p Marx and Engels attached great importance to formulating the fundamental questions underlying a proletarian party’s attitudes to religion, church, and religious believers. In his early works, such as “On the Jewish Question" (1843), “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction" (1843-1844) and “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”, Marx termed religion as an anti-scientific and reactionary ideology. He proved the incompatibility between religion and political freedom and explained the need for separation of church and state as a precondition for dernocratisation of existing social relations.

p Religion, its doom and the inevitability of its dying out, was the subject of an early work by Engels “The Condition of England”. He attacked distortions of the general democratic principle of freedom of conscience found even in the most liberal countries of that time, such as the USA and Great Britain, where religious prejudices predominated and atheists were not protected by law.

p The classics of Marxism warned against any simplified and narrow interpretation of the religious question. Engels criticised Diihring when the latter suggested that all religion should be prohibited in his “state of the future”. In 1874, Engels ridiculed 14 the followers of Louis Blanqui who tried to force the Pans Communards to ban religious preaching and any religious organisation.  [14•1 

p In the age of imperialism and proletarian revolutions, Lenin exposed the social, historical and epistemological roots of religion and substantiated the Communist Party’s basic policy towards religion and the church. He criticised the opportunistic distortions in the views of the founders of scientific communism on religion. He fought sophisticated religious-philosophical teachings, such as God-building and God-seeking, and the attempts to renew religion. In his works “Socialism and Religion”, “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion”, “Classes and Parties in Their Attitude to Religion and the Church”, “Materialism and Empiric-Criticism”, “On the Significance of Militant Materialism" and others, Lenin formulated the programme for a proletarian party as regards religion and believers and outlined ways of carrying it out.

p Developing the theses of Marx and Engels, Lenin taught Communists to distinguish between religion as an ideology alien to Marxism, on the one hand, and the working people who held religious beliefs, on the other. He insisted on careful, comradely concern for workers and peasants who believed in God. He urged Communists not to scorn the working people’s religious prejudices, but rather to enlighten the believers tactfully and patiently while uniting them with the class-conscious proletariat in their joint struggle.  [14•2  This proposition has always been a key principle in Communist Party policy toward religion and believers.

p While stressing the uncompromising attitude of Marxism and the proletarian party to religion and the church, which defends exploitation and stupefies the working class, Lenin also believed il would be wrong to place the religious question in the foreground among the other tasks of the proletariat. If the problem were put this way, then religious, rather than political, motives would be artificially made top priorities. The religious 15 division of society is substituted for the class division. Lenin cautioned against slipping into an abstract, idealistic treatment of religion outside the context of class struggle. “It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods,"  [15•1  he wrote. Lenin thought the proletariat would be best enlightened on the religious issue by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. He taught that a proletarian party’s atheistic propaganda should be subordinated “to its basic task—the development of the class struggle of the exploited masses against the exploiters"  [15•2  without permitting workers to be divided along religious lines. The class interests of the workers called for joint efforts by atheists and believers in their struggle against oppressors. Lenin considered the overcoming of religious prejudices to be closely linked to the working people’s struggle against exploitation, to revolutionary transformation of society and to construction of socialism and communism.

p Lenin extended and substantiated the major theoretical theses of the founders of Marxism on freedom of conscience and separation of church from state and school from church. He spoke resolutely against any coercion in matters of faith, any constraint or restriction of freedom of conscience. Having profoundly analysed the specific conditions and summed up the experience of the class struggle during preparations for the proletarian revolution, for its victory and construction of socialism, Lenin demonstrated that the clergy of pre-revolutionary Russia, united with the landowners and the bourgeoisie, had mercilessly exploited the masses. The church possessed enormous property and was a major proprietor which exploited the toiling masses. “The churches and monasteries own about six million dessiatines  [15•3  of land,"  [15•4  he wrote.

