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p Having explained the origin and meaning of religion, the founders of Marxism-Leninism suggested and substantiated ways to overcoming religious prejudices. Marx and Engels foresaw the future when the masses would be entirely free from religious ideology. Marx wrote to Arnold Ruge in 1842: “...religion in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself."  [127•2  Marx and Engels were convinced that religion would not die away automatically or spontaneously. They regarded it as an ideological weapon effectively used by the reactionary classes against the oppressed. Therefore, they were in favour of fighting priests who pretended to side with workers.  [127•3 

p The Marxist thesis on the ways of overcoming religion was grossly distorted by the opportunist Social-Democratic leaders, who put their trust in religion dying away automatically. Such 128 ideas, for example, were propagated by the Dutch Social Democrat Anton Pannekoek who believed that religious prejudices would disappear by themselves. Lenin was resolutely against these views. “We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism,"  [128•1  he wrote. Lenin linked the solution of the problem of liberating the working people from the religious drug to “the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion".  [128•2 

p He argued that only “...the class struggle of the working masses could, by comprehensively drawing the widest strata of the proletariat into conscious and revolutionary social practice, really free the oppressed masses from the yoke of religion."  [128•3 

p The materialist world-outlook incompatible with any belief in supernatural forces is best formed during the struggle against exploitation and during socialist and communist construction. “The real education of the masses,” Lenin said, “can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will."  [128•4  The participation of working people in the October Revolution, in Soviet socialist construction and in revolutionary transformation in the socialist countries, as well as in the class battles of the capitalist world have made millions of people everywhere abandon religion, which is a striking proof that Lenin was right in his outline of the ways of liberating the popular masses from religious prejudices.

p Atheism is spreading among working people in capitalist society, too. Marx and Engels made this point in their time. But the rise of atheism there is spontaneous. The economy, culture, ideology, everyday life and traditions of a country must undergo radical changes for people to give up religion en masse. Marx and Engels wrote in their review of a book by G. F. Daumer, a 129 German petty-bourgeois publicist: “With every great historical upheaval of social conditions the outlooks and ideas of men, and consequently their religious ideas, are revolutionised."  [129•1 

p The liberation of the masses from religion in socialist society is a long and painful process, by no means spontaneous. On the contrary, Lenin repeatedly stressed that the overcoming of religious prejudices has to be guided by the Communist Party at all times. The Party organises broad-ranging educational and atheistic propaganda, exposes the class meaning of religion and seeks to break the ties between religious organisations and the exploitative classes. Lenin armed the Communist Party with a specific plan for liberating the working people from religious ideology. He proved that religion and the clergy had always been used by the ruling classes to oppress the masses in class society. When one socio-economic system was replaced by another and a new exploitative class replaced the old, the social purpose of religion remained unchanged so long as exploitation remained.

p Everyone in tsarist Russia was obliged to profess a religion, regardless of his or her convictions. As of 1897, the population of 126.5 million was 69.9 per cent Orthodox, 8.91 per cent Roman Catholic and 10.83 per cent Moslem. There is no mention in the old statistics about persons with no religion. Even those who did not believe in any God or those who observed religious holidays and customs only by force of habit were still registered as believers. Russian Orthodoxy was the established church. Its adherents accounted for over 90 per cent of the population in 34 gubernias out of 96 at the turn of the century. 57 gubernias were more than 50 per cent Orthodox. In 1914, Russia had 77,767 Orthodox churches, 1,025 monasteries and nunneries, 117,915 priests and 94,629 monks, nuns and novices.

p While supporting religion, the tsarist government brutally persecuted atheists. Medieval, inquisitorial laws existed in Russia until 1917 “persecuting men for their belief or disbelief, violating men’s consciences, and linking cosy government jobs and 130 government-derived incomes with the dispensation of this or that dope by the established church."  [130•1 

p Different classes were affected by religion to different degrees. The enlightened part of the Russian intelligentsia was essentially atheistic. The peasantry was more religious than the workers. Economic dependence gave rise to superstitions in the masses of the oppressed workers and peasants. But not all the people in prerevolutionary Russia were pious despite the domination of the church ideology. The Christian faith was never a way of life for the entire population in tsarist Russia. “In spite of the profound moral significance attached in general to a strict submission to the church,” observed N. I. Kostomarov, a famous Russian historian, “Russian piety was based more on attention to outward ceremonies than on the inner religious feeling.”

p Russians have never been devout, a result in no small degree of the traditions of revolutionary liberation struggle and the free-thinking spirit of the progressive intelligentsia. Many representatives of Russian social thought spoke resolutely against the domination of people’s spiritual life by the church and loudly protested against attempts to portray the masses as bearers of profound religious beliefs. When the great Russian writer Gogol, ill and in a state of spiritual crisis, tried to describe Russian people as devout servants of God, Vissarion Belinsky, the great Russian literary critic and a Revolutionary Democrat responded quickly. “In your opinion,” wrote Belinsky in his celebrated Letter to Gogol, “the Russian people is the most religious in the world. A lie! The basis of religiosity is piety, reverence, fear of God. But a Russian man pronounces God’s name while scratching himself in some places. He says of an icon: it’s to pray when good and to cover a pot when not.” And elsewhere in the same letter, Belinsky addressed the writer: “Look more closely and you will see that this is a deeply atheistic people by nature. It has still a lot of superstitions but not a trace of religiosity.” Belinsky held that mystical exaltation is alien to the Russian people: “It has too much common sense, clear and positive mind for that and in this may lie its enormous historical destiny—in future.” He 131 believed that the Russian people would be able to free itself easily from religion and aim at realising their ideals rather than dreaming of the world beyond.

