Marxist–Leninist atheism

The membership booklet of the League of Militant Atheists in the Soviet Union

In the philosophy of Marxism, Marxist–Leninist atheism (also known as Marxist–Leninist scientific atheism) is the irreligious and anti-clerical element of Marxism–Leninism, the official state ideology of the Soviet Union.[1] Based upon a dialectical-materialist understanding of humanity's place in nature, Marxist–Leninist atheism proposes that religion is the opium of the people, meant to promote a person's passive acceptance of his and her poverty and exploitation as the normal way of human life on Earth in the hope of a spiritual reward after death. Thus, Marxism–Leninism advocates atheism, rather than belief in religion.[2][3][4]

To support those premises, Marxist–Leninist atheism explains the origin of religion and explains methods for the scientific criticism of religion.[5] The philosophic roots of materialist atheism are in the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and of Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924).[6] Unlike Soviet Marxism, other varieties of Marxism do not feature an antireligious philosophy, such as the liberation theology developed by Latin American Marxists.[7]

Philosophical bases

Ludwig Feuerbach

Ludwig Feuerbach separated philosophy from religion to allow philosophers the freedom to interpret the material reality of nature

In training as a philosopher in the early 19th century, Karl Marx participated in debates about the philosophy of religion, specifically about the interpretations presented in Hegelianism. In those debates, the Hegelians considered philosophy an intellectual enterprise in service to the insights of Christian religious comprehension, which Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had elaborately rationalized in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Although critical of contemporary religion as a 19th-century intellectual, Hegel pursued the ontology and the epistemology of Christianity, an interest compatible with Christian theological explanations of the questions of being and of existence, which he clarified, systematized and justified in his philosophy.[8]

After his death in 1831, Hegel's philosophy was debated by the Young Hegelians and the materialist atheists—such as Ludwig Feuerbach—who rejected all religious philosophy as a way of running the world. Marx sided with the materialist philosophers. Feuerbach separated philosophy from religion to grant intellectual autonomy to philosophers in their interpretations of material reality; objected to Hegel’s religion-based philosophy of spirit in order to critically attack the basic concepts of theology; and redirected philosophy from the heavens to the Earth, to the subjects of human dignity and the meaning of life, of morality and the purpose of existence.[9] He concluded that humanity created deities as reflections of the human Self.[10] In The Essence of Christianity (1841), Feurbach said the following about the separateness of man and God:

[...] But the idea of deity coincides with the idea of humanity. All divine attributes, all the attributes which make God God, are attributes of the [human] species — attributes which in the individual [person] are limited, but the limits of which are abolished in the essence of the species, and even in its existence, in so far as it has its complete existence only in all men taken together.[11]

As a modern philosopher, Feuerbach thought that religion exercised power over the human mind through "the promotion of fear from the mystical forces of the Heaven"[12] and with "an intensive hatred of the old God" said that houses of worship should be systematically destroyed and religious institutions eradicated.[13] Experienced in that praxis of materialist philosophy, thought and action, Marx became a radical philosopher.[14][15]

Karl Marx

Karl Marx synthesized anti-religious philosophy with dialectical materialism to show that religion is a social construct used for social control by the ruling class of a society

As a materialist philosopher, Marx rejected religious philosophy and its cultural contributions as detrimental to human progress and instead accepted human autonomy from supernatural authority as an axiomatic truth about the real world of 19th-century industrial Europe.[16] He said that the churches had invented religion to justify the painful economic oppression lived by working people in a socially stratified industrial society.[17] Thus, religion is the drug for escaping the real world. In A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx said:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering, and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heart-less world, and the soul of soul-less conditions. It [religion] is the opium of the people.[18]

According to Marx, atheist philosophy liberated men and women from suppressing their innate potential as human beings and allowed people to intellectually understand that they possess human agency and that they are masters of their reality because the earthly authority of supernatural deities is not real. Marx opposed religion's function of social atomization—anomie and alienation—of psychologically dividing humans from themselves as individual men and women and from each other as a community. Therefore, the authority of religious ideology must be removed from the public realm, from the law, customs and traditions with which men govern society. In On the Jewish Question, Marx said:

The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen, is neither a deception directed against citizenhood, nor is it a circumvention of political emancipation, it is political emancipation itself, the political method of emancipating oneself from religion. Of course, in periods when the political state, as such, is born violently out of civil society, when political liberation is the form in which men strive to achieve their liberation, the state can and must go as far as the abolition of religion, the destruction of religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine.

