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The fight against Christianity in the Soviet Union

Author: Grzegorz Kucharczyk,
"Love One Another!" 32/2015

One of the most frequent methods of “exerting influence” used by propagandists throughout the ages is to make the recipient believe that the message given by the propaganda is the common experience of many people, and that “it’s what everybody thinks”.

“The Voice of the Readers” or “it’s what everybody thinks”

Suffice it to mention the “telephone public opinion” technique used by one of the high-circulation newspapers published in Poland, which was (and still is) in the vanguard of the fight for “the worldview neutrality of the state”. Similar tricks were regularly used in the Soviet Union in press titles published by the Association of the Militant Godless. In “The Voice of the Readers” column, testimonies of priests who had left the clergy and their faith were published in the weekly The Godless. There were also letters from laymen “converted to atheism”. One such letter, from “a once believing peasant”, was published in 1925. The author confessed: “I have become a complete atheist; my faith in God was totally destroyed by electricity”.

Bolshevik Russia became the first country to legalise abortion in the twentieth century

In the same section, readers were persuaded that it was enough to abandon their faith to enjoy the latest technical achievements, such as tractors. Also in 1925, The Godless published a letter from collective farmers from Nizhny Novgorod who had entered a period of prosperity once they had thrown icons out of their homes: “Without God, we are doing much better. We have obtained two tractors, an efficient thresher and all the equipment necessary for the cultivation of soil”.

Do you want to have better crops? Become an atheist

And vice versa… the more believing a farmer – The Godless asserted on its pages – the worse the harvest, and the prospect of famine in the future. During the twenties, the press organ of the Association of the Militant Godless published a series of articles discussing why agriculture in the United Kingdom and the United States was more efficient than Soviet agriculture. The answer ran thus: farmers in Anglo-Saxon countries were guided by the advice of veterinarians and agronomists, while many Russian peasants still relied on intercessory prayer raised by priests to God in order to receive a good harvest.

The promotion of the “new morality” (“new” meaning anti-Christian) took a prominent place in the range of different measures implemented by the Bolshevik authorities

A similar idea was communicated by propaganda drawings published in The Godless. In the foreground, they presented a sloppy farmer, sitting in torn clothes on the doorstep of a crumbling cottage, while in the background the drawing showed a laughing peasant ploughing his field on a tractor. The caption under the picture explained: “The peasant is sitting, not sowing, not ploughing, not worrying, living by the Gospel and hoping for Father Christmas. Perhaps a miracle will make wheat grow on the field that has not been ploughed or sown”. On the other hand, it is clear that the man on the tractor has been reading about agronomy instead of the Gospel and understands that “he who does not work should not eat”.

What was the “new socialist morality”?

With the progress of industrialisation, enforced at the expense of millions of lives and irreparable environmental destruction, postulates appeared in atheistic propaganda to convert church buildings into factories. The latter were presented as true icons – icons of progress. Icons showing the Divine Persons and the Saints not only led to poor harvests, but also posed a threat of… epidemics. In 1924, The Godless quite seriously argued that the syphilis epidemic sweeping through Russian villages was caused by the habit of kissing icons, which “made it easy to transfer germs”. Of course, nobody mentioned a word about the relationship between the epidemic of STD and the “new socialist morality” promoted by the Soviet authorities.

The promotion of the “new morality” (“new” meaning anti-Christian) took a prominent place in the range of different measures implemented by the Bolshevik authorities for the purposes of the de-Christianisation of Russian society. In 1920, speaking at the congress of the Komsomol, Lenin stated bluntly: “Our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class conflict of the proletariat”.

In 1918, Bolshevik Russia not only declared the “separation of church and state”, but also introduced a divorce law which regulated this area in accordance with the principle of “divorce on demand” (before 1917, Russia did not have so-called secular divorce; issues related to the disintegration of married life were dealt with by the Orthodox Church court). The result was the practical disappearance of the institution of marriage in Bolshevik Russia during the first years after the revolution. At the beginning of the twenties, the number of divorces in Russia was the highest in Europe, twenty-six times that of “bourgeois” Europe.

Also in 1918, the Bolsheviks passed a law which allowed the killing of unborn humans. Like divorce, abortion was to be “on demand” from then on. In this way, Bolshevik Russia became the first country to legalise abortion in the twentieth century. One of the particularly blasphemous Bolshevik posters from that time depicted a pregnant Mother of God dreaming of a Soviet abortion.

During the twenties, the Association of the Militant Godless issued posters urging: “Women of Russia, throw out your pots and pans!” Articles published at the same time in The Godless proclaimed: “We will liberate working women from religious slavery”. The same magazine regularly published “authentic” testimonies of women from the provinces who had become atheists “because God did not give them anything”. Thanks to atheism – according to The Godless – Soviet women “have finally become people”. In 1930, the All Soviet Congress of Godless Women and the Women Fighters for Culture met in discussion. Of course, this was all about the “new socialist culture”.

During the first years after 1917, the main “face” of the radical moral revolution carried out in Russia by the Bolsheviks was Alexandra Kollontai. In the Bolshevik government (the Council of People’s Commissars), she served as the “social welfare commissionaire”. In addition, she headed the Department of Women( the so-called Zhenotdel) in the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party.

