Remembering 1917: the war on religion

Oct 13, 2017 by

by Paul Kengor, MercatorNet:

Why has this topic received so little attention from scholars?

November 7 marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution (or October 25 in the old Julian Calendar). On that day the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in Petrograd (St Petersburg) and launched their take-over of the Russian government. This led to a five-year civil war, followed by the iron hand of totalitarianism. Although most of the world, even Russia, would prefer to forget the failed experiment of Communism, we have to learn from our mistakes. In the coming weeks we will present reflections on the impact of the Russian Revolution. Here Paul Kengor discusses the Soviet war on religion. 

As Mikhail Gorbachev aptly stated, the Soviet communist state carried out a comprehensive “war on religion.” 1 He lamented that the Bolsheviks, his predecessors, even after the civil war ended in the early 1920s, during a time of “peace,” had “continued to tear down churches, arrest clergymen, and destroy them. This was no longer understandable or justifiable. Atheism took rather savage forms in our country at that time.” 2

The Soviet Union, reflective of the communist world as a whole, was openly hostile to religion and officially atheist; it was not irreligious or unreligious, with no stance on religion, but took the position that there was no God. Moreover, that atheism translated into a form of vicious anti-religion that included a systematic, often brutal campaign to eliminate belief. This began from the outset of the Soviet communist state and still continues in various forms in communist countries to this day, from China to North Korea to Cuba.

Communist Teaching

The roots of this hatred and intolerance of religion lie in the essence of communist ideology. Marx dubbed religion the “opiate of the masses,” and opined that, “Communism begins where atheism begins.” 3 Speaking on behalf of the Bolsheviks in his famous October 2, 1920 speech, Lenin stated matter-of-factly: “We do not believe in God.” Lenin insisted that “all worship of a divinity is a necrophilia.” 4 He wrote in a November 1913 letter that “any religious idea, any idea of any God at all, any flirtation even with a God is the most inexpressible foulness … the most dangerous foulness, the most shameful ‘infection.’” James Thrower of the University of Virginia (a Russia scholar and also a translator) says that in this letter the type of “infection” Lenin was referring to was venereal disease. 5

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