The League of Militant Atheists (), also Society of the Godless () or Union of the Godless (), was an atheistic and antireligious organization of workers and intelligentsia that developed in Soviet Russia under the influence of the ideological and cultural views and policies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1947.Richard Overy (2006), The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, p. 271 It consisted of party members, members of the Komsomol youth movement, those without specific political affiliation, workers, and military veterans.Burleigh (2007), p. 49.
The league embraced workers, peasants, students, and intelligentsia. It had its first affiliates at factories, plants, collective farms (kolkhozy), and educational institutions. By the beginning of 1941 it had about 3.5 million members from 100 ethnicities. It had about 96,000 offices across the country. Guided by Bolshevik principles of communist propaganda and by the Party's orders with regard to religion, the League aimed at exterminating religion in all its manifestations and forming an anti-religious scientific mindset among the workers.Compare: Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR, 1861-1945 by Theodore R. Weeks, John Wiley & Sons, 1st edition, 2010: "Antireligious Campaigns"A Thousand Years of Christianity in Ukraine: An Encyclopedic Chronology by Osyp Zinkevych by Andrew Sorokowski (1988), Smoloskyp Publishers and the National Committee to Commemorate the Millenium [sic] of Christianity in Ukraine, p. 206: "At the same time, the League of Militant Atheists and Party activists wrecked churches and harassed believers. No religion was spared in the general onslaught." It propagated atheism and scientific achievements,Compare: The History of Russia by Charles E. Ziegler (2009), p. 77: "A League of the Militant Godless, aided by the Komsomol, organized atheist lectures, satirized religious holidays, published anti-religious posters and pamphlets, and confiscated church bells and icons." conducted so-called "individual work" (a method of sending atheist tutors to meet with individual believers to attempt to make them renounce their faith); most of the peasantry was unimpressed, and even the party apparatus regarded the League as meddling and inefficient. The League's slogan was "Struggle against religion is struggle for socialism", which was meant to tie in their atheist views with the Communist drive to 'build Socialism'. One of the slogans adopted at the 2nd congress proclaimed: "Struggle against religion is struggle for the five-year plan!"Dimitry V. Pospielovsky. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 52 The League had international connections; it was part of the International of Proletarian Freethinkers and later of the Worldwide Freethinkers Union. By the mid-1930s, the Communist regime considered socialism to have been 'built',Большая советская энциклопедия. Социализм and the League adopted a new slogan: "Struggle against religion is struggle for communism", communism being the next stage after socialism according to Marxist ideology.
The league was a "nominally independent organization established by the Communist Party to promote atheism". It published newspapers, journals, and other materials that lampooned religion; it sponsored lectures and films; it organized demonstrations and parades; it set up antireligious museums; and it led a concerted effort telling Soviet citizens that religious beliefs and practices were wrong and harmful, and that good citizens ought to embrace a scientific, atheistic worldview.Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless Cornell University Press, 1998,
Origins and formation The newspaper Bezbozhnik (Godless, Atheist) (1922–1941), founded and edited by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky, played a significant role in the League's establishment, and had a wide network of correspondents and readers.Paul Dixon, Religion in the Soviet Union, first published 1945 in Workers International News, and can be found at: http://www.marxist.com/religion-soviet-union170406.htm Bezbozhnik appeared first in December 1922, and the following year a Moscow monthly for industrial workers Bezbozhnik u Stanka (The Godless at the Work-Bench, also known as "Bezbust") formed the like-minded Moscow Society of the Godless in August 1924.
In November 1924, the Anti-Religious Commission of the All-Union Communist Party (b), and in December, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee supported the project of creating an all-Union godless society. A special commission was set up to prepare for the congress of atheists.
The first congress of the organization, which took place in April 1925, decided to create a single all-union anti-religious society, called the "Union of Atheists".Крапивин М. Ю., Лейкин А. Я., Далгатов А. Г. Судьбы христианского сектантства в Советской России (1917 — конец 1930-х годов) / Рецензенты д. и. н. В. С. Измозик, д. и. н. В. В. Молзинский. — СПб.: С-Петербургского университета, 2003. Well known members of the Communist Party and Old Bolsheviks such as Nadezhda Krupskaya, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Pyotr Krasikov, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, Nikolai Bukharin and others participated in the foundation of the organization and Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was elected chairman.