p Alexander Herzen, another Revolutionary Democrat, believed that superstitions were produced by the objective conditions of Russian life. Poor, robbed by officials, worn out by labour, a peasant suffered from “poverty with no way out" and ignorance. “He is too crushed, too unhappy not to be superstitious,” Herzen wrote. But, he added, “the Russian peasant ... is indifferent to religion which incidentally is an impenetrable mystery to him. He observes all outward rituals of worship to clear his conscience; he goes to mass on Sunday in order not to think about church any longer for 6 days.” Anton Chekhov was also against overestimating Russian religious feelings. To ridicule the Godseekers, he said: “They are cheats, not decadents! They sell rotten goods. . .. Religion, mysticism and all sorts of devilry! The Russian peasant has never been pious and he has long put the devil under a sweating shelf in the steam bath.”

p Lenin thoroughly analysed the reasons for the superstitions held by the working people. He said that the toiler, tied to his plot of land, benighted, frightened and ignorant, was a victim of superstitions. But Lenin noted even in his early works that rationalism and distrust of the Gospel’s commandments were growing in the peasantry. He said in a brochure “To the Rural Poor" that even at that time peasants did not believe the priests who tried their hardest arguing that serfdom had been approved by Holy Scripture and legalised by God. Lenin repeatedly pointed out that the peasants were level-headed business-minded people who demanded tangible material benefits. Proceeding from these propositions, the Bolsheviks conducted extensive educational work in the masses, exposing the autocracy’s counterrevolutionary policies and those of the large army of priests serving it. Social-Democratic revolutionary leaflets and pamphlets contained a wealth of anti-religious material. They were a highly versatile, effective form of propaganda of communist ideas in the masses at that time. The League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class in St. Petersburg and the revolutionary Social-Democratic organisations in the Ukraine began issuing atheistic leaflets in great quantities as early as 1895 and 132 1896, and these activities were stepped up in the period 1902- 1907. The leaflets and pamphlets exposed the class meaning of religion, its alliance with the autocracy and persecution of science and enlightenment and propagated freedom of conscience. Under the impact of this propaganda, and in the crucible of fierce class battle, despite Draconian laws to protect worship, the political awareness of the masses grew and many revolutionary workers and peasants broke with religion. Although people did not give up religion en masse until the October Revolution, an alliance of militant atheists was formed at that time under the proletarian Party’s leadership. The Bolsheviks relied on this alliance after taking power to carry out their scientific policy as regards religion and the church.

p Power in Russia was transferred to the workers and peasants in October, 1917. This action marked the beginning of a new historical era—an era of triumph for socialism and communism. By destroying the regime of the bourgeoisie and landowners and establishing the Soviet Republic of workers and peasants, the October Revolution dealt a crushing blow to the age-old illusions that the tsar’s power came from God.

p For centuries the exploiting classes instilled in the working people the myth of the divine, supernatural origin of any power. The workers, peasants and revolutionary soldiers destroyed courageously and resolutely the former attributes of power and demonstrated to the whole world that the proletarian state did not need religion as a tool to hold the masses in spiritual slavery. Having eliminated private ownership of land and established public ownership of the country’s minerals, forests and means of production, Soviet power began removing the principal root of religion, that is the rule of capital in all its forms, thus creating requisites for the people giving up religion en masse. Lenin pointed out in his article “Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution" that, although freedom of conscience was an important problem for the bourgeoisie when they rose up against the feudals, they did not dare to carry it out because religion had helped the exploiters instill respect for the “sacred right of private property" in the oppressed for centuries.

p The founders of scientific communism pointed out that a formal proclamation of democratic freedoms and disestablishment 133 of church alone would not solve the problem of liberating man Irom religious chains. In bourgeois society, Marx wrote, “ political . . . emancipation . . . neither abolishes the real religiousness of man, nor strives to do so."  [133•1  Relying on science, Soviet power from the very start began combating boldly and resolutely the church’s age-old domination. “In not a single one of the most advanced countries in the world have these questions [religion, the denial of rights to women, etc.] been completely settled on bourgeois-democratic lines. ... In our country they have been settled completely by the legislation of the October Revolution,"  [133•2  Lenin wrote. The Soviet system was the first in history to grant extensive rights and freedoms to the formerly oppressed peoples in all spheres of social and public life, including the unrestricted ri^ht to freedom of conscience. In contrast to the bourgeoisie, which had opposed the church’s domination at the dawn of the bourgeois revolutions and then, giving up combating religion, allied with it, the proletarian state does not need church’s support and takes pains to enlighten the masses, helping them in overcoming religion.

