Christian apologists try to claim the Soviet regime was murderous because it was atheistic. To counter this, New Atheists have tried to argue atheism had nothing to do with any mass murder and oppression in the Soviet Union. Both arguments are wrong, but the New Atheist one involves contorted sophistry along with some quite remarkable distortion of historical facts.

In March 2001 the Taliban regime in Afghanistan shocked the world by undertaking a weeks-long program of destruction to, literally, deface the giant statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan; all in the name of their hardline interpretation of Islam. One of those who later condemned this iconoclasm was Richard Dawkins who commented with distaste on this and other examples of fundamentalist Islamic vandalism. With his usual great self-assurance, Dawkins declared:

I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca—or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

(Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 249)

Unfortunately for Dawkins, the recent history of atheism does not support his idealism here. Perhaps he was simply unaware of clear examples of atheists doing precisely what he claims they would never do. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was commissioned by Tsar Alexander I in 1812, to give thanks for Napoleon’s recent retreat from Russia. The huge building took decades to complete and was consecrated on 26 May, 1883. Topped by gold domes and filled with marble and paintings, the Cathedral was the third tallest Orthodox church in the world and was also the venue for the first performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

But on December 5, 1931, it was reduced to rubble by order of Josef Stalin – not bulldozed, certainly, but destroyed by the use of high explosives, Taliban-style. The destruction of the cathedral was part of a long campaign of the demolition and confiscation of churches and other religious buildings in the Soviet Union, as part of the Communist regime’s dedication to the imposition of atheism on the Russian people. Between 1917 and 1969 an estimated 41,000 Russian churches were destroyed or closed in the name of state sponsored atheism. The 20 tons of gold from the Cathedral’s domes went to the coffers of the Soviet state and much of its marble and decorations were incorporated into the Moscow Metro’s stations. Dawkins seems blissfully unaware that the twentieth century’s Communist atheists put the Taliban’s paltry efforts in the shade.

Soviet Atheist Ideology

New Atheist responses to the historical problem Soviet atheism poses for them are largely a response to a bad historical argument presented to them by many of their religious opponents. Christian apologist critics of atheism use it as a bludgeon: according to them, the Soviet Union was uniquely bloodthirsty and oppressive precisely because it was atheistic. To Christian ideologues like Dinesh D’Souza, the Soviet Union shows us what happens when an atheistic regime takes power, unshackled by theistic morality and decency:

Whatever the motives for atheist bloodthirstiness, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in 2,000 years not managed to kill as many people as have been killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades. It’s time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the greatest source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history.

(“Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history”, The Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 2006)

The most common defence against this line of argument by New Atheists is to deflect the blame for the crimes of the Soviet Union from atheism to the ideology of Marxist-Leninism and to downplay or reframe the role of atheism in that political doctrine. Richard Dawkins responds to the common Christian apologist charge that twentieth century atheism – embodied in Hitler and Stalin – has killed more people that any religion by noting, correctly, that Hitler was not an atheist. But he goes on:

[B]ut even if [Hitler was an atheist], the bottom line of the Stalin/Hitler debating point is very simple. Individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism. Stalin and Hitler did extremely evil things, in the name of, respectively, dogmatic and doctrinaire Marxism, and an insane and unscientific eugenics theory tinged with sub-Wagnerian ravings. Religious wars really are fought in the name of religion, and they have been horribly frequent in history. I cannot think of any war that has been fought in the name of atheism.

(Dawkins, The God Delusion, p.278)

So Dawkins brushes aside any association of atheism with the crimes of the Soviet Union by claiming it was simply “individual atheists doing evil things” in the name of Marxism, not in the name of atheism.

This is rather too glib, but that is somewhat understandable given it is in response to a bluntly wrong-headed piece of polemics by the likes of D’Souza, who has about as weak a grasp of history as Dawkins. To reduce the crimes of Soviet Communism to “atheism makes people bad” is absurd and any examination of regimes where religious ideologies have turned authoritarian shows that they are equally capable of violent and bloodthirsty oppression. What historical religious totalitarianism may have lacked regarding modern technology and mass communication they made up for with enthusiasm for the task of killing and torturing people. Given the resources of the Soviet Union, any pre-modern theocracy would have been every bit as blood-soaked and oppressive.

