The politics and propaganda of theocracies and atheocracies

¶ … religion of atheism, communism as a secular theocracy: Religious iconography and practice in the Soviet Union

The Soviet regime has often been called totalitarian regime, in the sense of the philosopher Hannah Arendt's definition of a government and ideology that exerts 'total' control over the populace. However, long before the communists came to power, the Russian government was a highly repressive regime and already possessed many of the characteristics of Arendt's conception of "a ruthless, brutal, and…potent form of political tyranny whose ambitions for world domination are unlimited. Disseminating propaganda derived from an ideology through the media of mass communication, totalitarianism relies on mass support. It crushes whoever and whatever stands in its way by means of terror and proceeds to a total reconstruction of the society it displaces. Thus a largely rural and feudal Russian Empire, under the absolutist rule of czars stretching back to the fifteenth century, was transformed first by Lenin after the October Revolution of 1917 and then by Stalin into an industrialized Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" (Kohn 4). This is why the transition from tsarist leadership to communist leadership is often described as a morphing of one totalitarian system of control to another: both systems were absolutist; both were brutal, although one was agrarian in nature while the other was industrialized.

However, another notable difference between the two regimes was that one was an officially religious government, dominated by the Russian Orthodox Church while its successor was officially atheistic. The Russian Orthodox Church was a part of the state, and although Jews and Muslims were part of the Russian Empire, to be a fully fledged member of the state required adherence to orthodoxy as well as to worship of the 'little father tsar.' When the communists came to power, atheism became the official state ideology. "The men and women who led the October Revolution made it clear that they did not aspire only to power in a raw, hegemonic sense. Their mission also included a reconfiguration of 'culture'" and that included replacing the centrality of the Russian Orthodox Church with communist (atheistic) loyalties (Husband, 1998, p. 74). Far beyond the aims of Marx and Engels, who believed that religion as an 'opiate of the masses' would vanish once workers were rationally convinced of the superiority of a collective society, the Russian communists under Lenin were determined to swiftly exercise ideological as well as political control over the large, sprawling Russian state. Changing the culture and the structure of human relationships went hand-in-hand with collectivizing farms and eradicating the White resistance. And no other program of the communists would inspire as much systematic resistance amongst the Russian people than the elimination of religion.

State control of religious institutions and the use of religion as a means of control is one popular, common mechanism of control in totalitarian regimes, even in an officially 'atheist' society like the Soviet Union. In the case of the Soviet empire, eradicating religion was a method of establishing communist legitimacy. According to William Husband's book 'Godless Communists' Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia 1917-1932 and his article "Soviet atheism and Russian Orthodox Strategies of Resistance, 1917-1932" the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union's religious program was primarily to supplant old social ties that had defined Tsarist Russia and create a new world defined by a secular worship of the state, rather than theology. The communists did not oppose religion merely because it conflicted with their official ideology, or because it was associated with tsarist instruments of control -- they also felt threatened by the potentially oppositional hold upon the hearts of the common people. The 'totalizing' system of mental and cultural and control required new thinking and the elimination of religion's alternative view of reality.

Loyalty to a community of believers was seen as a threat to state loyalty. "Deeply embedded in Russian culture, Orthodoxy shaped rituals of hospitality and celebrations, rites of passage, the ordering of daily and seasonal routines, and household organization" (Husband 1998, p.77). At first, this argument seems somewhat problematic given that tsarist rule demanded similar citizen loyalty, only in terms of loyalty to the Church and the tsar as a representative of the Church's holy authority on earth. How was the communists' philosophy so different than Orthodoxy: was it not one self-justifying ideology replacing another self-justifying ideology? Husband counters with evidence that although the tsars may have used religion as a means of self-justification, the response and personal interpretations of the Russian people of Orthodoxy was more creative and syncretic with local customs and thus had a deeper hold upon their loyalty.

The attempts of the Leninists were imposed from above while: "Among all strata...The traditional beliefs of all classes combined diverse elements in unequal measures: a common predisposition to expect regular supernatural intervention in daily affairs; religious and quasi-religious rituals associated with childbirth, marriage, and death, as well as with extensively utilized practices of folk medicine; religious rationales for perpetuating existing constructions of gender; and a calendar crowded with religious holidays, some of which occasioned several days of seemingly secular and even pre-Christian modes of celebration" (Husband, 1998, p. 76). Orthodoxy emerged organically in conjunction with other local customs, even while the Russian tsars might have been repressive; their theological control over these folk customs was not absolute.

