The Plot to Kill God

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chapter 1
Dreams of Secularization
We have not the right to close the doors of [the Socialist Party]
to a man who is infected with religious belief; but we are
obliged to do all that depends on us in order to destroy that
faith in him.
— George Plekhanov,
“Notes to Engels’ Ludwig Feuerbach,” 1892
22
Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Marxists imagined a world with-
out religion. What they pictured was a society free from the negative influ-
ences of religious institutions that had become the lapdogs of the European
power elite. Before the Russian Revolution, Russian Marxists saw the
Russian Orthodox Church as defending and blessing a tyrannical political
leadership and supporting a morally unjustified war effort. Revolution-
aries viewed religious institutions as the source of the twisted moral ideol-
ogy that defended an inherently immoral social and political system. Their
dreams of secularization were premised on a desire to rid the world of all
that was harmful to the struggling and exploited masses of humanity.
By the end of the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik leaders had achieved
something astonishing. For the first time in history, Marxist theorists
gained control over millions of people and found themselves finally able
to implement their dreams. Karl Marx had initially raised the battle cry
for a new brand of social activism, urging intellectuals to turn their
thoughts into action. Radical members of the Russian intelligentsia fer-
vently took up the cause, and after decades of fomenting rebellion, for-
merly marginal, exiled, and basement-dwelling revolutionaries took
charge of one of the largest countries on earth. Their plans were vast, and
with the collapse of the czarist regime, Bolsheviks fortified their utopian
dream to alter every aspect of society. They now debated about how they
would eliminate private property, restructure the economy, and produce
a Communist culture with a new set of values, beliefs, and identities.
The importance of the cultural aspect of the Soviet project cannot be
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overestimated. As Khrushchev reaffirmed nearly four decades after the rev-
olution, “It is the function of all ideological work of our Party and State to
develop new traits in Soviet people, to train them in collectivism and love
of work, in proletarian internationalism and patriotism, in lofty ethical
principles of the new society, Marxism-Leninism.”
1
Central to this utopian
goal of the new Soviet culture was the elimination of former ideological
and religious loyalties. Religion proved one of the most challenging rivals
because it existed at every level of society, from nationwide church hierar-
chies to local clerics with personal ties to their congregations, and from
nationally celebrated religious festivals to daily rituals performed in the pri-
vacy of one’s home. The complete secularization of society was a daunting
task, but Bolshevik leaders were confident that they would succeed.
According to the early Marxist-Leninist secularization dream, religion
was a castle made of sand. As the waves of social and political change
washed across its base, Bolsheviks believed that religion would collapse
under its own weight and be washed away without a trace. But this secu-
larization dream was much more ambitious than most scholarly concep-
tions of secularization stipulate. Secularization, in contemporary social
science literature, normally refers to a number of distinct events relating to
a general weakening of religious institutions. David Martin, in his work
A
General Theory of Secularization,
indicates that secularization tendencies
include (1) the deterioration of religious institutions, (2) the decline of reli-
gious practices, (3) the erosion of stable religious communities, and (4) the
differentiation of churches from other institutional spheres.
2
Clearly, the
tendencies toward secularization make no direct reference to religious
faith, but Marxist-Leninists assumed that religious belief would naturally
disappear with the process of institutional secularization. And this general
assumption continues to confound contemporary debates about secular-
ization, in which some scholars point to the decline of religious organiza-
tions as confirmation of religious decline while others note the persistence
of religious belief as evidence to the contrary.
3
But as the Soviet Union systematically enacted new religious policies,
Communist Party leaders discovered that the banning of religious activi-
ties along with the forced destruction of religious institutions could actu-
ally inspire religious belief through opposition to a perceived injustice.
Consequently, the deterioration of religious institutions, the decline of
religious practices, the erosion of religious communities, and the differ-
entiation of religious and secular spheres did
not
produce widespread
religious disbelief. As Yaroslavsky, head of the League of Militant Atheists,
noted to Stalin in the early 1930s, “Religion is like a nail, the harder you
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24
Dreams of Secularization
hit it the deeper it goes.”
4
Yaroslavsky’s quip advanced the idea that reli-
gion was not merely a collection of institutions or rituals but instead an
ideological conviction embedded within a larger culture.
The creation of the League of Militant Atheists, a churchlike atheist
propaganda organization, marked the beginning of an emerging Soviet
theory of religion. Communist Party theorists, especially Yaroslavsky,
argued that religion constituted a worldview or set of moral beliefs that
lie in the hearts of individuals but are propagated by religious institutions
and instilled through religious practices. From this perspective, secular-
ization was nothing less than the eradication of religious faith. In the
1920s and 1930s, Yaroslavsky was given the daunting task of seculariz-
ing all of Soviet culture. And because Yaroslavsky and his colleagues
were committed Marxist-Leninists, they were careful to lay out the philo-
sophical assertions that guided their plans.