That said, Dawkins’ defence is largely nonsense. While not all Soviet oppression was atheistic in its motivation by any means, to say atheism had no role in it at all is utterly wrong; though in Dawkins’ case his argument is likely based on a profound ignorance of history rather than disingenuousness. Of course, most of the excesses of the Soviets were those of a dogmatic political ideology trying to impose itself by force and, later, a totalitarian regime maintaining its dominance by violence. But that ideology definitely was proudly and self-consciously atheistic, with atheism as one of its central philosophical tenets. As a result, over its history it sought to impose atheism on the Soviet people, usually by various levels of coercion and, periodically, by violent force.

Marxist-Leninism’s atheism had its origins in a much earlier philosophical tradition, particularly the eighteenth century French radical attempts at reshaping society along purely rational lines. The origins of these efforts can be found in the works of the French philosophes, such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and de Condorcet, and they took on a distinctly anti-Christian or even overtly atheistic tenor in the arguments of Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715-1771) and Sylvain Maréchal (1750-1803). Maréchal was a communist and an atheist who enthusiastically supported the French Revolution. Like many of his fellow revolutionaries, he saw the Church as a pillar of the hated Ancien Régime, though he went further than most in proposing its complete dismantling and the establishment of an atheistic social order. In his Dictionnaire des Athées anciens et modernes (1800) Maréchal depicts the atheist as completely unconcerned with any question regarding God, saying the issue of God’s existence “no more concerns him than the question whether or not there is animal life on the moon”. Regarding Christianity, he calls for:

… the utter destruction of a long-standing and imposing error, which affects everything in existence, which distorts everything, virtue itself included, which is a pitfall for the weak, a lever for the strong, and a barrier to genius.

Other French revolutionaries shared this ideal and in 1794 the new regime briefly replaced Catholicism with a short-lived atheistic Cult of Reason based on principles similar to those outlined by Maréchal, before it was suppressed by Robespierre as a step too far and replaced by the less radical Cult of the Supreme Being.

These experiments in atheistic utopias collapsed as the French Revolution descended into chaos and evolved into Napoleonic imperialism, but they left a legacy in the radical political philosophies of the following century, and Russian radicalism had a distinctly anti-religious tenor as a result.

This is understandable, given that the Russian Orthodox Church had long since been made an integral part of Tsarist autocracy. Despite the Russian Empire encompassing a variety of religions, the Orthodox Church was given a highly privileged position, forming part of a tripartite ideological formula of Orthodoxy (pravoslavie), autocracy (samoderzhavie) and nationalism (narodnost). This means that in the century before 1917 Revolution, the Orthodox Church was completely entangled with the Tsarist Regime.

Late nineteenth century Russian radicalism drew heavily on other European thinkers, such as Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), who saw religion as deriving almost entirely from the material conditions in which people lived. Karl Marx (1818-1883) gave Feuerbach’s more abstract ideas about this a different and far more political turn by concluding, with his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels (1829-1895), that religion was something holding back radical change to those material conditions. For Marx and Engels, one of the key ways to reform society and liberate the working class was to liberate them from all religion. As Engels declared:

We want to sweep away everything that claims to be supernatural and superhuman, and thereby get rid of untruthfulness, for the root of all untruth and lying is the pretension of the human and the natural to be superhuman and supernatural. For that reason we have once and for all declared war on religion and religious ideas and care little whether we are called atheists or anything else.

(Engels’ “The Condition of England: Review of *Past and Present* by Thomas Carlyle” 1844)

Lenin and the Bolsheviks therefore inherited both the French revolutionaries’ distaste for the Church as a conservative bulwark supporting the aristocratic ruling class and Feuerbach, Marx and Engels’ conception of religion generally as a delusion that holds back humanity. This made atheism a central and critical tenet of their political ideology. Lenin had a practical and highly political approach to the issue, mandating “complete separation of church and state …. as a necessary component of political freedom” and arguing that the Soviet state was to be indifferent to people’s religious beliefs, so long as they remained “a private affair”. Party members, on the other hand, were not to be afforded this kind of freedom:

So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. …. [The party is] an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class [and] cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs.

(Lenin, “Socialism and Religion”, (1905)

For Lenin, the main focus of the party was to make a revolution and bring about a Communist system. Once the social and economic basis of religious ignorance and obscurantism had been destroyed and Communism established, religion would – by the power of Dialectical Materialism – wither and die out.

Anti-Religion in the Early Soviet Union

At least, that was the plan. The Bolsheviks were to be beacons of secular enlightenment to the masses and, through their example, their leadership and their efforts in educating the workers, help bring about the atheist Communist ideal that would inevitably come as religion died out.

