Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe

Paul Betts, Stephen A. Smith, Paul Betts, Stephen A. Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137546388
• eBook ISBN: 9781137546395
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Religion and science were fundamental aspects of Eastern European communist political culture from the very beginning, and remained in uneasy tension across the region over the decades. While both topics have long attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, they almost invariably have been studied discretely as separate stories. Religion, Science and Communism in Cold War Europe is the first scholarly effort to explore the delicate interface of religion, science and communism in Cold War Europe. It brings together an international team of researchers who address this relationship from a number of national viewpoints and thematic perspectives, ranging from mysticism to social science, space exploration to the socialist lifecycle, and architectural heritage to pop culture.  

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Paul Betts and Stephen A. Smith (eds.)Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War EuropeSt Antony's Series10.1057/978-1-137-54639-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Stephen A. Smith¹

(1)

All Souls College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Stephen A. Smith

Email: [email protected]

The volume arises from a conference held at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 16–17 May 2014, entitled ‘Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe’. We would like to thank St. Antony’s College, that college’s Modern European History Research Centre, and All Souls College Oxford for their financial support.

End Abstract

This volume of essays explores the inter-relationship of Communism, science and religion in the Soviet Union and the states of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe that were incorporated into the Soviet bloc after the Second World War. These regimes, which I shall refer to interchangeably as ‘Socialist’ or ‘Communist’, were committed to the application of science, technology and instrumental reason to all areas of social life, and a key assumption of their vision was that religion would wither away as societies moved towards full-blown Socialism. From our current vantage point, more than a quarter of a century after the fall of the Soviet bloc, organized religion, rather than falling into desuetude, seems to have proved surprisingly resilient through the Communist era, and in some regions of the former Soviet bloc religion has undergone a significant resurgence. This, obviously, raises the question of what, if any, impact state efforts to eliminate religion and disseminate science actually had. The scholarly literature has tended to treat Communism and religion and Communism and science as distinct fields. The historiography on Communism and religion has mainly focused on state repression, on the official promotion of ‘scientific atheism’, on collaboration of the churches with the state, on the role of religion in fostering political resistance and on the emergence of civil society in Eastern Europe.¹ Relatively little work has been done on the lived experience of believers, although that is now changing.² So far as the Cold War more broadly is concerned, it is striking how little attention has been paid to religion as a factor shaping that conflict, despite an enormous historiography on relations between the superpowers in the post-war period.³ Scholarly work on Communism and science has focused mainly on the Soviet Union and has tended to concentrate on the role of the state in promoting science during the Cold War, especially military technology, on the negative impact of official ideology on scientific endeavour and on the contribution of science and technology to industrialization in the economies of Eastern Europe.⁴ What the present volume seeks to do is to connect these two historiographies and to challenge the implicit assumption that science and religion were counterposed, i.e. that the advance of science was necessarily at the expense of religion. The volume seeks to explore the contradictory and often surprising interplay of ‘science’ (including the social sciences), state-backed atheism and religious belief, seeking, for example, to show how between the 1940s and the 1980s religion and atheism were subject to a continuous process of reconstitution as objects of social science, or how the natural sciences were drawn to occult themes. It seeks to emphasise the modes of interpenetration and coexistence of science, atheism and religious belief and the difficulties of drawing clear boundaries between them, pointing, for example, to the role of scientific expertise in formulating policy in both atheistic education and religious heritage. A secondary theme of the volume is to connect the usually separate historiographies of the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe (the volume looks at Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) and to encourage comparison of the different ways in which Communism, religion and science were triangulated across the different states of the Soviet bloc. The essays demonstrate that although the governments of the Eastern Bloc adopted the tenets of Stalinist anti-religious policy in the late 1940s, they rather quickly adapted them, according to the specific configuration of the religious field in their country, to its sociological make-up, its intellectual and cultural traditions and the extent to which it had undergone secularization in the interwar period.

The main themes that emerge from the 11 essays of the volume relate to the following broad areas. First, by the 1960s, Communist states faced increasing difficulties explaining the persistence of religious belief, notwithstanding the socio-economic modernization and educational advances that were assumed to erode religiosity. Scholars began to distance themselves from the vulgar Marxism of the 1950s and turn towards the social sciences and psychology to find ways of understanding the resilience of religious belief and practice. Those charged with propagating scientific atheism were increasingly forced to concede that its limited impact on the populace was due to its failure to tackle existential questions concerning human purposes, meanings and values to which religion had traditionally offered answers. One response was to accelerate the process of creating secular rituals to replace religious rituals that marked the key rites of passage and to seek to engage with the inescapable reality of death. Second, this was the era when, especially in the Soviet Union, great achievements in science, notably in the space race, afforded the government a certain legitimacy. Achievements in science and technology aroused public enthusiasm, especially in the context of Cold War competition, and the popularization of science made great strides. Somewhat paradoxically, the Cold War also spurred professional scientists to take an interest in phenomena that seemed to resist explanation in terms of dialectical materialism, an interest that extended to the occult. Third, scientism could easily take on quasi-religious forms, as institutions such as the anti-religious museum—never as numerous in Eastern Europe as in the Soviet Union—suggest. Fourth, the Christian Churches, for their part, showed increasing willingness to endorse the claims of science and, correspondingly, to reduce the sphere of knowledge in which religion had traditionally claimed authority. In addition, the involvement of the Russian Orthodox Church in the World Council of Churches or the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church called into question the leninist shibboleth that all religious institutions were bastions of reaction. Finally, the material heritage of the religious past, once held in contempt, became increasingly valued from the 1960s for its symbolic potential to connect the Socialist present to the historic culture of the nation, as many Socialist states increasingly asserted a national identity.

