A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

A History of Soviet Atheism

Victoria Smolkin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400890101
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia rusa

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

CHAPTER ONE

The Religious Front

MILITANT ATHEISM UNDER LENIN AND STALIN

ON THE EVE of the 1917 revolution, the Russian imperial autocracy was an Orthodox Christian state mapped onto a multiconfessional empire. It covered a sixth of the world’s landmass, and its more than 130 million subjects included Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Catholics, Lutherans, and various Protestant confessions as well as followers of numerous indigenous traditions. To govern this large and diverse population, the imperial autocracy relied on what historian Paul Werth calls the “multiconfessional establishment,” using religious institutions to extend its reach—both out to the borders of the expanding empire and deeper into the lives of ordinary subjects whose worlds remained far from the center of tsarist authority.¹ Through religious institutions, the state projected its power, unified its diverse peoples, governed its growing number of “foreign” confessions, and disciplined individual morality.² The Orthodox Church had a privileged place at the top of the empire’s confessional hierarchy and had historically performed an essential political role for the Russian state alongside its spiritual mission, providing transcendent legitimation for the tsar’s earthly authority. Orthodoxy’s position as the first among equals was formalized in the middle of the nineteenth century with “Official Nationality,” a tripartite ideological formula for imperial power that encompassed Orthodoxy (pravoslavie); autocracy (samoderzhavie); and nationality (narodnost’), a term that implies that the people’s “nation-mindedness,” encompassed in their obedience to the tsar and devotion to the Orthodox Church.³ In short, religion—and Orthodoxy in particular—was doing a lot of work for the old regime.

Whereas the Russian autocracy was an Orthodox Christian state mapped onto a multiconfessional empire, the Bolsheviks were an atheist party that sought to create a modern secular state to build a new Communist order. To do this, the Bolsheviks first had to deal with the institutions, ideologies, and cultural frameworks that they inherited from imperial Russia, and displace religion from the center of politics, ideology, society, culture, and everyday life. Once in power, the Bolsheviks used different channels to turn their vision into reality, from education, enlightenment, and cultural reforms to administrative regulation, political repression, and terror and violence. Yet despite their anti-religious sloganeering at home and the image of godless atheism that quickly spread beyond Soviet borders, the immediate reality was that the Bolsheviks had neither a systematic approach to managing religion nor a clear consensus about the nature and purpose of atheism in the Soviet project. Rather than being guided by a coherent vision of atheism’s role in forging the new Communist world, Soviet policies were improvised, dictated by competing objectives, and constrained by the political and social realities on the ground. In their drive to preserve the revolution and consolidate power, the Bolsheviks often had to choose between ideological purity or effective governance, cultural revolution or social stability. The question of how the Bolshevik Party’s commitment to atheism should shape Soviet engagements with religion remained without a definitive answer long after the revolution, producing the oscillations and contradictions that shaped political, social, and spiritual life under Lenin and Stalin.

The Old World

For Russia, the story of the “old world” begins in 988, with the Baptism of Rus’. According to the Primary Chronicle the “land of Rus’ ” came into being when Grand Prince Vladimir’s adoption of Christianity unified his lands and peoples. Before 988, Vladimir had already tried to build a pantheon to the multiple pagan gods of the eastern Slavs living in his realm in an effort to consolidate power, but when the pantheon failed to do this political work, Vladimir turned to the monotheistic faiths of his neighbors. In 986, the story goes, he received emissaries from the Muslim Bulgars of the Volga, the Jews of Khazaria, the Western Christians of Rome, and the Eastern Christians of Constantinople. Impressed by what he heard about Constantinople, Vladimir sent his own emissaries to Byzantium, who, upon their return, reported that Constantinople’s St. Sophia Cathedral was so magnificent that they “did not know whether we were in heaven or earth.”⁴ Vladimir became a Christian, destroyed the pagan pantheon, and forcibly baptized his people. And so, in 988, the land of the Rus’ became Christian, and in becoming Christian, it became a state with a history.