Even though the theories of Yaroslavsky and the atheist propagandists
who would follow him were broad in their scope and certainly single-
minded in their intent, much of their content reflects hypotheses that are
still popular in the social sciences today. Consequently, the secularization
strategies of the Soviet era produced a rich laboratory full of data from
which to test a wide range of pertinent sociological hypotheses. Overall,
the Soviet Secularization Experiment employed and tested six key theoret-
ical assertions concerning the substance and persistence of religion. Not all
of these assertions are logically derived from the ideology of Marxist-
Leninism, but, nonetheless, Soviet policies addressed their validity.
In sum, the Secularization Experiment tested the extent to which reli-
gious vitality or decline are a product of ignorance, ritual activity, social
institutions, social rewards, salvation incentives, and church-state rela-
tionships. The following chapter investigates the substance of these six
assertions in greater depth.
Secularization Assertions
Assertion 1
Religion is but the false sun which revolves around man
while he is not yet fully self-aware.
— Karl Marx
In 1549, Lelio Sozzini wrote to John Calvin that “most of my friends are
so well educated they can scarcely believe God exists.”
5
The idea that
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Dreams of Secularization
25
enlightened minds are naturally adverse to religious belief is not a new
one. Antireligious intellectual movements have a lengthy history that
most clearly dates back to ancient Greek philosophers, who questioned
the existence of the gods. In the fifth century, Xenophanes, as translated
by George Henry Lewes, concluded, “God, the infinite, could not be
infinite, neither could He be finite.”
6
Sharing his discovery, Xenophanes
toured cities and the countryside explaining to spectators how logic
proves that the supernatural is meaningless.
Although skeptics throughout the ages certainly applied logic, sci-
ence, and common sense to question the tenets of religious belief,
progress in science and the rise of liberal thought in the modern era did
little to bolster empirical claims for atheism. For instance, Newton’s
theory of gravity was initially understood as support for the existence of
an active God because “it involved the rejection of all purely mechanical
explanations of the movement of the heavens.”
7
And even though many
modern revolutionaries proclaimed an active tension between liberalism
and religious faith, Rousseau, the intellectual guru of the French Rev-
lution, was an active theist and in fact believed that social change
required the assistance of God. Intellectual traditions that posited that
science and liberalism are at war with religion have always existed
alongside scientists and revolutionaries who were religious. Therefore,
the empowerment of antireligious ideology requires a sociological
explanation because it was by no means a philosophically necessary
outcome of modern worldviews.
The sociologist Auguste Comte believed that religion would slowly
erode as technology and modern thinking penetrated popular culture; in
fact, he argued that sociology would replace religion as a way to not only
understand society but to also determine common moral attitudes con-
cerning behavior and the social order.
8
Although contemporary sociolo-
gists of religion no longer make this claim, the argument that the process
of modernization itself diminishes religion remains. But what is it about
modernization that is so incompatible with religion?
The history of Western Europe indicates that modernizing countries are
more likely to develop distinct religious and secular spheres—in other
words, they become societies in which the church is formally separated
from the state. Both Max Weber and Emile Durkheim believed this was
the result of a natural division of labor as societies got more complex and
bureaucratic. Nevertheless, if modernization erodes religious belief,
aspects of modernization such as urbanization, industrialization and sci-
entific advancement must also undermine religious views of the world.
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The separation of church and state by itself does not logically lead to non-
belief. Therefore, modernization can only affect religious faith if modern
political and scientific worldviews are inherently antireligious or atheistic.
Following Marx, early Communist Party leaders subscribed to this
belief and assumed that modernizing the regions of the Soviet Union and
educating the population in the basic tenets of science would speed up
the inevitable process of secularization. From their perspective, technol-
ogy and science were wholly incompatible with beliefs in the supernatu-
ral—Marxist-Leninists assumed that individuals would have to choose
one in the final analysis. And as the advantages of modernization and the
logic of science became apparent, they supposed that all rational individ-
uals would abandon religion.
Industrial and urban growth followed quickly from the implementa-
tion of Soviet economic plans. And after World War II, the space and
arms races between the United States and the Soviet Union demonstrated
that the Soviet system enjoyed a high level of technological advancement
and industrial might. In addition, Soviet officials successfully put into
practice a massive educational effort that brought schools, books, and
educational materials to tens of millions of children for the first time. As
a professor from Moscow State University explained, “Soviet education
aims at creating human beings, grounded in a scientific, materialistic
outlook, people who endeavor to make life happy in this world rather
than in some world to come.”
