The Rage Against God

by Peter Hitchens

  Although plenty of Russians, including leading Communists, had been secretly baptized by devout grandmothers, few had any knowledge of the church seasons, rituals, or scriptures. There were some isolated believers, but they were not in any way typical. The link between the people and their Christian inheritance—in custom, seasons, traditions, music, and belief—had been effectively broken, and Christianity had been reduced to a private matter, much as it is in Muslim nations. Moscow, despite growing enormously in the seventy-five years since the Bolshevik putsch, had lost 500 of its 600 churches, many of them spitefully desecrated, some blown up, some relegated to serve as storerooms or used as reformatories for feral delinquent youths who were encouraged to befoul and desecrate them. Any serious career was closed to an observant believer, since (as mentioned above) church membership was explicitly incompatible with Communist Party membership. For decades, spies were assumed to be present in all congregations. It was hard to see how Holy Russia could ever recover.

  Since then, there has been much rebuilding, regilding of old domes, and ostentatious religious observance by the powerful and the rich. The Kremlin cathedrals and St. Basil’s in Red Square (where I attended an almost ecstatic celebration of Easter in 1992, the first in that building for many decades) have been brought back into use. But I do not think that what was lost has been recovered, and I suspect it never will be.

  The persistence of some Communist symbolism in the state—the huge crystal red stars on the Kremlin towers, the unburied corpse of Lenin in Red Square—have little if anything to do with socialism. But they show that in a de-Christianized society, the state still has to rely on the childhood indoctrination of millions of citizens for a large part of its authority. If the church and tradition had not been so completely erased, these things would not be needed. Perhaps, two generations from now, Lenin will finally receive decent burial and the red stars will at last be taken down. But the church is unlikely to fill the space from which it was so violently expelled in the Communist period.

  Systematic Malice

  The Bolsheviks, who erased most of their original opponents with appalling violence, were from the start more subtle about religion, an enemy they knew was stronger than it looked. In his passionate yet restrained book The Russian Crucifixion, published in 1930, F. A. Mackenzie lists the provisions of the People’s Commissariat decree on religious associations issued on April 8, 1929. This was an extension of Lunacharsky’s original anti-religious decree set out on January 23, 1918, which had ended the teaching of religion in schools, had disestablished the church, and had begun the official state campaign against God. Much thought had gone into this web of regulations. Its systematic, cunning malice is as frightening as naked violence.

  Its authors knew exactly where and how to strike, how to bind, and what limits would be most effective in achieving what they wished to bring about. Each religious society had to be registered; a person might only belong to one such organization (so a church member could not also belong to the YMCA or a Student Christian group). Religious societies might only use one building for worship. Outside preachers were banned. Churches could not use their property for any purposes but religious ones. They could not give charity to outsiders or their own members. The state must have a monopoly of welfare. Special meetings for women, children, or adolescents were banned; likewise, Bible study groups, book groups, sewing groups, organized excursions, children’s playgrounds, libraries or reading rooms, or any kind of medical assistance. Religious symbols were banned from public buildings. Processions and open-air services were banned.

  Secular Intolerance

  There were no private schools under the Communist regime. All education was under the control of the Communist state. Mackenzie quotes the generally gullible newspaper, the Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian), as having maintained that “anti-religious education consists in simple teaching in the natural sciences.” He then quotes, in devastating rebuttal, Susan Lawrence, a British Labour politician, who might have been expected to be sympathetic to the Communists. She reported from Moscow in 1923:

  The schools are as I have said propaganda schools, framed to inculcate a definite ideal both in politics and religion. Communism is to be taught and religion is to be exterminated, and the whole programme of the schools is to be directed towards these ends. Exactly as the lessons in revolutionary history, and elementary economics, have as their object establishing firmly the outlook on the world of say [Thomas] Huxley or Mr [Charles] Bradlaugh [two prominent British atheists].

  It follows, as is always the case with dogmatic education, that there can be no free play of thought, and in particular there is no room in the system for any teacher who does not think as the State does. A teacher who was not a Communist or who was a professing Christian I am pretty sure would have to hide his opinion or lose his job as certainly as would be the case with a convinced atheist in a Catholic school in England.

  Lawrence does not make the important point that in Britain’s more pluralist society such a dissenter would have a chance of working elsewhere, whereas in Soviet Russia he would probably starve, if he remained at liberty and alive at all.

  Mackenzie then describes the discussions in professional magazines for Soviet teachers of how best to destroy the religious instinct among children. God and Christ must be treated as equivalent to fairytale figures, ghosts, and goblins. The church’s wealth is then to be discussed, and the point made that it would be better spent on repairing roads or buying shoes for children. Saintliness is to be debunked and associated with fraud and fakery. It is alleged that diphtheria can be spread by eating the Host at Communion and even that the Easter Kiss may spread syphilis.

  All this time the young are under great pressure to join mixed-sex Communist youth leagues—which are of course most active on Sundays when church services are being held. Mackenzie states, “They are soaked in Marxism; they are taught Communist songs and sing them as they march along, they are taught to hate priests; in country towns when they see one they hoot at him.”