p “Bourgeois democracy”, even in the most democratic of modern capitalist countries, does not go beyond recognising the equality of all religions before the law, the freedom to profess any faith, but not the right to atheism. In contrast to bourgeois society the socialist system provides greater democracy for working people in matters related to freedom of conscience, among others. The Soviet Union has not only freed people from “state privileges for one religion or another”, but is also solving a more difficult problem—liberating the human conscience from “ religious ideas", “the church" in general.  [133•3 

p By abolishing all national and national-religious privileges and disablements and proclaiming all faiths, customs, national and religious institutions to be free, the Soviet state ended the policy of putting people against each other and of using for the purpose religious and national strife. The lessons of the class 134 struggle in the course of the revolutionary break-up of the pillars of the old regime and the counter-revolutionary stance taken by clergymen of all the churches during the Civil War and foreign intervention stimulated the process of educating and changing attitudes to religion in the masses. During two revolutions and the Civil War, Russia’s working classes obtained a thorough political education in a short period. Affected by the revolutionary upheaval, their mentality and consciousness underwent radical changes.

p The revolutionary epoch was an important stage where workers and peasants began abandoning religion on a large scale. About 10 per cent of adults gave up religion during the first few years of Soviet rule. Although many people at that time still kept to some religious rituals to keep up the tradition, their former belief in God was shattered dramatically.

p However, the Communist Party was aware how difficult it would be to overcome religious beliefs in the population at large. Even in the first few years of Soviet rule, this work called for careful and thorough study of the population’s religious beliefs by local Party and state officials in order to determine future educational activities.

p To help believers become atheists and involve them in an active and constructive life in building a new society were the targets of the Communist Party at all times in their programme for atheist education. Lenin’s programme for atheist education was reflected in the documents adopted by the 12th Party Congress. It said that religious prejudices were still alive. “The religious prejudices, weakened and shattered by life, will retain the ground still for a long time to come,” stressed the resolution of the Congress.

p The proletariat was small in number in the outlying national areas of tsarist Russia. The local clergy took advantage of this fact when Soviet power was established by stepping up their activity. This led to the growth of Pan-Islamic and Pan- Turkic sentiments in the East and to the rise of Zionist groups in Western regions of the country. Because of this, the 12th Party Congress decided that atheist work among the believers of all denominations should be intensified. The Congress stressed that propaganda should be conducted regularly and scientifically, 135 using many methods. The Congress charged the local Party organisations with launching a more extensive propaganda drive through study groups, seminars, lectures, personal talks and in the press, by means of films and books on the subject. The Party Central Committee recommended that extreme care should be taken, especially while working with non-Russian peoples in the regions where religion and the clergy had greater historical influence and national and religious issues tended to be inseparable.

p As directed by the Party Central Committee, sociological research was conducted in the 1920s and early 1930s to study processes in the minds of the masses and see how their attitude to religion was changing. The studies were to find out exactly for every territory or region where religious beliefs (Orthodoxy, Mohammedanism, sectarianism, paganism, etc.) still survived on a large scale; in what regions they were especially strong and in what stratum of the population (craftsmen, peasant-farmers, in woodlands, ethnic centres, etc.), where religious sentiments revived noticeably and why (because of backwardness, vigorous church activities, slack cultural work, material conditions worsened by poor harvest and so on). The sociological studies produced findings characterising the attitudes of different groups of the population to religion, the numerical strength of religious communities, and the number of religious ceremonies performed at places of worship by various denominations.

p Most of the people continued to live in the countryside and still remained religious in the mid-1920s. But even at that time atheism increased with every new achievement of the socialist state. In Pskov Region (population 1,700,000), for example, 500,000 adults living mostly in towns did not belong to any religious association, neither Orthodox nor sectarian, at that time. Nearly two thirds of the inhabitants in Cherepovets no longer had regular connections with the church and were either atheists or waverers.

p The revolutionary-proletarian part of the population, mainly in the cities and towns, was the carrier of atheism, as a rule. Thus, in Moscow people abandoned religion more rapidly in the areas around large factories. There were fewer registered religious ceremonies performed in these areas in Moscow in the mid-1920s than on the capital’s outskirts. There were no exact 136 data but, considering that the Communist Party and Komsomol had a total of nearly 4 million members with unbelievers among non-Party workers, peasants and intellectuals and some of their family members all added to that number, quite a large figure can be obtained for the non-religious in that period.

p The Communist Party directed propagandists to conduct a profound study of the reasons for people’s continuing religious beliefs and demanded that they should keep track of the changes in people’s attitudes to religion. The first results of the studies conducted by the Party organisations and scientific institutions made clear that atheism was spreading in the country. The spread of atheism was caused by the process of socialist construction.

p On the basis of statistics and sociological findings, the People’s Commissar of Education, A. V. Lunacharsky, concluded that about 20 per cent of the population had already given up religion by the late 1920s in the USSR and the rest remained believers or waverers.

