p In this book, the author seeks to convey to the foreign reader the truth about how freedom of conscience is respected in the Soviet Union, to describe the position and evolution of various religions in this country and the attitude of the Soviet state to those who believe in God.

p This book is topical today when the forces hostile to the Soviet Union, along with anti-Soviet and anti-communist centres, and the bourgeois press and other media are spreading falsehoods about alleged violations of freedom of conscience in the USSR, seeking to prove that believers and priests are persecuted in the Soviet Union for their faith.

p The enemies of the Soviet Union need these charges in order to place communist ideals in a bad light, to poison the minds of the working people with bourgeois morals and to weaken the attraction of existing socialism. The slanderous campaign launched in many capitalist countries, particularly in the USA, against the socialist community under the false slogan of human rights has demonstrated once again that the idea of freedom of conscience is used by the bourgeoisie as propaganda instrument in order to perpetuate its rule and make the bourgeois way of life more attractive.

p Because their ideological arsenal lacks social doctrines capable of resisting the magnetic ideas of communism, bourgeois ideologists resort to falsifying Soviet reality and the profoundly humane and democratic principles of the policies pursued by the Communist Party and the government of the Soviet Union, including their attitudes toward religion and the church.

p Yet it is the capitalist countries that shamelessly trample on basic human rights. The capitalist system nowadays brings the working man countless sufferings and hardships—mass unemployment, inflation, skyrocketing prices, lack of housing and health care. It is there that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. What rights has an unemployed if he is unable to make a living, provide for his family, or if he is turned out of his apartment because he cannot pay the rent? Freedom of conscience indeed, when it is impossible even to live like a human being!

p The exploitative classes alone enjoy freedom under capitalism. “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society,"  [6•1  said Lenin.

p Freedom of conscience, like many other formal freedoms, is used to deceive the working people in bourgeois society. The leaders of the bourgeois revolution, Lenin pointed out, “a hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty years ago . . . promised to rid mankind of medieval privileges, of sex inequality, of state privileges for one religion or another (or ’religious ideas’, ’the church’ in general)... They promised, but did not keep their promises."  [6•2 

p There can be no freedom for working people in a society divided into antagonistic classes. Only the countries where the exploitative classes have been abolished are able to ensure real democratic rights and freedoms. The article on the freedom of conscience is an important part of the system of political rights and freedoms embodied in the Constitution of the USSR. It regards freedom of conscience as an inherent right of every Soviet citizen and a manifestation of personal freedom.

p Freedom of conscience is one of the most important principles of the Leninist policy of the Communist Party and the Soviet state toward religion and the church. The Soviet state is carrying out these principles firmly and consistently.

p The USSR is the first country to realise in practice the broadest possible freedom of conscience. The Soviet Constitution guarantees freedom of conscience thus ensuring total freedom to believe in any God and to conduct religious worship, as well as total freedom not to believe in God and to conduct propaganda against any religion. The Communist Party rejects in principle any coercion in matters of belief or unbelief and the laws of the socialist state safeguard the citizens’ freedom of conscience.

p By consistently implementing the Leninist policy-making principles on religion, the Communist Party has made tremendous progress in liberating Soviet people from religious ideology and has involved the working masses into active construction of a new society. A highly developed economy has emerged in the Soviet Union, the people’s intellectual culture has grown and a high standard of life has been attained over the years of Soviet power. This is why an overwhelming majority of Soviet population has broken with religious prejudices.

Some of the Soviet people, however, still remain under the influence of religious ideology. The Soviet state and society are guided by humane considerations in their attitudes toward such people. They try to liberate them gradually from the bonds of religion and make them active builders of the new world without offending their religious sensibilities, through long, painstaking work to raise their cultural level and to explain the negative aspects of religious prejudices, which are incompatible with a scientific view of the world. The Communist Party and Soviet state are guided by the theses of Marxism that religious consciousness, by its very nature, is an anti-scientific, illusory reflection of reality and is synonymous to ignorance and suppression of man’s spiritual forces. To liberate a believer from his religious delusion is to make him class-conscious, active and energetic, to emancipate his spiritual forces in order to create a life worthy of man on earth rather than in heaven.