League of Militant Atheists
The League of Militant Atheists, also Society of the Godless or Union of the Godless, was an atheistic and antireligious organization of workers and intelligentsia that developed in Soviet Russia under the influence of the ideological and cultural views and policies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1947. It consisted of party members, members of the Komsomol youth movement, those without specific political affiliation, workers, and military veterans.
The league embraced workers, peasants, students, and intelligentsia. It had its first affiliates at factories, plants, collective farms, and educational institutions. By the beginning of 1941 it had about 3.5 million members from 100 ethnicities. It had about 96,000 offices across the country. Guided by Bolshevik principles of communist propaganda and by the Party's orders with regard to religion, the League aimed at exterminating religion in all its manifestations and forming an anti-religious scientific mindset among the workers. It propagated atheism and scientific achievements, conducted so-called "individual work" ; most of the peasantry was unimpressed, and even the party apparatus regarded the League as meddling and inefficient. The League's slogan was "Struggle against religion is struggle for socialism", which was meant to tie in their atheist views with the Communist drive to 'build Socialism'. One of the slogans adopted at the 2nd congress proclaimed: "Struggle against religion is struggle for the five-year plan!" The League had international connections; it was part of the International of Proletarian Freethinkers and later of the Worldwide Freethinkers Union. By the mid-1930s, the Communist regime considered socialism to have been 'built', and the League adopted a new slogan: "Struggle against religion is struggle for communism", communism being the next stage after socialism according to Marxist ideology.
The league was a "nominally independent organization established by the Communist Party to promote atheism".
It published newspapers, journals, and other materials that lampooned religion; it sponsored lectures and films; it organized demonstrations and parades; it set up antireligious museums; and it led a concerted effort telling Soviet citizens that religious beliefs and practices were wrong and harmful, and that good citizens ought to embrace a scientific, atheistic worldview.
Origins and formation
The newspaper Bezbozhnik , founded and edited by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, played a significant role in the League's establishment, and had a wide network of correspondents and readers. Bezbozhnik appeared first in December 1922, and the following year a Moscow monthly for industrial workers Bezbozhnik u Stanka formed the like-minded Moscow Society of the Godless in August 1924.In November 1924, the Anti-Religious Commission of the All-Union Communist Party, and in December, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee supported the project of creating an all-Union godless society. A special commission was set up to prepare for the congress of atheists.
The first congress of the organization, which took place in April 1925, decided to create a single all-union anti-religious society, called the "Union of Atheists". Well known members of the Communist Party and Old Bolsheviks such as Nadezhda Krupskaya, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Pyotr Krasikov, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, Nikolai Bukharin and others participated in the foundation of the organization and Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was elected chairman.
In addition to the newspaper Bezbozhnik, the Central Soviet of the League of Militant Atheists published the illustrated magazine Bezbozhnik and the scientific and methodological journal Antireligioznik. The scientific society "Ateist" arose in 1921 in Moscow. It published the magazine Ateist from 1923 to 1931. This magazine published mainly works translated from foreign languages. Since 1931, the magazine Voinstvuiuschii ateizm, a periodical of the Central Soviet of the League of Militant Atheists, began to be published. Along with periodicals in Russian, the League of Militant Atheists published periodicals in other languages:
- "" − in Ukrainian,
- "Xudasizlar" − in Uzbek
- "" − in Tatar
- "" - in Yiddish
- "" – in Armenian
- "Das Neuland" − in German
- "Erdem ba Shazhan" – in Buryat
- "Mebrdzoli Ateisti" – in Georgian
- "Bezbożnik wojujący" – in Polish
- "Allahsyz" – in Azerbaijani
- "" – in Bashkir
The Moscow group tended to support the leftist side of the debate on how to destroy religion, and in 1924 it attacked Yaroslavsky, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich for differentiation between different religions, instead of genuine godlessness. It accused Yaroslavsky of attacking only the clergy rather than religion in general. Yaroslavsky protested this and affirmed that all religions were enemies of socialism including the Renovationist schism in the Orthodox church, but that the methods of struggle against different religions should vary due to the large number of loyal Soviet citizens with religious beliefs who should be re-educated as atheists rather than treated as class enemies. Bezbozhnik argued that it was an oversimplification to treat religion solely as a kind of class exploitation to be attacked, forgetting the complex nature of religions, as well as the individual believers. The CPSU Central Committee supported Yaroslavsky's viewpoint on this issue, although this debate remained unresolved at the Union that came in 1925.
The Moscow group merged with the Society of Friends of the Godless Newspaper in April 1925 to form the All-Union League of the Godless at its first congress. Between 1925 and 1929 a power struggle took place in the new organization between Yaroslavsky and his followers, and the leadership of the former Moscow group. The 1926 All-Union Conference on Antireligious Propaganda voted in favour of Yaroslavsky's views on the antireligious campaign, but the debate still continued. The Moscow group argued that the antireligious struggle should be led only by the party and the industrial proletariat, as opposed to the whole nation which Yaroslavsky wanted to mobilize to conduct the antireligious campaign.
