Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

The Bolsheviks’ anti-religion campaign moderated in the mid-1920s in the context of ‘NEP socialism’.²⁴ The New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin after the end of the civil war, permitted a revival of private peasant agriculture and was accompanied by some social and cultural relaxation, although no independent political activity outside the communist party was permitted. The Bolsheviks sought to persuade believers by propaganda and education until the return to a more coercive approach at the end of the 1920s when Stalin launched the campaign to forcibly collectivise Soviet agriculture. Peasant adherence to religion was deemed as pernicious as their attachment to land ownership. In 1929 the party declared a ‘merciless war’ against counter-revolutionary religious organisations.²⁵

Another ebb in the tide of anti-religious militancy came in the mid-1930s with the introduction of the so-called ‘Stalin Constitution’ of 1936, which guaranteed religious freedom and restored the voting rights of priests. But the church suffered again in the Great Terror of 1937–8, when 14,000 churches were closed and 35,000 ‘servants of religious cults’ were arrested. By 1939 there were fewer than a thousand Orthodox churches in the USSR compared to 50,000 in Tsarist Russia.²⁶

The great turning in Stalin’s policy on religion was his famous meeting with the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church in September 1943. The meeting took place in his Kremlin office and he began by noting with approval the church’s patriotic support for the Soviet war effort. In the course of a meeting that lasted an hour and twenty minutes, Stalin readily agreed to the appointment of a new patriarch, the opening of more churches, the freeing of arrested priests and the organisation of courses, seminaries and academies to educate the clergy. He even offered state financial support for the church and promised to allow the creation of candle factories to mass-produce a religious prop that had hitherto been handmade.

The record of the meeting was drawn up by Georgy Karpov, a former NKVD officer, whom Stalin subsequently appointed head of a Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church.²⁷ Reported in the press the next day, the meeting signalled peaceful co-existence between organised religion and the Soviet regime. In return for political fealty, the Orthodox Church and its followers were allowed to practise their religion, though without too much active pros-elytising.²⁸

Had Stalin perhaps returned to the religious fold? That was certainly the impression given by the patriarchy, who henceforth referred to him as ‘deeply revered and ‘beloved by all’, and as a ‘wise, divinely appointed leader’ who had become so through ‘God’s Providence’.²⁹ However, there were plenty of pragmatic reasons for Stalin to invite the church into his tent. It played well with public opinion in Britain and the United States, allies in the struggle against Hitler. Stalin didn’t need the church’s support to win the war, which had decisively turned in his favour since the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in January 1943, but every little helped. There had been a popular religious revival in the Soviet Union since the German invasion of June 1941 and it was more expedient to recognise and channel the phenomenon into a mainstream church than to repress it. As Victoria Smolkin has pointed out, Stalin made similar moves in relation to Muslims and Baptists.³⁰ Above all, Russian Orthodoxy would be a powerful ally when the vast territories occupied by the Germans between 1941 and 1944 were recaptured and reintegrated into the Soviet system.³¹

Another way of viewing Stalin’s relationship with his religious upbringing is to see communism as a ‘political religion’. The idea that when Stalin became a communist he swapped one faith for another is intuitively appealing. Certainly, the parallel between communism and Christianity is compelling. Communism had its sacred texts and ritual practices, its heretics, martyrs, sinners and saints. It also had a secularised eschatology of progress to heaven on earth through predetermined stages of history – slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. Communism, like Christianity, rested on an emotive, faith-based commitment from its adherents.

Stalin’s writings were ‘sprinkled with biblical allusions, invocations and inflections’, noted Roland Boer.³² Trotsky was labelled a Judas in the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Stalin was prone to invoke God in his everyday speech: ‘God bless’, ‘God only knows’, ‘it is for God to forgive’ and so on. In a speech to the Baku Soviet in November 1920 on the third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin alluded to Martin Luther’s famous statement to the Diet of Worms in 1521: