The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (27 page)

Surrealism was a much more serious—and more accomplished—art form than it is often given credit for.

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The Bolshevik Crusade for Scientific Atheism

W
e saw in the previous chapter that the “pervasive theme” of 1914, when so many people greeted the war so enthusiastically, was “community,” the wish to recover the community life that had existed before the forces of modernism destroyed it. In such an intellectual/emotional climate, and with the social upheavals brought about by the conflict, one might have expected that socialism, one of the most vibrant surrogate religions of the time and perhaps of all times, would have been waiting in the wings, so to speak, ready to take advantage of the mayhem. In practice, it didn’t work out like that.

Although Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had written in
The Communist Manifesto
, “the proletariat has no fatherland,” although they were completely opposed to nationalism, viewed war as invariably inimical to the interests of the laboring masses (“injecting a shot of illicit profits to prolong capitalism’s miserable life”), and although Marx had said that he saw war as the “midwife to revolution,” the Great War stimulated an outgrowth of nationalism which, in the main, the relatively new socialist parties embraced with as much gusto as anyone else. Nationalistic feelings, it would seem, outfaced international-socialist feelings everywhere. “Socialist leaders felt a tide of spontaneous patriotism welling up from below, and responded to this.”
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Everywhere, that is, except in Russia, as all the world knows. There, as the Great War endured and losses mounted, revolution had been antici
pated for months. In the new type of mass war, the home front was not excluded, and the suffering intensified, not helped by one government scandal after another. All the same, the end of the tsarist regime came surprisingly quickly, with the February Revolution of 1917 (February 26–29, Old System/March 8–11, New System) resulting in a “dual power.” Officially, a provisional government was now in place that would rule until elections could be held and a constituent assembly convened. But there was also an unofficial power center, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. This is where, for a time, the real power lay. Later in the year, soldiers began to desert from the front en masse, peasants started seizing gentry land and workers took control of the factories. The Bolshevik Revolution (October 26–27, OS/November 7–8, NS) established a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” whose immediate aims were the consolidation of Bolshevik power and getting the country out of the war.

This was not achieved without cost. In March 1918, the Russian government accepted German terms: the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk lost her the Baltic states, large areas of Ukraine (until then Russia’s breadbasket), Belorussia, Poland and swathes of Transcaucasia, not to mention an indemnity in gold. German troops did not withdraw until the following November (and only then as a result of the armistice on the western front), and this left a power vacuum in which “Red” and “White” armies engaged in a bloody civil war.
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By the time these hostilities were over, the economy was to all intents and purposes at a standstill and no fewer than thirteen million people were dead, most of them not as a result of war but from starvation and epidemics. Five million more were to die in the famine of 1921–22, as a result of which millions of orphaned or abandoned children roamed the countryside, forced to steal so as to survive.

The rest of the machinations and maneuverings via which the Great War led to the Russian Revolution need not concern us. What does concern us is the nature of Marxism, and for at least two reasons. One is that, in many ways, Marxism was conceived as an alternative religious structure; and the second, that it led to the most determined attempt yet made to eradicate God.

A NEW STAGE IN MANKIND’S DEVELOPMENT

Marx, says Bruce Mazlish, was one of the Essenes of early socialism. This is meant to imply a certain religious and ascetic quality, but in fact Marx defies easy characterizations. At times he saw himself as a scientist, invoking the name of Darwin as analogous to his own role in discovering laws not of “natural technology” but of “human technology.” In the late 1830s, at the end of the Romantic period, Marx wrote poetry and forged friendships with Heinrich Heine, Ferdinand Freiligrath and Georg Herwegh. As Mazlish also points out, the spread of Marxism is analogous to the expansion of Christianity and Islam. So it should not be surprising to find that Marxism first succeeded in Russia, a backward and very religious country where capitalist industrialization did not yet exist.