That inexorable death of religion was to be given something of a helping hand by the new Soviet state, of course, given that the Orthodox Church needed to be stripped of its political power. So part of the early Soviet Union’s separation of church and state included decrees on the nationalisation of all church and monastic land (October 26, 1917), the creation of secular institutions for marriage and the registration of children’s birth (December 18, 1917) and the removal of religious organisations from any judicial and educational entities (January 23, 1918). Likewise, religious rituals and ceremonies were banned from any government or social activity and private rituals were only allowed on the condition they “do not disturb the social order and do not infringe on the rights of citizens”. In these early years the Bolsheviks also undermined the Orthodox Church by allying with minority sects and religious reform dissidents – partly because Lenin saw the latter as worthy allies and partly to weaken the Orthodox hierarchy.

The Civil War of 1918-20 saw this attack on the dominant Orthodox Church’s political power accelerate, as the Church was seen as an active enemy of the Soviet state. The famine caused by Bolshevik policies was used against the Church, with the state demanding that Church lands be sold off for famine relief and to support the war effort. Church property, including valuable sacred objects, was seized by force, sparking bitter popular resistance from believers, who considered this sacrilege. This marked the end of Lenin’s outward tolerance and on March 19, 1922, he wrote to the Bolshevik Politburo declaring “a ruthless battle against the black-hundreds clergy” and pro-religious intellectuals who were the “over-educated lackeys of clericalism”.

Mass arrests of clergy and prominent religious apologists began on the grounds that these were “counter-revolutionaries”. At this stage Lenin stressed the importance not to alienate the masses through over-aggressive anti-religious activity – the Soviet state was too precarious to put the people off side. For now, the aggression against religion was largely against the perceived political threat of Orthodox clergy and intellectuals.

Meanwhile, the masses were to be won over to atheism by the evangelical efforts of the Party faithful. In 1925 the Party founded the League of Militant Atheists (Sojúz Voínstvujuščih Bezbóžnikov). Wielding slogans like “The Struggle Against Religion is a Struggle for Socialism!”, the League set up branches and apparatchiks in factories, collective farms, universities and schools across the Soviet Union. By 1945 the League was to have 3.5 million members and 96,000 offices across the country. The newspaper Bezbozhnik (“Godless”) had already been established in 1922 and was instrumental in the founding of the League. In 1923 it was joined by a magazine aimed at workers called Bezbozhnik u Stanka (“The Atheist at the Workbench”) and a number of scientific and methodological journals for the Party intelligentsia, such as Ateist (“Atheist” – from 1923) and Antireligioznik (“Antireligion” – from 1926). A newspaper for rural workers, Derevenskii bezbozhnik (“The Rural Godless”) was established in 1928.

The League and its publications pushed the idea that religion was inevitably dying out in the face of Soviet ideology, ridiculed Christian clergy and Jewish rabbis as oppressors of the Russian people and reported favourably on the closing of churches, the arrest of clergy and the confiscation of church lands.

Yemelyan Yaroslavsky had founded Bezbozhnik and quickly established himself as the leader of the League and the Soviet Union’s most prominent anti-religious propagandist. More radical atheists in the Party regarded him as too moderate, too intellectual and too focused on attacking the clergy rather than religion in general. That Yaroslavsky could be considered “moderate” is an indication of the tenor of anti-religious ideology at the time. At the Second Congress of Atheists in 1929, Yaroslavsky declared:

It is our duty to destroy every religious world-concept … If the destruction of ten million human beings, as happened in the last war, should be necessary for the triumph of one definite class, then that must be done and it will be done.

The strategy was denigration, marginalisation and persecution of the clergy and prominent religious activists and intellectuals and atheistic evangelisation and education of the masses. The former proved easier than the latter. The already overstretched Soviet education system in the pre-War years struggled to teach the basics and over-worked teachers largely ignored demands to teach anti-religious material and concentrated on reading, writing and arithmetic. Those teachers who did push atheism were often left unsupported by their superiors and met resistence and sometimes violence from their students’ parents.