  Mackenzie then notes:

  The summer and autumn of 1929 witnessed a steady growth of Communist aggression…everything short of the actual closing of the churches seemed now to have been done, but here the ingenuity of the Party in power proved not yet to be exhausted. The government decreed a five-day week in the place of the seven-day week, in order to break completely the observance of Sunday. Each person is now to have one day off in five, but since the day varies according to each person’s work, different members of a family often have their periodical rest on different days.

  The Bolsheviks had clearly learned from the failure of the ten-day week that formed part of the French Revolutionary calendar. This collapsed largely because the Sabbath of Reason came around much less often than the Sabbath of Christianity. But even the Bolsheviks’ five- (and later six-) day week experiment eventually proved too unpopular to sustain, because it made life too miserable.

  Mackenzie records:

  There came a campaign of the confiscation of church bells, nominally in order that their metal might be used for industrial purposes, but really to stop the call of religion. The workers were given the power to initiate proceedings to close churches, and in large sections of the country they launched campaigns to stop by force every place of worship there… the economic regulations were specially used to penalise the priests. From all over the country accounts began to arrive of the arrests of priests, because they had not produced the quantity of grain required, or had not been able to meet high taxes.

  Persecution of Christianity Was Not Hidden

  Mackenzie—who lived in Communist Russia for three years from 1921 to 1924 and plainly had extensive personal contact with many religious Russians—also gives detailed accounts of cruel and unjust imprisonment and executions, a detailed exposition of conditions at the Solovyetsky concentration camp and of several other prisons, convincing accounts of miserable exiles and other cruel punishments.

&nbs
p; It is important to note here that these harrowing descriptions—which probably err on the side of mildness—came long before anyone had heard of Alexander Solzhenitsyn or the Gulag Archipelago. Yet information about the expanding network of cruel and miserable prison camps was surprisingly freely available, especially concerning the island prison at Solovyetsky. The Soviet state had already quite obviously laid the foundations of the repressive apparatus that Stalin would perfect. Details of these facts were published and available throughout the long years when the Webbs and many others in the democratic and legal Western Left were prepared to defend the Soviet Union as a worthy social experiment and perhaps more. The Webbs cite Mackenzie in their bibliography, but they plainly regard him as an exaggerator. Time (whose daughter is Truth) is on his side.

  For those who wished to know, there was extensive evidence of the terrorist savagery of the Soviet state from very early on. The main barrier to such knowledge lay in the minds of those who idealized the Soviet state and did not wish to hear or believe it. It is also important to say that major figures in the religious resistance to the Bolsheviks, such as the judicially murdered Metropolitan Benjamin and Patriarch Tikhon, who was terrorized into self-abasement, were by no means mere reactionary tools of the old regime’s indefensible Holy Synod. Benjamin was explicitly in favor of separation of church and state. Tikhon came to prominence only after the collapse of the old regime and pointedly did not ally himself with the counter-revolutionary movement known as the Whites. But both were undoubtedly opposed to the extraordinarily violent version of socialism that burst unexpectedly onto the country after Lenin stepped from his train in Petrograd. Some of the leading figures in the pro-Bolshevik “Living Church,” by contrast, had been keen Monarchists and supporters of the “Black Hundreds,” state sponsored anti-Jewish organizations that often launched pogroms. One had spread the Blood Libel (that Jews used Christian blood in Passover bread) as recently as 1913.

  Even more vital is this point: The course of the Bolshevik government is a very varied one. It was merciless to its early political enemies, whether they were Czarist-era reformers, supporters of Alexander Kerensky, or fellow revolutionaries and socialists who rejected the Vanguard Party. But this was a brief frenzy, and they were all very soon either dead or imprisoned or fled abroad. The Bolsheviks killed their own most loyal supporters at Kronstadt in 1921, because they failed to understand that the revolution no longer required revolutionaries, but obedient servants. It resorted to the New Economic Policy when it was necessary for survival and abandoned it equally swiftly when it was no longer needed. It accepted foreign famine aid at one point and left millions to starve a few years later, when it wished to exterminate a whole social class.

  The government veered between ultra-radical social policies on such matters as abortion and homosexuality, adopted in the 1920s, and highly conservative attitudes on the same issues, adopted in 1934 (to the confusion of the revolution’s Western “progressive” supporters). It would then once again reverse its position on abortion, which by the 1990s was the main form of contraception in the USSR. It sought expansion by foreign wars, then preached socialism in one country, then began a new wave of socialist imperialism that would take it to Berlin, Prague, and Vienna at its highest point. It turned, cannibal-like, upon its own ranks and upon the entire Russian people in terrible purges whose extent will never be fully known and whose secret victims were still being discovered in shallow, unmarked graves in city center parks and gardens during my years in Moscow. Then it abandoned this and denounced those responsible. The government despised Hitler, then courted him, then despised him again. But during all this period, it consistently and without let-up sought to wipe out the teaching of faith and of the worship of God among children.