p The Party Central Committee took measures to step up educational work. Scientific centres on problems of atheism were set up in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Voronezh and other cities. These centres made more than 100 sociological studies in various regions of the country in the 1920s and early 1930s to find out how greatly the population was still influenced by religion. Sociological research into the problems of liberation from religious prejudices was carried out by the Moscow Institute on Methods of Extra-School Activities, the Institute for Study of the Peoples of the USSR, the labour activities centre of the Moscow Regional Council of Trade Unions and by institutes under the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

p In 1929 and 1930, people’s religious beliefs were studied in Byelorussia, Moscow, Leningrad, in Tataria, in the Volga-Kama Area and in some areas of the Lower Volga Area and in Karelia. Research expeditions went to Magnitogorsk, to the construction site of a large dam on the Dnieper River and to some areas of the Central Black-Earth Zone. The researchers obtained valuable data on people’s changing attitudes toward religion.

p The extent of continuing religious belief in Byelorussia was investigated thoroughly in 1929 and 1930. Using techniques devised specifically for the purpose, the Byelorussian experts made 137 a survey of 20 cities and towns and 225 villages. 3,086 questionnaires were distributed. The answers provided the data which proved valid for many parts of the republic. 35.4 per cent of those polled said they did riot believe in God, and 60 per cent of them were men.

p Sponsored by the Philosophy Institute under the auspices of the Communist Academy, an All-Union conference of researchers engaged in problems of religion and scientific atheism was held in December 1930. Another such conference took place in 1934. The speakers told the audiences about radical transformations in the minds of the masses, emphasising that religious ideology is undergoing great changes in the USSR; the former stabilisation in the number of religious communities was giving way to its gradual decrease. This trend could be found not only in the Russian Orthodox Church, but also in sects in the late 1920s. At the same time, delegates to the conferences drew attention to tendencies toward renovation present in almost all denominations and to the efforts of the churchmen and sectarians to revive and establish some seemingly-forgotten rituals and customs.

p Although breaking away from religious ideology was inexorable in the late 1920s and early 1930s, religious influence still remained considerable. In the RSFSR, for instance, Autonomous republics excluded, there were 36,805 religious associations as of January 1, 1928. Most of them (32,539) were functioning in the countryside and 4,266 in the cities and towns. In spite of a sharp decline, the USSR had 50 different sects with a total of 3.5 million members in the early 30s. There were still about nine million Old Believers. The Orthodox Church had 50,000 active places of worship throughout the country in 1929. The religious organisations had many clergymen and church activists. In addition, religious propaganda was conducted by thousands of former monks and nuns. In addition to preaching at places of worship, the religious centres of various denominations published journals, books and brochures. Thus, 100,000 copies of religious publications, 11 journals and other printed matter were distributed in the Ukraine in 1928 alone. The clergy’s efforts could not however stop the mass departure from religious belief.

p A significant indication of the decline in religiosity of the 138 population was the diminishing influence of the ceremonial aspect of worship. The number of rituals performed by Orthodox priests decreased everywhere at the turn of the 1920s, as did the number of baptisms by Baptists. The workers of the Znamya Oktyabrya factory in Byelorussia announced publicly that they would not observe religious holidays and urged all the working people to fight “for science, for a new and correct world- outlook, for a new order of things and a new way of life”. The inhabitants of most villages in Leningrad Region refused to celebrate “patron saint’s days" in 1929. Eight hundred collective farms were surveyed in the Central Black-Earth Zone in the spring sowing season in 1932 and it turned out that 75 per cent of the collective farmers worked on religious holidays. More than half of the peasants who had joined collective farms refused to celebrate religious holidays and rituals in 1934.

p Time spent on worship in the countryside has also decreased considerably. In 1934, men took 4 hours and women 15 hours to perform religious rituals against 119 hours for men and 199 hours for women in 1922 and 1923. The desire for self- education and schooling increased at the same time.

p The radical transformation of Soviet life during industrialisation and collectivisation, the involvement of the masses in the planned economic construction and the active participation of workers, peasants and working intelligentsia in fulfilling national economic plans all contributed to people giving up religion en masse. Clergymen themselves had to recognise this fact. A representative of the Mogilev Eparchial Board said at a conference of Orthodox priests held in Orsha in 1934: “Any close observer cannot help seeing the attitude of the younger generation to faith. . . . Atheism has deeply penetrated the minds of the common people; it is growing rapidly and getting stronger.”

p People abandoned religion on a large scale, a process that began after the October Revolution, and now progressed smoothly in the cities and in the countryside. About 70 per cent of the urban population and over 50 per cent of the collective farmers terminated regular connections with the church as early as the mid-1930s.

p The triumph of socialist relations in town and country and the working people’s active participation in building the new 139 society helped to release them increasingly from the influence of religion and the church. Atheism became widespread in the urban and rural areas in the late 1930s.

p Most people gave up religion and the church due to the immense work carried out by the Communist Party. Many of those clergymen who had not believed in the humane principles of socialism during the early years of Soviet rule changed their attitudes and became loyal Soviet citizens. Only a small number of clergymen still fought against it.

