The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (29 page)

Proletkult was a more general coalition of workers’ clubs, factory committees, workers’ theatres and educational societies. Numbering half a million adherents at its peak in 1920, Proletkult’s mission was plainly to create a new man and a new culture. Its unofficial theoretician was Bogdanov, though Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife) sat on the central committee. Pavel Kerzhentsev, a man of the theatre and a publisher, defined the “task of the proletkults [as] the development of an independent proletarian spiritual culture, including all areas of the human spirit—science, art and everyday life.”
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Nietzsche imbued the Proletkult writers almost as much as did Marx, encouraging the proletariat to become supermen, capable of enormous feats, “even miracles.” In a play by Pavel Bessalko (1887–1920), the workers are portrayed as not fearing God, because “we are our own God, judge and law.” In Vladimir Kirillov’s
The Iron
Messiah
, Jesus is an industrial worker. Various Proletkult poems were set to music “and became revolutionary hymns.” Lunacharsky extolled Proletkult as a “church militant” in a classless society, while others praised its attempts to escape from “spiritual slavery” and “spiritual subjugation”; this was to be achieved via the abolition of the difference between mental and physical work—“even the most brilliant man of science must also be skilled in manual labor.”
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In summary, what we can say is that during the Russian Revolution the inherent Prometheanism of Marxism was aligned with Nietzschean ideas (and even some occult ideas), in which propagandists tried to replace faith in religion with faith in “the wonder-working powers of science and technology. Cosmists, adherents of a quasi-occult doctrine at the margins of science, envisioned the abolition of death, space travel, and an immortal
Superman capable of anything.”
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“The cumulative effect of Nietzschean ideas entering Soviet society through all these conduits was enormous,” concluded Bernice Glazer Rosenthal. The new Soviet man embodied the idea that people can be remade, “that human perfection is possible . . . that the human species would (re)create itself according to its own specifications.” Trotsky expected (or said he expected) socialism to produce “a higher social-biologic type,” in effect, a superman who would “learn to move rivers and mountains. . . . The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx [imagine Goethe as the
average
!]. And above this ridge, new peaks will arise.”
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This was, one might say, the essence of Eisenstein’s films, so redolent of that era, in which a hero breaks out of the chorus (the ranks) to forge some great achievement but yet remains “one of us.”

For the writer and artist Sergei Tretyakov, the futurist—the archetypal new man-artist—was an “instigator-agitator. . . . This new type of worker must feel a fundamental hatred toward all things unorganized, inert, chaotic, sedentary and provincially backward. . . . He is repelled by thick pine forests, untilled steppes, unutilized waterfalls which tumble not according to our order . . . he finds greatness in every object of human production designed to overcome, subject, and master the elements and inert matter.”

THE CHURCH OF COMMUNISM

Again, fine-sounding words, but . . . In the early years after the Revolution, Soviet leaders for the most part believed that religious faith was detrimental to society and could be expunged from the human psyche—all that was needed were the right incentives and education. Many appear to have thought that religion would simply “evaporate” when the new, more egalitarian economic order emerged. In the early days, the “renovationist” movement sought to recruit revolutionaries through religious channels, but when this failed, and when the new economic order also failed to wash away religion, there emerged a growing antagonism toward both Christianity and Islam. And this led, eventually, to the deliberate creation of an atheist alternative to religion, which had three main elements. These
were the Standing Commission on Religious Questions, which oversaw all religious policy matters, the League of Militant Atheists (mentioned earlier), to spread the message “that religion was scientifically falsifiable,” and a raft of atheistic universities to educate a new generation of intellectuals.

The League was the most active part of this setup. It endured from 1925 to 1941, and after Leon Trotsky was replaced by Emelian Yaroslavsky, a close Stalin aide, a policy was followed whereby it was assumed that secularization could not occur unless religious cultural expression was abandoned. So began a series of crusade-like polemics to suppress religious expression and replace it with scientific atheism, under which, promoted by Stalin, “a vast and intricate ceremonial system began to take shape that would grow throughout the Soviet era . . . the creation of Soviet alternatives to baptisms, confirmations, religious marriages, funerals” and so on. In a Soviet (“Red”) baptism, for example, the official recited the following invocation over the infant:

Life becomes much brighter and more beautiful

Much quicker is its wonderful course

Suddenly here in our Soviet family

A small person is born.

Today we are celebrating in honor of him to whom

Belongs the future, and we are saying to him

“Hail, new citizen of our great Soviet state.”
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Paul Froese, in his study of the Soviet secularization experiment, says that the Russians saw religious faith as a product of ignorance—as the fruit of ritual activity, as a collection of social institutions, as offering a set of social rewards, as offering salvation incentives or as an aspect of the state. The “ignorance” argument was strongly held, many Communist Party leaders feeling that, since the findings of science and the fruits of technology were wholly at odds with beliefs in the supernatural, once this knowledge spread, religious faith would fade.

Party intellectuals were well aware of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s notion of religion: that its strength in part derives from the feeling of “collective effervescence,” from
participation in ritual
which generates
emotion, and this they sought to counter, as we have seen, with new rituals of their own. But at the same time, they realized they must destroy the Orthodox Church if the new rituals were to have any purchase. So began the massive—and ultimately brutal—attempts to destroy all traditional religious institutions: churches, monasteries, sharia courts, religious schools.

