Ask most religious people about the USSR and they will reel off a list of indisputable crimes that Stalin committed against faith of any sort. Too often they tar all socialists with the same brush. However, the truth is Stalinism had nothing to do with the reality of the Bolshevik Party in Lenin’s time, or with the early years of its rule in Russia. For a start, while the party’s programme was avowedly atheist, atheism was never a condition of party membership: for the Bolsheviks, religion was the private affair of every citizen. In 1905 Lenin wrote a diatribe against including atheism in the party programme, insisting, ‘No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism’. So socialists expect people to hold religious ideas when they first come into contact with socialist organisations, and to lose their religious convictions only insofar as they become convinced of their power to change the world. Marx preceded his famous dictum that religion is ‘the opium of the people’ with the recognition that religion can also provide a language in which people talk about the reality of their oppression and express aspirations to resist that oppression: 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 heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Lenin was clear that it was political suicide to insist workers abandon their religious beliefs before joining a revolutionary party. On the contrary, he encouraged the recruitment of believers. ‘We are absolutely opposed to giving the slightest offence to their religious convictions,’ he wrote in 1909. Those who did so, he called ‘infant-school materialists’: The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparent complete helplessness in the face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extraordinary events such as wars, earthquakes, etc. The Russian Marxists also understood that workers’ radicalisation could be reflected in their religious beliefs. In his autobiography Trotsky recalls that, for workers in Ukraine during the strike wave of the late 1890s, breaking away from the Russian Orthodox church to join another faith, such as the Baptists who ‘waged war on the official religion’, was often a first step on the road to socialist politics, ‘a temporary phase for them in their progress towards revolution’. A similar observation lay behind Lenin’s proposal in 1903 to publish a newspaper aimed at members of Christian religious sects, who numbered more than 10 million in Russia at the time. Nine issues of Rassvet (‘The Dawn’), were published in 1904 ‘by way of an experiment’.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 07:52:18 +0000
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