In contrast, the swift cultural shift in religious behavior demanded by the communists was seismic and demanded homogeneous conformity. It was of a far more totalitarian character than the religious conformity demanded of the tsars for most Russians. Opposition from below to the communists, according to Husband "assumed three main forms. First, believers turned to violence and terrorism. Second, they co-opted and adapted Soviet laws, state policies, and bureaucratic procedures to their own ends. Third, the faithful relied on stratagems of circumvention when more overt opposition would have been futile. Examination of these conflicts thus probes a key dimension of early popular opposition to Bolshevism. Scrutiny of early Soviet atheism illustrates that the attempt to recast Russian thinking about religion was more variegated and nuanced than has been previously believed and that religious resistance had more diverse motivations than existing works on church-state contention would suggest"(Husband, 1998, p.78). Some resistors, including some priests were fairly liberal, but resisted the eradication of their faith while more conservative elements used religion to articulate opposition to economic programs of the communists, such as the collectivization of agriculture.

The response of the populace to communism was often ambiguous and even occasionally resulted in a fusing of religion and the new state ideology, as the new state strove to exert institutional control over religion, including forcing church communities to register with the state and closely monitoring religious organization, as well as later impeding the professional advancement of citizens with known religious sympathies. The communists strove for a total system of control yet even under the specter of repression there was profound resistance. Furthermore, the crude nature of Red attacks upon churches during the Civil War, such as opening the graves of saints to reveal the decaying corpses within often had a mobilizing effect upon the White opposition (Husband 1998, p. 81). Rather than 'proving' the wrong-headedness of religion, such efforts turned many possible sympathizers against the Reds.

Husband's analysis raises the question: was communism a kind of secular theology, just as all-encompassing as a militant theocratic regime, as it exists as Iran today? His analysis also demonstrates how, like Iran, the lived experience of individuals within a theocracy, secular or more conventionally religious, is often more complex than official documents might suggest. Husband argues that equally as much as religious doctrine and institutional authority of the Church the folk customs and relationships of pre-revolutionary Russia were more important to the common people, from the upper class to the peasantry. Even when peasants supported reform in the wake of the death and destruction spawned by World War I, they did not reject religion but "synthesized competing interpretations of belief in the supernatural…blended traditional with revolutionary values" (Husband, 2000, p. 128-129).

This is what made the imposition of atheism so profoundly 'totalitarian' in character: because it denied the ability of the citizens to create their own creative cultural response. It is also what made, in its own way, the Soviet Union a far more dogmatic and 'theocratic' regime than the religious policies of even Tsar Nicholas II for most Russians. Its religion of atheism allowed no dissent or even grass-roots deviation. The greater bureaucratic and technological capacity of the state to monitor human behavior, of course, was another facilitator of this policy. As the regime grew older, the secret police and state control of the media became part of daily life -- although the people's means of resisting such tyranny also grew, through illegally circulated banned samizdat manuscripts, for example. A modern parallel might be seen in the modern Iranian theocracy's attempted 'crackdown' on anti-government Twitter posts during the recent protests: technology can act as a facilitator or a subverting force against totalitarianism.

The rigid theology of scientific, rational atheism as an antidote to the problems of religion was not found in Marx and Engels. Marx did see religion as fostering apathy to class divisions and as kind of a 'sop' to appropriate anger and revolutionary solidarity, but he believed that it would disappear of its own accord once the populace was made sufficiently aware of the cruelties of the class system. Lenin vehemently disagreed and believed that religion must be eradicated. A review of Dimitry V. Pospielovsky's A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory and Practice and the Believer noted: "The bloody persecution of the Orthodox church was well under way…on January 19, 1918…Sympathies toward the Whites during the Civil War (e.g. As shown by reciting a Te Deum) merited execution. However, even completely apolitical and even left-leaning clerics like Metropolitan Veniamin of Petrograd were tried and condemned. Veniamin's crime was to resist the campaign of confiscation of church valuables by insisting that the Church be allowed to ransom those used for sacramental purposes at their value in currency and that the rest be taken as voluntary contributions rather than pure confiscations" (Studies in Soviet Thought, 1998, p.148). Thus it did not matter if a cleric was liberal: what mattered is that all sources of authority that could compete for human loyalty were eradicated. The state took the wealth of the churches for itself in the name of the people, despite popular resistance to this policy and its potentially alienating effects upon apolitical Russians.

