Lenin insisted, as the basis of all his teaching, on a resolute denial of there being any known manifestation of the supernatural. He steadfastly insisted that the universe known to mankind (including mind equally with matter) was the sphere of science; and that this steadily advancing knowledge, the result of human experience of the universe, was the only useful instrument and the only valid guide of human action…When the Bolsheviks came into power in 1917, they made this defiant and dogmatic atheism the basis of their action.1
Note the approval implied in the words “resolute,” “steadfastly,” and “defiant.” The Webbs were impressed, even awed, by Lenin’s renunciation of the spiritual.
Before discussing the suppression of religion, the Webbs explain, “So far we have described the positive and creative aspects of the cult of science in the USSR.” (These include laudatory sections on such subjects as “The Leningrad Institute of the Brain” and “The Campaign against Rheumatism,” which I commend to those with a strong sense of the ridiculous.)
The Suppression of Religion
The Webbs creditably admit that “there is also a negative and destructive side: the violent denunciation and energetic uprooting, from one end of the Soviet Union to the other, of religion, and especially of the Christian religion.” But there follow various denunciations of the evils of the Orthodox Church, tending to suggest that at least some of the attack on it was justified.
The Webbs go on to remark: “Whatever may have been the shortcomings and defects of the Greek Orthodox Church, it must be recognised that the attitude taken up by the Communist Party has excited a pained surprise and intense disapproval among earnest Christians in Western Europe and the United States, which has militated against any friendship with the USSR.”
Note that they merely describe this surprise and disapproval among others (patronized as “earnest”) rather than expressing it themselves. Surprise is “pained” and disapproval “intense.” These are very different words from “resolute” and “steadfast.” It appears that they regret the action (if they regret it at all) because it has damaged the image of a government they admire. They are not against it because it is bad in itself.
The Webbs’ account of the Bolshevik state’s persecution of religion, beginning on page 1007, is relentlessly complacent, self-deceiving, and defensive. They suggest without any good evidence that, following Lenin’s coup d’etat of November 1917, there were “spontaneous mass conversions to atheism.” They seek with painful diligence to avoid blaming the state for the killing of priests and the destruction of churches in the postrevolutionary period, attributing these events to “popular excesses,” saying, “The Soviet government failed, for some years, to get control of the popular feeling”—although they also admit that this government “doubtless sympathised with it in all but its worst excesses.” All but the worst? We shall see.
Teaching Religion to Children Banned
The Webbs’ summary of the revolutionary campaign against the church is a useful starting point for examining this endless and ingenious fury, even so. This was not mere mindless smashing, intimidation, murder, and abuse, though there were plenty of these things. The Webbs correctly—and highly significantly—record that the schools were immediately secularized, religious teaching having been forbidden by Anatoly Lunacharsky’s education decree on October 26, 1917, one of the very first broadly political acts of the Lenin putsch. There was then a second, still more devastating decree (on January 3, 1922), which utterly banned the teaching of religion to children, even singly, in churches, church buildings, or private homes.
Those who nowadays characterize the teaching of religion to children as a form of abuse—and I will come to that shortly—might be surprised to find their views so closely prefigured in this proclamation, which conceded that:
Theological instruction for individuals over eighteen years of age who are able to discuss religious questions intelligibly can be authorised in special establishments opened by permission of the Soviet authorities… Collective teaching and isolated relations with young people under the age of eighteen, no matter where carried on, will be prosecuted with all the rigour of revolutionary law.
Such “rigour” could include the death penalty.
Rampant Anti-Christian Fervor
While Christian education was suppressed, official anti-Christian fervor was rampant. Hundreds of “Anti-God museums” appeared, mocking especially the Orthodox cult of relics, based on the belief that the corpses of saints did not decompose. Perhaps this is why, soon after, so much money and effort was used to try to prevent the corpse of Lenin from rotting, as if “science” could do what God could not. The Webbs once more assert, with their touching inability to understand the workings of Soviet despotism, that atheist propaganda was originally undertaken by individuals, only later supported by the weekly magazine Bezbozhnik (“The Godless”). Judging by the Webbs’ account, this journal somehow seems to have just happened to be published—in a state where the Communist Party controlled every drop of ink, every ream of paper, every printing press, every train, every delivery van, and every newsstand.
Likewise, a conference, which just happened to be held in 1925 in a country where conferences were rather closely supervised by the secret police, just happened to adopt theses laying down the lines on which religion “should be combated.” Coincidence is plainly hard at work in these matters, at least as far as the Webbs are concerned.
The mysterious passive voice is again in evidence as the Webbs record that a “Union of the Godless” was “established.” At an “All-Union conference of Anti-religious Societies,” which was somehow held in a country where every meeting hall was controlled by the state and a passport was necessary even for internal travel, this body changed its name to “The League of the Militant Godless.”