Workers were to be educated in anti-religious and atheistic ideology via the League’s various publications and lectures, reading clubs and political discussion groups. Some churches were converted into museums of anti-religious exhibitions and in 1929 the Moscow Planetarium was established as a monument to the triumph of reason. The Planetarium was very popular, though the activities of the League less so. While the rural workers’ atheistic newspaper was declared to the Second Congress of Atheists to be wildly popular on the collective farms where it was distributed, it was closed down in 1932 due to a lack of interest. By the early 1930s much of the activity of the League and other instruments of anti-religion in the Soviet Union consisted of internal squabbling, power struggles and abstruse arguments among intellectuals, which left the Soviet masses largely unaffected and substantially uninterested.

The ideological issues around atheism became even more pressing for the Party thanks to the “Lenin Levy” – the push to greatly expand the ranks of the Party in the face of criticism that it had become elitist and dominated by theorists and intellectuals. From 1923 to 1925 the Party swelled by half a million members, mainly ordinary workers, few of whom had much exposure to the pure Marxist-Leninist theory or experience of the revolutionary underground of the early century. These new Party members did not see Communism as incompatible with religious belief and, while they embraced the rest of the Party’s ideological platform, atheism was a regular point of dissent for them. Yaroslavsky reported on this issue:

There have been almost no instances where workers would express disagreement with some other point of our Communist program: they accept it wholesale. …. But the question of religion, gods, icons and the observance of rituals …. not infrequently is the hardest of all to figure out for [them], especially the women workers.

(“Is It Possible to Live Without God?”, Pravda, June 1, 1924)

The Party’s intelligentsia strove to convince these new members that atheism and the rejection of religion was essential to the Communist cause, but the expanded Party’s members often struggled to reconcile this with the reality of a domestic and social life still permeated by rituals, prayer and icons. Even Yaroslavsky had to accept that a Party in which men outnumbered women eight to one meant compromises whereby a Party member would have to tolerate his wife’s icons in the home or baptising his children. Contrary to the ideological expectations of the pre-Revolutionary years and despite the concerted efforts of ideologues like Yaroslavsky, atheism was not dawning as a natural outworking of dialectical materialism or the noble example of Party cadres.

The Stalinist Phase: 1924 – 1943

Lenin’s death in 1924 did not immediately lead to any great change in Soviet anti-religious policy and practice, though the impression that the efforts of the previous decade had not produced great results was growing among the Party elite. This changed when Stalin instituted the First and Second Five Year Plans (1928-1932 and 1933-1937 respectively). The push for greater industrialisation and the collectivisation of agricultural production meant fundamental elements of Soviet ideology were imposed on workers from above, often by force. “Cultural revolution” was a fundamental element of the Plans and atheism was a key part of that.

With the First Five-Year Plan, the Bolsheviks sought to mobilize all resources towards industrialization, collectivization and cultural revolution. The antireligious campaign was an important part of the broader cultural revolution, since the cultural revolution was about class war, and religion was a class enemy. The party marshalled all the means at its disposal – atheist propaganda, legal and administrative restrictions and extralegal repression – to prevent religion from becoming an obstacle to constructing ‘socialism in one country’.

(Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, Princeton, 2018, p. 46)

The Second Congress of Atheists in 1929 called for a “godless five year plan”, and the Council of People’s Commissars issued a decree, “On Religious Organisations”, which greatly reduced the “borders of legality” within which any religion could operate. Previous religious freedoms established in 1918 were revoked, monasteries were closed, religious communities had to register with state authorities and the former right to “freedom of religious propaganda” was removed, with only “atheistic propaganda” still protected by law. Smolkin observes that “in effect, the only right Soviet citizens retained was the right to worship inside the confines of specifically designated religious spaces.” (p. 46)

And even those were rapidly shrinking in number. In 1930, Yaroslavsky declared at a League meeting that “the process of full collectivisation is tied with the liquidation of a significant part of churches”. The closing, repurposing and destruction of churches had previously been sporadic and largely symbolic, but now it became systematic and calculated. Smolkin notes that “of more than fifty thousand Orthodox churches on the territory of the RSFSR in 1917, fewer than a thousand were left in 1939.” (p. 49)

Unsurprisingly, none of this was popular. The closure and destruction of churches, the banning of popular public rituals and the constant atheistic propaganda against icons, ceremonies, baptisms and processions caused widespread public resentment, led by clergy and lay religious activists and others that the state referred to as tserkoviks. These were seen as counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the state and, increasingly, they were marked for elimination. Stalin’s “Great Terror” came to a peak in 1937 and in that year alone eight thousand churches were closed or destroyed and 35,000 “servants of religious cults” (clergy and laity) were arrested. Many of these were exiled or simply executed. Mikhail Shkarovskii states baldly that in this period the Orthodox Church was “on the whole, destroyed.” (Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’i sovetskoe gosudarstvo v 1943-1964 godakh, 199, p. 126 – quoted in Smolkin p. 47).