At times of special self-confidence, political life seeks to suppress its prerequisite, civil society, and the elements composing this society, and to constitute itself as the real species-life of man, devoid of contradictions. But, it can achieve this only by coming into violent contradiction with its own conditions of life, only by declaring the revolution to be permanent, and, therefore, the political drama necessarily ends with the re-establishment of religion, private property, and all elements of civil society, just as war ends with peace.[19]

Therefore, religion was the product of objective material conditions and that economic systems, such as capitalism, affected the material conditions of society. That by abolishing systems of unequal social class and political economy, the state and religion would wither away consequent to the establishment of a communist society, which featured no formal state apparatus and no system of social classes. In A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843), Marx said:

The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of the people, is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.[20]

In that way, Marx transformed Feuerbach’s anti-religious philosophy into political praxis and into a philosophic basis of his ideology. In the 1844 manuscripts, Marx said: "Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is, at first, far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction";[21] and refined the atheism of Feuerbach into a considered critique of the material (socio-economic) conditions responsible for the invention of religion. In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx said said the following about the social artifice of religious sentiment:

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself, and [then] establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself, be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then. itself, be destroyed in theory and in practice. Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is, itself, a social product, and that the abstract individual [person] whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.[22]

The humanist philosophy of dialectical materialism proposed that humanity naturally resulted from the interplay of material forces (earth, wind and fire) in the physical world. Marx identified religion's origin as psychological solace for the exploited working classes living the subsistence-wage reality of industrial society. That despite religion's working-class origin, the clergy allowed the ruling class to control religious sentiment (the praxis of religion), which grants control of all society—the middle class, the working class and the proletariat, with Christian slaves hoping for a rewarding after-life. In The German Ideology, Marx said the following about the psychology of religious faith:

It is self-evident, moreover, that “spectres”, “bonds”, “the higher being”, “concept”, [and] “scruple”, are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception, apparently, of the isolated individual [person], the image of very empirical fetters and limitations, within which the mode of production of life, and the form of [social] intercourse coupled with it, move.[23]

The philosophy of Marxist–Leninist atheism interprets the social degeneration of organized religion—from psychological-solace to social-control—to justify the revolutionary abolition of an official state religion and its replacement with atheism. Thus, the Marxist–Leninist state has no official religion.[24]

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels identified religion as a person's need for a fantastic spiritual reflection of the self, by which to have some control over life and reality

In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Ideology (1846) and in the Anti-Dühring (1878), Friedrich Engels addressed contemporary social problems with critiques of the idealistic worldview, especially religious interpretations of the material reality of the world. Engels proposed that religion is a fantasy about supernatural powers controlling and determining Humanity's material poverty and dehumanizing moral squalor since early in human history; yet that such a lack of human control over human existence would end with the abolition of religion. That by way of theism, a people's need to believe in a deity, as a spiritual reflection of the self, religion would gradually disappear. In the Anti-Dühring, Engels said:

[...] and when this act has been accomplished, when society, by taking possession of all means of production, and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself, and all its members, from the bondage in which they are now held, by these means of production, which they, themselves, have produced, but which confront them as an irresistible alien force, when, therefore, man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes — only then will the last alien force, which is still reflected in religion, vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.[25]

Engels considered religion as a false consciousness incompatible with communist philosophy and urged the communist parties of the First International to advocate atheist politics in their home countries; and recommended scientific education as a means to overcome the mysticism and superstitions of people who required a religious explanation of the real world.[26] In light of the scientific progress of the Industrial Revolution, the speculative philosophy of theology became obsolete in determining a place for every person in society. In the Anti-Dühring, Engels said:

The real unity of the world consists in its materiality, and this is proved, not by a few juggled phrases, but by a long and wearisome development of philosophy and natural science.[27]

