“The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing
his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel”
-Adolf Hitler1
The Topics Covered in This Essay Are As Follows:
Atheist and Darwinist Communists
Subsections Are As Follows:
Of Vladimir LeninOf Joseph Stalin
Of Frederick Engles, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, et al
Atheist and Darwinist Communists
We have seen that Richard Dawkins argues that when individual atheists commit atrocious acts they are not doing so in the name of atheism. We will now see that this is not the case. Of course, the simple retort is that even if they did claim that they were doing it in the name of atheism they still were not committing those acts motivated by atheism because atheism is merely non-theism. However, the fact is that there are atheists who disagree, as we shall see, and do claim to do that which they do in the name of, and motivated by, atheism. This is because what atheism is turns out to be up for interpretation. There are various sects of atheism and there are even some that claim that the others are wrong. In reality, there are as many versions of atheism as there are individual atheists. Each, in turn, decides what atheism is for themselves and fills the void left by God with something of their choosing. Atheism is not merely a lack of belief, it is a blank canvas upon which individuals pain worldviews of their choosing.
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, “Men Have Forgotten God” – The Templeton Address
“It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot…
But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells–they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It is true that millions of our countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but, as is always the case in times of persecution and suffering, the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity…
The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system…
Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism…
Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society…
All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain.”
Of Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), the first leader of the USSR who modified Marxist doctrine as a Communist theoretician:
“Social-Democracy bases its whole world-outlook on scientific socialism, i. e., Marxism. The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism…a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion. Let us recall that the whole of Engels’s Anti-DD&#bc;hring, which Marx read in manuscript, is an indictment of the materialist and atheist DD&#bc;hring for not being a consistent materialist and for leaving loopholes for religion and religious philosophy. Let us recall that in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels reproaches Feuerbach for combating religion not in order to destroy it, but in order to renovate it, to invent a new, “exalted” religion, and so forth. Religion is the opium of the people-this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion…At the same time Engels frequently condemned the efforts of people who desired…to introduce into the programme of the workers’ party an explicit proclamation of atheism, in the sense of declaring war on religion…[Engels considered] vociferous proclamation of war on religion a piece of stupidity, and stated that such a declaration of war was the best way to revive interest in religion and to prevent it from really dying out…Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism…This is beyond doubt…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…A Marxist must be a materialist, i. e., an enemy of religion…By declaring…that religion is the opium of the people, our Duma group acted quite correctly, and thus created a precedent which should serve as a basis for all utterances by Russian Social-Democrats on the question of religion.”2 [italics in original]
“Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species bear no relation to one another, except by chance, and that they were created by God, and hence immutable.”3
“Atheism is a material and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific Socialism. In accordance with their fundamental philosophical outlook, Marx and Engels always called themselves materialists.”4
“when people charge us with harshness we wonder how they can forget the rudiments of Marxism.” 5
In this regard, it may be interesting to note the words of Mao Zedong:”You’d better have less conscience. Some of our comrades have too much mercy, not enough brutality, which means that they are not so Marxist. On this matter, we indeed have no conscience! Marxism is that brutal….We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution”6 and “Look at World War II, at Hitler’s cruelty. The more cruelty, the more enthusiasm for revolution.”7
Lenin further stated:
“Whatever helps the world Communist revolution is good; whatever hinders it is bad. Religion, through its insistence upon individual responsibility to the Creator of all things, interferes with the advance of world collectivism. It is, therefore, irredeemably evil.”8
“We deny all morality taken from superhuman or non-class conceptions. We say that this is a deception, a swindle, a befogging of the minds…In what sense do we deny ethics, morals? In the sense in which they are preached by the bourgeoisie, which deduces these morals from god’s commandments. Of course, we say that we do not believe in god.”9
“When people talk to us about morality we say: For the Communists, morality consists entirely of compact united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters. We do not believe in eternal morality, and we expose all fables about morality.”10
“A Marxist must be a materialist, i. e., an enemy of religion, but a dialectical materialist, i. e., one who treats the struggle against religion not in an abstract way, not on the basis of remote, purely theoretical, never varying preaching, but in a concrete way, on the basis of the class struggle which is going on in practice and is educating the masses more and better than anything else could.’”