In addition to the newspaper Bezbozhnik, the Central Soviet of the League of Militant Atheists published the illustrated magazine Bezbozhnik and the scientific and methodological journal Antireligioznik. The scientific society "Ateist" arose in 1921 in Moscow. It published the magazine Ateist from 1923 to 1931. This magazine published mainly works translated from foreign languages. Since 1931, the magazine Voinstvuiuschii ateizm, a periodical of the Central Soviet of the League of Militant Atheists, began to be published. Along with periodicals in Russian, the League of Militant Atheists published periodicals in other languages:
"" () − in Ukrainian, "Xudasizlar" (; − transcription: "Khudasyzlyar") − in Uzbek "" ( ) − in Tatar ()Фән һәм дин / فەن هەم دین "" () - in Yiddish "" () – in Armenian "Das Neuland""DAS NEULAND", antireligiöse Zeitschrift in deutscher Sprache − in German "Erdem ba Shazhan" () – in Buryat "Mebrdzoli Ateisti" () – in Georgian "Bezbożnik wojujący" – in Polish "Allahsyz" () – in Azerbaijani "" () – in Bashkir
By 1932, 10 anti-religious newspapers and 23 anti-religious magazines were published in the USSR.Вопросы Научного Атеизма. Выпуск 18. 1975./ М. М. Шейман. / У истоков массового атеизма./ С. 326И. П. Цамерян, М. И. Шахнович. Атеизм в СССРDaniel Peris. Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless 1st Edition. / Cornell University Press, 1998/ p. 74
The Moscow group tended to support the leftist side of the debate on how to destroy religion (i.e. in favour of attacking religion in all of its forms rather than moderation), and in 1924 it attacked Yaroslavsky, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich for differentiation between different religions, instead of genuine godlessness. It accused Yaroslavsky of attacking only the clergy rather than religion in general. Yaroslavsky protested this and affirmed that all religions were enemies of socialism including the Renovationist schism in the Orthodox church, but that the methods of struggle against different religions should vary due to the large number of loyal Soviet citizens with religious beliefs who should be re-educated as atheists rather than treated as class enemies.Dimitry V. Pospielovsky. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 51 Bezbozhnik argued that it was an oversimplification to treat religion solely as a kind of class exploitation to be attacked, forgetting the complex nature of religions, as well as the individual believers. The CPSU Central Committee supported Yaroslavsky's viewpoint on this issue, although this debate remained unresolved at the Union that came in 1925.
The Moscow group merged with the Society of Friends of the Godless Newspaper (associated with Bezbozhnik) in April 1925 to form the All-Union League of the Godless at its first congress.Sabrina Petra Ramet, Ed., Religious Policy in the Soviet Union. Cambridge University Press (1993). p. 5.Большая советская энциклопедия / / гл. ред. О. Ю. Шмидт. - Москва : Советская энциклопедия, 1926-. - 26 см. Т. 52: Сознание - Стратегия. - 1947. - 472 с., 22 л. ил., портр., цв. ил. : ил., карты, портр., табл. / С. 334-335 Between 1925 and 1929 a power struggle took place in the new organization between Yaroslavsky and his followers, and the leadership of the former Moscow group (Galaktionov, Polidorov, Kostelovskaia, Lunin and others).Dimitry V. Pospielovsky. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 50. The 1926 All-Union Conference on Antireligious Propaganda voted in favour of Yaroslavsky's views on the antireligious campaign, but the debate still continued. The Moscow group argued that the antireligious struggle should be led only by the party and the industrial proletariat, as opposed to the whole nation which Yaroslavsky wanted to mobilize to conduct the antireligious campaign.
In 1929, when resolutions that would set the tone for intensive persecution of the next decade were set and Yaroslavsky's victory in the power struggle had been completed, there were a few last attacks made on Yaroslavsky and the organization for minimizing the class-enemy thesis in attacking religion, of having few workers and peasants in its ranks, of using archaeology instead of aggressively attacking religion, of being indifferent to transforming the school system into a fundamentally antireligious atmosphere and of opportunistically citing works by non-Marxist Western bourgeois atheists in publications.Dimitry V. Pospielovsky. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 53. In response, Yaroslavsky claimed that they had supported antireligious education for years, but in contrast to the leftists who simply wanted to attack religion, he was working to replace the popular religious ideology with that of dialectical materialism. He also pointed out correctly that Lenin had used the works of the 18th century French atheists and other bourgeois atheists to assist in the campaign to disseminate atheism in the USSR. He admitted that the effect of their efforts up to that point was less than he had hoped, which he implicitly blamed on the Moscow branch for their lack of cooperation, lack of support from the party and some branches of the Komsomol, and a ban operating on their activities in Ukraine, as well as an inadequate finances.Dimitry V. Pospielovsky. A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory, and Practice, and the Believer, vol 1: A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies, St Martin's Press, New York (1987) p. 54.
Yaroslavsky, Stalin's loyal aide in the secretariat and one of the founding editors of Kommunist, came out on top despite the Moscow group's resistance in an effort to retain autonomy and the support for that group from the daily Komsomol'skaia Pravda.