Talk:USSR anti-religious campaign (1921–1928)

Atheism or Secularization

I am aware that the USSR persecuted religious institutions, but where is the evidence that the "elimination of all religion and its replacement with atheism was a fundamental ideological goal of the state." Isn't this just confusing secularization with atheism? I am also aware that many Christian authors believe this claim to be true, as martyrdom is an integral part of their faith. But is this claim backed by primary sources, and is this view accepted by the preponderance of historians? I would like further evidence, preferably other than Pospielovsky's work, which seems openly and unabashedly biased (given the title of his work, and that it is published by a Christian publisher, rather than a University press for instance). Jamesford2007 (talk) 08:05, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Hi James, there is a massive amount of evidence that the state was intending to eliminate religion throughout its history. I've cited an article that was written by Lenin with an attached link that you can read if you choose that will outline Lenin's hostility to all religion, which formed a basis for the anti-religious ideological outlook of the CPSU. I understand that you want more sources, and I'll try to find more; these articles are new and I'm still working on them at the moment... hopefully more people will contribute. I'll see what I can do about finding more even if they don't. Dr Pospielovsky is a former professor at the University of Western Ontario and a respected expert on this field. I hardly think the title of the work and the fact he published it by the Orthodox press invalidates it. I would be surprised if there was a reputable Soviet historian who claimed that the USSR was only interested in seperating religion and state, but not with eliminating religion, and I would highly recommend that you find one if you think this claim is dubious. God Bless, Reesorville (talk) 17:17, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

Hello Reesorville. I don't doubt that the communist party wanted, and indeed acted, to marginalize and persecute religious institutions. That however is not the same thing as replacing religion with atheism, which the article claims. My question is this, given that there were no injunctions against believing in God, what evidence is there that the replacement of religion with atheism was an actual intention of the CPSU? Couldn't it be argued rather that the persecution resulted from the ideological tensions between the dogmas of religion versus the dogmas of communism? It is very easy to make the error of conflating religious hostility with the imposition of atheism. As you know, one can easily be hostile towards religion yet also embrace a belief in God. (To be clear, I am not suggesting that the communists did. But the logical distinction remains.) Do we have documents, or declarations by communists officials to back this claim up? If so, what are they? I've been searching for evidence, but so far I have failed to find anything definitive. Lastly, I don't wish to diminish Pospielovsky's work. I would just prefer some analysis from a scholar with less of an axe to grind. For example, the subtitle of volume 3 of Pospielovsky' work is called "Soviet studies on the church and the believers response to atheism." But suppose we switched things around a bit. Let's say you wanted to do some research on the Crusades. You pick up a volume, but it is subtitled "The Christian Crusades and the atheist response to Religion." Wouldn't you raise an eyebrow or two? Jamesford2007 (talk) 06:27, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Hello I just finished reading Lenin's paper and I found it very interesting. Apparently Lenin states that, indeed, Marxism is philosophically materialistic and atheistic (not really a surprise), but he also says that the class struggle is to be placed above all considerations, in particular above religious divisions. If for example Christian workers form a trade union, it is your duty to remain silent about your atheism and help them out. Lenin supported the view that the most effective way to promote atheism is to win the class struggle, which is a "hundred times better than bald atheist propaganda." Indeed throughout the paper he is critical of a direct attack on religion (also citing support from Engels), as it is injurouse to both the causes of Marxism and atheism. Lenin writes “We must not only admit workers who preserve their belief in God into the Social-Democratic Party, but must deliberately set out to recruit them; we are absolutely opposed to giving the slightest offence to their religious convictions." Jamesford2007 (talk) 12:02, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Hi James, I hope you don't mind but I'm going to erase comments on this page in order to keep it from getting too cluttered. The communist party certainly did aim to eliminate all religion; it was not merely hostility. If you had lived in the 1920s and were a CPSU member who claimed that communism had a place for religion, you would have been criticized. If you lived in the 1930s and claimed this, you could have been purged. The Soviet official press routinely called for the liquidation of religion and the dissemination of atheism for years and years. State institutions commonly put much effort towards settling the issue of how to eliminate religion. Believers who declared full loyalty to the state and who claimed that christianity was in agreement with Marxism, could still be targetted simply for making religion popular. This is not some dubious academic claim, there is a massive body of evidence that will easily support it and as I stated before I would be surprised if you could find a credible historian in this field who would claim that it was merely hostility to religion and I challenge you to find one if you really think this is dubious.

