Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

The Bolsheviks espoused religious freedom but reserved the right to campaign against religion. As Stalin himself wrote in 1906:

Social-Democrats will combat all forms of religious persecution . . . will always protest against the persecution of Catholicism or Protestantism; they will always defend the right of nations to profess any religion they please; but at the same time . . . they will carry on agitation against Catholicism, Protestantism and the religion of the Orthodox Church in order to achieve the triumph of the socialist world outlook.¹⁷

The Bolsheviks’ leader, Lenin, was among the most implacable opponents of the church and was fond of quoting Marx’s aphorisms that religion was the sigh of the oppressed, the opium of the people and so on. Opposed to Lenin on the religion question was Anatoly Lunacharsky, a socialist poet, philosopher and lover of the arts who described himself as intellectual among Bolsheviks and a Bolshevik among intellectuals. He was an exponent of what he called ‘god-building’ (Bogostroitel’stvo). Lunacharsky believed that socialism was a secular religion and that socialists should seek to build bridges to Christians. Christian doctrine was scientifically false and the church was indeed a reactionary institution, but the ethics, values and sentiments of Christianity were laudable and overlapped with those of socialist humanism. In Lunacharsky’s version of Christian socialism there was no deity. Socialism was an anthropocentric religion whose God was humanity: ‘It is not necessary to look for God. Let us give him to the world! There is no God in the world, but there might be. The road of struggle for socialism . . . is what is meant by God-building.’¹⁸

Lunacharsky’s views were set out in a two-volume work, Religion and Socialism, published in 1908 and 1911. Stalin possessed a number of Lunacharsky’s books and pamphlets but Religion and Socialism is not recorded as being among them. Still, it seems likely that Stalin read or was at least familiar with the two books.¹⁹

God-building never did gain much traction among the Bolsheviks and Lunacharsky reconciled with Lenin in 1917. As the Bolsheviks’ commissar of enlightenment from 1917 to 1929, he abandoned god-building but strove to moderate the Bolsheviks’ anti-religious fervour. Even so, Bolshevik policy towards the church was highly repressive.²⁰ Soon after they seized power, they separated church from the state and schools from the church. While freedom of religious conscience was guaranteed by a constitution adopted in 1918, so too was the right to anti-religious propaganda. Priests, capitalists, criminals and other undesirables were categorised as second-class citizens with limited political rights. In 1922 the Bolsheviks expropriated church valuables and responded to popular opposition to their confiscation decrees with show trials and executions of priests and lay believers.²¹

Anti-religious propaganda and the promotion of Soviet atheism was a major Bolshevik priority from the early 1920s. It included sponsorship of an anti-religious newspaper, Bezbozhnik (Godless), and the creation of a League of the Godless, both of which were headed by that ubiquitous Stalin acolyte, Yemel’yan Yaroslavsky. Stalin was not enamoured of some of the propaganda, which he considered ‘anti-religious trash’, and in 1924 he decreed ‘hooliganish escapades under the guise of so-called anti-religious propaganda – all this should be cast off and liquidated immediately’.²²

In 1927 Stalin explained to a visiting American labour delegation that while the communist party stood for religious freedom, it ‘cannot be neutral towards religion, and it conducts anti-religious propaganda against all religious prejudices because it stands for science . . . because all religion is the antithesis of science’. Referring to the recent Scopes trial in Tennessee about the illegality of teaching evolution theory, Stalin assured the delegation that Darwinists could not be prosecuted in the USSR because communists defended science. But he was unapologetic about the continuing persecution of priests: ‘Have we repressed the clergy? Yes, we have. The only unfortunate thing is that they have not yet been completely eliminated.’²³