p Pre-revolutionary Russia had about a thousand monasteries 16 and nunneries with a vast army of monks and nuns. Millions of peasants suffered because they had no land while there were 40 dessiatines of and per each monk or nun. Hundreds of thousands of hapless peasants toiled on the lands which belonged to monasteries, nunneries or churches. An interesting comparison: the Troitse-Sergiev Monastery had 106,000 serfs in the mid-18th century wliile Count Sheremetycv, who was the richest grandee at that time, had only 44,561 serfs. Church bank accounts were enormous. Thus, 60 million gold roubles were on the current account of the Holy Synod in 1906. In addition, the church kept millions of roubles in so-called “eternal deposits".

p A close union between the exploiters and the church emerged over the centuries in pre-revolutionary Russia. The church was a de facto part of the exploitative state. The Russian Orthodox Church was headed by the Holy Synod, which was just another state department. Enveloping the imperial dynasty in a halo of holiness and protecting its foundations, the clergy tried to instil patience and love for the ruling classes in the minds of the masses. The churchmen threatened all those who rose to fight against the autocracy with chastisements on earth and in heaven in their sermons and religious writings.

p The ruling classes of tsarist Russia followed double-dealing policy toward the faiths of non-Russian peoples. On the one hand, they crudely trod upon the freedom of conscience of nonOrthodox believers but, on the other, they supported the national priesthood—rabbis, mullahs, Roman Catholic priests and the like. The clergy of Russia’s outlying national areas were equally zealous in endeavouring to hold the toiling masses in submission to local and central authorities.

p Religious inequality was intertwined with national oppression. In multinational Russia the proletarian party was multinational too. This was the reason why even during the period when Lenin was creating a proletarian party, he paid constant attention to its attitude to religion, because quite a large part of the proletariat and peasantry, particularly in the country’s outlying areas, were believers. It was imperative that the masses of believers be involved in the revolutionary movement, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the attempts of the 17 counter-revolutionary forces to use the church as a bulwark of the old world were not to be ignored. All this called for the party’s distinct and clear-cut policy in religious matters.

p This policy was worked out by Lenin. He demonstrated in his writings that the fight against religious prejudices could only be successful during revolutionary transformation of the old social relations based on the masses’ exploitation, backwardness and illiteracy. He recommended reliance on science in fighting religion and set an example himself of a scientific approach to the complex problems of overcoming religion. Even when he was only beginning his revolutionary work, along with his ideological struggle against anti-Marxist trends, Lenin often exposed the reactionary role played by religion and the church so as to unmask the reactionary nature of the autocratic system and rally revolutionary forces around the proletarian party. Between the late 1890s and 1907 alone Lenin raised religious issues more than 50 times. Articles such as “What Are Our Ministers Thinking About?”, “Review of Home Affairs”, “The New Factory Law”, among many others, used concrete facts to show how downtrodden were the people by the spiritual oppression of religion and the church.

p In his article entitled “Draft and Explanation of a Programme for the Social-Democratic Party”, Lenin formulated the demand for struggle for religious freedom for the first time. Together with other general democratic targets in the programme of the revolutionary Social Democrats this helped arouse the oppressed masses to fight against the autocracy. It was especially important for Russia where Orthodoxy was the established church and there were laws against believers of different faiths.

p In another article, “The Tasks of the Russian Social- Democrats”, Lenin explained that, in denouncing absolutism, party propaganda should point out tsarism’s hostility not only to the working class but also to other public groups, including persecuted religions and sects. He advised explaining to the workers that political oppression bore heavily on all the citizens, including representatives of oppressed religions and sects.

p The political denunciations of the autocracy for persecuting non-Orthodox religions and sects, although very important, did 18 not make up the whole of the party line on religion. In his book What Is To Be Done?, Lenin set the task for Social- Democrats to work out a practical programme for involving working people in the outlying national areas, whose religions and sects were persecuted, in the general democratic movement. The political denunciations were to convince non-Orthodox believers in the hostility of the autocracy and, as a result, to rouse, organise and rally together the working believers for the struggle against the autocracy under the slogans of revolutionary SocialDemocracy.

