Social Institution of religion in the Ideology of Bolshevism

Ivanov Andrei Alexandrovich ORCID: 0000-0003-4097-9447 PhD in History Associate Professor, Department of History and Philosophy, Saint Petersburg State University of Veterinary Medicine 196084, Russia, g. Saint Petersburg, ul. Chernigovskaya, 5 ivanovaa85@list.ru Other publications by this author

The spread of Marxist ideology in Russia in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries made it very urgent to develop the attitude of supporters of this political doctrine to the dominant social institutions in the country – the state, the army and the church. At the same time, if the state appeared to be a structure created mainly for the use of violence and maintaining the stability of the forms of exploitation prevailing in society, and the regular army in this context was only "an instrument of reaction, a servant of capital in the fight against labor, an executioner of people's freedom" ^{[7, p. 114]}, then the attitude towards religious organizations was quite contradictory.

In particular, already from the works of F. According to Engels, religious teachings represent only the reaction of individuals to natural, climatic and social changes, therefore, "every religion is nothing more than a fantastic reflection in the minds of people of those external forces that dominate them in their daily life - a reflection in which earthly forces take the form of unearthly" ^{[3, p. 6]}. In other words, religion, from the point of view of supporters of socialism and materialism, could be considered an unreliable form of cognition of the surrounding reality, according to which changes in the socio-political structure were directly associated with the actions of supernatural forces, and not objective facts of social life.

Accordingly, this sphere of social relations acquired, in the eyes of Marxists, many common features with the political ideology used by exploitative groups to control the behavior of the religiously minded masses. It was believed that such individuals were forced to recognize the domination of not only earthly, but also divine power over themselves, which they were unable to influence, which made these citizens a convenient object for imposing norms and patterns of labor and political behavior that were beneficial to the elite.

Meanwhile, adherents of socialism in Russia considered the revolutionary reorganization of the material world as the key to socio-economic progress, and the church in this vein became an ideological opponent for them, and the close connection of Orthodoxy with the Russian state and the armed forces forced them to see it as a form of manipulation of public consciousness to mask the interests of the ruling groups – in 1906, V.I. Lenin directly he pointed out to the party members that "we created our RSDLP union, by the way, precisely for ... the struggle against any religious deception of the workers" ^{[6, p. 145]}.

However, such an attitude was not at all equivalent to the existence of a fundamental antagonism between adherents of Marxism and Christianity. The fact is that for the supporters of the materialistic understanding of the world, the idea of God-fighting was untenable, since the eradication of the wrong view of social reality was only a secondary task in relation to changing the economic situation of believers.

Thus, the destruction of exploitation (in which the church also took part) was a priority task, the fulfillment of which was bound to inevitably affect the self–consciousness of citizens: "It would be absurd to think," wrote V.I. Lenin, "that in a society based on endless oppression and coarsening of the working masses, it is possible to disperse religious beliefs by purely preaching prejudices" ^{[7, p. 146]}.

Accordingly, the object of criticism for Russian socialists was usually not religion as such, but unfair, from their point of view, social norms and orders supported and strengthened by elite groups (nobility, clergy, merchants, etc.). Let us again turn to V.I. Lenin's opinion on this issue: "the oppression of religion over humanity is only the product and reflection of economic oppression within society" ^{[7, p. 146]}. In other words, it is possible to eliminate religion as a form of consciousness only through the transformation of being, hence the concentration on the fight against the church seemed counterproductive at the turn of the XIX – XX centuries, as it led to an inefficient waste of time and resources.

In this regard, it should be noted that in 1917 – 1918, both V.I. Lenin and the People's Commissar of Education A.V. Lunacharsky had close contacts with the American "World Christian Youth Union", which had the opportunity to openly conduct "cultural and educational work".  in about 60 Russian cities. When the question of the expediency of supporting such a religious organization was raised at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Moscow Council of Deputies, one of its leaders V.I. Yakhontov said that "we have much more counter-revolutionary and dangerous organizations, at least our church" ^{[11, p. 601]}.

It is characteristic that at the initial stage of the revolution in Russia, criticism of the ROC was based on the fact that "priests are lice in the people's body, they are accomplices of looters and landlords" ^[12], that is, it was only about the political position of the clergy. Canonical issues were raised extremely rarely, since unfounded criticism of certain religious dogmas rooted in the public consciousness could only discredit Marxists in the eyes of the broad masses of the population. Already in K. Marx, one can find a demand for supporters to "flaunt the sign of atheism less" ^{[3, p. 12]}, since unscientific denial of religion only leads to an escalation of social contradictions and conflicts. This was quite obvious to V.I. Lenin, who called for "avoiding any insult to the feelings of believers, leading only to the consolidation of religious fanaticism" ^{[8, p. 118]}.

Hence, the leaders of the RSDLP(b), even denying the need for religious views in a communist society, were ready to recognize the right of individuals to freedom of conscience, and the separation of the church from the state in their eyes (before 1917) only meant its transformation from an institution dominating the masses into a private matter of every citizen. In this regard, the separation model of state-church relations looked the most attractive, since in this case the principle of non-interference in the internal structure of each of the institutions was recognized, the promotion of religious values could not be carried out using means of state coercion, and the official authorities would not be able to impose sanctions on citizens depending on their religion

Nevertheless, in the question of the attitude of socialists to the church, V.I. Lenin has an interesting thesis: "We demand that religion be a private matter in relation to the state, but we cannot in any way consider religion a private matter in relation to our own party" ^{[7, p. 143]}.