Nor, says Mazlish, was Marx immune to the language of Luther in the latter’s translation of the Bible. “Some argue that Marx is heir of the tradition of the great Jewish prophets, thundering forth at mankind. . . . But Marx received that tradition in its Lutheran form, as a result of being raised a believing Christian. Marx, needless to say, did not remain a believing Christian, any more than Luther was a forerunner of communism. . . . What they do share . . . is a rhetorical structure, namely the characteristic articulation of the apocalyptic tradition that moves step by step . . . from the original condition of domination and oppression to the culmination of perfect community.” Although he became a militant atheist, “a scoffer at the ‘union with Christ,’” the function of religion, its place in our psychology, remained of central importance to Marx.
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Marx was always a philosopher as much as an economist. His basic contention, culminating in
Das Kapital
, was that the worker becomes “all the poorer the more wealth he produces.” He insists that the worker is poorer “even if better paid,” because of an increase in alienation—the worker has become impoverished
as a human being
. And so Marx developed the concept of alienation, arguing that it originated in labor and had four defining aspects: (1) labor is no longer the worker’s own under capitalism—it is an alien entity, dominating him; (2) the very act of production alienates the worker from his own nature—he becomes less than a man; (3) the needs
of the market—and of the factory—estrange men from other men; and (4) from his surrounding culture. Marx believed these forces of alienation were producing a new psychology.

His first achievement was to write as if he had discovered a new science, one that revealed a new stage in mankind’s development. He gives credit to the French and the English for first grasping that history is the history of industry and exchange, making economic history central. He dismisses political history; there is no social contract as such,
à la
Rousseau; only economic relations “tie man to man.” Such a view marked a profound revolution in political science.
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Marx also argued that this financial division of labor underlies “the emergence” of the state. The state offers what is in effect an illusory communal life. Families and classes exist, offering some identity, but “it follows from this that all struggles within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another.” Political life is but a veil for the “real struggles” based on the division of labor and private property, and this is a further cause of estrangement. This leads Marx to a famous passage addressing the “ruling ideas” in a society: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling
material
force of society, is at the same time its ruling
intellectual
force.” Because of this, the alteration of men (for the better), “on a mass scale,” can be achieved only by an act, a
revolution
. “Only in the activity of revolution itself [does] man make himself into a new man, cleansed and purified.”
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But is
Kapital
intended to be read as a dry textbook? Not really. “Workers who never read
Kapital
nevertheless could now trust that there was a scientific underpinning to their feeling of being exploited.”
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The purpose of
Kapital
was, as Engels saw, to become the workers’ bible, part of a campaign to kindle revolution. In that, it eventually succeeded.

STEEL, HAMMER AND STONE

Upon gaining power in 1918, the Bolshevik leaders moved swiftly to remove organized religion from Russian life. An early initiative was to alter the calendar from the Julian to the Gregorian system, aiming to confuse people about the holiday seasons of the Orthodox Church. They also created work schedules that invariably conflicted with religious holidays and, eventually, replaced the seven-day week with a six-day week—five days of work and the sixth off. In effect, they abolished Sunday so as to prevent believers from attending Sunday liturgy.
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In the 1920s, the Communist Party created the League of Militant Atheists, designed to broadcast the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism, what came to be called “scientific atheism.” “In general, scientific atheism combined a belief in socialist utopianism with an ethical mandate to proselytize the message of atheism. The role of the League of Militant Atheists was to teach the ethics of scientific atheism as a replacement for the moral teachings of popular theologies. They argued that religious doctrines created, to use Nietzsche’s term, a ‘slave morality’ that fooled religious believers into mistaking passivity for moral goodness.”
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To further their aims, the League set up atheist “cells,” or houses, a system by which the inhabitants of rural communities could learn about atheism and discuss the falsity of religion. An atheist newsletter,
Bezbozhnik
, was made available.

The Five-Year Plan of anti-religious propaganda adopted in 1932 envisioned eventually one million such cells, outnumbering the old parishes by sixty to one. The number of Russian Orthodox churches was reduced from 54,000 in 1914 to 39,000 in 1928 (and to 4,200 in 1941). And it wasn’t only Christianity that was hit; the number of Islamic courts was reduced from 220 in 1922 to just seven in 1927. The early Communists particularly hated the supernatural element in religion. In its place, Marxism-Leninism was held to have exclusive access to the truth, through the “sacred” writings of Marx and Engels, which for them had the status of divine revelation, placing economic relations, and exchange, at the center of the belief system.