The Webbs describe how very energetic campaigns for anti-religious propaganda were launched. (The passive voice appears yet again, as they strive to avoid the blazingly obvious truth that the state was engineering all these things.) And this movement somehow grew so that “From 9,000 cells and branches, it sprang year by year to 30,000, 50,000 and 70,000, with an aggregate membership, paying tiny fees, counted by millions.”
Despite recording the mysterious flourishing of this body (coinciding as it did with confiscation of church property and execution, imprisonment, exile, and harassment of priests and believers), the Webbs go on, with the amazing self-delusion of the fellow traveler—to equate the position of Christians in the USSR with that of atheists in 1930s Britain:
The social atmosphere in the USSR is unfriendly to any form of supernaturalism; just as the social atmosphere of the United States or Great Britain is unfriendly to any dogmatic atheism. But so far as the present writers could ascertain in 1932 and 1934, there is, in the USSR today, nothing that can properly be called persecution [my italics] of those who are Christians, any more than there is of Jews, Moslems or Buddhists. There is no law against the avowal of belief in any religious creed, or the private practice of its rites. There is no exclusion from office of men or women who are believers.
The last claim was a gross untruth, while being narrowly and technically correct. The law did not bar believers from office as such. But open piety meant automatic expulsion from the Communist Party, which in turn meant exclusion from office. The Webbs—who may genuinely not have grasped this—add, equally reassuringly, “The Soviet government has more than once intervened to moderate the provocative activity of the Union of the Godless.” Perhaps so. If its aim was to undermine Christian piety, its aggressive crudity was likely to have been counter-productive from time to time. The people were distressed when jeering Bolsheviks lampooned the great festivals of Christmas and Easter in the city streets. The Socialist G. P. Fedotov recalled meeting one such procession:
The population, and not only the faithful, looked upon this hideous carnival with dumb horror. There were no protests from the silent streets—the years of terror had done their work
—but nearly everyone tried to turn off the road when they met this shocking procession… The parade moved along empty streets and its attempts at creating laughter or provocation were met with dull silence on the part of the occasional witnesses.
Despite an attempt in 1923 by more intelligent Bolsheviks to restrain this kind of persecution by mockery, it returned later with renewed force under the direction of the regime’s chief God-baiter, Emelian Yaroslavski. A state that controls the waking lives of the rising generations can in fact erase faith by the use of relentless strength and consistency. And that is what happened.
The Bolshevik leadership genuinely hated and despised the thing they sought to destroy. A fair example of the league’s later propaganda is a 1929 issue of Bezbozhnik showing two smirking workers dumping Jesus Christ, open-mouthed and goggling, from a red wheelbarrow on to a garbage heap, along with some empty wine bottles. Behind them, a third proletarian is energetically smashing a church bell with a hammer. In the background, vast factory chimneys—the spires of Communism—pour soot into a vacant socialist heaven. The caption urges workers to abandon the old, allegedly drunken religious holiday of the Transfiguration and instead celebrate “Industrialization Day.” Much more offensive and sometimes obscene imagery was often used by this organization, whose pornographic and shocking parodies of religious ceremonies were an echo of the “Worship of Reason” in the French Revolution, when prostitutes dressed as Reason were paraded in churches.
Priests almost invariably appear in Bezbozhnik’s cartoons and posters as sinister drunks. (One interestingly appears in the same form in the work of the modern anti-Christian British children’s writer Philip Pullman.) Religious grandmothers, an enemy who could not easily be stifled even in a totalitarian state, are portrayed as crow-like witches trying to entice children into dark ecclesiastical portals; scavenger birds sit on the roofs of decrepit churches, while nearby the new enlightened state school shines with the virtue of science. The Almighty himself is portrayed as a red-nosed old booby in thick spectacles, wearing a White Guard cap and smoking a cigar. A particularly brutal cartoon depicts the Last Supper as a boozy debauch. Two of the apostles are under the table; bottles roll on the floor of the Upper Room; disciples reel, leer, or brawl with each other, haloes akimbo. Jesus—bottle in one hand, glass in the other—is depicted as saying (I translate fairly freely): “Drink ye all of this, for this is my own bathtub hooch, which is being drunk for you, for us and for many. Hurrah!” An explanatory text claims that the “so-called ‘Last Supper’” clearly proves that religion establishes, proclaims, and morally excuses drunkenness. “To fight against religion is to fight against drunkenness.”
The anti-drinking message is strong, as shown in that blasphemous lampoon of the Last Supper, and is an attempt to bracket the church with a tragedy that has always been the plague of the Russian poor. Yet, as I observed myself seventy years later, long after the war against Christianity had been effectively won, drunkenness was still a dreadful scourge across Russia, defying all attempts to suppress it. The main effect of a ban on alcohol sales, in 1990 Moscow, was a grave shortage of sugar, which had all been used to make moonshine vodka. Public and private drunkenness continued at appalling levels, as anyone could readily observe, wrecking family life and poisoning a society already in great pain. Far from providing a new materialist type of man with liberation from drink and ignorance, the “new civilization” left him more enslaved to alcohol than before and deprived of hope in either this world or the next.
