p Inasmuch as the attitude to religion is one of the most complex questions in the Party policy, Lenin repeatedly stressed the need for patient, insistent work to liberate the working people from religious influence. He sharply criticised those who wanted to declare open war on religion. Such leftist demands only revived interest in religion and hindered the process of religious prejudices dying out. The open war on religion interferes with consolidating working masses of different faiths and makes their struggle against exploiters more difficult.

p In his article “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion”, Lenin spoke against another misguided idea. There was a clause in the German Social Democrats’ Erfurt Programme, adopted at the Party’s Congress in 1891, concerning its attitude to religion. This clause had been introduced into the programme after a long battle waged by Engels against the Blanquists and Diihring who preached extreme intolerance of religion. The sharp reproof administered by Engels to the Blanquists and Diihring came to be interpreted by opportunists, even while Engels was still alive, as meaning that the proletarian party considered religion a private affair. In other words, they tried to extrapolate the thesis that religion was a private affair from the domain of the state to that of the party. Engels drew attention to the folly of such an interpretation and spoke resolutely against such opportunistic distortions in his introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France.

p To make clear the general democratic principles of freedom 22 of conscience, Lenin stressed that a man’s faith was a private affair as far as the state was concerned, but not as far as the socialist proletariat’s party was. The Communist Party is an association of advanced, class-conscious workers. “Such an association,” Lenin wrote, “cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs.. .. Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog."  [22•1  This is why the Communists have never concealed the fact that they are combating religion but, as Lenin taught, only with ideological weapons, and the ideological struggle waged by Communists cannot be a private affair. If one “declared religion to be a private matter" in relation to the Party, Lenin pointed out, then the role of the Party as the leader would be degraded “to the level of the most vulgar ’free-thinking’ philistinism, which is prepared to allow a non-denominational status, but which renounces the party struggle against the opium of religion which stupefies the people".  [22•2 

p The anarchists accused the Bolsheviks of inconsistency, of wavering between war with God and an alleged desire to “play up" to religious workers so as not to scare them away from the revolutionary path. Lenin proved the complete unsoundness of such charges in his article “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion”. He ridiculed those who expressed such opinions, calling them dilettantes, slapdash in their attitude to Marxism. Lenin also pointed out the falsity of the charge that the Marxist party took a moderate stand on religion for tactical considerations.

p Lenin’s works written to elaborate the Party Programme demonstrated how cruelly tsarist Russia persecuted and violated all the democratic freedoms. He exposed the alliance between the ruling classes and the established Orthodox Church, denounced the oppressive police and clerical control of people’s 23 conscience and revealed the cruel harassment and constraint of civil rights of non-Orthodox believers and atheists, the peoples of the Volga Area, Siberia, and the Far East, oppressed by tsarism and converted by force to Orthodoxy.

p Taking Russian reality as an example, Lenin showed that the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie and landowners used religion to preserve the monarchy and to crush the mass revolutionary movement. But while the nobility sought to preserve the old patriarchal church intact, the bourgeoisie spoke in favour of its renewal. In contrast to many European countries, the Russian bourgeoisie did not advance any demands for separation of church from state and school; they only wanted the church to be free from the police control imposed by the state.

p The needs of developing capitalism compelled the bourgeoisie to face the problem of reformation in the church so that the church could perform new social functions while the reactionaries tried to maintain the old conditions accepted by the nobility and feudals.

p Drawing attention to attempts by the bourgeois Cadet Party (Constitutional Democrats) to fool the workers and peasants by religious means, Lenin pointed out that in this issue “the standpoint of the Cadets ... merely expresses the efforts of ’cultured’ capital to bamboozle the people with religious narcotics by more refined methods of Church deception than the ones now practised by the rank-and-file Russian priests who are still living in the past."  [23•1  Although representatives of the bourgeoisie and landowners turned bourgeois wished the church’s authority to be preserved and its influence enhanced, they were opposed to crude methods of ideological brainwashing of the masses and for new and effective devices of such brainwashing.

p Cruel repressions launched after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution were accompanied by ideological attacks. It was then that Lenin wrote: ”. . .The Russian bourgeoisie for its counterrevolutionary purposes felt a need to revive religion, increase the demand for religion, invent religion, inoculate the people with religion or strengthen the hold of religion on them in new forms."  [23•2  24 Sergei Bulgakov, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Zinaida Gippius, fashionable writers of that time, even founded a whole new school that was named “God-seeking”. Frightened by the revolution, they began looking for ways of spreading religion among the masses. The God-seekers slandered the people’s revolution and socialism and praised treason, pessimism and decadence. Supported by the government, they preached idealism and religious superstition, and attacked and monstrously distorted Marxism. With an unheard-of zeal, bourgeois scholars, authors and journalists “refuted” the theoretical foundations of the Marxist party: dialectical and historical materialism. They tried to propagate idealism and religious superstition with their distorted interpretations of achievements in the natural sciences.

p The Party warded off reactionary ideological attacks though some Party intellectuals (Valentinov, Yushkevich, Bogdanov, Bazarov, Lunacharsky and others) proved to be ideologically unstable. In their quest for a religion acceptable to the proletariat and under the pretext of “improving” and “correcting” Marxism, they spoke against its very foundations, preaching “unification of Marxism with religion" and so on. Lenin exposed the reactionary essence of this movement in his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, revealing its groundlessness and negative effects.

p To expose the political clericalism of the Russian bourgeoisie, Lenin wrote several works—“Liberals and Clericals”, “The Priesthood in the Elections, and Elections with the Priesthood”, “Concerning the Workers’ Deputies to the Duma and Their Declaration" and “Results of the Elections”. He showed how the Russian ruling classes used the clergy and the church to enslave the working people.