It was an ideological tension as you state, but it was an ideological tension that saw belief in the supernatural to be opposed to materialism and that this tension needed to be resolved through an end to religious belief and consequently its replacement with atheism. Pospielovsky

I would admit Pospielovsky did have an axe to grind against the USSR but his work is not really characterized at all by criticizing atheism; he wrote these works in the late 1980s (long before Dawkins or other atheist celebrities began to become well-known) and his main critique is directed moreso against people such as Dr. Billy Graham who were claiming that the USSR was tolerant towards religion. His third volume is not a criticism of atheism; Dr. Pospielovsky is a scholar of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church and he is a world-known expert on the history of the church underneath the Soviet regime, and his third work deals with how the church dealt with the state's attempt to make them atheists. It is not about atheism and critiquing. A better comparison would be if someone wrote a book on the crusades and it was entitled: 'The Christian Crusades and the Muslim's response to Christianity' and the book dealt with how muslims responded to Christian domination over them.

Thank you for reading Lenin's artricle. I need to point out this if you didn't observe it: "Let us recall that in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels reproaches Feuerbach for combating religion not in order to destroy it, but in order to renovate it, to invent a new, “exalted” religion, and so forth. Religion is the opium of the people—this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion.[1] Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class." - Feuerbach was a German atheist philosopher who believed that religion should be abolished, but it should also be replaced with a new religion that worshipped humanity and possessed no supernatural beliefs. Engels and Marx criticized this; Lenin did likewise in the belief that compromise with any form of religion was not tolerable as an end-goal. Therefore you can see the truth in what I claim when I write that the state was concerned with eliminating religion as a fundamental ideological goal.

The reasons why Lenin did not outlaw religious belief are there in a more primitive form in that article; Marxist theory held that religion was a product of class, and therefore it was reasoned that in order to eliminate it, it was not necessary to outright attack it (nor would it be necessarily beneficial, since it may strengthen resistance) but rather in order to eliminate it, they would remove social classes and construct their ideal society, through which religion would simply inevitably disappear. When this didn't happen, these assumptions were questioned and eventually they were thrown out and the state adopted a much more militant attitude towards its anti-religious campaign. I explain much of this in the debate on Methodology section in this article.

Again, I really need to sress this; if you think this is dubious, then find a reputable historian who contradicts it, otherwise there's no reason to assume it is dubious and the academic publication that I'm citing should carry, although I'll see what I can do about finding others to support it. God Bless,Reesorville (talk) 17:20, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

I think you might be misjudging my intentions. I am not attacking the position that the USSR wanted religion eliminated, or had a desire to promote atheism. Rather, I am merely looking for primary source material which supports such claims, or even a few neutral sources which cite the evidence which can be verified by myself or others. You say there is a "massive body of evidence that will easily support it." Very well, I believe you. I just want to see it for myself, that is all. Currently, all we have is the narrative of one — perhaps biased — historian. This sits rather uncomfortably with me.

Second, Lenin clearly opposed religious metaphysics, and wished for its destruction. This was never at issue with me. But what I find interesting is that he thought a direct attack was the wrong way to go about it. He emphasized the sociological causes of religious belief — class struggle and the oppression of the poor — and sought to end religion through communist economics. This is in sharp contrast to attacking religion, either philosophically or through physical force. To what extent did the CPSU fail to heed Lenin’s call, well that is exactly why I’m here to find out. What took me by surprise though was that Lenin showed an unexpected level of toleration. Not that Lenin could be described as a tolerant person. Clearly he was not. But you don't see the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler with regard to the Jews. Lenin wanted believers converted, not destroyed.

Lastly, I rather do mind if you delete the comments here. For one, comments are not supposed to be deleted at all unless they are abusive. That clearly does not apply here. Second, I would hardly describe our conversation as clutter, given that this is the only discussion on the topic, spanning all but four replies. Generally talk pages are archived, not deleted. And that doesn't usually happen for over a year, or if the talk page grows enormously out of proportion. This exchange is not even a few days old! Jamesford2007 (talk) 01:45, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Hi James, I have to admit I am somewhat new to being a serious contributor to Wikipedia, and I'll respect your desire to keep this exchange undeleted.