Given that few of these arrests involved any actual trial, the exact numbers are difficult to assess. The pretexts for the arrests were usually something to do with “anti-Soviet activity”, but in many cases this simply consisted of saying a prayer in public or some other minor religious act. In many cases there was no obvious pretext at all. Most of those arrested ended up in gulags for the usual three (later four) years, though the ones who survived were usually then sent into exile. Those who tried to return to their clerical role in their former diocese or parish were regularly arrested again and summarily shot.

Accounts of more prominent cases found their way to the outside world, usually if they involved a bishop or leading clergyman. Most went undocumented. Dimitry V. Pospielovsky’s Soviet Anti Religious Campaigns and Persecutions: A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory and Practice and the Believer Vol 2 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988) catalogues a large number of the more prominent cases of summary arrest, imprisonment, exile and execution of clergy and religious activists in this period. No-one can credibly pretend that this was anything other than state-mandated atheism being imposed by violence. For example:

A group of geologists, surveying in the Siberian Taiga in the summer of 1933, had camped for a night in the vicinity of a concentration camp when they suddenly saw a group of prisoners being led by camp guards and lined up before a freshly dug ditch. When the guards saw the geologists they told them that these were priests, ‘an element alien to the Soviet Power’. This was the only rationalization for their execution.

The geologists were told to remove themselves to the nearby
tents. From the tents they heard how, before every individual execution, the victim was told that were he to deny God’s existence this would be his last chance to survive. In every case, without exception, the answer was: ‘God exists’. A pistol-shot followed. This procedure was repeated sixty times until the whole operation was over.

(Pospielovsky, pp. 82-3)

Pospielovsky gives many other very similar accounts. For example:

Early in 1934 three Orthodox priests and two lay believers were taken out of their special regime Kolyma camp to the local OGPU administration. Each of them was asked to renounce his faith in Jesus. Instead, all of them re-confirmed their faith, although they were warned: ‘If you don’t deny your Christ, [death] awaits you.’ Without any formal charges they were then taken to a freshly dug grave, and four were shot. One of the three priests, however, also without any explanation, was told to bury the dead and was spared.

(Pospielovsky, pp. 83)

By the eve of the Second World War, Stalin had effectively destroyed the Orthodox Church as an institution and severely constrained all other religious groups in the Soviet Union. But it was still clear that the Terror had not broken the people’s devotion to their religious faith. The 1937 census indicated that more than half of urban respondents identified as believers and this rose to two-thirds in rural areas. The 1939 census tried to solve the problem by removing the “religion” question, but even then many respondents answered the question “Citizen of which state?” with “Orthodox” or simply “Christian” (Smolkin, p. 48).

So while the atheist activist hardliners continued to push for the elimination of religion completely, the last years of the 1930s saw signs of some level of accommodation. Article 124 of the new Constitution of 1936 affirmed an at least theoretical right of Soviet citizens to “observe religious cults”. Persecution of clergy and prominent laypeople was still at a peak at this stage, but it was seen as a possible change in attitude at the top. In 1937 the historian Sergei Bakrushkin published an article entitled “On the Issue of the Christianisation of the Rus” in the journal Marxist Historian, arguing that the conversion of Grand Prince Vladimir to Christianity in 987 AD had not been a wicked imposition of a tool of oppression by foreign missionaries, but actually a savvy political decision to enter into a (for the time) more progressive ideology.

But the real change came in 1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Faced with defeat and crumbling Russian morale in the wake of swift German victories, Stalin realised he needed to draw on all the resources he had. He decided to reverse most of the previous anti-religious policies and harness the devotion of the people to the Orthodox faith to draw on its long tradition of patriotic defence of “Holy Mother Russia”. This had the added benefit of countering the Germans’ use of religion to undermine the Soviets in the territories they occupied and also mollified the Allies in the west, who were alarmed at reports of the anti-religious terror. Understandably relieved at the reversal, Sergii, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Moscow, put his support behind the war effort and in 1943, in return for some concessions by Stalin, Bishop Sergii gathered a council of nineteen bishops – sixteen of whom had just been released from gulags for the occasion – and was elected the Patriarch of Moscow. From this point the churches became a part of the apparatus of the Soviet state, even if it was often an uneasy relationship.