  Anatoly Lunacharksy was the first to begin persecution, subtle but deadly, in his education decree. In my days as a Trotskyist, he was regarded as an enlightened, almost gentle intellectual figure, the kind of revolutionary who remained respectable because he had later been denounced by Stalin. We used to sell his book, Revolutionary Silhouettes, on our bookstalls. The persecution was vigorously supported by both Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, both of whom (for all their other differences) were enthusiastic anti-theists and neither of whom can be accused of seeking to set up Communism as a religion (though Trotsky, realizing the power of religion, did seek to appropriate the rites of passage formerly celebrated by the church).

  When Stalin wiped Lunacharksy from Soviet history in his great purge, he did not do so because the former Education Commissar had been hostile to the church. When Stalin revived patriotism and slightly relaxed the persecution of the adult church (though not the much more important efforts to destroy its roots among the young) during the 1941 – 45 war against Germany, he did not do so because he had all along been secretly longing to do so. Rather, he did this because both forces might serve his desperate ends. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev—likewise a man who was cruel when it was practical, and enlightened when that was practical, in accordance with revolutionary ethics—was to launch a particularly merciless assault on the church in the years after the war.

  The regime’s institutional loathing for the teaching of religion, and its desire to eradicate it, survived every doctrinal detour and swerve. And the eradication campaign—unlike so many of its other campaigns—was a success, perhaps because it required only destruction. Soviet power only failed when it tried to build or create. The very limited religious revival of Christianity in the new Russia is one of buildings, ritual, and status. God is largely absent from the hearts of the people, who know little of him and were not introduced to him at the age when (as the commissars knew and the new anti-theists know) we learn to love ideas as well as people. If we do not learn faith then, it is unlikely we shall ever learn it. If we do learn it then, we are unlikely ever to shake it off, though we are afraid to do so. So it is important that what we learn should be good. So what is good? Was the anti-theist teaching of the Soviet schools good? Did they produce a good society? Was Homo Sovieticus, the new human ideal of Communism, a triumph? Nobody who ever visited that country with open eyes could think so.

  It is conceivable that Russia’s future generations may rediscover what their great-grandparents knew. It is certain that those born and raised in the Soviet period are with very few exceptions closed to the ideas of God and conscience as understood by faithful Christians blessed with a religious upbringing in a Christian culture. This may be especially the case with those in authority who now ostentatiously adopt religious postures because they realize that their country’s reserves of moral authority are quite spent. But the Godless emptiness helps to explain why post-Communist Russia has struggled so hard to cope with unaccustomed liberty and has gone so rapidly from being a thought-police state to being a gangster state, with an interlude of chaos in between.

  * * *

  1The “Black Hundreds” were a semi-official militia that engaged in state-sponsored pogroms against Jews. Some clergymen supported this despicable organization, but many did not. Some leaders of the “Living Church,” which for a while collaborated with the Bolsheviks, had been open supporters of it. The use of the phrase in the memorandum is in general a smear.

  2See Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 91.

  3Russia’s Iron Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 311.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Great Debate

  “Behold, they speak with their mouth, and swords are in their lips.”

  (THE 59TH PSALM)

  Let us now dispose of the claim made by my brother Christopher, which I tried to challenge during our debate in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on April 3, 2008, that “Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with religion, as seek to replace it.”1 First, an interesting reflection on the title of his book in the USA, where “God�
�� was rendered as “god” on the cover and title page—different from the British edition. In Decree Number 176 of the Revolutionary Government, issued in 1917, a number of spelling reforms were introduced by law, including the abolition of several letters in the Cyrillic alphabet. The decree also stated that the word god should henceforth be used without a capital “G.”

  The coincidence in instinct, taste, and thought between my brother and the Bolsheviks and their sympathizers is striking and undeniable. I wish he would talk about it more. As an ex-Trotskyist myself, I have watched and listened in frustration as others, who do not know how and what revolutionaries think, fail to press the key questions. Christopher remains equivocal about Leon Trotsky. He recently nominated this blood-encrusted putschist conspirator and apostle of revolutionary terror as his subject for an edition of the BBC’s radio series “Great Lives,” in which the guest argues for the greatness of a chosen individual. During a recent TV encounter with Robert Service, Trotsky’s biographer,2 Christopher interestingly praised Trotsky for his “moral courage.” It is doubtful (see p. 158) if Trotsky could himself have accepted this compliment. In both these broadcasts, the issue of whether Trotsky’s unvaryingly repressive instincts and actions cancel out his skills as polemicist and journalist—and ought to deny him greatness—was not fully resolved.

  Christopher has also said, “One of Lenin’s great achievements, in my opinion, is to create a secular Russia.”3 Alas, the interviewer does not seem to have inquired what Lenin’s other “great achievements” were, or if he did, the answers have not been recorded. Nor was there any discussion about the methods Lenin used to achieve this end. Lenin certainly did create a secular Russia, but how does this accord with my brother’s claim that the Communists also sought to replace religion, not to negate it?