By scientific advances, socio-economic and cultural progress required that materialism become a science rather than remain a philosophy apart from the sciences. In the "Negation of a Negation" section of the Anti-Dühring, Engels said:

This modern materialism, the negation of the negation, is not the mere re-establishment of the old, but adds to the permanent foundations of this old materialism the whole thought-content of two thousand years of development of philosophy and natural science, as well as of the history of these two thousand years. It [materialism] is no longer a philosophy at all, but simply a world outlook, which has to establish its validity and be applied, not in a science of sciences, standing apart, but in the real sciences. Philosophy is therefore sublated here, that is, “both overcome and preserved”; overcome as regards its form, and preserved as regards its real content.[28]

Vladimir Lenin

The painting Bolshevik by Boris Kustodiev depicts a Bolshevik revolutionary, bearing the red flag, glaring at an Eastern Orthodox church.

As a revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin said that a true communist would always promote atheism and combat religion[13] because it is the psychological opiate that robs people of their human agency, of their volition, as men and women, to control their own reality.[29] To refute the political legitimacy of religion, Lenin adapted the atheism of Marx and Engels to the Russian Empire.[13] In "Socialism and Religion", Lenin said the following about the social-control function of religious sentiment:

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 [the] 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.[30]

Since the social ideology of the Eastern Orthodox Church supported the Tsarist monarchy, voiding the credibility of religion would void the political legitimacy of the Tsar as the Russian head of state. In practice, scientific atheism is a means of class struggle for voiding the authority of the ruling class who lived from the labours of the working class and the proletariat because all intellectual activity was by and for the maintenance of class interests. Therefore, theoretical debates about supernatural control of human affairs on Earth made sense only by ignoring the poverty lived by the majority of Russia.[31] In the event, scientific atheism became a philosophic basis of Marxism–Leninism, the ideology of the Communist Party in Russia, unlike the milder irreligion and anti-religion of non-Russian communist parties.[32]

To establish a socialist state in Russia, Lenin advocated the dissemination of scientific atheism as an “urgent necessity” for the Communist Party;[13] and dismissed Anatoly Lunacharsky's proposal that the Bolsheviks take advantage of God-Building (derived from Feurbach's "religion of humanity") which "cultivated in the masses emotion, moral values, [and] desire" and so include those religious people to the revolution.[13] Politically, Lenin "appealed to militant atheism as a criterion for the sincerity of Marxist commitments, as a testing principle",[13] yet requiring atheism of possible revolutionaries alienated "some of the sympathetic, leftist-minded, yet religious [and] believing intellectuals, workers or peasants".[13] Hence, a true communist was atheist.[33]

Soviet Union

In 1931, Joseph Stalin ordered the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow

The pragmatic policies of Lenin and the Communist Party indicated that religion was to be tolerated and suppressed as required by political conditions, yet there remained the ideal of an atheist society without an official state religion.[34][35][36] Lenin did not seek to replace religion with atheism as an end in itself, but he needed to communicate the worldview of materialism to the mass population of Russia:

Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists and Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must combat religion — that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: "We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way. The combating of religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching, and it must not be reduced to such preaching. It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion."[29]

The establishment of a socialist society in Russia required changes in the socio-political consciousness of the people. Thus, intellectually transcending religion, mysticism and the supernatural was a requirement for membership to the Communist Party.[37][38] For Lenin, the true socialist is a revolutionary always combating religion and religious sentiment as enemies of reason, science, and socio-economic progress.[39]

The Bolshevik government's anti-religion campaigns featured propaganda, anti-religious legislation, secular universal-education, anti-religious discrimination, political harassment, continual arrests and violence.[40] Initially, the Bolsheviks expected that religion would wither away with the establishment of socialism, hence after the October Revolution they tolerated most religions, except for the Eastern Orthodox Church who supported Tsarist autocracy. Yet by the late 1920s, when religion had not withered away, the Bolshevik government began anti-religion campaigns (1928–1941)[41] that persecuted "bishops, priests, and lay believers" of all Christian denominations and had them "arrested, shot, and sent to labour camps".[42] In the east, Buddhist Lamaist priests "were rounded up in Mongolia, by the NKVD in concert with its local affiliate, executed on the spot or shipped off to the Soviet Union to be shot or die at hard labor in the mushrooming GULAG system" of labour camps;[43] and by 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, 40,000 churches and 25,000 mosques had been closed and converted into schools, cinemas and clubs, warehouses and grain stores, or museums of scientific atheism.[44]

