History and examination of communist anti-religious campaigns

[Radical Atom]

Title says it all.
I am particularly interested about the anti-religious movements that occurred during the late 20s and 30s (and even more in the ones, if they existed, that occurred during the Revolution) in the Soviet Union, it's really an interesting moment on Soviet history.
I find it strange however that these movements weren't already existing until the very late 20s, by the time the Revolution was already dead. The League of the Militant Godless (a.k.a. Society of the Godless) was founded on 1929 and Bezbozhnik started publishing in 1922, so it's hard not to doubt the revolutionary consciousness of the movement.
How effective was their task? What were the better and the worse examples? It's hard to get a clear account too, it being a touchy subject and being doubly susceptible to propaganda (one for being "state atheism" and the other for occurring in the Soviet Union). From what I read though, they feel more like the result of alienation rather than a genuine revolutionary movement, especially since when Stalin tried to get cozy with the Christian Orthodoxy he got rid of them once they seemed to have outlived their usefulness.
And they didn't only target reactionaries, overt or not, but also "committed believers" which given the situation of the Soviet state even by the 30s, backwardness could easily still be a thing, especially in the rural areas, hardly something you could blame on a poor peasant who grew up in the time of the czar. And while I have no sympathy for religious symbols what I do question, too, is the effectiveness of, for example, removing religious symbols from the private spaces of soviet citizens.
The point is to spread and propagate atheism and class consciousness, you don't emancipate people by terrorizing them.
I think on this issue Lenin presents a convincing and nuanced case:



Socialism and Religion

Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the “free” workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are “entitled” only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery. The economic oppression of the workers inevitably calls forth and engenders every kind of political oppression and social humiliation, the coarsening and darkening of the spiritual and moral life of the masses. The workers may secure a greater or lesser degree of political liberty to fight for their economic emancipation, but no amount of liberty will rid them of poverty, unemployment, and oppression until the power of capital is overthrown. Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man. But a slave who has become conscious of his slavery and has risen to struggle for his emancipation has already half ceased to be a slave. The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth. The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.
Religion must be declared a private affair. In these words socialists usually express their attitude towards religion. But the meaning of these words should be accurately defined to prevent any misunderstanding. We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated. No subsidies should be granted to the established church nor state allowances made to ecclesiastical and religious societies. These should become absolutely free associations of like-minded citizens, associations independent of the state. Only the complete fulfilment of these demands can put an end to the shameful and accursed past when the church lived in feudal dependence on the state, and Russian citizens lived in feudal dependence on the established church, when medieval, inquisitorial laws (to this day remaining in our criminal codes and on our statute-books) were in existence and were applied, persecuting men for their belief or disbelief, violating men’s consciences, and linking cosy government jobs and government-derived incomes with the dispensation of this or that dope by the established church. Complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church. The Russian revolution must put this demand into effect as a necessary component of political freedom. In this respect, the Russian revolution is in a particularly favorable position, since the revolting officialism of the police-ridden feudal autocracy has called forth discontent, unrest and indignation even among the clergy. However abject, however ignorant Russian Orthodox clergymen may have been, even they have now been awakened by the thunder of the downfall of the old, medieval order in Russia. Even they are joining in the demand for freedom, are protesting against bureaucratic practices and officialism, against the spying for the police imposed on the “servants of God”. We socialists must lend this movement our support, carrying the demands of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their conclusion, making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that they should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police. Either you are sincere, in which case you must stand for the complete separation of Church and State and of School and Church, for religion to be declared wholly and absolutely a private affair. Or you do not accept these consistent demands for freedom, in which case you evidently are still held captive by the traditions of the inquisition, in which case you evidently still cling to your cosy government jobs and government-derived incomes, in which case you evidently do not believe in the spiritual power of your weapon and continue to take bribes from the state. And in that case the class-conscious workers of all Russia declare merciless war on you. So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideological and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.
If that is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party?
The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats. Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists. But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism.
Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven. That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in our Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating themselves with our Party. We shall always preach the scientific world-outlook, and it is essential for us to combat the inconsistency of various “Christians”. But that does not mean in the least that the religious question ought to be advanced to first place, where it does not belong at all; nor does it mean that we should allow the forces of the really revolutionary economic and political struggle to be split up on account of third-rate opinions or senseless ideas, rapidly losing all political importance, rapidly being swept out as rubbish by the very course of economic development. Everywhere the reactionary bourgeoisie has concerned itself, and is now beginning to concern itself in Russia, with the fomenting of religious strife—in order thereby to divert the attention of the masses from the really important and fundamental economic and political problems, now being solved in practice by the all-Russian proletariat uniting in revolutionary struggle. This reactionary policy of splitting up the proletarian forces, which today manifests itself mainly in Black-Hundred pogroms, may tomorrow conceive some more subtle forms. We, at any rate, shall oppose it by calmly, consistently and patiently preaching proletarian solidarity and the scientific world-outlook—a preaching alien to any stirring up of secondary differences.The revolutionary proletariat will succeed in making religion a really private affair, so far as the state is concerned. And in this political system, cleansed of medieval mildew, the proletariat will wage a broad and open struggle for the elimination of economic slavery, the true source of the religious humbugging of mankind.