Lenin wrote the following in, The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion11:
“It is the absolute duty of Social-Democrats to make a public statement of their attitude towards religion. Social-Democracy bases its whole world-outlook on scientific socialism, i. e., Marxism. The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism…a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion. Let us recall that the whole of Engels’s Anti-DD&#bc;hring, which Marx read in manuscript, is an indictment of the materialist and atheist DD&#bc;hring for not being a consistent materialist and for leaving loopholes for religion and religious philosophy. Let us recall that in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels reproaches Feuerbach for combating religion not in order to destroy it, but in order to renovate it, to invent a new, ‘exalted’ religion, and so forth. Religion is the opium of the people-this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion12…
At the same time Engels frequently condemned the efforts…to introduce into the programme of the workers’ party an explicit proclamation of atheism, in the sense of declaring war on religion…Engels called…vociferous proclamation of war on religion a piece of stupidity, and stated that such a declaration of war was the best way to revive interest in religion and to prevent it from really dying out…
Engels insisted that the workers’ party should have the ability to work patiently at the task of organising and educating the proletariat, which would lead to the dying out of religion, and not throw itself into the gamble of a political war on religion.13 This view has become part of the very essence of German Social-Democracy, which, for example, advocated freedom for the Jesuits, their admission into Germany, and the complete abandonment of police methods of combating any particular religion. ‘Religion is a private matter’: this celebrated point in the Erfurt Programme (1891) summed up these political tactics of Social-Democracy…
Social-Democrats regard religion as a private matter in relation to the state, but not in relation to themselves, not in relation to Marxism, and not in relation to the workers’ party14…
Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion…This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels…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…It must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion…
No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way. Does this mean that educational books against religion are harmful or unnecessary? No, nothing of the kind. It means that Social-Democracy’s atheist propaganda must be subordinated to its basic task-the development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters…
Atheist propaganda in such circumstances [a labor strike in which the workers are divided into atheists and Christians] may be both unnecessary and harmful…class struggle, which in the conditions of modern capitalist society will convert Christian workers to Social-Democracy and to atheism a hundred times better than bald atheist propaganda…
A Marxist must be a materialist, i. e., an enemy of religion, but a dialectical materialist…
In Russia conditions are quite different [than in Social-Democrats in the West]…while Engels was comparatively mild in correcting the opportunism of the German Social-Democrats who were substituting, for the demand of the workers’ party that the state should declare religion a private matter, the declaration that religion is a private matter for the Social-Democrats themselves, and for the Social-Democratic Party, it is clear that the importation of this German distortion by the Russian opportunists would have merited a rebuke a hundred times more severe by Engels…
By declaring from the Duma [representative assemblies] rostrum that religion is the opium of the people, our Duma group acted quite correctly, and thus created a precedent which should serve as a basis for all utterances by Russian Social-Democrats on the question of religion.”
Of Joseph Stalin
I have already quoted professor of philosophy Daniel Dennett (during his debate with Dinesh D’Souza, “Is God (and Religion) a man-made invention?”) in this regard in part 4 yet, I thought to reproduce it here where it seemed again to be relevant as we consider Stalin in particular:
“…it occurred to me – let’s think about Stalin for a moment. Was he an atheist? You might say well of course he was an atheist. No, on the contrary. In a certain sense, he wasn’t an atheist at all. He believed in god. Not only that, he believe in a god whose will determined what right and wrong was. And he was sure of the existence of this god, and the god’s name was Stalin.”
Emilian Yaroslavsky (President and Founder of the Union of the Militant Godless) wrote of Stalin:
“At a very early age, while still a pupil in the ecclesiastical school, Comrade Stalin developed a critical mind and revolutionary sentiments. He began to read Darwin and became an atheist. G. Glurdjidze, a boyhood friend of Stalin’s, relates: I began to speak of God, Joseph heard me out, and after a moment’s silence, said: ‘You know, they are fooling us, there is no God….’