In 1959, the academic course Fundamentals of Scientific Atheism (Osnovy nauchnogo ateizma) was "introduced into the curriculum of all higher educational institutions" in the Soviet Union. In 1964, it was made compulsory for all pupils after a "paucity of student response".[45]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Institute of Scientific Atheism of the Academy of Social Sciences (1981). Questions of Scientific Atheism: “Marxist–Leninist atheism, with all its content is directed to the development of the abilities of the individual [person], religion deprives a person of his [and her] own “I”, doubles consciousness, creates conditions for him. . . . “
  2. ↑ Kruglov, Anatoly Agapeevich. (Belarus, 1983). Fundamentals of Scientific Atheism: “The highest form is Marxist–Leninist atheism. * It relies on a materialistic understanding, not only of Nature (which was typical of pre–Marxist atheism) but also of society. . . .
  3. ↑ Институт научного атеизма (Академия общественных наук) (1981). "Вопросы научного атеизма" (in Russian). Изд-во "Мысл". марксистско-ленинский атеизм всем своим содержанием «аправлен на развитие способностей личности. Религия лишает человека его собственного «я», раздваивает сознание, создает для него условия ... Missing or empty |url= (help)
  4. ↑ In Novaya Zhizn No. 28, 3 December 1905, Marxists Internet Archive, Lenin said that: “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 . . . 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. . . . 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.” Marxists Internet Archive
  5. ↑ Thrower, James (1983). Marxist-Leninist "scientific Atheism" and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the USSR. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 9789027930606. As an integral part of the Marxist–Leninist world-view, ‘scientific atheism’ is grounded in the view of the world and of Man enshrined in dialectical [materialism] and historical materialism: The study of scientific atheism brings to light an integral part of the Marxist–Leninist world-view. Being a philosophical science, scientific atheism emanates from the basic tenets of dialectical and historical materialism, both in explaining the origin of religion, and its scientific criticism of [religion]. (ibid., p. 272.)
  6. ↑ Slovak Studies, Volume 21. The Slovak Institute in North America. p. 231. "The origin of Marxist–Leninist atheism, as understood in the USSR, is linked with the development of the German philosophy of Hegel and Feuerbach."
  7. ↑ Richard L. Rubenstein, John K. Roth (1988). The Politics of Latin American Liberation Theology. Washington Institute Press. ISBN 978-0-88702-040-7. There were, however, Marxist voices that pointed out the disadvantages of such antireligious policies.
  8. ↑ Dimitry V. Pospielovsky. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, pp. 9–10.
  9. ↑ Feuerbach, Ludwig. Essence of Christianity, New York: Harper Torch Books, 1957. pp. 13–14.
  10. ↑ Feuerbach, Ludwig. Essence of Christianity, New York: Harper Torch Books, 1957. p. 152.
  11. ↑ Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity, Chapter 16
  12. ↑ Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist–Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti–Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 11. “. . . religious commitments should be intellectually and emotionally destroyed. . . . The catharsis of an intensive hatred towards the old God. . . . All previous religious institutions should be ruthlessly eradicated from the face of the Earth and from the memory of coming generations, so that they could never regain power over people's minds through deception and the promotion of fear from the mystical forces of the Heaven.”
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Pospielovsky, Dimitry V (29 September 1987). History Of Marxist-Leninist Atheism And Soviet Antireligious: A History Of Soviet Atheism In Theory And Practice And The Believer. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 10–11. ISBN 9781349188383. ... old churches as Houses of the Lord should be demolished without any regret or mercy. As a materialist he believed that religious 'deceptions' were not worthy of any compromise or tolerance. They had to be destroyed. ... Feurbach insisted that the liberation of intrinsic human dignity from the reign of illusory images by the human mind in the form of religious beliefs could be achieved only if traditional faith as mercilessly attacked by a more decent and humanizing intellectual system. Religious commitments should be intellectually and emotionally destroyed by the catharsis of an intensive hatred of the old God. All previous religious institutions should be ruthlessly eradicated from the face of the earth and from the memory of coming generations, so that they could never regain power over people's minds through deception and the promotion of fear from the mystical forces of the Heavens. At this point young Marx was completely fascinated by Feuerbach's open rebellion against the powerful tradition of Christianity unconditionally as an intellectual revelation.