p Orthodoxy being the established church of Russia under the patronage of the tsarist government and all the other religions and faiths being just tolerated or intolerated and persecuted, the Social Democrats’ propaganda and agitation did a great deal to prove that absolutism was hostile to the working class and peasantry, as well as to the working people of the persecuted religions and sects. Lenin wrote in his work “To the Rural Poor" that among European countries only Russia and Turkey still maintained the shameful laws against adherents of religions different from the established ones: “These laws either totally ban a certain religion, or prohibit its propagation, or deprive those who belong to it of certain rights."  [18•1  The admission of “dissenters” into educational institutions, for example, was restricted. They were not allowed to hold official government positions; there was a so-called Pale established for some ethnic groups of certain religions. They were prohibited to settle outside it. It was allowed to change Orthodoxy for another creed only as a rare exception.

p In working on the Draft Party Programme in 1895, Lenin advanced the demand for freedom of religion.  [18•2  Later, in 1902, he detailed and made more specific the Party’s attitude to religion in his “Material for the Preparation of the Programme of the R.S.D.L.P.”. He included the demands for unrestricted freedom of conscience and for separation of church from state and 19 of school from church which were made part of the final text of the Party Programme.  [19•1  Lenin set a practical task for Party organisations to involve members of persecuted religions and sects in the general democratic movement. While showing the adherents of different religions how the autocracy oppressed them, it was necessary to rouse, organise and lead them to fight against tsarism under Social-Democratic slogans. Lenin’s ideas regarding confiscation of lands owned by monasteries and churches were reflected in the Programme.

p Freedom of conscience occupies a special place in Lenin’s programme for active ideological struggle against religion. Meaning that freedom in matters of belief or unbelief is an elementary component of any really democratic state system, Lenin thoroughly substantiated and developed the theses of Marx and Engels that the working people could not be expected to be freed from mysticism and superstition without freedom of conscience. He held that real freedom of conscience was possible only when church was completely separated from state and school from church: “Complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church."  [19•2 

p Lenin formulated the general democratic principles which the proletarian party maintains in the sphere of freedom of conscience. “Everybody must be perfectly free, not only to profess whatever religion he pleases,” Lenin wrote, “but also to ... change his religion. . .. There should be no ’established’ religion or church. All religions and all churches should have equal status in the state."  [19•3  In antagonistic societies, freedom of conscience is reduced at best to freedom of worship alone. Real freedom of conscience should include equality of rights for all citizens, whether they believe in God or not, and recognition of religion as a private affair. It allows free conversion from one faith into another, does not recognise any religion as the “ 20 established religion”, provides for non-interference of church and state in each other’s affairs and includes freedom of atheistic propaganda.

p A key document outlying the Party’s attitude toward religion was Lenin’s article “Socialism and Religion”, written in 1905. It clearly formulates the basic principles which a proletarian party should adhere to with respect to religion.

p First, the Party believed that religion was a form of spiritual oppression. It was engendered by social injustice and the oppressed classes’ impotence in their struggle against the exploiters and continued to be supported by capitalism’s merciless exploitation of working people. “The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in 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."  [20•1  From this ensued the attitude of the proletarian party to religion, which involved resolute, uncompromising struggle until religious prejudice in the minds of the working people was entirely overcome.

p Second, religion and religious consciousness could be overcome only in class struggle, i.e. the struggle against religion was to be subordinated to the struggle for socialism. That was why Lenin spoke resolutely against advancing the religious question to first place—because it did not belong there at all in real life, in the working people’s struggle to liberate themselves from the oppression of the exploiters. He stressed that the working people’s unity in the struggle for the creation of paradise on earth was more important than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.

p Third, Lenin explained the political meaning of the democratic demand for freedom of conscience and gave it a proletarian interpretation, arguing that it also included the freedom of atheism, i.e. the right not to profess any religion. This 21 demand was especially important for old Russia, in which shameful laws against atheists and non-Orthodox believers were still in force.

Fourth, Lenin thoroughly explained the need for a complete separation of church from state and school from church. He proved that this demand was one of the most important guarantees of freedom of conscience. While insisting on the principle of freedom of conscience, Lenin emphasised that the Party opposed all religions (whether established or persecuted) with ideological weapons, the Party press, and persuasion.