I was astonished at these words, I had never heard anything like it before.’How can you say such things, Soso?’ I exclaimed.’I’ll lend you a book to read; it will show you that the world and all living things are quite different from what you imagine, and all this talk about God is sheer nonsense,’ Joseph said.’What book is that?’ I enquired.’Darwin. You must read it,’ Joseph impressed on me.”15
Stalin also stated,”Of course, we are far from being enthusiastic about the fascist regime in Germany”16 and “I know how much the German nation loves its Fuhrer; I should therefore like to drink to his health.”17Karl Radek, Bolshevik Communist propagandist,
“There are magnificent lads in the SA and SS. You’ll see, the day will come when they’ll be throwing hand grenades for us.”18
Stalin further stated,
“The Party cannot be neutral towards religion, and it conducts anti-religious propaganda against all religious prejudices because it stands for science, whereas religious prejudices run counter to science, because all religion is the antithesis of science.”19
In 17 Feb. 1936 Time Magazine reported (“Godless Jubilee”) that there was a:
“celebration by massed Communist delegations from all over Russia of the tenth anniversary of the founding in Moscow of the Union of the Militant Godless…
active profession of atheism is the badge of a Communist, Joseph Stalin has uttered officially such lukewarm words as these: ‘The Party cannot be neutral toward Religion because Religion is something opposite to Science’…
[Archbishop Nicholas John Kedroff, Dean of the Cathedral of St. Nicholas in Manhattan a US affiliate of the Soviet Russia’s Greek Orthodox Church wrote,] ‘In some ways the Church has more freedom in Russia now than it had under the Tsars…The clergy in Russia today are not so poor as you might think. Not long ago I received a letter from a priest who wanted some new parts for his Buick.’ The prosperity in Russia of even one priest able to require new parts for his Buick drives the League of the Militant Godless into tantrums [they see the ‘New Menace’ as being priests who were preaching a blend of Communism and Christianity]…
[despite the church’s “more freedom”] by an alteration of the law made in 1929, any public propaganda of religion apart from services and sermons in church is made a penal offense…
In stirring up the police to inflict upon unchurched preachers of religion the full penalty of Soviet law, the Godless are especially active. Last week they boasted at their Jubilee of fresh success in a Western Siberian village. They have at last got its ‘chief evangelist,’ P. M. Golofast, sentenced to ten years in jail along with two minor evangelists, jailed respectively for two and five years…
Roman Catholic missionaries in Russia today are under the direct and exceedingly discreet patronage of His Holiness Pope Pius XI. At the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Manhattan, a prelate declared last week: ‘No one except Rome knows just who is doing what and where in Russia. If it were known, the Soviets would chop their heads off. As for such churches as are open in Russia, they are only to make it appear to tourists that there is no persecution’…Pius XI is considered by the Godless their personal and potent foe in the great battle for Russian souls…
Russia’s militant Godless campaign against all gods and all faiths. Excruciating is their stage skit Buddha-on-the-Telephone…tolerated by Communism in Leningrad for visiting religionists, are a beauteous Moslem mosque and an elaborately carved Buddhist temple…
Until the recent Soviet innovation of sending out bits of ‘human interest’ material about Bolshevik leaders, Comrade Yaroslavsky was not known to have any other interests than stern Party duty, pouncing on priests and Godlessness…
Yaroslavsky aphorisms: ‘We make no distinction between our struggle against Capitalism and our struggle against Religion!…Decent conduct has nothing to do with Hell or Heaven….Religion is adopting-the disguise of Communism! We even hear it said that Christ was the first Socialist, or the first Communist!…
While Prof. Daniel Dennett’s statements regarding the atheist Stalin’s theism are clearly fallacious. They appear all the more wayward now that we have considered Stalin and his system of Communism in greater detail.
Of Frederick Engles, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, et al
Robert M. Young, Darwin scholar and Marxist, Darwinian Evolution and Human History
Young writes, “Marx and Engels were very interested indeed in Darwinian evolution, and that there is no unequivocal answer to the question of its meaning to them.” The issue is the various ways in which Marx and Engels described their utilization of Darwinism namely: as a “basis,” or a “conjuror’s trick,” or an “analogy” (between the history of life and human history).