This statement should not be understood in the sense of a ban on the admission of believers to the party (with their unconditional agreement with the party program) – it was believed that "honest and loyal communists" could be useful in building a new society, even if they share any religious values ^{[7, pp. 65-66, 146]}. Apparently, the quoted passage contained an indication of the need for the party to formulate a certain strategy in relations with the church in order to prevent the integration of these institutions and to suppress religious propaganda within the party.

In fact, the presence of ideological contradictions between Marxism and religion put the RSDLP (b) in front of the need to conduct active propaganda work in terms of spreading the ideas of materialism and scientific knowledge about the surrounding world in order to reorient believers from spiritual pursuits to participate in the class struggle on the side of the socialists. Such appeals are found even in K. Marx, who believed that "the elimination of religion as an illusory happiness of the people is a requirement of its real happiness" ^{[14, p. 49]}.

It is characteristic that a significant part of the rank–and-file members of the Bolshevik Party were distinguished by features of Messianic self-consciousness - this was especially strongly manifested after they came to power in Russia, when the following point of view became widespread: "We have a new morality. Our humanity is absolute, because it is based on the glorious ideals of the destruction of all violence and oppression. Everything is allowed to us, because we were the first in the world to raise the sword not for the sake of enslavement and suppression, but in the name of universal freedom and liberation from slavery" ^[5]. In fact, in the ideological views of a number of Bolsheviks, the task of the party was not only to criticize the church and religion or even to destroy them, the question of using the political program of the RSDLP(b) as the foundation of a new worldview replacing and substituting religion became open. Although the leadership of the party during the Civil War repeatedly condemned the aspirations of its members to turn socialism into a set of dogmas accepted solely on faith, it was not possible to completely eradicate this attitude.

Such circumstances allowed the philosopher N.A. Berdyaev to assert that "Marxism is not only the doctrine of historical or economic materialism about the complete dependence of man on the economy, Marxism is also the doctrine of deliverance, about the Messianic vocation of the proletariat, about the coming perfect society in which man will no longer depend on the economy, about power and victory man over the irrational forces of nature and society" ^{[1, p. 81]}.

Similar motives were heard in the work of the Austrian economist J. Schumpeter: "In a certain sense, Marxism is a religion. For the believer, it provides, firstly, a system of ultimate goals that determine the meaning of life, and absolute criteria for evaluating events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to the implementation of goals, containing not only a path to salvation, but also a definition of the evil from which humanity or a select part of humanity must be saved. We can add the following: Marxist socialism belongs to the kind of religions that promises paradise already during life" ^{[13, p. 19-20]}. Even modern specialists N.V. Rabodyazhev and E.G. Solovyov, characterizing Soviet society, directly pointed to the fact that "communist messianism took the place of faith in the exclusivity of the Orthodox kingdom" ^{[9, p. 94]}.

In fact, the regime of state atheism established in the USSR borrowed many aspects of the "state Orthodoxy of the tsarist era," as A. Krasikov wrote ^{[4, p. 18]}, not only in matters of approving official unanimity, but also striving to spread their views beyond the territory controlled by the Soviet state, as well as creating a strict hierarchy within atheistic organizations. It is not for nothing that the famous Archpriest S.N. Bulgakov in his writings openly called the USSR "the only confessional state in the world in which militant atheism is the dominant religion" ^{[2, p. 343]}.

In the symbolic field, the similarity of Bolshevism and Christianity was very noticeable – portraits of the leaders of the proletariat took the place of icons, church hymns were replaced by revolutionary hymns, former builders of Christian cathedrals after the revolution were actively involved in the decoration of ideologically important architectural objects. It is characteristic that in 1924, after the death of V.I. Lenin, an interesting case took place in the Soviet Transcaucasia, noted in the summary of the local Cheka: "the local population, with the permission of the commission for mourning days, arranged church dirges and then processions through the streets with a portrait of T. Lenin" ^{[10, pp. 188-189]}.

At the same time, some representatives of the religious elite of the Russian Empire before 1917 criticized capitalism and supported a number of socialist slogans, and the revolution seemed to them an instrument of spiritual revival and renewal.

Apparently, in the first half of the XX century, the Soviet state and the Church could hardly build a relationship within the framework of the separation model, since in a certain respect they duplicated each other's functions. In this situation, the most likely was either the preservation of state-church relations in line with the cooperative model that had spread before the overthrow of the monarchy, or the transition to a confrontational model of relations. If we take into account that by 1917 the authority of the ROC in society had significantly decreased (for example, compared to 1916 during the revolution, the number of servicemen who observed Orthodox traditions decreased by about 10 times), the last of the described scenarios was extremely unprofitable for religious institutions, since it could lead to their destruction. Actually, already throughout 1917 there were numerous cases of looting and destruction of churches – for example, in Petrograd, on the eve of the overthrow of the Provisional Government, both the Church of the Savior on Sennaya Square and the church at the Novodevichy Monastery suffered from robbers.

Thus, it can be concluded that, despite the ideological differences between the adherents of socialism and Orthodoxy, a potential conflict between them could well take place in a non-violent form. Mutual condemnation of political positions in the pre-revolutionary period did not exclude the possibility of establishing mutually beneficial contacts, but this trend did not develop properly in the first half of the XX century.

You can simply select and copy link from below text field.