League of Militant Atheists - Authority On Antireligious Methodology

Authority On Antireligious Methodology

The debate on how to best exterminate religion was argued among the Soviet leadership, until in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when it was resolved by Stalin who condemned the extremes of both sides, and Yaroslavsky followed suit. The do-nothing approach of the rightists who thought religion would die away naturally and the leftist approach to attack all forms of religion as class enemies were both condemned as deviations from the party line. Yaroslavsky argued against the leftists (who had earlier criticized him) that if religion was simply a class phenomenon there would be no need to combat it if a classless society was truly being produced. He affirmed that an all-sided attack on religion was needed, but did not subscribe to the leftist deviation that had been condemned.

The League not only attacked religion but also attacked deviations from what it saw as the proper line to combat religion in the USSR and, in effect, set the 'proper' line to follow in this sphere for party membership. Early Marxist beliefs that religion would disappear with the coming of a tractor (Leon Trotsky had made this claim) were ridiculed by the League. The popularity of religion among nationalistic intellectuals was pointed out by Lukachevsky (LMG) and he claimed that if religion was only rooted in ownership of property, it could not explain the growth of the renovationists.

The League occupied the leadership role in the antireligious campaign of the Communist Party.

It employed the powers given to it by the CPSU Central Committee at the 1929 congress to dictate orders to schools, universities, the armed forces, the trade unions, the Komsomol, the Young Pioneer Organization, the Soviet press, and other institutions for the purpose of its antireligious campaign. It criticized many public institutions (including the Communist Party) for failing to adequately attack religious belief and instructed them on how to be more effective. The People's Commisariat for enlightenment was heckled and Glavnauka, the Chief Administration for Science and Scholarship was also singled out for criticism. A spokesperson for the latter tried to justify their behaviour to the LMG by claiming that they had reduced the total number of historical buildings under its protection (mostly ancient churches and monasteries) from 7000 to 1000, by destroying them.

The League concerned itself with the issue of active believers who had infiltrated its own membership and who were trying to prove their loyalty to the regime or even undermine the antireligious work of the League. League members who suspected each other of harbouring religious beliefs secretly discussed their concerns in the early years. The League also had to address the issue of atheists in its membership who may have sympathized with the religious believers and who may have had doubts about what they were doing. In answer to these, the League adopted a policy that any League member who entered a church (to conduct antireligious work by checking on the strength of believers or numbering them) had to first receive local branch approval beforehand in order so that he did not give the impression that he was going to the church to pray. In contrast the League in Tashkent actually tried to translate the Quran into Uzbek so that more Muslims could read it, in hope that when Muslims were able to read what the Quran actually said, they would reject its content as fallacious.

All members of the Komsomol were obligated to join the League, and it directed all members of the CPSU to support the League's work. The extreme character of the line to be taken against religion is described:

All religions, no matter how much they 'renovate' and cleanse themselves, are systems of idea... profoundly hostile to the ideology of... socialism... Religious organizations... are in reality political agencies... of class groupings hostile to the proletariat inside the country and of the international bourgeoisie... Special attention must be paid to the renovationist currents in Orthodoxy, Islam, Lamaism and other religions... These currents are but the disguises for more effective struggle against the Soviet power. By comparing ancient Buddhism, and ancient Christianity to communism, the Renovationists are essentially trying to replace the communist theory by a cleansed form of religion, which therefore becomes more dangerous.

In 1930 the Second Plenum of the LMG Central Council adopted an antireligious five-year plan with the intention of annihilating religion in the USSR.

The League purged its rightist members in 1932–1934. In addition, the League of Militant Atheists sometimes took a violent approach to those who would not accept the League's message. For example, "bishops, priests, and lay believers" were "arrested, shot, and sent to labour camps."