s godless possibilities when the road to that future had to be paved with
so much suffering, hatred, and blood.
57 Ramet, Sabrina P., ed. Religious Policy in the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993. 127
58 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule A, Vol. 31, Case 479 (interviewer G.A., type A4). Female, 38, Great Russian, Book keeper. Widener Library, Harvard
60 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule A. Vol. 28, Case 532
(interviewer J.R., type A4). Male, 50, Great Russian, Planner-economist and major in Soviet Army. Widener Library, Harvard University. 1951
61 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule A, Vol. 10, Case 127 (interviewer M.L., type A4). Male, 26, Great Russian, Student. Widener Library, Harvard
University. 62 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule A, Vol. 5, Case 56 (interviewer
A.D., type A2). Male, 36, Great Russian, Army officer. Widener Library, Harvard University. 63 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule A, Vol. 2, Case 18 (interviewer
R.F., type A3). Male, 34 to 45, Great Russian, Bookkeeper, chiefly in Army. Widener Library,
Harvard University.
Moore 22
have discovered that many Russian atheists had no desire to erase religion from the social life of
Russia. In fact, most unbelievers saw religion as a vital part of the Russian landscape and life, as
one Soviet atheist explained "I've never been religious. Already in my childhood I felt a certain
dislike toward religion. However, I regard religion as an important factor in community life.
Church is a social institution."64 If party leaders had contacted this group of atheists they would
have learned that their campaign was being run to the detriment of the party's desired goal. N. S.
Timasheff reported that interviews with displaced persons (who left Russia in great numbers in
1943-44) agree that religion no longer played a large part in the life of the younger generation.
Many said that the school had made them atheists, but the majority seemed to favor religious
tolerance. Some acknowledged that the excesses of anti- religious propaganda destroyed the
disrespect for religion created in them by the school."65 One Soviet citizen best explained the
complexities of Russian atheism that the Soviet leadership missed completely, when saying: "On
the one hand we were not educated in a religious spirit. But we were not atheistic either. For
example my father did not go to church but he was always tolerant...I think that in our family
was an old Russian Atheism. But not in the bad sense of it. In the sense that you are tolerant to
everybody."66 It was this tolerance that the Soviet leadership ignored to their detriment.
The majority of the Russian people, believers and unbelievers, were willing to accept
atheism as a new faith, but not as a new oppressing force, but the vanguard philosophy could not
present its conclusions in any other manner than as divine commands from the future that had to
64 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule A, Vol. 35, Case 96/(NY)1493
(interviewer A.S., type A4). Male, 43, Great Russian, Engineer-economist. Widener Library, Harvard University.
65 Timasheff, N.S. "Urbanization, Operation Anti-religion and the Decline of Religion in the USSR." American Slavic and East European Review, 14, no. 2 (1955) 232.
66 Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System. Schedule A, Vol. 9, Case 116 (interviewer K.G., type A4). Male, 32, Byelorussian, Kolkhoznik. Widener Library, Harvard
University.
Moore 23
be followed and carried out at all costs. Any blood spilt in the present was fuel for the future.
The vanguard had seen the way and any divergence of opinion or contradiction in the outcome
could be seen as nothing but counter-revolutionary or unholy aberrations. They could not see that
the majority of Soviet atheists respected religion and saw it as a vital Russian, and Soviet social
institution. The two could have lived in harmony it seems, if it were not for an obstructive anti-
religious campaign that interfered.
The conclusion that Paul Froese reached when studying why forced secularization failed
in the Soviet Union is that "systems of belief require more than simply the power of promotion
and coercion to become accepted.”67 Because the party believed they knew what was best for the
people the "atheistic monopoly....never questioned itself or addressed the concerns of its would-
be converts.”68 Atheism and secularism flourish in open societies, where individuals can embark
on personal journeys of self-discovery and come to their own conclusions about God. Something
so complex and so personal as one’s metaphysical and spiritual concepts could not be effectively
managed by the vanguard outlook, that gazed past the people to the eye of the future, missing
everything else; missing everything important and essential.
67 Froese, Paul. "Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an
Atheistic Monopoly Failed." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 43, no. 1 (2004): 35.