Young continues thusly:
“At the moment it is all too apparent that right wing and liberal points of view are seeking in biological science legitimacy for their beliefs about the limits of human nature and the limits of equality…[biology is used] as support by racists and other elitists…It is worth pointing out that there is also a long tradition of claiming that the laws of evolution make socialism inevitable…20
Darwin was crucially influenced by T. R. Malthus, whose gloomy population theory gave Darwin the key idea of population pressure in competing for scarce resources [see interesting considerations here]. In his later work on the Descent of Man, it is also true that Darwin’s views on human tribes were decidedly racist…
in the Soviet Union, where the enforced social engineering of Stalinism led to repression and to the Gulag Archipelago…in China where the Maoist slogan ‘Throw off nature’s insolent yoke’ led finally to a powerful reaction and the present policies which are decidedly technocratic. In Eastern Europe we have had demands for more traditional human rewards – goods and rights – mitigating the harshness of socialist discipline, notably in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. And, of course, the most appalling recent example of failure to gear social change to second nature and its refractoriness was the systematic murder of millions of Kampucheans who did not become instant socialists on the Pol Pot model…
Now I want to come back to Darwinian evolution. The connection is this: science and appeals to scientific socialism have been rooted in Darwinism by those who claimed that it provided a basis for Marxism. For example, the work of the Russian philosopher George Plekhanov was considered by Lenin to be ‘the best there is in the whole international literature of Marxism’, and Plekhanov regarded Marxism as ‘Darwinism in its application to social science’. This sort of appeal to science in the realm of social policy is scientism21…It provides the legitimacy for arguing for a ‘correct line’ – the scientific management of society. Some of the most appalling things have occurred in the name of socialism and have been justified by the ‘correct line’. When their wrongness has been acknowledged, it is said that a ‘mistake’ has been made…
Here I come to the crux of the problem of Darwinism for Marxists. Aspects of evolutionism are consistent with Marxism. The explanation of the origins of humankind and of mind by purely natural forces was and remains as welcome to Marxists as to any other secularists…”
Frederick Engles’ preface to The Communist Manifesto,
“The proposition which in my opinion is destined to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology.”22
Engels also wrote:
“The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes’s doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes [a war of all against all] and of the bourgeois economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus’ theory of population. When this conjuror’s trick has been performed. . . the same theories are transferred again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved.”23
Emilian Yaroslavsky,
“The program of the Communist International also clearly states that Communists fight against religion…Remember that the struggle against religion is a struggle for socialism.”24
Mao Zedong,
“Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.”25
Karl Marx,
“Darwin’s book of Natural Selection. Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view…Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history.”26
Leon Trotsky, The ABC of Materialist Dialectics (1939):
“We call our dialectic, materialist, since its roots are neither in heaven nor in the depths of our ‘free will’, but in objective reality, in nature. Consciousness grew out of the unconscious, psychology out of physiology, the organic world out of the inorganic, the solar system out of nebulae…Darwinism…was the highest triumph of the dialectic in the whole field of organic matter.”
Daniel J. Flynn quoting “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression” (published by Harvard University Press, written by eleven scholars).
“The roots of Marxist-Leninism are perhaps not to be found in Marx at all, but in a deviant version of Darwinism…applied to social questions with the same catastrophic results that occur when such ideas are applied to racial issues.”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, “Men Have Forgotten God” – The Templeton Address
“In its past, Russia did know a time when the social ideal was not fame, or riches, or material success, but a pious way of life. Russia was then steeped in an Orthodox Christianity which remained true to the Church of the first centuries. The Orthodoxy of that time knew how to safeguard its people under the yoke of a foreign occupation that lasted more than two centuries, while at the same time fending off iniquitous blows from the swords of Western crusaders. During those centuries the Orthodox faith in our country became part of the very pattern of thought and the personality of our people, the forms of daily life, the work calendar, the priorities in every undertaking, the organization of the week and of the year. Faith was the shaping and unifying force of the nation. But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter’s forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened…
The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy…Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies.
For a short period of time, when he needed to gather strength for the struggle against Hitler, Stalin cynically adopted a friendly posture toward the Church. This deceptive game, continued in later years by Brezhnev with the help of showcase publications and other window dressing, has unfortunately tended to be taken at its face value in the West. Yet the tenacity with which hatred of religion is rooted in Communism may be judged by the example of their most liberal leader, Krushchev: for though he undertook a number of significant steps to extend freedom, Krushchev simultaneously rekindled the frenzied Leninist obsession with destroying religion…
The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end.”
Daniel J. Flynn again referencing “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression“:
“The more representatives from the reactionary clergy and the recalcitrant bourgeoisie we shoot,” Lenin wrote in March of 1922, “the better it will be for us. We must teach these people a lesson as quickly as possible, so that the thought of protesting again doesn’t occur to them for decades to come”…
In 1922 alone, more than 8,000 priests, monks, and nuns were executed in the Soviet Union…
In 1967, Albania declared itself the world’s first officially atheist nation and reduced more than 2,000 churches and mosques to rubble or expropriated them for state use…
Almost fifty percent of all Catholics were killed in Cambodia…
Moslems saw more than 40% of their co-religionists killed. Mosques and The Koran were burned and Pol Pot’s henchmen sadistically forced followers of Islam to eat pork…
The Romanian Secret Police encouraged prisoners to devise “reeducation” programs. The leader of one such program named “Eugen Turcanu devised especially diabolical measures to force seminarians to renounce their faith,” co-author Karel Bartosek reports. “Some had their heads repeatedly plunged into a bucket of urine and fecal matter while the guards intoned a parody of the baptismal rite”…
Moreover, from 1917 to 1969, the Communists destroyed 41,000 of Russia’s 48,000 churches.