I've given you a primary source that you could look up that clearly indicated Lenin's intentions with regard to eliminating all religion. As I said before, I will try to find more both for this claim and the rest of the articles... it would be great if I had others to help me, but even if not, I'll try to get this.

You make an excellent point about Lenin's moderation in the 1909 piece he wrote. I do touch on this issue in the parts I wrote about the debate on methodology, but in truth this is an issue that probably deserves an article in itself... I might wind up writing it one day. Giving the answer to your excellent query that you're trying to find out why did the CPSU fail to heed this call, is somewhat complicated, and I'll try me best here.

The position of Lenin's party and the later Soviet leadership towards religion was always hostility towards it, but the methodology by which its elimination ought to be carried out was something that could vary greatly, and what occurred in practice often was not what was officially promulgated, and this was both purposeful (eg. the state wanted to make it appear that is what doing what it was in fact doing) and it also may have been affected (I think this is a thesis of Dr. Joan Delaney Grossman) by the internal power struggles in the CPSU especially in the earliest years after 1917 (ie. the central committee issued guidelines that were not respected by the people who violated them who may have been loyal to someone else). Lenin did not wish to annihilate religious believers in the way that Hitler wanted to get rid of the jews, but he did, as you say want to make them atheists. This is really the common position of most of the soviet leadership down to the late 1980s. What was not common was the methodology.

It was the marxist belief that religion was a product of material conditions, and for that reason it was assumed that by changing material conditions and eliminating class, religion would go as well. This obviously didn't happen though, and the Soviet leadership from very early on began to think that religion was far more tenacious and strong then they had initially judged. This was primarily perhaps what led to a re-thinking of earlier notions that held directly attacking religion to be unnecessary, and an adoption of massive amounts of antireligious propaganda as well as the widespread persecutions of later years.

Most of the atrocities committed in the first few years were against the Orthodox church, and other religions were not generally hurt to a comparable degree. One may ask, why they thought they needed to do such atrocities if they thought that religion was going to disapper on its own. The ansewr is perhaps because the initial violence against Orthodoxy was inspired by the paranoia of the new regime that feared for its very survival and it saw in the Orthodox Church one of the central pillars of the old Tsarist order; in other words, these initial atrocities, while they may have also been thought to have served the end of eliminating religion, were more directly inspired by the regime's fear of losing power. For this same reason, other religions were initially relatively tolerated in contrast... this however, would change later when the state would target all religion, even to the point at which it even persecuted marxist believers who said that God favoured communism and who declared full loyalty to the state.

Lenin wrote in 1909 that they should avoid offending bleievers feelings in a way that would incur deeper resistance. This was a position that was generally maintained to one degree or another up until the new legislation in 1929. Specific examples I can think of where such logic was applied, would be in somemtime in the 1920s I think there was a story about some militant atheists who were part of the Komsomol or some other state institution who entered an Orthodox liturgy and let loose a pig in the middle of it that caused a great deal of chaos; this action was condemned by the atheist press, not because they respected religion, but because they thought that this sort of thing was exactly what would simply lead to hardened feelings of religious fundamentalism.

Now, even in saying this, this same atheist press would come to routinely insult believers in all sorts of ways that may appear as hypocritical in light of their condemnation of these other atheists, but the difference here is that they would have claimed that some insults were helpful and others were not, or they were effective in some situations while others were not. Similarly and in the same sort of way, Lenin would come to approve of some measures of violence and persecution against believers, but not others, out of the belief that some things would harden religious resistance and others would not. For example, he insisted (as I think is written in this article) that they should use the opportunity of the church valuables campaign to kill as many believers as they could, because he thought no one was going to side with them in light of the famine, but at the same time he insisted that the Patriarch himself should not be touched because he might be turned into a martyr.

