In a plethora of other deeds, decrees and resolutions of the Soviet power directed against the church and believers, this one looked particularly sinister, because in addition to habitual brutality that had been blighting the nation since 1917 it contained universal stupidity. One thing is comforting: while brutality and stupidity come together as a couple, after a blood bath brutality inevitably drowns in stupidity and the triumph of stupidity is always the Pyrrhic victory.
On May 15, 1932, a document was signed by Stalin. The crux of the matter was that by the end of the second five-year plan (1933–1937) the notion of God was to be obliterated from the minds of Soviet people entirely and permanently. This was exactly what they said in the Union of Militant Atheists (UMA) – the organization established in 1925 with the wholehearted support of Soviet authorities: “By May 1, 1937 the name of God must be forgotten across the USSR.”
Credit should be given to irreplaceable leader of UMA, comrade Yemelyan M. Yaroslavsky (born Miney Israel Gubelman). Before bringing his atheistic hordes out for the battle against Heaven, he had thoroughly planned his campaigns.
Thus the proclamation of the “Godless five-year plan” coincided with the XVII Party Conference where the program for the second five-year plan was adopted. Therefore the two programs, political-economic and antireligious ones, concurred. Yet it was back in 1929 that comrade Yemelyan conceived his plan of ultimate eradication of religion from the souls of the people trusted to his care. At the Second All-Russian Congress of Atheists the outlines of that plan were already discernible and the Union of Atheists was renamed into the Union of Militant Atheists.
It seems to me that pathological propensity of the new authorities, mostly consisting of undereducated and painfully revengeful people, towards creating a countless number of aggressive public structures – was a kind of revenge on the former regime. They could not sleep well at night until they settled scores with all kind of unions of Russian people, Michael Archangel, imperial geographic, historic and other societies and creative academies.
In 1930 Yaroslavsky’s plan was all ready in the rough. It was assumed that by 1932-33 all churches (not only Russian Orthodox ones) would be closed down. The following year they planned to devote to total eradication of any religious beliefs in Soviet families. This can probably be construed as the seizure of icons, religious literature, baptismal crosses and paintings. Some time earlier it was even proposed to introduce a new time reckoning from October 1917 and the phrase “After (Christ’s) Death” was replaced with the featureless “our era.”
The year 1935 was marked by sweeping antireligious propaganda among the Soviet youth; the year 1936 – by the shutdown of the concealed houses of worship killing off the remnants of the clergy; 1937 was the year of the final cleanup operation. What if a hideaway of Old Believers was left in the northern forests or a solitary muezzin had not yet been thrown down from his prayer tower in Dagestan’s Mountains?
The plan was as extensive as it was utopian. Pragmatic politician Stalin was well aware of that and therefore neither Yaroslavsky personally nor UMA generally were granted any special powers, for otherwise the authorities and their affiliate public organizations would have to wage a war on more than 55% of the country’s population as this was the percentage of Soviet citizens who designated themselves as believers during the census of 1937. Incidentally, out of 30 million of illiterate adults 25 million considered themselves believers. This also belies the big talk about the allegedly successful struggle of the Soviets against ubiquitous illiteracy.
As early as in 1935 it became clear to Yaroslavsky and his comrades that the plan would never be fulfilled. They had to admit that millions of their compatriots still believed in God, and that parishes were still functioning along with church ministers ready to preach God’s word.
UMA dropped out of Kremlin’s favor, but not because the high-ranked officials put up with ineradicable religiosity of common folks, but because they decided that the measures taken by NKVD (KGB) were more efficient. By 1941 slightly more than 5,000 worshipers remained in the country, and that was nothing much to worry about…
The Union of Militant Atheists led by Yaroslavsky was still contending for the right to enforce and uproot, but all their attempts to get ahead of the game ended in failure. At the beginning of the war Stalin forced Yaroslavsky to write an article for the Pravda newspaper on “Why do religious people stand against Hitler?” The irreconcilable struggler against God was drawn nearer to the altar he hated so much.
Theomachy took different forms in the USSR. New “godless marathons” did happen after the Great Patriotic war as well. Experience in this work seems to be taken into account by some of contemporary proponents of liberal-atheistic Rus nowadays. At least some of their technologies are by no means new. In times of Gubelman-Yaroslavsky they would desecrate the churches, scorn icons and look for (or fabricate) damaging evidence against Church leaders. God forbid we’ll see another Union of Atheists or even a theomachist party established.
Symbolically, the beginning of the “Godless five-year plan” in the 1930s coincided with the day of venerating the first Russian saints – Princes Boris and Gleb. This is symbolic but perhaps not accidental…
Mikhail Bykov