p The radical changes in people’s minds and democratism of public life destroyed the social roots of religion in the USSR; religion and the church entered a deep crisis. Marx pointed out that this trend was inevitable under socialism. In an interview with a reporter from the Chicago Tribune he said that religion would disappear as socialism developed. It had to disappear as a result of the social development where education would play a great role.

p The Communist Party organised atheist propaganda among believers, instructing its ideologists that the success of their work would depend on their ability to involve all the Soviet people, including those who were religious, in active construction of the new society. Participation in the social process was the best means to liberate believers from religion. While stressing the primary importance of revolutionary practice in overcoming religion, the Party cautioned against any underestimation of planned and purposeful atheistic activities.

p This work was launched under the guidance of Party organisations just before the War. More books on atheism were published, more lectures and talks arranged. Training courses for propagandists of atheism were started in many places.

p Fewer people abandoned religion during the War and the process was even reversed in some places. Bourgeois Sovietologists still try to picture this fact as proof that religion is alive in the minds of the Soviet people and that the CPSU and Soviet state have failed to make religious prejudices disappear. The false reasons to explain the temporary revival of religious beliefs are based on political motives to serve anti-communism.

p The reasons for some revival of religious belief during the War are as follows:

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p First, the War brought unheard-of hardships, suffering, destruction and death to millions of people. Worry about the fate of the country, one’s home, for the lives of one’s family and relatives created the conditions for religious sentiments. Second, the churchmen and sectarians became more active. While praying for victory over Nazi Germany and urging people to help frontline soldiers, they sought at the same time to strengthen belief in God and to attract more people to religion, especially the grief-stricken. In their efforts, the clergy relied on their church’s growing material and financial resources, stronger machinery, and greater capacity for training personnel and issuing a broad range of publications. Third, the Nazi invaders initially encouraged those churchmen and sectarians who were willing to collaborate, concealing their secret designs to ban entirely the traditional popular faiths in the occupied territories. Fourth, atheistic propaganda grew weaker during the War. The Union of Militant Atheists almost ceased to function and atheist newspapers and magazines were no longer published. Well-versed atheists gradually stopped active work and verbal propaganda work was cut down. Some artists and writers expressed the harmful opinion that religion and the church were neutral, even useful in socialist society.

p The patriotism of believers and many clergymen displayed during the War and the praise given to activity by the religious centres were interpreted by some experts as a change in the attitude to religion. Freedom of conscience as guaranteed by the USSR Constitution came to be understood as unrestricted freedom of religious propaganda. The false theory that the victory of socialism in the USSR had totally destroyed the social roots of religion became popular. Leniency toward the churchmen who violated the Soviet legislation on worship developed. The reasons why religious prejudices were still alive were not discussed and their influence on certain groups of Soviet people and their ideological harm were underestimated.

p There were objective reasons for the struggle against religious prejudices to be weakened, namely: the fact that the defeat of fascism spent a great deal of the people’s physical and spiritual forces during the War. The Party organisations, state and public bodies pursued one goal: victory over Nazi Germany.

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p At the same time, it would be wrong to overestimate the influence of religion on Soviet people during the War. The Soviet people’s fight against the Nazi invaders did not stop the process of turning away from religion. The just, national character of the War for the Soviet Union, a profound analysis of its causes made in the Marxist-Leninist spirit and the purposeful work of the Communist Party to mobilise the working people’s efforts toward defeating the enemy all helped to strengthen further the Soviet people’s belief in the humane principles of socialism and the correctness of the scientific-materialist world view. Only the rate at which people left religion was slowed down during the war years, but the decline in the influence of religion and the church still continued.

p Despite the difficult situation, the Party Central Committee deemed necessary to propagate alheist views among believers, which is proved by its resolution adopted in 1944 “On Organisation of Scientific-Educational Propaganda".

p While directing the communist education, the Party Central Committee repeatedly drew attention of the Party organisations to the fact that work on overcoming religious prejudices should be followed closely at all times. By its resolution “On the Work of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia" dated January 25, 1947, it bound all the Party organisations in the Republic to work patiently with believers, exposing hostile activities by some Catholic ministers at that time. Guided by these directives, the local Party organisations took measures to step up their atheist activities. The All-Union Znanie Society made arrangements everywhere for lectures on atheistic and scientific subjects. The Society’s Central Board and some local branches formed atheist sections and scientific-methodological councils for propagation of atheist knowledge. Close attention was given to natural sciences. Verbal and written propaganda focused on the Marxist-Leninist proposition that scientific and religious world views were incompatible, and the preaching of churchmen and sectarians contradicted scientific knowledge.

p Nevertheless, this work was not up to the tasks set by the Party. Church organisations took advantage of weak atheist propaganda and stepped up their activity. Active preaching and charity work, individual handling of religious waverers and the emotional 142 impact of divine services led to an increase in the number of people observing religious rituals in some places. All sorts of fanatics resumed their illegal activities at “holy places”. Religious holidays in certain populated areas were marked by drinking and violations of labour discipline under the pretext of celebrating religious rituals. All this interfered with conscientious, active economic and cultural construction.

