Book Review
Storming the Heavens:
The Soviet League of the Militant Godless
Daniel Peris. Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1998. 237 pp. $39.95.
Although Soviet Communism, like its Nazi cousin, raised barbarism to the level of state policy,
some of its activities and institutions still strike one as more bizarre than evil. The League of the
Militant Godless, an organization employed by Josif Stalin to "storm the heavens," ridicule and
humiliate clergymen, and transform "superstitious" citizens into atheists, is one such institution. In
chronicling the League's rise and fall, Daniel Peris--formerly a history professor at the University
of Wyoming and currently employed by a Western investment firm in Moscow--reminds us that
some aspects of Soviet history were at the same time horrifying and comical.
Set up in 1925, the League was, in Peris's words, 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 to
persuade Soviet citizens that religious beliefs and practices were "wrong" and harmful, and that
good citizens ought to embrace a scientific, atheistic worldview.
The League arranged competitions between christened and unchristened infants (to demonstrate
that there were no differences in their health or growth rates), and it staged contests to show the
superiority of "godless fields" (agricultural plots that used modern soil and plant science) over
those of religious peasants who employed traditional techniques and asked a priest to bless their
land. In addition, the League opened antireligious museums in former monasteries and churches
around the country. In 1929, "godless shock brigades," "godless factories," and "godless
collective farms" appeared. Groups of industrial workers and farmers promised to fulfill and
overfulfill their production plans, while simultaneously deriding religious beliefs.
The League was a classic Soviet "mass organization." Within a decade it claimed to have 5.5
million members, 2 million more than the Communist Party itself. From the beginning, however, it
offended more people than it persuaded. One Soviet commentator termed the League's efforts
"all bluster" and derided it as an "atheist sect"; another said that the League had "adopted all of
its adversary's worst features of intolerance and fanaticism." Membership figures for branches
were inflated, and reports of antireligious activities were simply made up to please higher-ranking
officials. Entire [End Page 113] factories and schools were enrolled in the League, often without
the permission (or even the knowledge) of the workers or students who had "joined." By 1930
Emelyan Yaroslavskii, the head of the organization, observed that whole towns and villages had
declared themselves "godless," although in fact there had been no discernible change in the
population's views.
Even if some branches had encountered limited success, Yaroslavskii went on, "when entire
districts are declared Godless, in a region where there is nothing, no culture, no [antireligious]
work--this is a joke." As early as 1928 Anatolii Lunacharskii, the minister of education, said that
"religion is like a nail; the harder you hit it, the deeper it goes into the wood," but this did not deter
Stalin. A decade later another commentator admitted that "it is much more difficult to uproot
religion from the minds of the workers than to liberate them from the exploitation of capitalism."
Antireligious propaganda, it turned out, was at best an exercise in futility and self-deception and
at worst an instrument that stimulated and reinforced the religious convictions it aimed to destroy.
What does Peris have to say about this "peculiar institution"? He draws on a wide range of
primary and secondary sources, including the journals Bezbozhnik (The Godless) and
Bezbozhnik u stanka (The Godless at the Work-Bench) and various collections of documents. In
addition, he has made use of archival materials that until recently were inaccessible scholars.
What makes this volume particularly intriguing is that he has gone beyond the various Moscow
and St. Petersburg archives--such as the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History
(Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsialno-Politicheskoi Istorii, formerly the Central Party
Archive of the Institute for Marxism-Leninism), the State Archive of the Russian Federation
(Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, formerly the Central State Archive of the October
Revolution and Socialist Construction) and the Central State Archive of Historical-Political
Documents of St. Petersburg (formerly the Leningrad Party Archive)--with additional research in
provincial archives. In particular, he made considerable use of Communist Party and local
government archives in the industrial city of Yaroslavl and the much smaller town of Pskov.
The story Peris tells is not new. It has been chronicled, though in considerably less detail, by such
scholars as Joan Delaney, Sheila Fitzpatrick, William C. Fletcher, Walter Kolarz, Dmitry V.
Pospielovsky, Boleslaw Szczesniak, Nicholas Timasheff, and, most notably, John Shelton Curtiss.
What makes Peris's effort different is his use of anecdotes, statistics, and quotations from the
Yaroslavl and Pskov branches of the League. What could have been a dry recitation of data is
invigorated by quotations from debates among local notables, as well as from "criticism and selfcriticism sessions" run by higher authorities.
It is here that one must ask how much the opening of archives has contributed to our knowledge
of antireligious (or any other) policy. For example, Peris cites a complaint from a Pskov
newspaper in 1928 about "Potemkin secularization" in the city. On paper, the story indicates,
there were two district councils and twenty cells with 600 members. "Many knew this," the source
goes on, "but when efforts were made to unite the councils into one city council, there were [not
only] no members and cells, [End Page 114] but also no district councils." When this became
known, "a provisional council was somehow thrown together and the search began for cells, their
members, and the aktiv." How different is this from the Yaroslavskii quotation mentioned above,
which was taken from an "open" source? How much of what Peris has found in the archives is
genuinely "new"?
