HomeWare 14/HOMEWARE14.bin/games/cga/soviets.arj/F2GORKY.DOC

Text File | 1992-10-06 | 7KB | 139 lines

                          Anti-religious Campaigns

     The Soviet Union was the first state to have as an
ideological objective the elimination of religion.  Toward that
end, the Communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed
religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the
schools.  Actions toward particular religions, however, were
determined by State interests, and most organized religions were
never outlawed.
     The main target of the anti-religious campaign in the 1920s
and 1930s was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest
number of faithful.  Nearly all of its clergy, and many of its
believers, were shot or sent to labor camps.  Theological schools
were closed, and church publications were prohibited.  By 1939
only about 500 of over 50,000 churches remained open.
     After Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941,
Joseph Stalin revived the Russian Orthodox Church to intensify
patriotic support for the war effort.  By 1957 about 22,000
Russian Orthodox churches had become active.  But in 1959 Nikita
Khrushchev initiated his own campaign against the Russian
Orthodox Church and forced the closure of about 12,000 churches.
By 1985 fewer than 7,000 churches remained active.  Members of
the church hierarchy were jailed or forced out, their places
taken by docile clergy, many of whom had ties with the KGB.
     Campaigns against other religions were closely associated
with particular nationalities, especially if they recognized a
foreign religious authority such as the Pope.  By 1926, the Roman
Catholic  Church had no bishops left in the Soviet Union, and by
1941 only two of the almost 1,200 churches that had existed in
1917, mostly in Lithuania, were still active.  The Ukrainian
Catholic Church (Uniate), linked with Ukrainian nationalism, was
forcibly subordinated in 1946 to the Russian Orthodox Church, and
the Autocephalous Orthodox Churches of Belorussia and Ukraine
were suppressed twice, in the late 1920s and again in 1944.
     Attacks on Judaism were endemic throughout the Soviet
period, and the organized practice of Judaism became almost
impossible.  Protestant denominations and other sects were also
persecuted.  The All-Union Council of Evangelical Christian
Baptists, established by the government in 1944, typically was
forced to confine its activities to the narrow act of worship and
denied most opportunities for religious teaching and publication.
Fearful of a pan-Islamic movement, the Soviet regime
systematically suppressed Islam by force, until 1941.  The Nazi
invasion of the Soviet Union that year led the government to
adopt a policy of official toleration of Islam while actively
encouraging atheism among Muslims.


                                   Letter from Gorky to Stalin

Dear Iosif Vissarionovich:

     ....

     The emigre and bourgeois press bases its perception of
Soviet reality almost entirely on the negative information which
is published by our own press for self-criticism with the aim of
education and agitation.  The products of the these "individual
journalists" of the bourgeois press are not as numerous and
harmful as they are made out to be, in contrast to our own
release of self-revealing facts and conclusions.

     By strongly emphasizing facts of a negative nature, we open
ourselves up to our enemies, providing them an enormous amount of
material, which they in turn very aptly use against us,
compromising our party and our leadership in the eyes of Europe's
proletariat, compromising the very principle of the dictatorship
of the working class, because the proletariat of Europe and
America feeds on the bourgeois newspapers for the most part--and
for this reason it cannot grasp our country's cultural-
revolutionary progress, our successes and achievements in
industrialization, the enthusiasm of our working masses, and of
their influence on the impoverished peasantry.

     It stands to reason, I do not think we can positively
influence the attitude which the bourgeoisie has already formed
towards the Union of Soviets, and I do know that European
conditions are zealously raising the revolutionary consciousness
of the European proletariat.

     I also know that the one-sidedness of our treatment of
reality--created by us--exerts an extremely unhealthy influence
on our young people.

     In their letters, and in their conversations with me, it
seems that today's youth displays an extremely pessimistic mood.
This mood is very natural.  Direct knowledge of reality of our
youth from the central areas, especially our provinces is
limited, insignificant.  To acquaint themselves with what is
going on they turn to the newspapers.

[...]

     It is furthermore imperative to put the propaganda of
atheism on solid ground.  You won't achieve much with the weapons
of Marx and materialism, as we have seen.  Materialism and
religion are two different planes and they don't coincide.  If a
fool speaks from the heavens and the sage from a factory--they
won't understand one another.  The sage needs to hit the fool
with his stick, with his weapon.

     For this reason, there should be courses set up at the
Communist Academy which would not only treat the history of
religion, and mainly the history of the Christian church, i.e.,
the study of church history as politics.

     We need to know the "fathers of the church," the apologists
of Christianity, especially indispensable to the study of the
history of Catholicism, the most powerful and intellectual church
organization whose political significance is quite clear.  We
need to know the history of church schisms, heresies, the
Inquisition, the "religious" wars, etc.  Every quotation by a
believer is easily countered with dozens of theological
quotations which contradict it.

     We cannot do without an edition of the "Bible" with critical
commentaries from the Tubingen school and books on criticism of
biblical texts, which could bring a very useful "confusion into
the minds" of believers.

     There is a fine role to be played here by a popular book on
the Taborites and the Husite movements.  It would be useful
to introduce here "The history of the peasant wars in Germany,"
the old book by Zimmerman.  Carefully edited, it would be very
useful for the minds.

     It is necessary to produce a book on the church's struggle
against science.

     Our youth is very poorly informed on questions of this
nature.  The "tendency" toward a religious disposition is very
noticeable--a natural result of developing individualism.  At
this time, as always, the young are in a hurry to find "the
definitive answer."

[...]