p On July 7, 1954 the CPSU Central Committee adopted a resolution ”On Major Drawbacks in Scientific-Atheistic Propaganda and Measures to Improve It”. The Central Committee demanded that all ideologists should activate their anti-religious work and launch an atheist drive to expose the reactionary essence of religion. It recommended that the best Party and Komsomol cadres, scholars and propagandists should be entrusted with this work. The Central Committee censured the system of working by spurts in the propaganda of atheist and scientific knowledge demanding that the anti-religious work should be carried on according to plans and use the personal approach method. To help the propagandists and to publicise the problems of scientific atheism, the Central Committee recommended that Znanie Society should publish a popular-science monthly magazine Nauka i religiya and charged the all-Union publishing houses to print more works by the founders of Marxism-Leninism on religion and atheism and relevant books by Russian and foreign classics. The resolution imposed on the Central Committee of the Young Communist League and the All-Union Central Trade Union Council the duty to devise and carry out a large number of measures to intensify the atheist education of working people.

p Following this resolution, Party organisations, state and public bodies stepped up considerably their activities to overcome religious prejudice. An editorial entitled “Against Religious Prejudices" published in Pravda noted that “carrying out the directives of the CPSU Central Committee, Party organisations did some work to intensify the atheist education of the working people. It helped to liberate new groups of the population from the religious prison”. Influenced by atheist propaganda, many believers and some clergymen broke with religion and became themselves involved in such propaganda. They included a 143 former archpriest and professor in the Leningrad Theological Academy, Alcksandr Osipov, and a former Candidate of Theology and a teacher in a theological seminary, Evgraf Duluman, among others.

p As directed by the CPSU Central Committee, measures were taken everywhere to expose and terminate activities by charlatans near the so-called holy places and diverse scientific- educational work with believers was conducted resulting in the formerly massive pilgrimage to the “holy places" dying down. Due to the current stampede of believers from religion, the sphere of church activities is becoming narrower each year.

p The USSR is a country of mass atheism, as is shown by sociological studies although there is no recording people’s belief or unbelief in the USSR. Only specific sociological studies can provide such data. They were stopped during and for some time after the War and resumed in the early 1960s.

p The studies have shown that given complete freedom of conscience, religion is declining everywhere. The break of people with the belief in God on a large scale in socialist society is a result of radical changes in the Soviet people’s life style, of their high social awareness and of the Communist Party’s planned scientific-atheistic work among believers.

p Believers’ consciousness has also changed radically. Nowadays, Soviet people who are still religious more often than not are unaware of the meaning of their creed: they do not read the Bible, Koran or Talmud, and observe religious rites only to maintain tradition. There is even more evidence that religion has no roots and no future in the USSR. It is increasingly difficult for the church to attract youth who do not participate in religious ceremonies.

p As a result of religion’s weakening role in the lives of Soviet people, big religious processions have become a thing of the past, miracle-working icons and relics are no longer made on a large scale and sham healings of the sick and other display of religious fanaticism has stopped. “Miracles” of healing and imperishable relics of the church holy fathers are little spoken of from pulpits today. It would have seemed ridiculous today even to believers, and so the modern clergy has to be versatile and flexible in order to fuel the dying religious flame.

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p Sociological studies brought about a lot of diverse data characterising religion’s influence on different strata of the population. They have shown that the process of people leaving religion, which began during the first years of Soviet rule, continues steadily but its progress is not the same everywhere. The church still maintains its grip on badly-educated elderly people, mainly women. Regular church-goers include those who are not engaged in social production, pensioners and housewives. Out of 1,102 believers polled in Ivano-Frankovsk, Odessa, Sumy, Ternopol and Chernigov regions, 40 per cent do not work at a factory or on a farm. Skilled industrial workers account for 8.6 per cent, operators of farm machinery for 3.2 per cent and office employees for 2.62 per cent.

p All the studies have shown that the number of believers with secondary education is relatively small and those with higher education extremely rare. For example, 76.6 per cent of Baptists in Byelorussia are badly-educated or illiterate persons, as are 77 per cent of the Baptists in Alma-Ata.

p Scientists ascertained that the following factors hamper the process of believers giving up religion: differences between mental and manual labour and between low-skilled and highskilled labour, differences in cultural and educational standards, non-participation of some groups of people, especially women, in active public and political life, and weak participation by retired people in public activities.

