Godless Communists

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Godless Communists by William B. Husband

This book covers the history of the relationship between the Russian state and the Orthodox Church from the period prior to the Russian Revolution until approximately 1932. This is a competent but unengaging work that is interested in policies and deracinated sociology than in the experience of persecution among the population. The balance of the work seemed to favor the position of the anti-religious Communists who were, it seems, dealing with a population steeped in a superstition that prevented material advance.

The author, William B. Husband, acknowledges that “atheism was an integral part of the world's first large-scale experiment in communism.” (p. xii.) Husband also notes that the Russian Revolution's “officially sanctioned atheism entered an environment frequently inhospitable, when not altogether hostile” and that during 1917-1932 the “fledgling revolutionary state was not yet the powerful dictatorship it became at the height of Stalinism.” (p. xii.) This is the tone that the book takes, namely it seemed to empathize more with the weak efforts of Communism to eliminate religion than with the efforts of Orthodox believers to preserve their way of life.

Chapter 1 is entitled “Belief and Nonbelief in Pre-Revolutionary Russia.” Husband's first chapter starts with medieval history to define the place of atheism in European thought. Husband's argument is that the medieval church's fight was with heresy, not with atheism, which essentially did not exist. Europeans did not separate the natural world from the supernatural realm until the Reformation. (p. 6.) Religion offered supernatural intervention into the world, and people were attracted to religion and to magic, the latter of which was derided by elites as “superstition.” “Premodern European Christians thus subscribed to a hybrid of divine, magical and pagan rites for one reason above all: it seemed to work.” (p. 8.)

This order of culture broke down with the Reformation. The Reformation also provided the environment for skepticism. “The very elements Protestants used to challenge Catholicism – the ultimate authority of the written word, the direct relationship between each believer and God, justification through faith, a universal priesthood – helped instill in skeptics the confidence to interpret religious matters for themselves.” (p. 12.) From that point on, skepticism and atheism became live options for Europeans, and atheism became a competing faith. (One of Husband's positions seems to be that “militant atheism is more an alternative to religion than its rejection.” (p. 3.).)

Russia, of course, lagged behind these developments because of its marginal position in Europe and the Mongol invasion. Western influenced inevitably entered Russia among its elites, many of whom were influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach's rejection of religion on the basis of philosophical materialism. (p. 29.) Antireligious and anticlericalism became common among the radical intelligentsia in the late 19th century. (p. 34.) According to Husband, the Bolshevik position on atheism developed only gradually and without special urgency. (p. 34.) The Bolsheviks were no more anti-religious than other radicals. (p. 24.) Husband's thesis is that in October of 1917, the Bolshevik's “antireligious position rested more on untested assumptions and facile interpretations of ideology than on clearly articulated plans or experience.” (p. 35.) The Bolsheviks expected their revolution to eradicate religion, not as a plan, but as a an automatic collateral benefit of the creation of a new social and political order, and they were surprised to discover that the old order of religion resisted. (p. 25.)

Chapter 2 is “Revolution and Antireligious Policy.” Bolshevism postulated a Manichean worldview where those who identified with its policies were enlightened and conscious and those who didn't were backward and counter-revolutionary. The Party took as pragmatic an approach to religion as it had in the era of the New Economic Policy. The Bolshevik Party leadership uncompromisingly held that religious belief should be eradicated, but failed to make this project a high priority. (p. 46.) The Orthodox Church, however, placed confrontation with the new state on its list of priorities, particularly after “uncoordinated violence” was inflicted on clergy, cathedrals and monasteries. (p. 47.) Patriarch Tikhon pronounced an anathema on the Bolsheviks when the Party changed the calendar, nationalized marriage and planned to oust the orthodox from education. (p. 47.) Husband accepts the Communist legalism that the state was “nonreligious” rather than “antireligious” (notwithstanding propaganda efforts against Christianity, seizure of Church property and murder of priests...the murder of priests getting only occasional mention, such as “As already noted, the Red Army, Cheka, and antireligious militants killed a number of bishops and priests.” (p. 51). ) The Party initially regarded the eradication of religion as an administrative matter. (p. 49.) Violent conflicts arose between Church and State when believers interposed themselves in front of the entry of commissars. (p. 51.) Otherwise, believers engaged in passive resistance to frustrate the usurpation of church property. Religious believers were disqualified from serving on railroads and river police in 1919. (p. 52.) In 1919, the first party congress adopted a resolution expressing a clear determination to eliminate the “religious prejudices of the masses.” (p. 52.) In 1922, Russian authorities executed three church activists who had led believers in threateningly encircling soviet officials who were trying to loot a church. (p. 57.) In 1925, the Atheist Society changed its name to the League of Godless, which then propagandized on behalf of atheism. (p.62.)