The story of the Baptism of Rus’ is as much about the consolidation of political power as it is about spiritual salvation. From the beginning, Russian statehood and political identity were inextricably connected with Orthodox Christianity. In part, this was because of growing tensions between the Latin West and the Byzantine East, which eventually split Christendom in the Great Schism of 1054. Kievan Rus’, which had been converted not long before, remained under the authority of Byzantium. Byzantium declined over the next two centuries, and compromised with the Latin Church by recognizing papal authority at the 1438 Council of Florence, in exchange for assistance against the Ottoman threat. The Orthodox Church in Russia, unwilling to make the same compromise, became de facto independent of the Byzantine Church.⁵ When Constantinople fell in 1453, Muscovite Russia positioned itself as the only politically independent Orthodox state, which endowed Muscovite ideology with considerable political capital. As Muscovy consolidated political power, the Orthodox Church too became more assertive, establishing its own patriarchate in 1589. The relationship between church and state, then, was reciprocal. Just as the Orthodox Church depended on the Russian state to defend its ecclesiastical autonomy, the Russian state depended on Orthodoxy for its political legitimacy. The theoretical foundation of Russia’s statehood was formulated by ecclesiastical writers, and the authority of the Orthodox ruler was grounded in his ability to protect and defend the true faith. Russian rulers, therefore, depended on Orthodoxy for its symbolic investment of the political order with sacred meaning.

The thread that runs through Russian history is that Russia’s salvation rests in power, and, more specifically, in the state’s capacity to contain two perennial threats to its territorial and cultural sovereignty: domestic disunity and foreign occupation. A strong state—or, perhaps more importantly, the image of a strong state—was considered essential to this enterprise. Russian history is punctuated by political salvation from recurring crises. Indeed, the Romanov dynasty, which ruled Russia for more than three hundred years, was founded in 1613 in the aftermath of the “Time of Troubles,” a period when political disunity and social disintegration opened the state to foreign invasion. It was under the threat of being ruled by a Polish (and Catholic) prince that the Orthodox Church and the Muscovite political elite came together to elect the first Romanov tsar, Mikhail Fedorovich (r. 1613–45), after decades of political infighting. Young and pious—he was only sixteen when he became tsar—Mikhail was dominated by his father, Feodor Nikitich Romanov (c. 1544–1633), who became, in 1619, Filaret, Patriarch of the Church. The origin of Russia’s old regime, then, lay in the shared power of church and state.

Russia’s old regime was a traditional political order: the ruler was autocratic, and the people were subjects, not citizens. At the same time, beginning with the rule of Tsar Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725), the Russian imperial autocracy became part of a broader European process that saw the rise and consolidation of the state. To mobilize resources and govern most effectively, the early modern European state enlisted the church as a partner in the project of disciplining its subjects. Peter’s vision of a rational state placed Russia within this broader European pattern,⁶ and like elsewhere in Europe, the political consolidation of the imperial Russian state was carried out at the expense of religious authority. The Russian state’s precarious grasp on power and tenuous reach into local governance meant that it always saw the church as both an ally and threat—a competing authority that could both support and undermine the state. Peter, growing up in the wake of the Old Believers schism that marked the tumultuous rule of his father, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (r. 1645–76), had witnessed the devastation that competing centers of authority could inflict, and believed that the consolidation of state power depended on the state’s ability to incorporate the church into the work of government. With his church reforms, Peter placed the church under the oversight of the Holy Synod, a new government body headed by a layperson. This strengthened the bureaucratic and political reach of the state by institutionalizing the record keeping of births, marriages, and deaths (to be carried out through local parishes), disciplining “superstition,” making annual confession mandatory, and obligating the clergy to report the content of confession if it was construed as a political threat.⁷ Indeed, from the perspective of an autocrat governing a geographically vast and confessionally diverse land, the work of defining and regulating correct conduct was far too important to be left outside the state’s authority.⁸ Indeed, as Viktor Zhivov argues, “Peter did not aspire to any form of revived piety. In general, for Russian rulers discipline was immeasurably more important than any kind of religious values.”⁹ But the purpose of Peter’s church reforms was not just to place the political authority of the state above that of the church; it was to appropriate the church’s spiritual charisma. Indeed, the primary value of Orthodoxy, for Peter, was its ability to buttress state ideology. As Vera Shevzov notes, Peter’s Spiritual Regulation (1721) was intended to make clear to his subjects—who “imagine[d] that such a [church] administrator is a second Sovereign, a power equal to that of the Autocrat, or even greater than he”—the distinction between political and spiritual authority, and primacy of the former over the latter.¹⁰ During the imperial period, then, the Russian state and Orthodox Church worked, in the words of Nadieszda Kizenko, “hand in hand,” both governing the people and directing their spiritual salvation.¹¹