p Interesting research has been made in Voronezh Region by M. K. Teplyakov and his associates. The population there is known.to have been especially religious before the 1917 Revolution. The Region had 1,169 Orthodox places of worship and 14 monasteries and convents where divine service was celebrated by 5,000 priests and deacons and about 3,000 monks and nuns. A high percentage of religious people still remained during the first post-revolutionary years. Along with Orthodoxy, many sectarian groups existed there, some of them very active. Selective studies found that the countryside was 90 per cent religious even in the mid-1920s. But the mentality of the Voronezh people (has radically changed during 60-odd years of Soviet power. The studies carried out in 6 towns, two workers’ settlements and 127 villages, using special techniques, covered 60,000 145 peopie. Officials of the region, city and district Party committees, secretaries of the executive committees of the Soviets of People’s Deputies, and Komsomol activists helped with the research as did thousands of trained instructors and pollsters: teachers, students and activists of Znanic Society. The bulk of the Region’s population was found to be non-religious. 49,978 (77.6 per cent) of the total of 59,288 polled said that they did not believe in God. Only 7.9 per cent of all adults in the Region proved to be deeply pious and 7.2 per cent were undecided.

p Out of the total of non-religious persons residing in the city of Voronezh and Voronezh Region, 35,575 (77.3 per cent) said “No” when asked if they had ever been religious and 10,403 (22.6 per cent) stated that they had believed in God, but left religion during the years of Soviet power.

p Thirteen thousand families with a total of 30,000 members were surveyed in the town of Shuya. Of these, 10 per cent were found to be religious and only 2 per cent deeply pious.

p Believers make up 3-5 per cent of those working and about 10 per cent of those who do not work (retired, disabled and housewives) in Leningrad and Leningrad Region.

p Social inactivity is one of the reasons that part of the population still remains religious. Finding himself isolated, socially inactive person feels lonely and useless and often attracts churchmen or sectarians trying to win him round. Sociological studies have shown that a very small number of people maintain religious traditions and perform religious rituals among those working, particularly at large enterprises where political and propaganda work is well-organised in the masses. On the contrary, the percentage of believers is still high among the pensioners, invalids, housewives and persons who work at small enterprises and in public services.

p The percentage of religious women is still high. There are many widows among them—a result of the last War—and unmarried mothers who have to carry the burden of bringing up their children. Many women do not participate in the life of the community. Believers in Belgorod Region, who go to church or to prayers in sects, for instance, are 80 per cent women. They account for 78-80 per cent of Orthodox adherents and 84.4 per cent of Evangelical Christian Baptists in Gorky.

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p The rural population is more religious than city dwellers for several reasons, in particular because of their historical, social and cultural background. This has been confirmed by specific sociological studies made in some regions of the RSFSR, in the republics of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, the Northern Caucasus, Tataria, Bashkiria and Azerbaijan. But religion affects different groups of farmers to a different degree. There are more religious persons among those who live in small localities, such as auls in the mountains, kishlaks near the desert and in isolated farmsteads far from cultural centres.

p The carriers of religious beliefs in the village are primarily labourers, aged men and women engaged in domestic chores who are cut off from public activities. The overwhelming majority of operators of farm machinery, best farmers, and people with higher or secondary education have long forgotten about religious prejudices and are convinced atheists. Thus at state farms of Kustanai Region where 96 per cent of the work force are skilled workers and machine operators, only 4.6 per cent of those polled said they believed in God. Believers make up 13.4 per cent of the men engaged in various jobs at collective farms of Orel Region, but only 3.9 per cent of farm machinery operators.

p The overwhelming majority of believers are honest Soviet people who have lost touch with social production due to old age or other circumstances. This has been shown by all studies, including those made recently in Ivano-Frankovsk, Odessa, Sumy, Ternopol and Chernovtsy regions in the Ukraine.

p Leningrad sociologists studied 12 professional groups of intellectuals (white-collar workers, doctors and teachers, as well as writers, journalists, artists and actors). An overwhelming majority of the intelligentsia was found to have scientific, materialist views and to agree with the policies of the Communist Party and Soviet state to overcome religious prejudices. The 12 groups included 1,000 professionals. Only 9 persons (less than 1 per cent) could be referred to as believers or as hesitant about faith.

p Such studies made in some regions of the country totally refute assertions by bourgeois propaganda that a religious revival is taking place in the USSR among the intelligentsia. On the contrary, as the studies have demonstrated, many intellectuals 147 participate actively in scientific-atheist propaganda and help the Party combat religion ideologically.

p As was mentioned above, the believers are mainly aged men and women^ Young people make up a negligible percentage of those who regularly attend places of worship. This fact indicates that the resources drawing new believers into religion are steadily dwindling.

p Religious views are alien to the absolute majority of Soviet youth. Recent sociological studies of the young, including those of school age, reveal that the degree of religiosity in that bracket dropped more than five-fold compared with the 1920s and 1930s. 1,619 pupils of grades 8-10 polled in 28 Leningrad schools had 24 believers (1.5 per cent) and 34 (2.4 per cent) said they were hesitant about faith. A survey of 800 youths in Odessa and Odessa Region confirmed that only 20 of them (2.5 per cent) were religious.

p 5.5 per cent of the rural population in the 16-30 age bracket of Orel Region are believers. They are mostly girls from religious families. Girls are known to maintain closer ties with their families and, especially, with women (mother or grandmother) whose religiosity in general is higher than that of men.