Husband suggests that this only increased the popular and populist elements of religious ideology -- without much access to institutional church controls, people did not abandon the church but reconfigured their personal religious traditions to suit the times. In response to atheistic imposition, populist observation of religion was more feasible than institutional resistance. At first, factories were one common site of teaching: "Priests had full access to workers' barracks, and despite a directive by the factory party cell several old iconostasis continued to be displayed. Senior skilled workers conducted religious instruction among the unskilled and collected donations for the support of the priest and the construction of a new church. The Party began publishing a factory newspaper, Without God and Boss, irregularly in 1923, but only in 1925 was the factory committee able to close one of three local churches and launch a campaign to remove icons" (Husband, 1998, p. 83).

Despite official repression, priests gained support, not just from religious Russians, but also because the communists had abolished all religious holidays and thus all days of leisure -- eventually, however, they were forced to replace them with other 'official' holidays in support of the regime. "During the early Soviet period, even factory administrators sympathetic to the revolution continued the prerevolutionary practice of closing textile mills for two weeks at Easter, sometimes citing very real shortages of raw materials and fuel in order to put the best possible face on the situation" (Hubbard, 1998, p. 95). Loss of productivity due to drunkenness and fasts was also a real concern: by creating new holidays, the communists created a social release valve that was contained and structured leisure upon the regime's terms. The symbolism was unintentional but obvious -- new state 'religious' holidays were officially celebrating the atheistic state, but they often coincided with old, Church holidays to reduce resistance.

As priests also strove to lead efforts to oppose collectivization of agriculture, this strengthened the determination of the communists to quash the influence of the Church. While the communists consolidated their power, institutional controls were placed upon priests. The mechanisms of the state were also made manifest when priests were forced to suffer official sanctions that effectively denied them a livelihood: "By 1929, priests were considered not to be workers and therefore subject to a much higher rate of taxation similar to that imposed on entrepreneurs. Although as less than full citizens, priests were ineligible for military service (as well as to vote), they had to pay a special military non-service tax…combined with the special income tax, the non-service tax might in some cases be more than one hundred per cent of income. As 'non-toiling elements', priests were also ineligible to join collective farms. Likewise, they were deprived of all social security rights for health care or pensions" (Studies in Soviet Thought, 1998, p.149). Priests were defined occupationally out of the new system as virtually non-existent workers.

Thus communist leadership, despite parroting Marx's contention that religion was the opiate of the masses, felt free to use reconfigured religious holidays ceremonies to inspire loyalty even while they opposed the priesthood and created new classes of non-persons (like the priests and bourgeois). The communists created a new religious dogma, a more inflexible one, to replace the old. Perhaps the most obvious symbol of the Soviet religion of atheism was how, upon his death, Lenin was displayed with more fanfare than a medieval saint. "His body was not cremated in the revolutionary faction but embalmed, displayed for forty days...and ultimately housed in a mausoleum" (Hubbard 2000, p. 96). The comparison is comparable with how Christian leaders had difficulty abolishing the syncretism of faiths, pagan and Christian, that arose during the period of transition to Christianity over the course of the middle ages. The Church eventually incorporated many pagan rituals into Christian ones (such as the feast of the Winter Solstice, which became Christmas). Now, communist Russia became an state of atheistic faith -- and in response to the people's needs had to adopt old festival days and holidays and transformed them into religious ones, to secure popular loyalty.

Hubbard's title of 'Godless Communism' is deliberately put in quotes: contrary to the anti-communist rhetoric of the Cold War in the west, in lived practice, communism was anything but 'godless.' The state created a religion of communism, and the people preserved their religious traditions in modified form. They often used religion as a means of resistance to communism, while the state transformed religious rituals into secular ones. This notion of communism as a kind of religion is not a new one: Theorist and Russian emigre Nikolai Berdyaev believed that state religious fervor was ingrained within the Russian soul and even wrote in 1944 that Christianity and communism were not inherently incompatible. "The Russian messianic conception…always exalted Russia as a country that would help to solve the problems of humanity and would accept a place in the service of humanity…recent changes in Russia, the changed attitude to religion and to the country's traditions, make it not only possible but right for Christian Russians to rally to the Soviet government" (Latter 2006). In 1927, Metropolitan Sergii, the patriarch locum tenens of the Russian Orthodox Church, even "called on his followers to accept and obey Soviet power as divinely ordained" (Miner 2002)