9
This educational program explicitly com-
municated that technological and scientific advancements disproved reli-
gious systems of belief. A curriculum of “scientific atheism” became cen-
tral in the education of youth, scientists, and scholars. Soviet citizens
learned that religious belief was tantamount to scientific ignorance. If the
Soviet people were to enter a modern age of Communism, they were told
that they needed to abandon their antiquated ideas. With the weapons of
modern science, technology, and industrialization, early Communist
Party leaders fully expected to eliminate all traces of religious belief from
society.
The Secularization Experiment represents the first time in history that
the belief that science and modernity undermine religion became official
state ideology. As such, Soviet policy tested Marx’s assertion that educa-
tion and self-awareness will ultimately extinguish the false sun of reli-
gion. Subsequent chapters will uncover the extent to which Soviet citi-
zens were persuaded to discard their religious sentiments as antireligious
philosophy came to dominate their intellectual, academic, and profes-
sional lives.
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Assertion 2
There are rites without gods, and indeed rites from
which gods derive.
—Emile Durkheim,
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Emile Durkheim maintained, “Religious beliefs rest upon a specific expe-
rience whose demonstrative value is, in one sense, not one bit inferior to
that of scientific experiments, though different from them.”
10
The experi-
ence to which Durkheim refers is the feeling of “collective effervescence,”
an intense emotional response to ritualistic interaction. Through partici-
pation in ritual, individuals feed off the fervor of other participants to cre-
ate a general enthusiasm that an individual could not attain in isolation.
The intensity of this collectively generated emotion can produce a wide of
range of thoughts and perceptions, from strident senses of nationalism
and group solidarity to, in the case of religious rituals, firm convictions of
religious devotion. For Durkheim, ritual activities produce religious faith
as individuals elicit from one another powerful feelings that later get
ascribed to some external force. In sum, Durkheim believed that social
ecstasy is misperceived by the individual as mystical experience.
Communist Party officials became increasingly concerned with reli-
gious ritual activity as religious practices persisted, even as many religious
organizations dissolved. While Soviet elites were certainly not Durk-
heimian in their philosophical worldview, they began to view ritual as a
key aspect of religious perseverance and concluded that public and pri-
vate religious rituals must be ended. Nonetheless, Communist Party lead-
ers sensed that ritualistic activity was a necessary and potentially produc-
tive aspect of human expression. So instead of attempting to eliminate all
ritual activity, they sought to replace religious rituals with Soviet ones.
In their blatant attempt to manufacture new rituals, Soviet officials
revealed certain Durkheimian assumptions concerning the substance of
rituals. Durkheim supposed that the beliefs that explain the meaning and
purpose of rituals are secondary. Specifically, religious beliefs are simply
an explanatory system that provided a framework from which the indi-
vidual describes her experience after the fact. William James noted how
religious experiences, while physiologically and emotionally very similar,
are explained in the language of the individual’s cultural environment. For
instance, Muslims will attribute their experience to Allah, while Christians
might believe that Jesus spoke to them. If beliefs about a religious experi-
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ence were transposed onto a universal feeling of social solidarity, Soviets
could retain the social and emotional element of religious practices while
replacing the symbolic and ideological elements of the ritual. Individuals
would continue to experience the emotional power of religious rituals
but reattribute their feelings to the effects of Communism.
Simply put, Communist Party leaders hoped to connect Communist
symbols and ideology to experiences of “collective effervescence.” The
end result would be a population that no longer worshiped God but
instead revered the Soviet system with religiouslike devotion. In actuality,
Soviet elites hoped to realize something that Durkheim only believed to be
true. Namely, they were going to replace the false object of ritual activity,
God, with the true object, Society. In this way, rituals would continue to
promote social solidarity but no longer under the guise of a false ideology.
Actual Communist rituals reveal the simplicity of this plan. Soviet
officials quite consciously mimicked many aspects of common religious
ceremonies and plainly replaced certain phrases and symbols with
Communist alternatives. For instance, “God” is replaced by “the prole-
tariat” in texts, and the hammer and sickle stand in for the cross as
emblems of the sacred. Soviet weddings, funerals, confirmations, bap-
tisms, festivals, and national holidays were intended to create a new
faith—a faith in Soviet Communism. This is why many scholars of the
Soviet Union observe that Soviet Communism was its own religion. But
in the minds of Communist Party leaders, Soviet rituals were the antithe-
sis of religion because they removed God from the explanatory scheme.
The Secularization Experiment tested Durkheim’s assertion that ritu-
als inspire social solidarity through a collective focus on God but, alter-
natively, do not require God. Subsequent chapters investigate the extent
to which Soviet ritual activities inspired citizens to abandon centuries-old
religious rites and traditions.