p There were three believers of young or middle age for ten elderly ones during the early years of Soviet rule, whereas today, the ratio is 1:10. At the same time, it would be a mistake to underestimate atheistic education of youth on these grounds. There are still cases of an unprincipled attitude toward religion both among rural and urban young people when they use religious paraphernalia for ornaments and participate in religious ceremonies for reasons that have nothing to do with religious convictions.

p The social roots of religion have been shattered in the USSR but the sources for reproduction of religion still remain. One must remember that religious preachers nowadays put their hopes for the future upon “reproduction of religiosity" in the young generation.

p Family has been a channel for handing down religiosity. Family traditions and feverish recruitment work of religious preachers and church activists are not the only reasons, of course, for religiosity still being alive. Vestiges of the old style of life still 148 survive in some spheres, especially in the countryside. Negligence in scientific-atheist work also plays a role.

p One cannot treat today the notion of “believer” as a stereotype. As studies have demonstrated, the number of convinced believers is steadily declining. There are many people among parishioners whose religiosity is reduced to irregular attendance of their places of worship.

p Ceremonies are the most tenacious and conservative parts of the Orthodox creed. But today children are often baptised and burial services performed for non-religious motives.

p Sometimes, people who never turn to religion in their daily life behave as if they were religious. They do not go to church or mosque and do not believe in religious dogma, but they compromise and arrange for baptism, burial service or marriage in church when a child is born or family members marry or die. The findings of study made at the Ernst Thaelmann Factory in Moscow are typical. Only 8.6 per cent of the workers there who had baptised their children had done so because of their religious views. The rest said they had taken such a step at the urging of their relatives (37 per cent), or in order to mark the birth of the child with a solemn ceremony (6.8 per cent), or did not want to break with tradition (39.6 per cent), or “just in case" (8 per cent). In Voronezh Region, too, only 5-8 per cent of the parents who had baptised their children had performed this ceremony because of their religious views.

p Attendance of public prayers is another indication of the decline in religious belief. Many believers go to church only on major religious holidays, which is especially typical of urban communities. Attendance at places of worship is diminishing all the time. Of course, a person may be religious but not go to church. There are many cases when deeply pious people do not attend public prayers and celebrate religious ceremonies at home and, on the contrary, unbelievers may turn up by chance or intentionally at a place of worship on the most popular religious holiday. But there is no doubt that Easter for an Orthodox or Catholic believer or Uraza-Bairam and the preceding fast for Moslems are the periods in the life of believers when their attitude toward their religion is manifested best of all. It is then that more prayers are read and more rites are celebrated and 149 the clergy and ordinary believers are more active. However, sociological studies have found that even on the most popular religious holidays no more than 6-8 per cent of adults attend Orthodox churches or mosques.

p All this reflects a profound crisis in all religions in the USSR. The spread of unbelief and the establishment of the scientific materialist world-outlook is convincing proof of this crisis.

p The time when religion in a village was the ideological hub of life has long become a thing of the past. The style of life and culture of urban and rural workers today has changed so much for the better that even their pre-war level looks very low now, although great progress was evident even at that time compared with the period before October 1917.

p Most of the Soviet population have shaken off religious prejudices completely.

p Ordinary religious consciousness has been transformed radically. Many modern believers combine scientific materialist views of nature and society in their minds with adherence to old religious traditions and belief in God. Even theologians have to admit that perception of God, the next life in the beyond, and other religious tenets moved into the background in believers’ minds. The idea of a new socio-political life and the struggle for it, theologians say, has become the central idea of modern times. It is there that most of the strength of the nation in general and of the believers in particular is spent.

p Present-day believers in the USSR are affected not so much by the sources of religious information (sermons of clergymen and religious literature) as by non-religious sources. Thus 83.9 per cent of believers listen to the radio, 75,3 per cent watch TV, 10.6 to 23.2 per cent go to places of entertainment, 8.9 to 14.7 per cent see films and 2.9 to 8.9 per cent read books.

p Under the impact of a flood of scientific information and changing conditions in life and work, believers have freed themselves from the burden of obsolete religious perception, which leads to a gradual decline in faith and a final break with it. The immense changes in the economy, culture and spiritual life of Soviet people over the last 30 or 40 years have reduced the religious adherence of the Soviet (population by a factor of 4 or 5 and the percentage of the young (14 to 30 years old) 150 among the believers has dropped tenfold for the same period. This is an indication of the increased atheistic influence of Soviet schooling and of the entire educational system. The percentages of families where religious instruction is given decreased by a factor of four.

p Recent research into the religious adherence of the population and the development of the atheist movement has demonstrated that no more than 8-10 per cent of adults are now active believers. This percentage may fluctuate in different regions of the country depending on actual conditions there but it is an indisputable fact that the mass-scale adherence to religion has been overcome in the Soviet Union since the Revolution. About 90 per cent of the population has broken off with religion for good.

Socialist society is a society of mass atheism. As a result of the profound changes in socio-economic conditions, elimination of the exploitative classes and the triumph of socialism, as a result of the successful development of science and of the general growth of the country’s cultural standards, most of the population in the Soviet Union have long freed themselves from vestiges of religion.