Christianity in The Soviet Union - Official Soviet Stance

Official Soviet Stance

See also: Soviet anti-religious legislation and Marxist–Leninist atheism

The Soviet regime was ostensibly committed to the complete annihilation of religious institutions and ideas. Militant atheism was central to the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a high priority of all Soviet leaders. Communism required the abolition of religion. Convinced atheists were considered to be more virtuous individuals than those of religious belief.

The state established atheism as the only scientific truth. Criticism of atheism or the state's anti-religious policies was forbidden and could lead to forced retirement, arrest and/or imprisonment.

The holding of a religion was never officially outlawed and the Soviet Constitutions always guaranteed the right to believe. However, since Marxist ideology as interpreted by Lenin and his successors dictated that religion was an obstacle to the construction of the communist society, putting an end to all religion (and replacing it with atheism) was a fundamentally important ideological goal of the state. The persecution of religion was carried out officially through many legal measures that were designed to hamper religious activities, a massive volume of anti-religious propaganda as well as education, and through various other means. The official persecution was also, however, accompanied by much secret instructions that remained unofficial. In practice the state also sought to control religious bodies and to interfere with them, with the ultimate goal of making them disappear. To this effect, the state sought to control the activities of the leaders of the different religious communities.

The official persecution was often disguised under euphemisms in official party documents such as 'struggle against bourgeois ideology', 'dissemination of materialist ideology', etc. The government often rejected the principle that all religious believers should be treated as public enemies, partly due to pragmatic considerations of the large number of people adhering to a faith and also partly from the belief that there were many loyal Soviet citizens included among the number of believers whom ought to be convinced to become atheists rather than outright attacked.

Religious believers were always subject to anti-religious propaganda, legislation that restricted their religious practice or suffered restrictions in Soviet society, however, as a result of the paradigm stated above, they were rarely officially ever subject to arrest, imprisonment or death simply for having their beliefs, but usually they suffered those things during the persecution as a result of some perception (real or imagined) of their resistance to the state's broader campaign against religion.

The campaign was designed to disseminate atheism, and the acts of violence and terror tactics that would be used, while being almost always officially invoked on the basis of perceived resistance to the state, in the larger scheme they were meant not simply as acts against rebellion, but to further assist in the suppression of religion in order to disseminate atheism.