  14. ↑ Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist–Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti–Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 13. “It was obvious at this point that reading Feuerhach was not the only source of inspiration for [Karl] Marx’s atheism. The fascination with Feuerbach’s war against Christianity was, for young Marx, nothing more than an expression of his own readiness to pursue, in an anti-religious struggle, all the social and political extremes that materialistic determination required in principle. Yet, as David Aikman, in his most profound and erudite study of Marx and Marxism, notes, the clue to Marx’s passionate and violent atheism, or rather [his] anti-theism, cannot be found in an intellectual tradition, alone. He traces Marx’s anti-theism to the young Marx’s preoccupation with the Promethean cult of ‘Satan as a destroyer’.
  15. ↑ Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist–Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti–Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 11. “At this point young Marx was completely fascinated by Feuerbach’s ‘humanistic zest’, and he adopted Feuerbach’s open rebellion against the powerful tradition of Christianity, unconditionally, as an intellectual revelation. Very early in his career, Marx bought the seductive idea that the higher goals of humanity would justify any radicalism, not only the intellectual kind but the social and political as well.”
  16. ↑ Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol. 1: A History of Marxist–Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti–Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 12. “Obviously Marx began his own theory of reality with an incomplete intellectual disdain for everything that religious thought, represented, theoretically, practically or emotionally. The cultural contributions of religion over the centuries were dismissed as unimportant and irrelevant to the well-being of the human mind."
  17. ↑ Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist–Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti–Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) pg 12. "The cultural contributions of religion over the centuries were dismissed as unimportant and irrelevant to the well-being of the human mind."
  18. ↑ Marx, K. 1976. Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Collected Works, vol. 3. New York.
  19. ↑ Karl Marx. "On the Jewish Question".
  20. ↑ Karl Marx. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction, December 1843 – January 1844, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 7 and 10 February 1844, found at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
  21. ↑ Karl Marx. Private Property and Communism, found at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm
  22. ↑ Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, http://marx.eserver.org/1845-feuerbach.theses.txt
  23. ↑ Marx, The German Ideology, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
  24. ↑ Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist–Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti–Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 23. “It [religion] had been taken over, however, by the ruling classes, says Marx, and gradually [it was] turned into a tool for the intellectual and emotional control of the masses. Marx insists on perceiving the history of Christianity as an enterprise for the preservation of the status quo, as an elaborate. . . .”
  25. ↑ Anti-Dühring, Friedrich Engels, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch27.htm
  26. ↑ Pospielovsky. Dimitry V. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist–Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti–Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) pp. 16–17.
  27. ↑ Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/index.htm
  28. ↑ Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, 1,13, Negation of a Negation, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/index.htm
  29. 1 2 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion“. Proletary, No. 45, 13 May 1909. At: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm
  30. ↑ Lenin, V.I., “Socialism and Religion”, at
  31. ↑ Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist–Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti–Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987), pp. 18–19.
  32. ↑ Dimitry V. Pospielovsky. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 18–19.
  33. ↑ Curtiss, John Shelton (1965). Essays in Russian and Soviet History. Brill Academic Publishers. p. 173.
  34. ↑ Simon, Gerhard. Church, State, and Opposition in the U.S.S.R., University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles (1974) p. 64. “The political situation of the Russian Orthodox Church, and of all other religious groups, in the Soviet Union is governed by two principles, which are logically contradictory. On the one hand, the Soviet Constitution of 5 December 1936, Article 124, guarantees ‘freedom to hold religious services’. On the other hand, the Communist Party has never made any secret of the fact, either before or after 1917, that it regards ‘militant atheism’ as an integral part of its ideology, and will regard ‘religion as by no means a private matter’. It therefore uses ‘the means of ideological influence to educate people in the spirit of scientific materialism and to overcome religious prejudices. . . .’ Thus, it is the goal of the C.P.S.U. and thereby also of the Soviet state, for which it is, after all, the ‘guiding cell’, gradually to liquidate the religious communities.”