As Peris points out, the principal "successes" that were achieved in the struggle against religion
did not necessarily--in fact, almost definitely did not--derive from the League's efforts. Even
though churches were closed and clergy arrested, he writes, "this was an exercise in power, not
cultural transformation." More generally, it is no easy matter to distinguish among coercion, the
threat of coercion, and propaganda when explaining why relatively few people attended church.
In addition, he observes, "the demographic upheaval resulting from the regime's concomitant
policy of forced collectivization and rapid industrialization also created tremendous obstacles to
the maintenance of stable religious communities."
It is even more difficult to assess the effects of propaganda on religious belief. The census of
January 1937 asked all citizens whether they were "believers" or "non-believers," but the results
were not published until more than half a century had elapsed. The reason, in all probability, was
the regime's embarrassment that too few people had declared themselves atheists--only 42.9
percent of those who answered stated that they were nonbelievers. This result was especially
surprising because many respondents undoubtedly felt obliged to classify themselves as
nonbelievers. As Peris notes, "An answer could have been interpreted as a statement of political
support or opposition to the regime, quite distinct from an individual's genuine feelings about
religion."
But even though the details were kept secret, the general picture was available at the time to
anyone who read the Soviet press. In November 1937, for example, Yaroslavskii publicly
acknowledged that one-third of the rural population and two-thirds of the urban population--less
than half of all Soviet citizens--had become atheists. A process of secularization undoubtedly
accompanied urbanization and education that transformed a large segment of the population
during the 1920s and 1930s. Peris notes, however, that this process "clearly had little to do with
the organization specifically created to promote atheism"--the League of the Militant Godless.
Instead, Peris suggests that broader social, political, and economic forces "challenged the
traditional order and provided little space for religion."
Why should we care about what the League did half a century ago? In retrospect, both the
organization and its program seem little short of preposterous. Russia has undergone a religious
renaissance in recent years, and in survey after survey citizens of all social and economic strata
express greater respect for the Orthodox Church than for any other organization in Russia. In
1988, on the occasion of the millennium of Prince Vladimir's "Baptism of Rus," Mikhail Gorbachev
met with Patriach Pimen of the Orthodox Church. Gorbachev spoke of the Church's loyalty and
patriotism, and he promised that religious men and women would no longer be treated as pariahs.
"Believers," he declared, "are Soviet people, working people, patriots, and they have every right
to express their views with dignity." [End Page 115]
Gorbachev was as good as his word. Churches, mosques, synagogues, and prayer houses
reopened; religious pilgrimages resumed; and organized religious groups once again were
allowed to perform a "social mission," a function that Stalin had outlawed in 1929. By April 1991
Patriarch Aleksii (who succeeded Pimen) stated that "Russia has painfully . . . endured a time of
serving false gods," clearly implying that a new era had begun. Three months later the Patriarch
repeated this point, asserting that "during the past year, I think that we truly have been able to
extricate ourselves from the state's obtrusive tutelage."
We do not know what induced Gorbachev to make this radical shift in official policy, but a variety
of motives--his desire to gain popular support for his policies of glasnost and perestroika, his
quest for legitimacy on the part of the regime, his search for an ally in combating the country's
social problems, and perhaps even his desire to unleash the creative energies of a population
alienated by years of restrictions on religious belief and conduct--seem to have persuaded him of
the need for change.
Unfortunately, the period since the fall of 1997, when the Russian Orthodox Church and its allies
pushed through a bill in the Duma that restricted the rights of all religious organizations other than
Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism, has witnessed a good deal of retrograde movement.
While Orthodoxy has flourished, other denominations--especially Catholicism and some of the
smaller, proselytizing, millenarian Protestant groups--have found their freedom severely curtailed.
Furthermore, the state once again has set up a body to "supervise" religious affairs, although this
time the relationship appears to be symbiotic.
In fact, high-level Orthodox church functionaries--most of whom advanced to positions of
influence in Soviet times--seem to represent an obstacle to genuine religious freedom. As the
British historian Geoffrey Hosking wrote in 1990,
Decades of active persecution alternating with contemptuous manipulation have left it [i.e., the
Russian Orthodox Church] not only numerically reduced but spiritually debilitated. . . . Enfeebled
by subservience to an atheist state, the Church is no longer fitted to act as [a] vehicle for a
religious revival or to promote social solidarity.
In early 1990 the Holy Synod admitted publicly that the government had been interfering in
church appointments and the administration of parishes for many years. Patriarch Pimen himself,
after subsequently admitting "we had to tell lies," asked for "forgiveness, understanding, and
prayer." More recently, evidence has emerged that his successor, Aleksii, worked as a KGB
informer for several decades and owed his rapid rise through the hierarchy, at least in part, to
security police "friends."
Peris tells the story of official pressure, as well as of a sometimes compliant and sometimes
recalcitrant population of religious believers, with considerable skill. Whether he has managed to
reveal anything dramatically new is uncertain, but he has done a valuable service by reminding
us of the cruel and mocking attitude adopted by a regime that claimed to speak for the oppressed.
And he has done so with grace and style.
Reviewed by David Powell, Wheaton College