Vladimir Lenin was highly critical of religion, saying in his book Religion:
Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism.In The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion, he wrote:
Religion is the opium of the people: this saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion. All modern religions and churches, all and of every kind of religious organizations are always considered by Marxism as the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class.However, while Lenin was critical of religion, he also specifically made a point to not include it in Our Programme or his ideological goals by saying:
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.
The Soviet Union was established by the Bolsheviks in 1922, in place of the Russian Empire.
At the time of the 1917 Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church was deeply integrated into the autocratic state, enjoying official status. This was a significant factor that contributed to the Bolshevik attitude to religion and the steps they took to control it.
Crackdowns on the established church reflected many people's dissatisfaction with the church in pre-revolutionary Russia. The close ties between the church and the state led to the perception of the church as corrupt and greedy by many members of the intelligentsia. Many peasants, while highly religious, also viewed the church unfavourably. Respect for religion did not extend to the local priests. The church owned a significant portion of Russia's land, and this was a bone of contention – land ownership was a big factor in the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Thus the USSR became the first state to have as one objective of its official ideology the elimination of existing religion, and the prevention of future implanting of religious belief, with the goal of establishing state atheism (gosateizm).
Saint Benjamin of Petrograd
After the arrest and deposition of Metropolitan Pitirim (Onkova) on 15 March [O.S. 2 March] 1917, Benjamin administered the Petrograd diocese as vicarial Bishop of Gdov. On 6 June [O.S. 24 May] of that year, he was democratically elected by the clergy and the people to the archbishopric of Petrograd and Ladoga, the first bishop popularly elected in the Russian church. On 30 June [O.S. 17 June] his title was changed to Archbishop of Petrograd and Gdov by decree of the Holy Synod, and on 26 August [O.S. 13 August] he was elevated to metropolitan.
While the Church tried to maintain a neutral stance during the Russian Civil War, and Benjamin was one of the few people in Russia with no interest in politics, the Russian Orthodox Church and Soviet State had diametrically opposite world views and the church was viewed as dangerously counter-revolutionary by the Soviet authorities. The real conflict, however, came out into the open in 1922 when the Soviet authorities demanded the church hand over church valuables to pay for famine relief. The Russian church agreed to this, but refused to hand over certain valuables of religious or historic significance. Benjamin did not resist turning over the Church's valuables, believing it was his duty to help save lives, but insisted this be voluntary and not a plundering of church property by the Bolsheviks. On 6 March Benjamin met with a commission formed to help the starving that agreed to his voluntary dispersal of funds controlled by the parishes. Newspapers of that time praised the Benjamin and his clergy for their charitable spirit. In April, Benjamin reached an agreement with Petrograd party officials to hand over certain valuables and to allow parishioners to substitute their own valuables for other church valuables of historic or religious significance. However, party leaders in Moscow did not approve of that decision and declared that the confiscation of Church property would continue. Protesters gathered in Petrograd, shouting and throwing stones at those who were stealing from the churches.
On 24 March twelve priests broke ranks with the other clergy, whom they called counter-revolutionaries and blamed for the famine, and called for unconditional surrender of all Church valuables to the Soviets. This led to outrage which Benjamin tried to calm, asking for a meeting with the authorities leading to an agreement that parishes would be permitted to keep their sacred vessels if they substituted other property of equal value. This pacified the situation until some priests tried to wrest control of the Church from Patriarch Tikhon and the established hierarchy. Benjamin excommunicated his priests involved with the coup which enraged the Soviets who threatened Benjamin with his and others' arrest and execution. Benjamin reacted by commencing meeting with his friends in order to say farewell and giving instructions for the administration of the diocese.
In April and May 1922, a number of churchmen were arrested and tried as counter-revolutionaries for opposing the seizure of church valuables. Benjamin was placed under house arrest on 29 May and subsequently imprisoned after he had opposed efforts by Alexander Vvedensky to establish the renovationist All-Russian Church Administration as the new church government after Patriarch Tikhon abdicated on 12 May. Benjamin was tried by a revolutionary tribunal with ten other defendants from 10 June to 5 July.
The defendants were given a chance to speak, and Benjamin addressed the court saying it grieved him to be called an enemy of the people whom he had always loved and to whom he had dedicated his life to them.
During the night of 12–13 August [O.S. 30–31 July] 1922 after having been shaved and dressed in rags so that the firing squad would not know that they were shooting members of the clergy, Benjamin and those with him, Archimandrite Sergius, Yury Novitsky, and John Kovsharov, were executed in the eastern outskirts of Petrograd, at the Porokhov Station of the Irinovskaya Railroad.
Control, supression and elimination of religion in the Soviet Union
Marxist–Leninist atheism has consistently advocated the control, suppression, and elimination of religion. Within about a year of the revolution, the state expropriated all church property, including the churches themselves, and in the period from 1922 to 1926, 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests were killed. Many more were persecuted.
Christians belonged to various churches: Orthodox (which had the largest number of followers), Catholic, Baptist and various other Protestant denominations. The majority of the Muslims in the Soviet Union were Sunni. Judaism also had many followers. Other religions, practiced by a small number of believers, included Buddhism and Shamanism.
As for the Russian Orthodox Church, Soviet authorities sought to control it and, in times of national crisis, to exploit it for the regime's own purposes; but their ultimate goal was to eliminate it. Many of the clergy were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941 only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence prior to World War I.
Religion, national identity, patriotism and propaganda in the Soviet Union
The Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 induced Stalin to enlist the Russian Orthodox Church as an ally to arouse Russian patriotism against foreign aggression. Russian Orthodox religious life experienced a revival: thousands of churches were reopened; there were 22,000 by the time Nikita Khrushchev came to power. The regime permitted religious publications, and church membership grew.