This same kind of logic characterized a great deal of soviet history with regard to religion; the method that they undertook was not really based on a philosophical question of whether or not it was right, but it was a methodological question of what would work best. If killing people or arresting people seemed to serve this end at times or in certain circumstances and they could get away with it, then they would do so, but if it didn't then they didn't do so. If atheistic propaganda in schools would seem to serve this end, then they would use it, and at the same time, if letting loose animals in religious service did not seem to serve this end, then they would condemn the practice. And what changed over the years and decades was the mindset of what was judged to be effective and what wasn't. For example things were done in the 1930s that had been condemned in 1920s as being ineffective and simply a way to harden believers' feelings (People who retained beliefs that religion did not need to be attacked because it would go away naturally, were actually purged in the 1930s), and in the immediate post-war period Stalin would open up a degree of tolerance for religion, that would later be criticized for being a betrayal of Lenin for its tolerance. At no point, however, did they ever let go of the position that religion needed to be eliminated... rather what changed was how they thought this ought to be done.

Lenin's toleration was not forgotten in later years and it would be often invoked time and again. But this toleration didn't mean (even to Lenin once he took power) that all attacks on religion were wrong, but in principle it meant that some things were rejected in the belief that it would be counter-productive.

Millions of people from 1917-1989 were recruited in these campaigns, with billions of roubles spent and the amount of methodological analysis that went into it is vast. The fact that even with this much effort they failed to vanquish religion and beliefs were still held by the majority of people, I think was perhaps a source of humiliation for the government.

If you have any more queries, please feel free to state them, and I'll see what I can help with. God Bless, Reesorville (talk) 04:35, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

No you've done a wonderful job here summarizing the antireligious methodology of the USSR. It's given me much to think about. But what I would recommend to you is this. When writing Wikipedia articles, especially when you are relying on one or few published sources — which many of us don't have access to — do not simply summarize the authors opinions. This may require that you quote the author on specific points which might be considered disputable. A reference to page 84 (for example) means nothing to me if I don't have access to the book. How can I know that such-and-such claim can be deduced from the authors work, or supported from the authors evidence? Furthermore the author no doubt appeals to evidence, or quotes other historians, or quotes notable historical figures. If such a quotation supports a specific point use it in the article to support the assertion. This allows the editors to infer on their own if a specific claim is true, or follows logically from the premises. Lastly, include more sources. Readers like myself are not intimately familiar with who Dimitry Pospielovsky is. For all I know he could be another David Irving. Please attempt to use sources from mainstream (dare I say secular) University presses. It signals to editors and readers that the claims contained therein have been put through peer review, and are somewhere within the mainstream. Finally, whenever possible include links to primary and even secondary sourced documents which can be accessed easily through the Internet. This allows editors to check your work, and keeps articles more neutral and less controversial. The link to Lenin's piece for example was wonderfully informative. Best, Jamesford2007 (talk) 11:17, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Hi James, I'll do my best to try to do what you ask for with regard to getting more specific quotations, more sources and finding more internet sources where available. I appreciate your critique of the article in that fashion, because it tells what I need to add to it. I'm going to first try to expand a some of the other articles and then I'm going to set down with trying to find more soucres, and giving added credibility through those other methods you mention; I expect this whole thing will probably take me some time. I wouldn't have though it would have made a difference for Dr. Pospielovsky to have used a religious press, partly because these books are accepted as academic sources even in universities and you can find articles in academic journals that will reference them. Thanks for your analysis. God Bless, —Preceding unsigned comment added by Reesorville (talk • contribs) 18:38, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Title

Wouldn't the title more reasonably b e "Soviet anti-religious campaign (1921–28)", since Soviet is the standard adjective for the USSR (like American for the USA)? 216.8.148.134 (talk) 18:36, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Jewish leadership of anti religious campaign omitted?

why is it that while few Jewish individuals who opposed this campaign are rightly mentioned with their heritage, Jewish heritage of most of the leaders of this campaign are not mentioned at all? (see individual articles on people mentioned as well as members of party committees to check their backgrounds, which amply justifies statement that most of them were of Jewish heritage). why this blatant double standard? is it wikimedia policy to see no evil but only the good in certain quarters regardless of facts? 123.231.83.186 (talk) 12:54, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Issue with Reference 11

The reference (reference 11) to the following statement and statistics, "When church leaders demanded freedom of religion under the constitution, the Communists responded with terror. They murdered the metropolitan of Kiev and executed twenty-eight bishops and 6,775 priests. Despite mass demonstrations in support of the church, repression cowed most ecclesiastical leaders into submission", refers the user to a parked domain and no longer to the source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TrentKJ (talk • contribs) 04:24, 28 April 2019 (UTC)