The beauty of old Soviet anti-religious propaganda
Deep in the guts of Russian library stacks exists what remains — little acknowledged or discussed — of a dead and buried atheist dream. The dream first took shape among Russian radicals of the mid-19th century, to whom the prospect of mass atheism seemed the key to Russia’s salvation. When Lenin seized power in 1917, the Bolsheviks integrated it into their vision of heaven on earth.
Even if the whole subject now lies under a layer of dust, visitors to Russia’s magnificent state libraries — Sovietera temples of learning devoted to the enlightenment of the oncebenighted people — can unearth volumes of vividly illustrated antireligious magazines from the Soviet era that reveal the evolution of a godless utopia. The main anti-religious magazines of the 1920s, Godless and Godless at the Machine, were graphic declarations of war on all religions. Godless published illustrated essays on religion around the world that resembled entries in a children’s encyclopaedia. Godless at the Machine championed Marxism-infused satires and caricatures.
Blasphemous shock and awe were a major part of the Bolshevik aesthetic, which sought to show a still-pious nation just who was in charge. One memorable atheist illustration showed a worker climbing a ladder into the heavens above a landscape of shattered temples to smash the gods. It carried the caption: “We’ve finished the earthy tsars and we’re coming for the heavenly ones!”
The articles in Godless — into which Godless at the Machine was folded in 1931 — showed a deep awareness of Soviet atheism’s 19th-century intellectual roots. It published features on heroes of the Bolshevik atheist canon, including Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov (both sons of priests), the first writers to deny the existence of God in Russian print. The contributors also scoured Western philosophy and literature for all that was anti-religious or anticlerical, from Hobbes and Shakespeare to Voltaire and Victor Hugo.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Soviet satirists struggled to understand the persistence of religion in a now-urbanised, literate country where so many churches had been replaced by gleaming libraries, theatres and TV towers. They showed, too, a deep resentment of the West’s concern with religious freedom in the USSR (which they portrayed as a front for espionage), and of ungrateful jeans-wearing Russian hipsters who flashed crucifixes as symbols of rebellion. The Russian atheist dream died with glasnost, and now enjoys little popular nostalgia. Yet today, the Russian authorities often react touchily to public displays of irreligious irreverence; to them, flirtations with godlessness seem synonymous with revolution.
By arrangement with the Spectator