Khrushchev reversed the regime's policy of cooperation with the Russian Orthodox Church. Although it remained officially sanctioned, in 1959 Khrushchev launched an antireligious campaign that was continued in a less stringent manner by his successor, Brezhnev. By 1975 the number of active Russian Orthodox churches was reduced to 7,000. Some of the most prominent members of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and some activists were jailed or forced to leave the church. Their place was taken by docile clergy who were obedient to the state and who were sometimes infiltrated by KGB agents, making the Russian Orthodox Church useful to the regime. It espoused and propagated Soviet foreign policy and furthered the russification of non-Russian Christians, such as Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusians.
The regime applied a different policy toward the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Viewed by the government as very nationalistic, both were suppressed, first at the end of the 1920s and again in 1944 after they had renewed themselves under German occupation. The leadership of both churches was decimated; large numbers of priests were shot or sent to labor camps, and members of their congregations were harassed and persecuted.
The Georgian Orthodox Church was subject to a somewhat different policy and fared far worse than the Russian Orthodox Church. During World War II, however, it was allowed greater autonomy in running its affairs in return for calling its members to support the war effort, although it did not achieve the kind of accommodation with the authorities that the Russian Orthodox Church had. The government reimposed tight control over it after the war. Out of some 2,100 churches in 1917, only 200 were still open in the 1980s, and it was forbidden to serve its adherents outside the Georgian Republic. In many cases, the regime forced the Georgian Orthodox Church to conduct services in Old Church Slavonic instead of in the Georgian language.
The Soviet government's policies toward the Catholic Church were strongly influenced by Soviet Catholics' recognition of an outside authority as head of their church. As a result of World War II, millions of Catholics (including Greco-Catholics) became Soviet citizens and were subjected to new repression. Also, in the three republics where most of the Catholics lived, the Lithuanian SSR, the Byelorussian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR, Catholicism and nationalism were closely linked. Although the Roman Catholic Church was tolerated in Lithuania, large numbers of the clergy were imprisoned, many seminaries were closed, and police agents infiltrated the remainder. The anti-Catholic campaign in Lithuania abated after Stalin's death, but harsh measures against the church were resumed in 1957 and continued through the Brezhnev era.
Soviet policy was particularly harsh toward the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. Ukrainian Greek-Catholics came under Soviet rule in 1939, when western Ukraine was incorporated into the Soviet Union as part of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. Although the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was permitted to function, it was almost immediately subjected to intense harassment. Retreating before the German army in 1941, Soviet authorities arrested large numbers of Ukrainian Greek Catholic priests, who were either killed or deported to Siberia. After the Red Army reoccupied western Ukraine in 1944, the Soviet regime liquidated the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church by arresting its metropolitan, all of its bishops, hundreds of clergy, and the more active church members, killing some and sending the rest to labor camps. At the same time, Soviet authorities forced the remaining clergy to abrogate the union with Rome and subordinate themselves to the Russian Orthodox Church.
Before World War II, there were fewer Protestants in the Soviet Union than adherents of other faiths, but they showed remarkable growth since then. In 1944 the Soviet government established the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christian Baptists (now the Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists of Russia) to gain some control over the various Protestant sects. Many congregations refused to join this body, however, and others that initially joined it subsequently left. All found that the state, through the council, was interfering in church life.
Soviet policy toward Islam was affected, on the one hand by the large Muslim population, its close ties to national cultures, and its tendency to accept Soviet authority, and on the other hand by its susceptibility to foreign influence. Although actively encouraging atheism, Soviet authorities permitted some limited religious activity in all the Muslim republics, under the auspices of the regional branches of the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of the USSR. Mosques functioned in most large cities of the Central Asian republics and the Azerbaijan Republic, but their number decreased from 25,000 in 1917 to 500 in the 1970s. Under Stalinist rule, Soviet authorities cracked down on Muslim clergy, closing many mosques or turning them into warehouses. In 1989, as part of the general relaxation of restrictions on religions, some additional Muslim religious associations were registered, and some of the mosques that had been closed by the government were returned to Muslim communities. The government also announced plans to permit the training of limited numbers of Muslim religious leaders in two- and five-year courses in Ufa and Baku, respectively.
Although Lenin publicly condemned anti-Semitism, the regime was hostile toward Judaism from the beginning. In 1919 the Soviet authorities abolished Jewish community councils, which were traditionally responsible for maintaining synagogues. They created a special Jewish section of the party, whose tasks included propaganda against Jewish clergy and religion. To offset Jewish national and religious aspirations, and to reflect the Jewish national movement's role in the socialist movement of the Russian Empire (for example, Trotsky was first a member of the Jewish Bund, not the Social Democratic Labour Party), an alternative to the Land of Israel was established in 1934.
The Jewish Autonomous Oblast, created in 1928 by Stalin, with Birobidzhan in the Russian Far East as its administrative center, was to become a "Soviet Zion". Yiddish, rather than "reactionary" Hebrew, would be the national language, and proletarian socialist literature and arts would replace Judaism as the quintessence of its culture. Despite a massive domestic and international state propaganda campaign, the Jewish population there never reached 30% (as of 2003 it was only about 1.2%). The experiment ended in the mid-1930s, during Stalin's first campaign of purges. Jewish leaders were arrested and executed, and Yiddish schools were shut down. Further persecutions and purges followed.
The training of rabbis became impossible until early 1940's, and until the late 1980s only one Yiddish periodical was published. Because of its identification with Zionism, Hebrew was taught only in schools for diplomats. Most of the 5,000 synagogues functioning prior to the Bolshevik Revolution were closed under Stalin, and others were closed under Khrushchev. The practice of Judaism became very difficult, intensifying the desire of Jews to leave the Soviet Union.
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