From Religion in the Soviet Union Part One and Part Two, by Trotskyite, Denzil Dean Harber aka Paul Dixon (first published in The Workers International News, October 1945):
Marx said, ‘Religion is the opium of the people’ – and this postulate is the corner stone of the whole philosophy of Marxism with regard to religion. Marxism always regarded all modern religions and churches, and every kind of religious organisation as instruments of that bourgeois reaction whose aim is to defend exploitation, stupefying the working class. (The Attitude of the Workers’ Party towards religion, May, 1909)…
[CPSU’s (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) 1919 Programme]:
‘to secure the complete breakup of the union between the exploiting classes and the organisations for religious propaganda, thus co-operating in the actual deliverance of the working masses from religious prejudices, and organising the most extensive propaganda of scientific enlightenment and anti-religious conceptions. While doing this, we must carefully avoid anything that can wound the feelings of believers, for such a method can only lead to the strengthening of religious fanaticism’…
The clergy…were entirely cut off from Soviet life. Priests had no right to vote in Soviet elections or to be elected to Soviet organisations. For the class-conscious Soviet worker the Church was a relic of the past which was destined gradually to wither away under the influence of the rising material and cultural standards of the masses…
A.B.C of Communism – the text book issued by the CPSU in the days of Lenin and Trotsky –
‘the transition from the Society which makes an end of capitalism to the society which is completely freed from all traces of class division and class struggle, will bring about the natural death of all religion and all superstition’…
[Stalinist policy made] an attempt was made to liquidate the Church and its influence by government decree. Starting in 1929 churches were forcibly closed and priests arrested and exiled all over the Soviet Union. The celebrated Shrine of the Iberian Virgin in Moscow – esteemed by believers to be the ‘holiest’ in all Russia was demolished – Stalin and his Government were not afraid of strengthening religious fanaticism by wounding the feelings of believers as Lenin and Trotsky had been! Religion, they believed, could be liquidated, like the kulak, by a stroke of the pen. The Society of Militant Atheists, under Stalin’s orders, issued on May 15th 1932, the “Five Year Plan of Atheism” – by May 1st 1937, such as the ‘Plan’, ‘not a single house of prayer shall remain in the territory of the USSR, and the very concept of God must be banished from the Soviet Union as a survival of the Middle Ages and an instrument for the oppression of the working masses’…
In the New Constitution of the U.S.S.R. of 1936 priests were given the right to vote and to be elected in Soviet elections. Nevertheless the alliance between Stalin and the Orthodox Church was not yet finally cemented. In the period of mass purges of 1937 the attack upon the Church was for a short time resumed. Once again priests were arrested and banished and in January 1938 the “Society of Militant Atheists” accused the Clergy of being in the service of the military staffs of Fascist States, of disorganising the Army, of trying to wreck railways, etc., etc…
Inevitably, under the conditions of the rule of the Bureaucracy, the Church must command the support of broad sections of the population; Stalin cannot destroy this support by administrative means-he has tried and failed. He must therefore secure an agreement with this Church which he cannot crush in order to secure the hold of the Bureaucracy over the Soviet masses, for the nature of his regime does not permit the existence of an independent and potentially hostile force within the Soviet State…
Stalin who in his interview with the First American Trade Union Delegation (September 1927) once stated ‘The Party cannot be neutral with regard to religion, and it conducts anti-religious propaganda against any and all religious prejudices because it stands for science, while religious prejudices go against science, since every religion is something contrary to science.’”
Harber/Dixon also made reference to, “the materialist basis upon which Marxism stands.” He pointed out that there were “anti-religious tests for the Army and Civil Service” that were later abolished due to a tentative policy which he described as “The Left zig-zag of the bureaucracy was inevitably followed by a turn to the right.” He also mentions that the CPSU established the “Society of Militant Atheists” who published a journal: The Atheist.