Disclaimer: this is a thread to discuss the methodology, formation and general history of these groups or campaigns, and what must be learned from them in order to effectually combat religion. Do not derail the thread with petty moralism about the "freedom" for people to remain forever in the darkness of superstition.

[John Nada]

I find it strange however that these movements weren't already existing until the very late 20s, by the time the Revolution was already dead. The League of the Militant Godless (a.k.a. Society of the Godless) was founded on 1929 and Bezbozhnik started publishing in 1922, so it's hard not to doubt the revolutionary consciousness of the movement.From the perspective of the Soviets, the revolution wasn't dead, it was just beginning. There was a big push to revolutionize culture:
Our opponents told us repeatedly that we were rash in undertaking to implant socialism in an insufficiently cultured country. But they were misled by our having started from the opposite end to that prescribed by theory (the theory of pedants of all kinds), because in our country the political and social revolution preceded the cultural revolution, that very cultural revolution which nevertheless now confronts us.

This cultural revolution would now suffice to make our country a completely socialist country; but it presents immense difficulties of a purely cultural (for we are illiterate) and material character (for to be cultured we must achieve a certain development of the material means of production, we must have a certain material base). Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/06.htm
From the standpoint of the cultural development of the people, the period under review has been marked by a veritable cultural revolution. The introduction of universal compulsory elementary education in the languages of the various nationalities of the U.S.S.R., the increasing number of schools and scholars of all grades, the increasing number of college trained experts, and the creation and growth of a new intelligentsia, a Soviet intelligentsia -- such is the general picture of the cultural advancement of our people.[...]

As a result of this immense cultural work a numerous new, Soviet intelligentsia has arisen and developed in our country, an intelligentsia which has emerged from the ranks of the working class, peasantry and Soviet employees, which is of the flesh and blood of our people, has never known the yoke of exploitation, hates exploiters, and is ready to serve the peoples of the U.S.S.R. faithfully and devotedly.

I think that the rise of this new, socialist intelligentsia of the people is one of the most important results of the cultural revolution in our country. Source: http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/REC39.html#s2ii

Part of the problem with moving towards the construct of socialism forward without help from advance nations like Germany, was the lower level of "culture" in Russia. The orthodox idea of how a socialist revolution would've proceed was that it'd be first capitalism, then cultural development(like the Enlightenment, literacy, education, technical skills, political knowledge, ect.), then a dictatorship of the proletariat, then socialism. Unfortunately, in Russia a lot of people were illiterate, disproportionately from the proletariat and poor peasantry(who were supposed to lead the revolution). There was a lot of superstition, prejudice and bourgeois/feudal ideology too. Most the educated and skilled people, particularly in the bureaucracy, were from the upper classes, who's loyalty to socialism is wavering if not hostile. And the ideology of the old exploiting classes didn't just disappear overnight. It was proceeding more like semi-feudal capitalism->proletarian hegemony->cultural revolution->socialist construction.

Because of this contradiction, there was a big push around the late-20s to the mid-30s to replace the ex-bourgeois/noble specialist and intellectuals with workers and poor peasants. A lot of the ex-exploiting class members were purged from leadership positions and replaced with people with worker and peasant backgrounds. Kind of a class affirmative action. It was necessary to industrialize the USSR. Hell, if you look at the leadership in the USSR post-30s onward, a lot were engineers trained in this era.