Chapter 3 is “Materialization and the Secularization of Society.” The Bolshevik Party's mission was the “struggle for a new lifestyle.” (“Byt.”) The Bolsheviks believed that the adoption of materialism would cause Russians to exhibit “greater mutual cooperation and honesty.” (p. 69.) Husband returns to the theme that the Russian peasantry felt helpless before illness and the elements and turned to superstition, religion and magic. (p. 71.) “For the Bolsheviks, therefore, promoting atheism included fostering social attitudes that would also raise labor productivity and improve the quality of life.” (p. 72.) Husband dwells in this section on the broad use of sympathetic magic that the Russian peasantry engaged in, e.g., attempting to control rain by submerging a clergyman in full vestments in a river. (p. 78.) An interesting feature is the huge number of holidays that Russian peasants were allowed – amounting to around 150 to 200 a year, or 50 in addition to Sundays. (p. 88.) Soviet holidays reduced the amount of fee time given to workers, and, as Husband points out, had the benefit of reducing the number of days lost to hangover because of the excessive drinking associated with Orthodox holidays. (p. 88.) Husband touts the material benefits of religion – churches provided a clean and warm place, and holidays were social occasions, which Soviets could not match. (p. 90.) By 1929, the Soviets had instituted policies to move the day of rest around so that Sundays would be interfered with. (p. 93.) Soviets also provided alternative holidays and festivities, such as “Octoberings” instead of baptisms. (p. 97.)

Chapter 4 is “Soviet Family Values.” The promotion of Soviet values required the alteration of the rhythms of individual lives. (p. 100.) This effort was assisted or promoted by collectivization and by industrialization, which destroyed villages with their traditional forms of social control and mixed up populations. At factories, the Soviets eliminated churches where they could. By 1921, the Soviets clearly ruled that believers could not be party members. (p. 118.)

The early soviet period was a renaissance for superstition since faith healers did not have to hide from the Orthodox. (p. 116.) Even among Party members, superstition proved attractive. “The same people who sang revolutionary songs and chastushki in the Komsomol clubs of Kostroma also observed popular superstitions, whereas in the many areas where sorcery and pre-Christian practices survived.” (p. 122.)

Husband advances the proposition that there was a blurring of religion and anti-religion. Komsomol members might express religious beliefs to family but deny it among the party. Female workers might condense prayers, but dutifully clean icons. (p. 126.)

The fifth chapter is “Resistance, Circumvention and Accommodation.” Husband's argument here is that while there were Bolshevik persecutors and Orthodox martyrs, the vast percentage of people fell into a middle ground where they attempted to accommodate themselves to the new social rules. The Party for its part lacked a consensus on the specifics about how religion should be treated. (p. 131.) Orthodox believers did not simply tolerate repression passively but countered it with insubordination and force, using violence for self-defense and resistance. (p. 140.) On the other hand, Husband reports that the “activist core against religion was miniscule.” (p. 151) “Acceptance and passivity – acquiescing to the elimination of the old without enthusiastically embracing the new – became an important mode of behavior in Soviet society.” (p. 155.)

In his Epilogue, Husband notes that the number of clergy dropped from 79,000 to 31,000 and the number of churches had been reduced by 50 to 80 percent....which would seem to call into question much of Husband's narrative about “confused” and “uncoordinated” persecution of the church.

Likewise, Husband notes that the Bolsheviks misunderstood that what they “dismissed as superstition” was “actually deeply embedded in mass consciousness: aggregations of divine, magical, and pagan precepts that many in society employed to fathom and control the present and the future.” (p. 161.)

Finally, closes with the note that “after 1917, Russians thus faced no fewer alternative belief systems than before. The range of possibilities changed, though, and the influence of the nonspiritual increased.” (p. 163.)

I don't know what to make of this book. I'm glad that I annotated it in this way because it allows me to get a deeper understanding of Husband's points. My feeling is that the parts of this book are greater than the whole. For example, I am fascinated by the idea that magical thinking survived into materialist Russia, but not a lot was done with this. I am also very skeptical of the significance of Husband's repeated points that there really was no central plan to persecute religion. So what? There clearly was persecution, and the persecution was horrific, as suggested by the fact that the number of priests dropped from 79,000 to 31,000. I suspect that someone could write a similar book about the persecution of Jews by the Nazis – that it was just ad hoc decisions made by people on the spot – and we would call that “Holocaust denial.” The feeling that I got from Husband was that this was somehow a natural development – a rational choice – of the Russian people, rather than something that was imposed on them. Husband spent virtually no time on Communist atrocities, somehow what stands out in my memory are the few incidents where Believers stood up to their persecutors.

This is an odd book. I got the feeling that it was primarily drawn from Bolshevik sources and adopted a Bolshevik perspective. In a way, this is useful. The data about mass belief in sympathetic magic and the number of holidays do, frankly, sound like an impediment to social “development” in the Western sense. Nonetheless, I don't feel like a got the entire story about what the Communist project to install atheism in Russia was about. The sense I got was that I was supposed to conclude that there was no such “project,” just ad hoc efforts all generally geared to the end of the elimination of religion, but it really wasn't persecution.

Nonetheless, there are a wealth of details here, which may be interesting for those with some knowledge of the subject. For novices in this area, I recommend [[ASIN:1591023068 And God Created Lenin: Marxism vs Religion In Russia, 1917-1929]] or [[ASIN:0520255291 The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization]].