Assertion 3
Bishops and archbishops enjoy authority merely as
deputies of the temporal power.
— Leon Trotsky,
The History of the Russian Revolution
Religious institutions—churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, spiri-
tual organizations, religious schools, and religious courts—provide an
organizational structure to perpetuate religious belief and commitment.
These institutions strive to attract and retain members and maintain loy-
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alty to their religious message and mission. Individuals are committed to
religious organizations for a number of reasons. A common view of reli-
gious commitment holds that individuals are mainly socialized into a
religious community. They learn as children to attend church or partici-
pate in an accepted religious practice. Through this socialization, indi-
viduals may internalize religious ideas or simply continue religious
behavior out of habit. Alternatively, people may also accept religious
institutions out of fear of sanctions from religious authorities.
From a Marxist-Leninist perspective, religious institutions ultimately
justify current power relations and provide an otherworldly object at
which to direct individual problems and personal requests. In return,
political structures support and bolster the influence of religious institu-
tions. Marxist-Leninists viewed the institution of religion within this
mutually beneficial relationship as merely one propaganda arm of the
larger political structure. As such, they expected that religion would die
without the continued support and favoritism of the power elite.
In Russia, Marxist-Leninists argued, the Russian Orthodox Church
only legitimated czarist rule and offered little material assistance to the
population. By destroying the Russian Orthodox Church, Soviet leaders
felt they could break the cycle of religious socialization that had survived
through official state propagation. Emelian Yaroslavsky, the Soviet min-
ister of antireligious propaganda, explained, “The Party strives for the
complete dissolution of the ties between the exploiting classes and the
organizations of religious propaganda.”
11
Marxist-Leninists assumed
that without state support, religious institutions would collapse and indi-
viduals would naturally drift toward nonbelief. They also assumed that
the ideological dominance of Roman Catholicism in Lithuania, Christian
Orthodoxy in the territories around Russia, and Islam in Central Asia
would fade as the religious institutions in these regions buckled under
state regulation.
The campaign to annihilate religious institutions was massive and
quite brutal. Within a mere decade, Soviet forces had destroyed or over-
taken most of the property holdings and buildings of the dominant reli-
gions throughout the Soviet Union. In addition, Soviet officials closed
Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Islamic schools and completely shut
down the Islamic court system throughout Central Asia. Before Soviet
rule, dominant religious groups in the various regions of the Russian
empire enjoyed governmental support and protection. They ran state-
funded institutions, oversaw most cultural events, and provided national
ceremonies and political legitimation. Consequently, citizens became
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accustomed to a society in which religion was a recognized feature of
their daily experiences. Soviet rule changed this dramatically. No longer
did dominant religious institutions bask in the favoritism of political
elites; now, they were forced to fight for their very existence.
According to Trotsky’s assertion, bishops and archbishops would lose
sway without the continued support of the temporal authority. The
Secularization Experiment tested the mettle of religious organizations
across the Soviet Union, and, as we will see, some proved more resilient
than others.
Assertion 4
Religious or magical behavior or thinking must not be
set apart from the range of everyday purposive conduct,
particularly since even the ends of the religious and
magical actions are predominantly economic.
—Max Weber,
Economy and Society
In contrast to theories of religious persistence that stress the cultural, rit-
ual, and institutional socialization of individuals toward a religious
worldview, contemporary social theorists have explored the role of
rational calculations in religious decision making. While individuals are
certainly socialized into particular beliefs and worldviews, they may also
ponder ideas presented to them, weighing explanations of the world
against personal experiences and desires. Individuals may alter their
political opinions and religious beliefs as they learn more about the
world or develop different social ties through interaction with new
friends, neighbors, and coworkers. Within the boundaries of our cultural
environment, we are exploratory beings. As such, Max Weber, along
with more contemporary economic and social theorists, posited that indi-
viduals will make decisions in their own interests; this is often referred to
as the assumption of rational choice. For instance, a person is unlikely to
espouse a belief system that condemns an activity in which she is repeat-
edly engaged. While the instance of an individual directly undermining
her own goals is not impossible, it is certainly an anomaly and more suit-
ably the topic of abnormal psychology. Therefore, rational choice theo-
rists expect individuals, en masse, to behave and state beliefs in ways that
are personally advantageous.
From this perspective, individuals openly ponder the advantages to
religious behavior and belief. In cost-benefit terms, social rewards are a
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clear and common advantage to religious participation. As an active
member of a religious community, one reaps a number of valuable social
rewards—companionship, access to social networks, and social status,
to name a few. Churchgoers often find spouses, employment, and sources
of important information through their church community, have support
from other church members if they fall ill or find themselves in need of
assistance, and are generally perceived as respectable members of society.