Kollontai proclaimed the slogans “the harmony of genders” and “erotic friendship between man and woman”. She was the author of the so-called “glass of water” theory, which stated that sexual satisfaction in communist society (and getting rid of its “unwanted effects” in the form of conceived and unborn children) should be as simple and generally available as drinking a glass of water. This brings to mind the words of G. K. Chesterton about “people who talk about free love, understanding it as something quite different, which should rather be called free debauchery”, and about those who “eagerly repeat the cliché about birth control, meaning in fact the lack of control and fewer births”.

In the Russian provinces, officers of the commissariat led by Kollontai (the Commissioner herself was very active in establishing newer and newer “erotic friendships”) began implementing its outlined strategy with gusto. In 1918, in Saratov, the local social welfare department published The Decree on the Nationalisation of Women, which in addition to the abolition of the institution of marriage foresaw the creation of a network of licensed brothels in the city.

In 1918, the Bolsheviks passed a law which allowed the killing of unborn humans. Like divorce, abortion was to be “on demand” from then on

The same year, in Vlodimir, social welfare commissionaires opened a Bureau of Free Love. At the same time, they issued an order to all unmarried women – from eighteen to fifty years of age – to register with the Bureau. Kollontai’s Vlodimir commissionaires issued a proclamation which stated that all women from the age of eighteen were the “property of the state” (meaning the property of lustful men), and every male citizen could choose any woman from the register (the woman’s consent was not necessary) and beget offspring with her “in the interest of the state”.

As you can see, Heinrich Himmler (the head of the SS), who during World War II ordered the establishment of a network of houses called Lebensborn (“source of life”), in which “racially pure” SS men were to procreate for the Third Reich “racially pure” offspring with women chosen for their “racial purity”, was really only a follower of the idea implemented in Bolshevik Russia during the early twenties.

The plague of abortion

As one Russian historian (A. Popov) states: “during the 1920s in Russia, a peculiar culture of abortion was created, designed to adapt and accustom society to the widespread use of abortion as the main or even the only means of regulating the number of children in the family”.

The terrible “abortion culture” introduced by the communists in the Soviet Union reaped a bloody harvest. From the beginning of the 1920s, a dramatic demographic decline was recorded in Bolshevik Russia.In the years 1925–1930, the number of births decreased there by 12%. From 1930 to 1935, the rate had already reached 25%.

According to official data, in 1928, in Leningrad (the second largest city in the Soviet Union), 92,620 pregnancies were recorded. Only 42% of them ended in childbirth. 58% of unborn children were murdered. The average statistical womanresident of Leningrad in the early 1930s had six to eight abortions before the age of thirty-five.

The whole of the Soviet Union had very similar statistics. In 1928, in the entire communist empire, only 41% of pregnancies ended in birth. Most of the babies (57.5%) disappeared as a result of abortion. In 1931, it was even worse. Official statistics stated that only 36.2% of pregnancies ended in birth, and nearly 63% of unborn children were killed.

The plague of abortion was so widespread that it threatened the foundations of Soviet demographics, and even the communist authorities felt compelled to restrict the freedom to kill the unborn. In 1936, the Soviet government introduced some limitations to the availability of “abortion services”. However, the possibility of killing a foetus for “social reasons” was upheld. The result was that while in 1937 (official data) approximately 355,000 abortions were performed throughout the Soviet Union, in 1940 this number grew to over 500,000 per year.

We can say that the unborn citizens of the Soviet Union were the first victims of the great terror in the communist empire of evil. They were dying en masse before, during and after the mass “cleansings” arranged by Stalin. This “abortion culture” was one of the important factors preparing the ground for Stalinist genocide. If the most vulnerable are mass murdered, how much easier it is to murder those for whom sooner or later “a paragraph will be found”.

The destruction of family means the destruction of religion

As you can see, from the beginning, the main target of the attack by the Bolsheviks advocating “new morality” was the family. It should be emphasised that this was not some “revolutionary perversity”, the loosening of morals characteristic of any war, especially civil war. It was a more the consistent implementation of ideological assumptions inscribed in the essence of communist ideology from the beginning.

In the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels predicted the destruction of the “bourgeois” family (nota bene the Communists described as “bourgeois” what we call “normal”): “What shapes a contemporary bourgeois family? Capital and private acquirement. The fully developed family exists only for the bourgeoisie, but it is complemented by the forced absence of the proletarian family and public prostitution. The bourgeois family will disappear naturally with the disappearance of its complement, and both will cease to exist with the disappearance of capital.”

A detailed plan to destroy the “bourgeois family” was drawn up by Friedrich Engels almost forty years after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. One of the most important measures leading to that goal was the introduction of liberal divorce laws, disguised as the “freedom of marriage”. Engels: “Full freedom of marriage can therefore [after the victory of the communist revolution, G. K.] only be generally established when the abolition of capitalist production and of the property relations created by it has removed all the accompanying economic considerations which still exert such a powerful influence on the choice of a marriage partner. […] But what will quite certainly disappear from monogamy are all the features stamped upon it through its origin in property relations; these are, in the first place, supremacy of the man, and, secondly, indissolubility. The supremacy of the man in marriage is the simple consequence of his economic supremacy, and with the abolition of the latter will disappear of itself.”

Source: https://loamagazine.org/archive/2015/2015-32/the-fight-against-christianity-in-the-soviet-union

The article was published with the permission from "Love One Another!" in September 2020.

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