The volume is not concerned with the efforts of the Soviet Union and its client states to combat institutionalized religion or with church–state relations as such. Yet the often tense relationship between church and state cannot be ignored, since it provides the institutional framework within which the contest between science, religion and official ideology played out. It should also be mentioned that the focus is very much on the Christian churches, since these dominated the religious landscape of Eastern Europe, but we should not forget that in the Soviet Union the attack on religion extended to Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism, and that in the Socialist bloc as a whole a decimated Judaism and—in parts of Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria—a hardy Islam were also elements of the religious landscape.

The Soviet Struggle Against Religion

The Bolsheviks stood in an Enlightenment tradition, reinforced by nineteenth-century philosophical materialism, which championed reason as the source of social progress and looked to the application of scientific knowledge to nature and society as the key to furthering human advancement. In their hostility to religion, however, the Bolsheviks went much further than the Second International. In Germany the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had endorsed a generalized secular humanism, confidently believing that science would bring intellectual emancipation from religion, and had encouraged worker activists to read classic materialist texts such as Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff: Empirisch-naturphilosophische Studien (1855) (Force and Matter: Empirico-philosophical Studies) or Ernst Haeckel’s Die Welträtsel (1895–1899) (The Riddle of the Universe, 1901). Yet the SPD upheld freedom of religion and avoided vituperative anti-religious rhetoric.⁵ By contrast, the Bolsheviks revelled in hostility to religion, not least because the Russian Orthodox Church was such a pillar of the old regime. It was also the case the Russian intelligentsia, more than its counterparts in western Europe, had espoused atheism as intrinsic to progressive politics. As Victoria Frede observes, questioning the existence of God took on a ‘peculiarly intensive, existential quality in Russia’, in contrast to France, Great Britain, and Germany, where ‘metaphysical doubt gradually resolved itself into polite agnosticism’.⁶ After October 1917, with Orthodox hierarchy and clergy opposed to them, the Bolsheviks determined to bring the Church to heel, not only instituting the separation of Church and state that had become standard in Europe since the French and American revolutions, but also expropriating it economically and radically curtailing its freedom to operate as an independent organization. Much has been written about the fierce campaigns against the Church and the efforts of bishops, priests and laity to resist them. Suffice it to say that notwithstanding its institutional battering at the hands of the state, it was clear by the time of the Second World War that the Orthodox Church would not go under anytime soon.

At the time the Bolsheviks took power, the concept of secularization in its modern sense was not yet in circulation. Like many Russian intellectuals in the nineteenth century, however, including some churchmen, they took for granted that socio-economic modernization—whether construed as urbanization, migration, industrialization, the decline of face-to-face communities, or the rationalization of social life—would bring about a decline in the social influence of religion. The Bolsheviks, however, were never content to let modernization take its course. They believed that the state must take conscious, determined action to undermine religion and promote science, using the full panoply of its repressive, ideological, pedagogical and legal powers. They perceived religion in all its forms as inimical to Socialism, since it instilled values at odds with the activism and collectivism required of Socialist citizens, encouraging fatalism and humility, acquiescence in the status quo, sectarian dogmatism, a concern with individual salvation and a general orientation to the world beyond this.⁷ Socialist society, they believed, would be atheist or it would be nothing, a perspective exported to the countries of Eastern Europe in the late 1940s.

The positive counterpart to Bolshevik anti-religious propaganda was the vigorous commitment to propagate a scientific understanding of the natural and social worlds. The assumption was that each advance of scientific knowledge, together with increased control of nature that it enabled, would expose the falsity of religious claims. Different agencies of state, therefore, including the agitprop sections of the Communist parties, schools, the Red Army, scientific institutions, the press, publishing houses and the radio, were enlisted into combining anti-religious propaganda with the popularization of scientific knowledge. ‘Scientific-atheist propaganda’, as Igor Polianski shows in his article on anti-religious museums, meant not only refuting the claims of religion about the origin of man and the universe in the light of modern science but also using historical criticism to debunk stories in the bible and demonstrate the age-old subservience of religious institution...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 1. Religion and Social Science in Eastern Europe
• 2. Science, Religion and the Paranormal
• 3. The Socialist Life-Cycle: Between Science and Religion
• 4. Socialism and the Problem of Religious Heritage