New Atheist Excuses

This was far from the end of the anti-religious campaigns in the Soviet Union or the end of the “atheist work” done by the League of Militant Atheists or the Party’s later atheist ideologues. New forms of oppression began under Khrushchev and continued under Brezhnev and his successors, right up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These campaigns were less large scale and certainly far less bloody than the Stalinist anti-religion terror, but the idea that from the 1940s onward the Soviets became more or less tolerant of religion is nonsense.

Khrushchev placed more emphasis on education and, particularly, on extolling scientific achievements as a way to convince the Soviet people to abandon religion. Under his rule and that of Brezhnev, the ideologues of the Party realised that the rituals and ceremonial of the churches needed to be replaced with secular alternatives. This had some success, though many people attended the state’s wedding centres and birth registration ceremonies while also privately observing equivalent religious ceremonies at home. On the whole, the Soviet Union became predominantly secular by the 1990s, though not ideologically or militantly atheist in the way the early Bolsheviks had hoped. The secularisation paralleled a similar trend in western countries from the 1960s, and a decline in religiosity was not matched by an increasing fervour for Marxist-Leninism. On the contrary, young people in the 1980s and 1990s became increasingly uninterested in both.

But the awkward fact that there had definitely been persecution of believers in the Soviet Union, which resulted in the harassment, arrest, imprisonment, exile, torture and execution of hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens purely in the name of atheism, is a problem for the current crop of anti-theistic activists. It is impossible to maintain what Nathan Johnstone calls “the innocence of atheism” in the face of these hard historical facts. So New Atheists work around this by either simply pretending these things never happened or pretending they somehow had nothing to do with atheism at all.

As already noted, Dawkins tries to brush Stalin’s crimes aside by claiming “individual atheists may do evil things but they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism”. To be fair, Dawkins is responding to the Christian apologist argument that atheism is inherently amoral and that Stalin is a testament to what happens when the restraints of theistic religion are removed. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor made this argument in response to Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, asking “a God-free zone … ruled by reason, and where does it lead? It leads to terror and oppression.” (Today, 9 May, 2008, BBC Radio 4)

But the facts of history detailed above show that at least some of Stalin’s crimes against humanity were not just “individual atheists doing evil things” and were very much “doing evil things in the name of atheism”. Dawkins’ glib defence ignores history.

Other New Atheists take a different tack and declare that atheism is inherently incapable of driving people to oppress others because only an ideology can do this and atheism is not an ideology. Far from being an ideology, they argue, atheism is an absence of an ideology. So Keith M. Parsons contends “atheism, whether it is taken as the claim that belief in God is false or incoherent or unjustified, just does not have sufficient content to constitute a worldview” (“Atheism: Twilight or Dawn?”, in R. B. Stewart (ed.), The Future of Atheism: Alister McGrath & Daniel Dennett in Dialogue, 2008, p. 55). So nothing Stalin and Lenin et. al. did can be laid at the door of atheism per se – it can only be blamed on Marxist-Leninism.

This is less glib than Dawkins’ gambit, but still little more than nifty footwork. As Nathan Johnstone counters:

But politically, sociologically, culturally, even biologically, atheism is no longer an answer but a *question*. If there is no God, why has mankind been so disposed to believe in one? If so much of our lives have been shaped by an unreality, has this been beneficial or harmful? How far are we obligated to reshape our cultures in line with scientific naturalism, and is continued supernaturalism now a barrier to human well-being? The metaphysical conclusion of atheism has always been a trigger to sociological, cultural and political analysis – it makes almost unavoidable the development of a viewpoint on these issues.

(Johnstone, The New Atheism, Myth, and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, p. 179)

Being an atheist himself, Johnstone is pretty clear that this is the case. And the New Atheists he is critiquing can not really argue otherwise, since most of them have written whole books presenting detailed answers to these very questions. No New Atheist book consists of one page saying simply “Is there a God? No. The end.”

So it is disingenuous to pretend that atheism is a pure abstract concept that can never be a central part of an ideology. And it is a historical nonsense that it was not a critical and motivating part of the Marxist-Leninism that led to the anti-religious campaigns and deadly persecutions outlined above. To brush aside evidence of NKVD goons asking people if they believed in God and then shooting them in the head if they said “yes” as if this has nothing to do with Soviet ideology’s intrinsic atheism is patently ridiculous.