p Tsarism had been cruelly oppressing the peoples of the outlying national areas for many centuries. The ruling classes were afraid of the working people’s international solidarity and sought to split the revolutionary forces according to nationality of their members. National discord was stirred up by activities of 25 many religious preachers. However, religious and national conflicts had the same class basis and pursued the same end: to divide the lower classes in the interests of the upper classes. The upper classes themselves would always find a common language between themselves. In his article, “The Working Class and the National Question”, Lenin noted the desire of the exploitative classes to divide the working people along religious lines while they themselves got along splendidly together. “ Orthodox Christians and Jews, Russians and Germans, Poles and Ukrainians, everyone who possesses capital, exploit the workers of all nations in company,"  [25•1  he wrote.

p Mercilessly oppressing the working people regardless of their religion, the bourgeoisie and the clergy often cover up the oppression with speculations about the “interests” of a nation or the “needs” for development of national culture. Lenin exposed the falsity of such statements, pointing out that under the cover of the slogan of “national culture" the Black Hundreds  [25•2  and clericals did their reactionary and dirty business, and the slogan of “national culture" in the mouth of the ruling classes was nothing else but the Black-Hundred and clerical deception in the interests of the landowners, the clergy and the bourgeoisie.

p In tsarist Russia, this slogan strengthened militant clericalism and bourgeois nationalism. Lenin cited an example in his article “How Does Bishop Nikon Defend the Ukrainians?" A bill on the Ukrainian-language schools and societies was presented to the State Duma. Bishop Nikon was the first to sign the bill, but of course he did not care about developing national cultures or Ukrainian culture. Bishop Nikon, Lenin noted, begged the Great-Russian landowners for privileges to be granted to Ukrainians on the grounds that they were brothers under Christ while Jews, for example, were people of foreign extraction. Lenin used this example to show the nature of clerical-bourgeois 26 nationalism: a Christ-loving deputy to the Duma had spoken openly in defence of interests of one nation at the expense of the other that was to be suppressed.  [26•1  The ruling classes of Russia were afraid of international solidarity of the working people and tried to prevent it and to split the revolutionary forces according to religion while the clergy helped them as much as they could. Under the circumstances, the Party’s activities to rally the working masses in the internationalist spirit were of paramount importance. The clear-cut Party policy in the religious sphere and the democratic principles of freedom of conscience, formulated by Lenin, were instrumental in this work for internationalist education of Russia’s working people.

p Opportunism inside proletarian parties does serious harm to the internationalist unity of working people and to revolutionary movements in general, especially when in alliance with religion. In Russia, the alliance of opportunism and the priesthood was a logical result in the development of the two versions of capitalism’s ideological defence. Lenin repeatedly drew attention to the connection between opportunism and clericalism. His article “What Next?" said: “The opportunists are bourgeois enemies of the proletarian revolution, who in peaceful times carry on their bourgeois work in secret, concealing themselves within the workers’ parties, while in times of crisis they immediately prove to be open allies of the entire united bourgeoisie, from the conservative to the most radical and democratic part of the latter, from the free-thinkers, to the religious and clerical sections."  [26•2 

p Karl Kautsky, an ideologist of opportunism, even tried to defend religious ideology on theoretical grounds. He divided religion into “interior” and “exterior” ones, into essence and form and spirit and organisation. He argued that it was not religion which was reactionary but the church. Religion was ostensibly neutral in class struggle. Kautsky idealised early Christianity and preached the identity between socialism and religion. Exposing Kautsky’s opportunism, Lenin wrote that “Kautsky has turned Marxism into a. most hideous and stupid 27 counterrevolutionary theory, into the lowest kind of clericalism."  [27•1 

p Present-day renegades, such as Ernst Fischer, Roger Garaudy, Ernst Bloch and the like, who openly defend religion and clericalism, do not go far beyond Kautsky. In their arbitrary interpretations of the propositions of the founders of Marxism on religion’s meaning and social function, they try to prove that the thesis of religion having always been the opiate of the people never belonged to Marx. They ascribe a positive role to religion in social progress, in the liberation movement of the oppressed classes and in the development of culture and civilisation. Garaudy argues, for example, that religion cannot be opposed to science without reservation because, allegedly, there are both contradiction and continuity between them. Therefore a Communist Party, claims Garaudy, should be above materialism and idealism, religion and atheism. Garaudy and his supporters assert that religion has changed so much to the better that its description by Marx, Engels and Lenin is no longer applicable. The speculations about some abrupt turn in the history of the church, about a “radical” reappraisal of religious values were needed for the renegades to justify their bows to religion. They deliberately conceal the indisputable fact that nowadays, just as in the past, there still exists the socio-political and ideological platform of joint actions of opportunism and the clergy against the proletarian concept of freedom of conscience.

Lenin set the task for the Communists to expose the alliance of opportunism and the clergy. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, conciliatory petty-bourgeois parties in Russia, paid lip-service to disestablishment of the church and even included the demand for freedom of conscience into their programmes but took pains to strengthen their alliance with the clergy and betrayed the interests of workers and peasants. After the autocracy was overthrown, they supported the Provisional Government that made good use of religious organisations to consolidate the counter-revolutionary forces. The conciliatory parties, together with the clergy, launched political campaigns in support of the bourgeoisie’s domestic and foreign policies. 28 Allied with the priests, the petty-bourgeois parties advocated the slogan of “war to the victorious end" and slandered the Bolshevik Party and its leader, Lenin.