  35. ↑ Pospielovsky, Dimitry V. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol. 1: A History of Marxist–Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti–Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 34.
  36. ↑ Thrower, James. Marxist–Leninist ‘Scientific Atheism’ and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the U. S. S. R., Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin (1983) p. 118. “Many of the previous — and often tactical — restraints upon the [Communist] Party’s anti-religious stance disappeared, and, as time went by, the distinction, which Lenin had earlier drawn, between the attitude of the Party and the attitude of the State toward religion, became meaningless as the structures of the Party and the structures of the State increasingly began to coincide. Whilst the original constitution of the Russian Federal Republic guaranteed freedom of conscience, and included the right to both religious and anti-religious propaganda, this, in reality, meant freedom from religion — as was evidence when the decree proclaiming the new constitution forbade all private religious instruction for children under the age of eighteen, and when, shortly afterwards, Lenin ordered all religious literature, which had been previously published — along with all pornographic literature, to be destroyed. Eventually — in the Stalin constitution of 1936 — the provision for religious propaganda, other than religious worship, was withdrawn.”
  37. ↑ Hyde, Douglas Arnold. Communism Today, University of Notre Dame Press, South Bend (1973) p. 74 “The conscious rejection of religion is necessary in order for communism to be established.”
  38. ↑ Dimitry V. Pospielovsky. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol. 1: A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 8.
  39. ↑ Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, “On the Significance of Militant Materialism”, 12 March 1922. Found at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm
  40. ↑ De James Thrower (1983). Marxist-Leninist Scientific Atheism and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the USSR. Walter de Gruyter. p. 135. ISBN 978-90-279-3060-6.
  41. ↑ Ramet, Sabrina Petra, Ed., Religious Policy in the Soviet Union. Cambridge University Press (1993). p. 4.
  42. ↑ Ramet, Sabrina (10 November 2005). "Religious Policy in the Soviet Union". University of Cambridge. Missing or empty |url= (help)
  43. ↑ George Ginsburgs, William B. Simons (1994). Law in Eastern Europe. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. p. 12. Just as outrageous was the conduct of the NKVD abroad on those occasions where it was afforded the opportunity to enlarge the geographical scope of its work. Thousands of political suspects and Lamaist priests were rounded up in Mongolia by the NKVD in concert with its local affiliate, executed on the spot or shipped off to the Soviet Union to be shot or die at hard labor in the mushrooming GULAG system.
  44. ↑ Todd, Allan; Waller, Sally (19 May 2011). History for the IB Diploma: Origins and Development of Authoritarian and Single Party States. Cambridge University Press. p. 53. ISBN 9780521189347. By the time of the Nazi invasion in 1941, nearly 40,000 Christian churches and 25,000 Muslims mosques had been closed down and converted into schools, cinemas, clubs, warehouses and grain stores, or Museums of Scientific Atheism.
  45. ↑ Thrower, James (1983). Marxist-Leninist "scientific Atheism" and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the USSR. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 9789027930606. In 1959, a new course, entitled Osnovy nauchnogo ateizma (Fundamentals of Scientific Atheism) was introduced into the curriculum of all higher educational institutions, including universities. The course was originally voluntary, but owing to the paucity of student response it has, from 1964, been compulsory for all students.

Further reading

  • Husband, William. "Godless communists": atheism and society in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932 Northern Illinois University Press. 2002. ISBN 0-87580-595-7.
  • Marsh, Christopher. Religion and the State in Russia and China: Suppression, Survival, and Revival. Continuum International Publishing Group. 2011. ISBN 1-4411-1247-2.
  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. A History of Marxist–Leninist atheism and Soviet antireligious policies. Macmillan. 1987. ISBN 0-333-42326-7.
  • Thrower, James. Marxist–Leninist scientific atheism and the study of religion and atheism in the USSR. Walter de Gruyter. 1983. ISBN 90-279-3060-0.

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