Therefore, religious participation can be quite rewarding socially and
economically.
While social rewards might explain why individuals participate in reli-
gious organizations, they say little about religious belief. Namely, one can
participate and reap rewards without actually believing in religious ideas.
These types of religious participants are referred to as
free riders
—like
bus riders who have not bought a ticket and attempt to ride for free—
because they seek the social rewards of religious participation while
shirking true commitment to the group and the belief system. In times of
need or when religious membership becomes detrimental, free riders will
abandon their group because they have no deep investment in the ideas
or members of the group. Before Soviet rule, it is difficult to know how
many fervent religious believers existed in the regions that would make
up the Soviet Union. Most individuals were affiliated with a certain reli-
gious tradition, but because state-supported religions were culturally
ubiquitous in Russia and the surrounding areas, it is unclear whether reli-
gious identities were simply ethnic and national labels or indicative of a
deep devotion to religious concepts. In the nineteenth century, Russian
intellectuals debated the extent to which the Russian people were com-
prised mainly of religious free riders or faithful believers who would
fight and die for their convictions. In one heated debate, the author
Nikolai Gogol asserted that the Russian population was deeply spiritual
while the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky objected. Belinsky wrote
Gogol, “In your opinion, the Russian people are the most religious in the
world. This is a lie! The basis of religiousness is pietism, reverence, fear
of God. But the Russian pronounces the name of God while scratch-
ing. . . . Look closer and you will see that it is by nature a profoundly
atheist people.”
12
According to Belinsky, Russian religiosity was a mean-
ingless facade that would fall away when religious habits became social
liabilities. Community Party elites would test this idea.
The Secularization Experiment radically altered the social rewards of
religious participation. In a complete reversal of past expectations, reli-
gious believers could be denied career promotion, could be harassed at
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work or school, and, in the most extreme cases, could be imprisoned in
labor camps or psychiatric wards and sometimes executed for their faith.
Under these circumstances, religious free riders would be expected to jump
ship because religious organizations could no longer offer any benefits for
membership and social expectations would no longer urge religious par-
ticipation. Antireligious repression, at the very least, rid religious groups of
free riders. Anyone who remained openly religious in the Soviet system
demonstrated that their commitment to their faith did not depend on
social rewards. Soviets expected that few religious adherents would turn
out to be true believers once social incentives no longer existed.
To augment the harsh costs of religious commitment, Soviet society
offered social incentives to adopt the official ideology of the Soviet state
and become atheist. For this reason, individuals had many reasons to fal-
sify their religious beliefs and fake commitment to the Communist proj-
ect: to avoid discrimination, to seek favoritism, and to protect their well-
being. Ironically, while Soviet rule rid society of religious free riders, it
may have produced a population of Communist free riders. And in the
end, free riders will rob any system or group of vitality because they
always attempt to take more than they give.
Subsequent chapters probe the extent to which expressions of pre-
Soviet-era religiosity were mere facades and to which atheist identities
were embraced by social and political opportunists.
Assertion 5
Religion is concerned with the supernatural; everything
else is secondary.
—Rodney Stark and Roger Finke,
Acts of Faith
Because religious communities rely heavily on the active contribution of
members, they are extremely vulnerable to individuals who exploit group
resources. Religious organizations tend to solve this free rider problem by
placing high costs on religious membership.
13
Costs can include tithing
requirements, expectations of time commitment, and behavioral restric-
tions that may increase social stigma and social isolation from the larger
society. These kinds of costs insure that individuals are not simply
exploiting a group for personal gain; their personal sacrifices become evi-
dence of their good faith. Nevertheless, many outside observers of strict
religious groups feel that the costs of religious participation far outweigh
the benefits and question whether the faithful closely consider the costs
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involved in their religion. Why would someone give away their earthly
belongings, deny themselves certain pleasures in life, or risk their lives for
a religious group if they are calculating their self-interest? Religious
believers do these things because they
believe
that they are commanded
by some higher power.
Sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke argue that belief should be
considered an integral part of an individual’s calculations in making any
decision. If one believes she will go to hell if she does not give away her
possessions, then the idea of hell becomes a perceived cost of religious
inaction.
14
Certainly, the eternal pleasures of heaven are worth the tem-
porary pains of worldly deprivation. For this reason, Stark and Finke
indicate that compensations of the afterlife, or
otherworldly rewards,
are
perhaps more important than social rewards in making religious deci-
sions. Belief in otherworldly rewards often explains action that appears
wholly irrational; suicide bombers and religious martyrs are not neces-
sarily depressed or hopeless but are instead idealists who expect to
receive compensation in the afterlife for their earthly sacrifice. Within
this mindset, death does not appear final but is instead a doorway into a
preferable existence. In the final analysis, true religious faith profoundly
influences decision making and can lead to astonishing actions.