Yaroslavsky was certain—and told Stalin so—that too direct an assault would backfire, and so the brutality did not start immediately. In effect, the League of Militant Atheists served as a kind of church of communism in the 1920s and early 1930s, distributing atheist newspapers, giving atheist lectures, preaching at meetings that people were compelled to attend, and mimicking religious institutions: theoretical Communist texts were treated like holy books, Soviet leaders were presented as saint-like, the doctrine of historical materialism was used to explain that paradise was now attainable here on earth, in this life. There was a concept of “Soviet time,” which held that future generations would remember this “first generation” as pathbreakers in the new society, and so this first—in effect golden—generation would “live forever” in the collective memory of humanity: here was a secular form of immortality. In addition to which, religious believers were castigated as “disbelievers”—disbelievers in the Soviet system, in effect non-combatants in the struggle for a “higher” form of society.

Lenin in particular was vitriolic about religion. “Every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness . . . vileness of the most dangerous kind, ‘contagion’ of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagion . . . are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of a God decked out in the smartest ‘ideological’ costumes . . .” All the more ironic, then, that Lenin’s embalming has to be seen in this light, since apart from anything else it was an intentional imitation of the way the bodies of saints were displayed in monasteries throughout Russia, where, according to Orthodox belief, holy cadavers decompose at a slower rate than those of ordinary mortals.
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But it wasn’t only Lenin—not by any means. Immediately following the 1917 revolution and in the civil war that ensued, the Bolsheviks were already targeting churches, monasteries and clerics as “potential sources
of anti-revolutionary activity.” Church property was seized, and monks, priests and nuns were often killed in the process. In 1922, Patriarch Tikhon wrote a letter of protest to Lenin, complaining that thousands of clergy were being killed and that more than a hundred thousand believers had been shot. His protest was ignored, he was himself sent into exile, and a decade later he, too, was shot.

Other horrors followed. Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev was castrated and shot, Veniamin of St. Petersburg was doused with water in the freezing cold and turned into a pillar of ice, Bishop Germogen of Tobolsk was strapped to the paddle wheel of a steamboat and mangled by the rotating blades, and Archbishop Andronnik of Perm was buried alive.
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St. Petersburg’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan was turned into the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, which, among other activities, held exhibitions illustrating the “folly” of religion. The architecturally unique Cathedral of Christ the Savior was blown up and set to be replaced with a shrine to Lenin, but in the end a swimming pool was put there instead. Church bells were melted down and icons stripped of their jeweled settings.
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In the many thousands of local “cells” that were set up to replace the parish churches, discussions about atheism were held in which the main attraction was sometimes accounts by “converts,” people who had seen the light, abandoned their religious belief and embraced scientific atheism. “Not less than one cell” was installed in each factory, government office or school; and in the countryside at each collective farm or “machine tractor station.” As we have seen, the League proposed one million cells throughout the country, though this total was never achieved.
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PRAYERS VERSUS THE TRACTOR

Since the factory was regarded by theorists as the proper substitute for churches “as places of community, faith and purpose,” urban factories were used as alternatives to churches. A large piece of machinery often served as the focus for communal gatherings, as a kind of secular altar serving “the anti-God industry.” The common purpose of the factory was expected to replace the common purpose of worship. Workers were
expected to show their new faith by adding the time they had formerly spent worshipping to the time they spent working. In the factories and in the countryside, technology was presented as a way to “work miracles”—but demonstrating that miracles were the work not of God but of people. One propaganda poster posited “prayers or the tractor” as alternative ways to produce change and improvement in the community.

Other scientific initiatives against religion included an examination of holy water under the microscope to show that it had no special properties. In the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, one exhibit showed that Noah’s Ark could not have held all the animals then known to have existed on earth.
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As homework, schoolchildren were sometimes given the task of converting fellow family members to scientific atheism. University courses carefully explained how physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology all showed that religion was wrong.

From the early 1920s, Trotsky realized that people do have a need for theatrical and emotional outlets at regular intervals, and so, on gaining power, the Bolsheviks set about creating what was in effect a new liturgy. In addition to immediately changing the calendar from the Julian to the Gregorian, a new ceremonial year was introduced which celebrated such events as March 18, “The Day of the Paris Commune” (introduced in 1918); May 5, “The Day of the Press” (1922); the first Sunday in June, “The Day of International Cooperation” (1923); and November 7, “Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution” (1918).

The KGB insisted on vetting religious newspapers before publication and used bishops and clergy as informers against their colleagues. These and other ploys compromised the Orthodox Church in the early years of Soviet control, but at the same time prolonged the life of the church in a way that in the long run paid off. Nonetheless, the push-pull approach of the Soviet leadership also paid off to an extent in that, between the mid-1920s and the start of the Second World War, church attendance rates in Russia fell from more than 50 percent to less than 20 percent, while children throughout that same period were about 10 percent less likely than their parents to go to church.
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At the same time, there was a turn to smaller religious groupings, which would meet in secret.

It would be wrong, though, to give the impression that this change was
uniform across the Soviet bloc. Poland was exceptionally resilient in its religious beliefs, as was Lithuania, where loudspeakers were forbidden in churches because they were felt to “lure” people away from their work, and where the famous “Hill of Crosses”—a hill where locals had erected a number of crosses that were later bulldozed by the Soviets—was located. Overnight, after the bulldozing, another array of crosses appeared, and this was repeated several times until the bulldozers gave up. But in Central Asia it was a different story: there, the number of devout Muslims was reduced massively following Stalin’s purges: both Lenin and Stalin regarded the Central Asian Muslims as “primitive” and, as Stalin said, Islam had to be destroyed. There was also a campaign, known as
hujum
, to force Muslim women to unveil. Though many women welcomed this, and complied with the campaign, the males did not accept the policy so equably, and women were attacked and even raped for their actions.