My guess is the atheist campaign was part of this "cultural revolution" to raise the technical know-how of the populous and aid industrialization. IMO the cultural revolution didn't go far enough, pushed it too much from above and not enough from below, and relied too much on the bureaucracy it was meant to combat, but I digress.

Another thing you got to consider, is the influence of the clergy. Russia was not like in modern US with a separation of church and state. The clergy was a part of the Tsarist bureaucracy. These were reactionaries promising the keys to heaven or hell, who's interest lies with violent counterrevolutionaries. They were part of the nobility a la the First Estate. The priest would even tell the police about confessions under the Tsar!

[Radical Atom]

Another thing you got to consider, is the influence of the clergy. Russia was not like in modern US with a separation of church and state. The clergy was a part of the Tsarist bureaucracy. These were reactionaries promising the keys to heaven or hell, who's interest lies with violent counterrevolutionaries. They were part of the nobility a la the First Estate. The priest would even tell the police about confessions under the Tsar!
Just for clarification, I'm absolutely convinced of the need to ruthlessly liquidate and annihilate the clergy and religion, there's no real disagreement on this question. I'm well aware of the viciousness of the whites. I'm discussing specifically these tactics and the particular ideological background (proletarian vis a vis progressive bourgeois) of these particular movements in their particular historical context here.

But isn't the problem that this "cultural revolution" was "manufactured" by the bureaucracy? Only, unlike Mao's fiasco, it wasn't a titanically cynical and incompetent thinly veiled massive purge of the opposition.
It could have been a genuine attempt by the new and growing Soviet bureaucracy who genuinely thought that they were pushing forward towards socialism; but the fact is that genuine proletarian grassroots popular movements had already existed (Soviet avant-garde or the red terror of the Cheka), Soviet proletarians proved themselves, they were class conscious and building their own culture without "direction" from a bureaucracy. In that sense I think some people underestimate the Soviet proletariat, of course there were backward elements, especially in the countryside, but if the Soviet people were as backwards as some put it there'd been no Revolution. Illiteracy is a huge handicap, but it doesn't make class consciousness impossible (remember Big Bill Haywood's "I've never read Marx Kapital but I have marks of capital all over my body."?).
Not to mention, again, that it's hard not to doubt the revolutionary consciousness of the movement given that the after Operation Barbarossa started the Orthodox Church was quickly rehabilitated and the League of Militant Godless was disbanded. Had it been really a completely independent grassroots movement wouldn't it either still have been operating and protesting the rehabilitation of religion in the Soviet Union or they'd been purged by the stalinist bureaucracy to shut them up rather than simply being disbanded?

[Ismail]

Not to mention, again, that it's hard not to doubt the revolutionary consciousness of the movement given that the after Operation Barbarossa started the Orthodox Church was quickly rehabilitated and the League of Militant Godless was disbanded. Had it been really a completely independent grassroots movement wouldn't it either still have been operating and protesting the rehabilitation of religion in the Soviet Union or they'd been purged by the stalinist bureaucracy to shut them up rather than simply being disbanded?To begin with, if it were "a completely independent grassroots movement" it likely would have engaged in ultra-left policies on a vast scale, similar to Mao's Red Guards. That the League operated under the leadership of the CPSU(B) and still committed ultra-left errors, as League members reported throughout the 1930s, is a good indication of that. Other "completely independent grassroots movements" like Proletkult showed what harm was done as a result of such "independence."

Second, the Orthodox Church was not "rehabilitated." With the Soviet state having stabilized itself in the preceding two decades, with the struggle having been successfully waged against the Tsarist-era clergy, and with the patriotic impulses of Russians, Ukrainians, and other peoples of the USSR having been awakened by the Nazi invasion, all the religions of the country were mobilized in service of the Great Patriotic War. But as Edgar Snow noted (The Pattern of Soviet Power, 1945, pp. 188-189):

Let no one imagine, however, that the State has made any concession to religion as a separate power or authority in secular life. Atheism is still taught in the schools, and young people, except where parents have been extremely zealous, remain indifferent to the idea of God. Any notion that religious instruction might be be admitted to educational institutions was dispelled by warnings such as the following recently issued to Young Communists:

“It is no use concealing the fact that among the teachers there are people, a small number it is true, who have recently begun to show tolerance toward religion. Cases of observance of religious ceremonies by teachers have even increased. Our party’s attitude toward religion is well known and has not changed. Our party fights against religious prejudices because it stands for science, while all religion is contrary to science.