Soviet officials certainly understood the power of religious belief to
motivate extraordinary behavior. Yaroslavsky warned Stalin that Soviet
policy should “carefully avoid giving offense to the religious sentiments
of believers, which only leads to the strengthening of religious fanati-
cism.”
15
Even though they would offend religious believers all over the
world, Soviet officials remained conscious of the need to convert indi-
viduals from their religious faith and win the population’s ideological
loyalty.
Consequently, Communist Party leaders created a massive missionary
effort intended to spread the gospel of atheism. The League of Militant
Atheists, a propaganda arm of the Community Party, served as a kind of
a church of Communism in the 1920s and 1930s, with atheist prosely-
tizers and atheist meetinghouses standing in for clerics and churches.
The league distributed atheist newspapers, gave atheist lectures, and
preached the message of scientific atheism to anyone who would listen
(many of whom were compelled to do so). They hoped to transfer peo-
ple’s faith in God to a belief in historical materialism and scientific athe-
ism. Soviet officials felt that atheist conversion was the only way individ-
uals would abandon fanatical behavior aimed at improving one’s
standing in a nonexistent afterlife. In the language of Stark and Finke,
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atheist propagandists wanted to convince the Soviet population that oth-
erworldly rewards were illusory.
The way to replace religion was clear. Soviet rituals mimicked religious
rites, Soviet theoretical texts were treated like sacred scripture, and Soviet
leaders were hailed as saintlike and deserving of holy reverence. Did
Soviet leaders also attempt to offer individuals a Communist alternative
to otherworldly rewards? Perhaps the promise of Communism was itself
an otherworldly reward. A society devoid of injustice, inequality, or alien-
ation sounds similar to many descriptions of heaven. The doctrine of his-
torical materialism explained that this earthly paradise was inevitable
but could only be achieved with the eradication of all religion. Therefore,
a high cost of the Communist dream was the relinquishing of heavenly
dreams—trading one otherworldly reward for another.
But heavenly dreams offer something that Communism could not:
Religious believers were to experience heaven for themselves, while faith-
ful Communists could only revel in the
thought
that their dreams would
be attained by some future generation. Soviet leaders attempted to
resolve this obvious problem in two ways. First, they promised that the
Communist ideal was within reach and therefore a likely reward in the
near future. This strategy was empirically problematic because Soviet cit-
izens continued to encounter social problems that were, in theory, near-
ing their end. Second, Soviet officials maintained that future generations
would always remember the pioneers in the struggle against oppression;
in this way, the faithful would live forever in the collective memory of
humanity at the “end of history.” In tandem with this effort was a bizarre
reconceptualization of time in which linear conceptions of time were
eschewed in favor of a more “sacred” or “charismatic,” to quote the
political theorist Stephen Hanson, sense of Soviet time.
16
But promises of
remembrance and new conceptions of earthly time fall short of an eternal
life in heaven surrounded by one’s friends and loved ones. Nevertheless,
an attempt was made to convince Soviet citizens that their personal sac-
rifices would not go unrewarded. And in many instances, committed
Communists laid down their lives for the dream of a Soviet utopia.
The importance of otherworldly rewards becomes central to under-
standing the inability of Soviet officials to convert individuals to scientific
atheism. One wonders what might draw individuals to hold atheist
beliefs. The idea that the supernatural is a sham appears to offer no com-
fort or delight. But by tying atheism to historical materialism and scien-
tific progress, Soviet rulers hoped to demonstrate that atheism had its
own benefits. In the end, they argued that atheism was about liberation
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from false belief and salvation from earthly oppression. The attractive-
ness of “this-worldly” salvation reveals much about the primary impor-
tance of the supernatural in religion.
The desire for salvation is difficult to measure. Nevertheless, the Secu-
larization Experiment pitted religious and Communist salvation against
one another, and the following chapters investigate the extent to which
the Soviet population favored one over the other.
Assertion 6
Market forces constrain churches just as they constrain
secular firms.
—Adam Smith,
An Inquiry into the Nature
and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
As a result of their strategies to secularize society, Soviet leaders dramat-
ically altered the composition of religious markets across the Soviet
Union.
Religious market
is a phrase used to describe all the religious
activity going on in any society comprised mainly of one or more orga-
nizations seeking to attract or maintain adherents.