We shall come back to scientific atheism shortly, but first we need to
return to Nietzsche because, as recent scholarship has shown, the early Soviet intellectual, social and political scene was almost as much influenced by the German philosopher as it was transformed by Marx, Engels and Lenin. The pre-eminent scholar in this field is Bernice Glazer Rosenthal, professor of history at Fordham University, who says that although for most of the Soviet period “either [Nietzsche’s] name was unmentionable, or it could be used only as a pejorative,” and although from 1920 on his books were removed from the People’s Libraries, they were not removed from all of them and individually owned copies were passed from hand to hand, a practice that would become a tradition in Eastern Europe as the century wore on.
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Despite this, she says, the “philosopher with a hammer,” as Nietzsche was known in Russia, touched deep cultural chords. Dostoevsky had to an extent prepared Russia for Nietzsche, and in many respects the German’s ideas were compatible with Marxism, or treated issues that Marx and Engels had neglected. Nietzsche’s views on the malleability of language, his contempt for what he called “old words” and his embrace of the “new word,” with its biblical undertones, impressed those whom Rosenthal calls the Nietzschean Marxists, people such as Aleksandr Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky. Another area where Nietzsche and Marxism found themselves in tandem was the philosopher’s decrying of individualism: the world was, as he put it, “torn asunder and shattered into individuation,” which was for him the source of all evil. Nietzsche championed a different form of individuality—“self-realization within a community.”
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The Bolsheviks also liked his view of the universe as an irrational place “in which blind will is the only constant,” and his notion that science diminishes man, especially Darwinism, because it stresses “mere survival,” not creativity.

Just as Dostoevsky had prepared Russia for Nietzsche, so too, Rosenthal says, had the Russian
intelligenty
, its intelligentsia. This was a movement born in the mid–nineteenth century, composed mainly of the sons and daughters of the nobility who were intent on transforming Russia, then a very backward country in terms of industrialization and urbanization. And although many of them were atheists, they accepted the kenotic values of self-sacrifice, humility and love, believing that ideas imported from
more “advanced” Western European countries could transform their land. This was, in effect, says Rosenthal, a surrogate religion, an ideology of salvation.
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Nietzsche was even present, she suggests, in the pseudonyms that certain Bolsheviks adopted, in particular Stalin (born Josef Djugashvili), Molotov (Viacheslav Skriabin) and Kamenev (Lev Rozenfeld), names that stem from the Russian words for “steel,” “hammer” and “stone” respectively, and recall Nietzsche’s injunction, “Be hard!”
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In more narrowly cultural terms, which may be regarded as surrogate-religious and post-Christian in orientation, Rosenthal focuses on Russian Symbolism, Futurism and Proletkult, and particularly on Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Viacheslav Ivanov, Lev Shestov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Bogdanov and Sergei Eisenstein. “Russian symbolism,” she writes, “started out as a religion of art. . . . Aesthetic creativity gives life meaning . . . art leads to high truths.”

Symbolism began in part as a rejection of vulgar mass culture. “Symbolist works bypass the intellect to address the psyche directly and were crafted to evoke chains of subliminal associations and a mysterious, otherworldly mood. The poetry suggests rather than states, sometimes in arcane or vatic language.” Merezhkovsky thought that “historical Christianity” was obsolete but argued that people need religious faith as much as they need food. He sought a “new religious consciousness” through the example of such figures as Goethe, Pushkin and Tolstoy, with whom he disagreed on many details but with whom he aligned himself when Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Russian Church. Merezhkovsky helped to found the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society, which was eventually closed down because the sight of clergymen and lay intellectuals debating on equal terms, as well as openly discussing the role of sex, was too intoxicating for the people, who attended the debates in capacity audiences.
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