* * *
1This passage, and much of what follows, can be found in the second volume of the 1940 edition of their crowning work (published by Longmans, Green), as part of Chapter XI, entitled “Science the Salvation of Mankind.” This is preceded by Chapter X, significantly called “The Remaking of Man.” Presumably, they were correcting the final proofs as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact joined the USSR and the Third Reich in the most cynical military alliance in human history.
CHAPTER 13
Provoking a Bloody War with the Church
“Then let mine enemy persecute my soul, and take me: yea, let him tread my life down upon the earth, and lay mine honour in the dust.”
(THE 7TH PSALM)
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s secret Shuya Memorandum of March 22, 1922, launched the state-sponsored looting of Russia’s churches in the hope of provoking the Orthodox hierarchy into resistance and so crushing them. “In order to get our hands on this fund of several hundred million gold rubles (and perhaps even several hundred billion), we must do whatever is necessary,” commanded the Bolshevik leader, whose tone was as ever shockingly bloodthirsty and violent. “We must now give the most decisive and merciless battle to the Black Hundreds1 clergy and subdue its resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for decades to come.” But the Bolshevik expectations of gold from this source were absurdly ambitious and probably a red herring from the start. The real motive was to goad Christians into defending themselves and then to smash them in pieces. In this it succeeded. That year, 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks, and 3,447 nuns were killed.2
No wonder William Henry Chamberlin, in his account of what he saw during twelve years as a correspondent in Moscow for the Christian Science Monitor, wrote: “There have been many instances in history when one religion cruelly persecuted all others; but in Russia the world is witnessing the first effort to destroy completely any belief in supernatural interpretation of life [my italics].”3
Chamberlin compares Communism with religion, describing it as “the faith without God.” But he stresses the difference between the two: “What distinguishes Communism from the fanatical authoritarian religions with which it has so many points in common is of course its rigid, dogmatic and uncompromising exclusion of any element in life lying outside the confines of the present material world… Truth and objectivity are of minor importance. The main purpose is to defame and denounce in every way.”
Chamberlin notes that until 1929, Article 4 of the Soviet constitution guaranteed a “right to religious propaganda” as well as the right to anti-religious propaganda. After that date, the faithful were only allowed to “profess” their faith, not to propagandize for it. But the Godless kept their right to campaign.
Priests and their families were subject to severe persecution. A priest’s children were barred from middle or higher schools or from state employment unless they renounced and broke off all connections with their fathers. Priests were disenfranchised along with criminals and the insane. They were also denied ration cards, often necessary for survival in periods of shortage.
Chamberlin also details the Communist campaign against Christmas, a festival that—because it is so much loved by children—arouses the special hostility of utopian despots at all times and in all places. Pointing out that the sale of Christmas trees was then strictly forbidden in Moscow (except to foreigners in special hard-currency shops), Chamberlin quotes from a little pamphlet aimed at schoolchildren, “Against the Christmas Tree.” This publication was one in a series called “The Library of the Young Atheist,” whose time has plainly almost come around again. It contains this severe warning:
Millions of little children are brought up by very religious grandmothers. For such children the Christmas tree represents a very great danger… Not one Young Pioneer detachment, not one school and not one group of Young Atheists should leave children of pre-school age unattended during the Christmas holidays. The struggle against the Christmas Tree is the struggle against religion and against our class enemies.
By the time I lived in Moscow at the very end of the Communist era, sixty years later, few had any knowledge or memory of Christmas as it had once been celebrated. Trees were sold in street markets, but they were not Christmas trees; they were for the wholly secular New Year festival, which was by then the principal winter holiday. Christmas was more or less dead. Middle-aged, middle-class Russians generally viewed religion with a sour contempt taught to them repeatedly since their earliest
childhood.
Children, rather nauseatingly described as “our only privileged class,” were encouraged to place more trust in the state than in their families, not least by the odious cult of Pavlik Morozov, a peasant child said to have been killed by his grandfather after he denounced his own parents to the NKVD (secret police) for hoarding grain. Morozov may well not have existed, but the mythology surrounding him was extensive, including visits by school children to statues of him. One such statue was still to be seen in a small park in the Krasnaya Presnya district of Moscow as late as 1991. It vanished soon after the final collapse of Communism in that year, but several adult Russians known to me recalled being taught to revere him, and one visibly shuddered at the memory, though she was in all other ways a devoted and loyal Communist.
The Destruction of Beauty and Custom
Perhaps the greatest damage done to religion by systematic state persecution was to break the continuity of tradition and prayer. A famous story was told in 1990s Moscow of a group of children of elite Russians, members of the privileged Nomenklatura, who, realizing in their early twenties that they were Jews, decided to celebrate Yom Kippur—a solemn holy day set aside for atonement and repentance—with a large and joyous party. This utter ignorance of any religious lore and traditions was common.
The Rage Against God Page 14