17
The market analogy
is applied to religion because it is expected that religious groups will
compete for members. Few religious groups want members to divide
their time and commitment between multiple groups; therefore, groups
tend to stress exclusive commitment. Because there are a finite number of
people, religious groups must contend for adherents just like sellers of
wares compete for buyers in a market setting. The winners are religious
groups that can attract and sustain members.
Religious markets, like economic markets, are greatly influenced by
how much the state controls them. The Soviet economy was a state-
controlled economy; likewise, Soviet religious culture was state con-
trolled. When the Bolsheviks initially took power, they dramatically
altered the control of existing religious markets. Before the Russian
Revolution, Russians were mostly Orthodox, Lithuanians were mostly
Roman Catholic, and Uzbeks were mostly Muslim. When a population is
overwhelmingly affiliated with one religious tradition, this group has a
religious monopoly:
they have successfully cornered the religious market.
While large numbers of Jews, Old Believers, and Sufis populated the var-
ious regions of the Soviet empire, the Russian Orthodox Church, the
Lithuanian Catholic Church, and Islam all held monopoly control of
their respective republics.
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Social theorists posit that religious monopolies can only exist when a
religious group is favored by the state. In other words, the government
must actively suppress religious groups that hope to compete with a
favored religion for that religion to maintain its dominance. Studies of
religious deregulation in Europe, Latin America, and the United States
show that reductions in state regulatory policies will lead to the intro-
duction of new religious doctrines and the growth of minority religions.
18
Without religious regulation or in circumstances of complete religious
freedom, a religious market will be more pluralistic because it allows for
the promotion of multiple religious doctrines.
19
Up until the Secularization Experiment, there was no test of what
happens to monopoly religions that encounter antireligious policies. One
prediction is that strong opposition to atheism would appear in regions
with a historically dominant majority religion. Wouldn’t members of a
dominant church rally in large numbers to either secure some religious
freedom or at least successfully withstand religious repression once the
state enacted antireligious policies? This actually seems unlikely when
one considers that religious monopolies require the support of a state to
sustain their dominance. In fact, while the majority of the population
may be affiliated with a monopoly religion, they tend to rarely partici-
pate in religious activities.
20
This means that although monopoly
churches enjoy high membership rates, members tend to have low levels
of commitment. Therefore, uncommitted members of a dominant church
may easily acquiesce to atheistic policies because they are unwilling to
risk personal harm for a religion that they very rarely practice. In other
words, most members of a religious monopoly should turn out to be free
riders.
Nevertheless, individuals may still retain a religious perspective of the
world, even if they are attached halfheartedly to the dominant religious
tradition of their region. Namely, it is one thing to be a “Christmas
Catholic”—someone who only attends church on special occasions—
and quite another to be a convinced atheist. Therefore, Soviet leaders
wanted to do more than just drive individuals away from their religious
traditions; they wanted to drive the population
toward
something. Their
systematic attempts to convert individuals to atheism introduced some-
thing unique into the religious market: an atheist competitor!
Atheism has probably existed as long as there have been religious
worldviews. But never before had atheism been promoted so systemati-
cally and on such a large scale. Practically overnight, formerly accepted,
mainstream religious perspectives became viewed officially as radical and
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antiestablishment. With state support, institutional promotion, the full
force of the media, and atheist proselytizers, the doctrine of scientific
atheism became the new ideological monopoly. While Soviets criticized
the religious monopolies of the past, they actually replicated czarist
attempts to establish devotion and loyalty from the top down.
Soviets understood conversion in terms consistent with the story of
Russia’s Christianization in 988. Legend has it that Prince Vladimir sent
envoys out to investigate the world’s religions. After carefully considering
their reports, Vladimir chose Greek Orthodoxy as the state religion, and
his decree marked the conversion of Russia to Christianity. Nearly one
thousand years later, Soviet leaders would decree atheism the state ideol-
ogy to mark the secularization of society.
In actuality, Christian ideas mixed with indigenous pagan beliefs over
many centuries to result in the Russian Orthodox tradition we know
today. While Vladimir certainly played a key role in altering the religious
landscape of his kingdom by creating a state-supported religion, the
Christianization of Russia was a slow and arduous process that ulti-
mately depended on the success of thousands of Christian messengers
over hundreds of years. Scientific atheists attempted to absorb and alter
many Christian rituals in ways similar to how early Christians infused
pagan practices with Christian messages. Nevertheless, it remained to be
seen if scientific atheism could inspire a popular movement that would
ultimately spread the faith of Communism. Perhaps Soviets would
require a thousand years to secularize the population. But Soviet leaders
had high expectations and, in the end, mistakenly believed that if
Vladimir could Christianize Russia overnight, they could secularize in
similar fashion.