“By what means does our party fight against religion? M. I. Kalinin gave a good answer to this question in his talk to frontline agitators in 1943. He said, ‘We do not persecute anyone for religion. We regard it as an error and fight against it with enlightenment.’ In conformity with the requirements of our party, care must be taken to avoid any offense to the feelings of believers, which only leads to a strengthening of religious fanaticism.”

Despite the fact that “believers” persist even among the school-teachers, the State can afford to be more tolerant, since the power of the Church to organize resistance has been completely broken. It possesses no important economic power. It can in no way control or influence livelihood or threaten the socialist system, nor does it any longer criticize Communism.The League's work was continued in 1947 with the creation of a new organization known as Znanie, which did not repeat the ultra-leftist mistakes of the 1930s.

[Radical Atom]

Which are in your opinion the best campaigns and measures and which ones were the most unsuccessful? Were there similar campaigns throughout the pro-soviet camp worldwide? Not only the Warsaw Pact camp, but also the post-colonial nations in Asia and Africa? Were there attempts to fight superstitious backwardness there? How did the Albanian experience fare in comparison, where was it more successful at and what were its bigger mistakes?
Also any good works on either?

[Ismail]

Which are in your opinion the best campaigns and measures and which ones were the most unsuccessful? Were there similar campaigns throughout the pro-soviet camp worldwide? Not only the Warsaw Pact camp, but also the post-colonial nations in Asia and Africa? Were there attempts to fight superstitious backwardness there? How did the Albanian experience fare in comparison, where was it more successful at and what were its bigger mistakes?
Also any good works on either?I didn't see this reply, so apologies for the delay.

The Albanian anti-religious campaign was certainly the most dramatic, to the extent that the state prohibited religiously-based names for children (e.g. Mehmet, Pjetër or Josif weren't allowed) and even private religious worship was more or less verboten.

Religious fundamentalism in Albania was always a pretty rare phenomenon, and unlike Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, etc. there was never a "national" church that united countrymen, since Turkish authorities and the Greek Patriarchate tried to convince Albanians that they were either "Turks" or "Greeks" based on their religious affiliation.

The campaign was effective, albeit very unpopular:

"The first public mass was celebrated November 4 [1990], in a cemetery chapel in Shkodra, by Simon Jubani, released in 1989 after twenty-six years of imprisonment. The crowd of 5,000 worshipers was made up of Catholics, few of whom could remember this central rite of the Church. Interestingly enough, there were also substantial numbers of Muslims present, most of them apparently unaware of the difference between Christianity and Islam. Here already was a sign of the [anti-religious] campaign's success." - Denis R. Janz, World Christianity and Marxism, 1998, p. 108.

I don't think it was a necessary campaign though. Already by the time it started in the late 60s, foreign observers were noting that the influence of the church or mosque in Albanian life was nil. All it really succeeded in doing was alienating a lot of people from the Party and government.

Other socialist countries had different policies. As you probably know, in the GDR there was a Christian Democratic Union which operated alongside other parties under the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party. The East German government tried to "appropriate" religion rather than directly combat it. To quote one source:

"Since, in materialistic philosophy, the Christian churches can have no part or only a subsidiary one in fulfilling the socio-political tasks of the socialist state, they were systematically deprived of all but their directly ecclesiastical social functions and restricted to a purely religious sphere. Under the pressure of the state, the churches in the GDR have had to revert back to being simply institutions for worship, no longer having general social tasks such as kindergartens, schools or hospitals. because of this, the churches have lost their institutional support in society. . .

Ulbricht himself declared in the People's Chamber in 1960 that Christianity and the humanist aims of socialism were not opposites. . .

It is impossible to speak of a specific battle against the churches or even of a ruthless persecution, yet there has undoubtedly been a systematic repression of church influence on public life. One example of the long-standing conflict between church and state was the state-run Jugendweihe (Dedication of youth), a secular substitute for confirmation, following Marxist philosophy. This examples hows the attempts made by the party to deprive the churches of their traditional social functions and to replace the religious church cult by a party cult inspired by its philosophy (this was also done with marriages, baptisms and funerals). . . .