In 1929, when resolutions that would set the tone for intensive persecution of the next decade were set and Yaroslavsky's victory in the power struggle had been completed, there were a few last attacks made on Yaroslavsky and the organization for minimizing the class-enemy thesis in attacking religion, of having few workers and peasants in its ranks, of using archaeology instead of aggressively attacking religion, of being indifferent to transforming the school system into a fundamentally antireligious atmosphere and of opportunistically citing works by non-Marxist Western bourgeois atheists in publications. In response, Yaroslavsky claimed that they had supported antireligious education for years, but in contrast to the leftists who simply wanted to attack religion, he was working to replace the popular religious ideology with that of dialectical materialism. He also pointed out correctly that Lenin had used the works of the 18th century French atheists and other bourgeois atheists to assist in the campaign to disseminate atheism in the USSR. He admitted that the effect of their efforts up to that point was less than he had hoped, which he implicitly blamed on the Moscow branch for their lack of cooperation, lack of support from the party and some branches of the Komsomol, and a ban operating on their activities in Ukraine, as well as an inadequate finances.
Yaroslavsky, Stalin's loyal aide in the secretariat and one of the founding editors of Kommunist, came out on top despite the Moscow group's resistance in an effort to retain autonomy and the support for that group from the daily Komsomol'skaia Pravda.
The problems that Yaroslavsky outlined in his response were addressed in 1929 at the second congress. The CPSU Central Committee delegated to the LMA full powers to launch a great antireligious attack with the objective of completely eliminating religion from the country, granting them the right to mobilize all public organizations.
In 1929, the Second Congress changed the society's name to The Union of Belligerent Atheists. At this Second Congress of Atheists, Nikolai Bukharin, the editor of Pravda, called for the extermination of religion "at the tip of the bayonet." The Central Council chose Yaroslavsky as its leader; he occupied this post continuously.
Atheistic periodicals published in various languages
Authority on antireligious methodology
The debate on how to best exterminate religion was argued among the Soviet leadership, until in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when it was resolved by Stalin who condemned the extremes of both sides, and Yaroslavsky followed suit. The do-nothing approach of the rightists who thought religion would die away naturally and the leftist approach to attack all forms of religion as class enemies were both condemned as deviations from the party line. Yaroslavsky argued against the leftists that if religion was simply a class phenomenon there would be no need to combat it if a classless society was truly being produced. He affirmed that an all-sided attack on religion was needed, but did not subscribe to the leftist deviation that had been condemned.The League not only attacked religion but also attacked deviations from what it saw as the proper line to combat religion in the USSR and, in effect, set the 'proper' line to follow in this sphere for party membership. Early Marxist beliefs that religion would disappear with the coming of a tractor were ridiculed by the League. The popularity of religion among nationalistic intellectuals was pointed out by Lukachevsky and he claimed that if religion was only rooted in ownership of property, it could not explain the growth of the renovationists.
The League occupied the leadership role in the antireligious campaign of the Communist Party.
It employed the powers given to it by the CPSU Central Committee at the 1929 congress to dictate orders to schools, universities, the Soviet Armed Forces, the trade unions, the Komsomol, the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization, the Soviet press, and other institutions for the purpose of its antireligious campaign. It criticized many public institutions for failing to adequately attack religious belief and instructed them on how to be more effective. The People's Commisariat of Education was heckled and Glavnauka, the Chief Administration for Science and Scholarship was also singled out for criticism. A spokesperson for the latter tried to justify their behaviour to the LMA by claiming that they had reduced the total number of historical buildings under its protection from 7000 to 1000, by destroying them.
The League concerned itself with the issue of active believers who had infiltrated its own membership and who were trying to prove their loyalty to the regime or even undermine the antireligious work of the League. League members who suspected each other of harbouring religious beliefs secretly discussed their concerns in the early years. The League also had to address the issue of atheists in its membership who may have sympathized with the religious believers and who may have had doubts about what they were doing. In answer to these, the League adopted a policy that any League member who entered a church had to first receive local branch approval beforehand in order so that he did not give the impression that he was going to the church to pray. In contrast the League in Tashkent actually tried to translate the Quran into Uzbek so that more Muslims could read it, in hope that when Muslims were able to read what the Quran actually said, they would reject its content as fallacious.
All members of the Komsomol were obligated to join the League, and it directed all members of the CPSU to support the League's work. The extreme character of the line to be taken against religion is described:
All religions, no matter how much they 'renovate' and cleanse themselves, are systems of idea... profoundly hostile to the ideology of... socialism... Religious organizations... are in reality political agencies... of class groupings hostile to the proletariat inside the country and of the international bourgeoisie... Special attention must be paid to the renovationist currents in Orthodoxy, Islam, Lamaism and other religions... These currents are but the disguises for more effective struggle against the Soviet power. By comparing ancient Buddhism, and ancient Christianity to communism, the Renovationists are essentially trying to replace the communist theory by a cleansed form of religion, which therefore becomes more dangerous.
In 1932 the Second Plenum of the LMA Central Council was ordered by Stalin to adopt an antireligious five-year plan with the intention of eliminating the Church and its influence in the USSR.
Under the doctrine of state atheism in the Soviet Union, there was a "government-sponsored program of forced conversion to atheism" conducted by the Communists, with the LMA at the forefront of this campaign. Many priests were killed and imprisoned. Thousands of churches were closed, some turned into hospitals.