Some try to rescue the argument by admitting that Soviet ideology did have atheism as a central tenet and people were oppressed and killed as a result. But they say that a fanatical application of any ideology is irrational and so counter to the (assumed) inherent rationality of atheism, so these were not really atheists by merit of their murderous fanaticism. This is a classic “No True Scotsman” Fallacy – it does not cut much ice when Christians try to claim Crusaders or Conquistadors were “not really Christians” when they killed in the name of Christ and it is equally weak here.

The final gambit used by New Atheists, and probably the one that seems most popular, is to flip the table and declare Marxist-Leninism to be … a religion. Hitchens makes this argument at length in Chapter Seventeen of his God is Not Great (2007). In his reading, all Stalin did was fill in the gap left by the Tsars and replace the trappings, ceremonial and totalitarianism of Tsarist Orthodoxy with Communist equivalents. As well as carefully noting that Stalin had “trained to be a priest in a seminary in Georgia”, Hitchens lists various parallels between Stalinism and religious extremism, from making science subordinate to theology, to fixed iconography, ritualised slogans, processions and parades and so on. As for the persecution of the churches under Stalin, while he assures his readers he is not trying to “explain or excuse the killing of priests and nuns and the desecration of churches”, he attributes this to mere “anti-clericalism”:

[T]he long association of religion with corrupt secular power has meant that most nations have to go through at least one anticlerical phase, from Cromwell through Henry VIII to the French Revolution to the Risorgimento.

(Hitchens, p. 83)

This argument is riddled with problems. The insinuation that Stalin’s education in a seminary school as a teenager somehow means that he was less of an atheist than he claimed or that his totalitarianism can be attributed to a religious education is weak. A Georgian Orthodox seminary school was certainly meant to ultimately turn out graduates who would go on to a clerical life, but most of its students would not. It was more like a Catholic high school in the west rather than a seminary in the western tradition. Stalin attended from the age of 14 to his expulsion six years later, but was not very interested in his studies, acted as something of a rebel and openly declared his atheism while still a student.

More importantly, to pretend that having trappings that can also be found in religions somehow makes Stalin’s Marxist-Leninism into a religion is absurd. The Olympic movement also has slogans, ideals, symbols, iconography, parades, rituals and other elements that parallel religious practices and ideas, but it is not a religion. Nor was Soviet Marxism. And to pretend that an ideology that was fundamentally atheistic and anti-religious was somehow a de facto religion is clearly nonsense, especially when at least a proportion of the crimes it committed were specifically and explicitly motivated by that atheism. This argument is little more than a clumsy attempt at sleight of hand.

Finally, Hitchens tries to deal with the awkward fact of specifically anti-religious atrocities by dismissing them as mere “anti-clericalism”. The flaws in this argument are apparent if we look at his examples. Henry VIII and Cromwell were trying to reform the clergy – they were not against clerics, they just thought the clerics of their time were corrupt, immoral, heretical or all three. And the French revolutionaries and the political radicals of Italy’s unification were trying to establish a separation of church and state, to remove ecclesiastical entanglement in politics. This was nothing like what we see in the Soviet Union, which was a concerted effort to destroy religion completely, based on an ideological commitment to atheism.

Of course not all of the atrocities committed by Stalin and other Soviet leaders were driven by this atheistic tenet in their program, but to pretend that none of them were is absurd. To dismiss it as mere “fanaticism” is disingenuous, given that atheism was a prominent part of the program they were fanatical about. To say it was just “evil people doing evil things” also ignores the centrality of atheism in the driving ideology that led to this evil. And to try to dress Soviet Marxist-Leninism as “effectively, just another religion” also skips around the fact atheism was a motivating force in many of these atrocities.

None of these arguments work. They fail as historical analysis and most of them fail even as rhetoric. Atheist activists have to abandon the claim that no-one killed in the name of atheism – they did, and the evidence of the twentieth century is clear on this. Acknowledging this fact of history does not somehow taint atheism per se or give ground to argument that atheism is inherently amoral. It is simply accepting a fact.

Further Reading

Nathan Johnstone, The New Atheism, Myth, and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Borden W. Painter, The New Atheist Denial of History, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Dimitry V. Pospielovsky’s Soviet Anti Religious Campaigns and Persecutions: A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory and Practice and the Believer Vol 2 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988)

Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, (Princeton, 2018)