For this reason the real danger facing the churches in the GDR today is no longer a direct confrontation with the state, but rather a progressive shrinking and inner atrophy. . . since the church in the GDR—unlike that in the West—does not have the opportunity of compensating for its dwindling religious substance and attractiveness by social activities [such as charity], it is hit all the harder by the process of secularization." - Kurt Sontheimer and Wilhelm Bleek, The Government and Politics of East Germany, 1975, pp. 122-125.

I think that the GDR's example of "appropriating" religious practices and turning them in a secular direction was more or less followed in other Eastern European countries a well, albeit not as extensively (e.g. there was nothing approximating to Ulbricht's "Ten Commandments of Socialist Morality" which he unveiled in 1958.)

By the mid-70s pretty much every socialist country except China and Albania held that there was much common ground between rank-and-file religious believers and Marxists. For instance,

"Now however, we are not involved in any such business [atheism], for a very simple and Marxist reason, because we know that a Church cannot be abolished. Not because priests are strong, but because the Church lives within the people, it exists in their heads, and because the present world situation influences everything that is going on in people's heads. Therefore, to fight the Church as a religious institution is nonsensical. Our criterion should not be whether one is an atheist or not, but whether one supports our socialism or not, and whether one supports peace or not. All the rest is secondary."
(Vjesnik, January 1, 1980, quoted in Albanian Catholic Bulletin Vol. 1 No. 1. 1980. p. 24.)

An October 1979 "Fourth International Round table tribune" in which "participants from 57 countries and two liberation movements, openly discussed the role of religion in history and especially today in the struggle for liberation":

"At Cavat, the problem of religion, in this case primarily Christianity and Islam, was posed not as a question of theology and confession, but as a matter of certain inherited humanistic values which socialist and progressive culture generally must respect and moreover integrate. It was explicitly stated that this is not a political tactic to win over the religious masses but rather an endeavor to enrich movements with the general values of mankind which can become an incentive in the striving for a socialist civilization free of antagonisms. Christianity is not only a factor of alienation; it can also be an incentive, an impulse and part of the revolutionary strength of the people, said some; Islam should not be considered only as a religion for it is a philosophy of individual and collective existence and can be progressive and give stimulus to the struggle for liberation and against exploitation, said others.

Latin American theology based on the revolutionary compromise of the working masses is opposed to idolatry and fetishism and illuminates the profound link of the religious masses with the political and revolutionary movement, remarked certain participants. Some West European Marxists said it would be wrong to discriminate between Christian communists and atheistic communists. The social and historical weight of the religious factor and its considerable significance in third world countries should be understood not only as reflecting a level of social consciousness strongly bound by tradition but also and primarily a desire to express through religion the aspirations to emancipation and national selfhood and also a resistance to class culture and the domination of colonizers and exploiters. In this case, it was stated, religions can be counted among progressive and emancipatory ideologies."
(Yugoslav journal Socialist Thought and Practice #12, 1979, quoted in ibid.)

Religion in countries like Ethiopia, Angola and South Yemen was basically untouched to my knowledge. In Nicaragua the FSLN actively worked to cultivate ties with liberation theologians, as did Zimbabwe's ZANU.

As for Afghanistan,

"[The PDPA] has no quarrel with the religious aspect of Islamism, only its sectarian interpretation by reaction. The Afghan revolutionaries see no contradiction between a belief in Islam and a belief in socialism, and many of them are practicing Moslems." - Phillip Bonosky, Afghanistan: Washington's Secret War, 2001, p. 109.

The same author interviewed a pro-government mullah (page 131): "To this: 'Are you persecuted?' Abdul Aziz Sadegh, a man in his late 50s, answered flatly: 'Our only persecutors are the counterrevolutionaries.' It was they, not the PDPA members, who burned down the mosques and assassinated the mullahs who supported the government. He himself, as he would tell us later, was also on their hit list... Nor was the government anti-Islamic. The government not only did not interfere in the work of the mullahs but gave them funds with which to make repairs to their mosques and to rebuild those that were burned down."

[thamexper]

there are a lot of useful information. Thanks All :D