The autocracy reached its apogee during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825–55), but before long, Tsar Alexander II’s (r. 1855–81) Great Reforms of the 1860s, in the spheres of jurisprudence, economy, military, and education, began to strain Russia’s traditional order.¹² Perhaps the most significant reform undertaken by the imperial autocracy was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, which gave Russia’s peasants new freedoms, including the right to move in search of better opportunities. By the end of the nineteenth century, Russia’s economic transformation, and industrialization in particular, meant that these opportunities were concentrated in the empire’s urban centers. As peasants moved to the cities and became workers, their worlds expanded beyond the village, with the factory and the new urban culture they encountered beyond it shaping their worldviews. In the city, these new workers also encountered modern politics and the revolutionary intelligentsia, who organized political “circles” to make workers conscious of their misery and teach them what they could do to better their lot.¹³

At the same time, even as the empire modernized, much that was customary persisted, including religious culture. Indeed, the concept of religion—in the modern definition of the term, as something grounded in belief that happened in a specially designated time and space—would have remained unfamiliar for most people. Rather than being relegated to a distinct sphere, religion extended far beyond the church and its dogma. Religion remained at the core of politics, bureaucracy, culture, and education, and continued to be embedded in the places and practices of everyday life, ordering space and time, separating work and rest, shaping communal bonds around a shared history, and forming the foundation of individual and group identity. Through religion, communities came together to make pilgrimages, celebrate feasts, observe fasts, and mark births, marriages, and deaths. Religion was less about belief than about experience, encompassing values and customs that most simply took for granted.¹⁴ Even as the links between the worker and the village grew weaker, they rarely disappeared.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, under imperial Russia’s last ruler, Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), the autocratic order was breaking down under the pressures of modernization. During the revolution of 1905, the people’s political demands forced the tsar to concede certain civil rights and political freedoms, including religious toleration, which made it legal for individuals to leave the Orthodox Church.¹⁵ In this newly pluralistic religious marketplace, the Orthodox Church, the established church, found it difficult to compete with confessions that had control over their own affairs.¹⁶ This was especially the case with regard to the various “sects” that were becoming more numerous and vocal.¹⁷ At the same time, religion was so central to the political, social, and cultural framework of the empire that even liberal reformers were wary of placing the Russian state on secular foundations—both administratively, by establishing a secular bureaucracy, and ideologically, by fully institutionalizing the “freedom of conscience” promised by the tsar in his October Manifesto.¹⁸ Indeed, the Edict of Toleration underscored the contradictions of the modernizing autocracy, since it fell short of true freedom of conscience by only permitting conversion to (but not away from) Christian confessions, and not allowing for confessionlessness or unbelief.¹⁹

Russian statesmen also worried that without religion as a foundation, the growing chasm between the state and people—who, in the state’s view, remained superstitious, irrational, and thus potentially subversive and ungovernable—would become unbridgeable. Conservative officials feared that removing religion from the political and ideological foundation of the imperial order would lead to atheism, and atheism would bring about moral collapse and undermine the state. But even liberal reformers committed to freedom of conscience in principle acknowledged that th...