Soviet officials assumed the success of the Secularization Experiment
depended on the elimination of religious monopolies. Ironically, this goal
was celebrated by religious sects throughout the Soviet Union. These
groups had previously suffered intense religious repression under policies
that favored dominant religious monopolies. Therefore, many religious
sects viewed the Soviet assault on the Russian Orthodox Church and
other dominant groups as an overdue comeuppance. In fact, as Soviet
leaders concentrated their antireligious policies on dominant religions,
many of these formerly marginalized religious groups formed new bonds
with the Soviet population. As a result, some small religious groups actu-
ally increased in size under Communism. In the end, the Secularization
Experiment would have a lasting impact on levels of religious pluralism.
Religious pluralism’s effect on religious vitality is a much-debated
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topic in the social sciences.
21
The market model of religion holds that reli-
gious pluralism increases religiosity because, as in any market, competi-
tion is good for business. The fall of the Soviet Union provides a perfect
test case for this idea. Before Soviet rule, dominant religious groups
enjoyed state favoritism, and during the Soviet era, scientific atheism
became the new ideological monopoly. The collapse of Soviet Com-
munism left a religious market with no clear monopoly.
Which religious groups succeeded and which failed in the post-
Communist world reveals much about the role of religious competition
and the importance of state regulation in the composition and vitality of
religious markets. Using the market analogy, the Secularization Experi-
ment offers something rarely observed—a marginal philosophical tradi-
tion that achieved massive state support almost overnight and subse-
quently lost its political and social advantages just as quickly. The effects
of this bizarre phenomenon greatly inform our understanding of how
changing church-state relationships alters beliefs in a relatively short span
of time.
Making Dreams a Reality
Early Bolsheviks certainly had their work cut out for them. Not only
were their revolutionary dreams big, they had no prior examples of suc-
cessful Communist revolutions from which to model their plans.
Consequently, early revolutionaries relied on theory. Unlike natural sci-
entists, it is rare that a social theorist gets the opportunity to implement
his or her hypotheses to test how they will work in the environment
studied. I expect this is a welcome blessing for most of the population.
But in the Soviet Union’s case, a social experiment was conducted on the
most massive scale imaginable. The religious arm of this experiment was
guided by a series of distinct hypotheses concerning the function, struc-
ture, and purpose of religion and also by some innovative responses to
changing events.
Borrowing from the language of the economics, the multiple theoreti-
cal assertions tested by the Secularization Experiment can be loosely
grouped into
demand-side
and
supply-side hypotheses.
Demand-side
hypotheses of religious growth and decline focus on how the elements of
religion that are attractive to people change over time. For instance, if
one hypothesizes that individuals seek out religious meaning and expla-
nation in times of personal crisis, she would expect that natural disasters
and social upheavals would send large portions of the population run-
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ning to seek guidance from religious organizations. In contrast, supply-
side hypotheses of religious growth and decline focus on how the supply
of religious goods changes over time. A popular supply-side assertion is
the controversial religious pluralism hypothesis developed by Stark and
Finke that states, “To the degree that religious economies are unregulated
and competitive, overall levels of religious commitment will be high.”
22
This hypothesis indicates that religiosity changes to the extent that
churches are allowed to and attempt to actively recruit new members. In
simple terms, demand-side explanations analyze why individuals seek
out religion, and supply-side explanations study how churches seek out
members.
Contemporary theorists of religion tend to pit these two explanatory
perspectives against one another. But Soviet officials experimented with
both supply-side and demand-side models of religious change. At first,
the Soviet regime assumed that religiosity was wholly a product of reli-
gious supply. Their altering of church-state relationships and attempts to
shut down religious institutions represent tactics to cut off religious sup-
ply. The successes and failures of this supply-side strategy are investigated
in chapter 4, “Shutting Off Religious Supply.”
But Soviet theorists also hypothesized that the demand for religion
was the product of economic woes, simple ignorance, and an innate need
for ritual expression. The campaign to modernize and reeducate the
Soviet population and provide them with atheist rituals was a demand-
side strategy to redirect what theorists posited were the sources of reli-
gious need. The successes and failures of this strategy are investigated in
chapter 5, “Hunting for Religious Demand.”
Finally, chapter 7 revisits the six assertions presented above to clarify
how findings from the Soviet Secularization Experiment support or
undermine these basic theoretical perspectives. Ultimately, the secular-
ization dreams of the early Bolsheviks never became a reality, but their
attempts to make their dreams real drastically altered the religious lives
of Soviet citizens and have a lasting influence across the post-Soviet
regions of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. And their application of so-
cial theories of religion still have much to teach theorists and researchers
today.
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