Characteristically they began: 'lama dark peasant';'! write to you from a god-forsaken place'; 'Lying on a dark stove, I am thinking'. Such peasants were gripped by the desire to 'acquire political development and to understand the world', 'to have literature and leadership', lest they become surplus to requirements in the new order. And even the millions who did not warm to the soviet project nevertheless internalized its categories of 'cultured' and 'backward', 'revolutionary' and 'reactionary'.
The attack on religion
The early 1920s generally saw the regime relax its policies, but from 1922 to the death of Patriarch Tikhon in 1925 it launched a sustained assault on the Orthodox Church. In February 1922 the Bolsheviks ordered the Church to surrender its valuables to aid the victims of the famine. This provoked a sharp clash in Shuia, in which four were killed and ten injured. In private Lenin discarded the pretence that the seizures were intended to assist famine victims - 'we shall secure for ourselves a fund of several hundred million rubles' - and ordered that the Shuia 'insurrectionists' be tried. Eight priests, two men, and one woman were duly executed and 25 imprisoned. In Petrograd, where popular agitation against the seizures had an anti-semitic character, Metropolitan Veniamin and three others were tried and executed. It has been claimed that there were 1,414 clashes with believers in 1922-3 in which over 7,000 priests, monks, and nuns disappeared, most apparently killed.
In May 1922 the Orthodox Church succumbed to a damaging schism. A group of radical priests, known as Renovationists, came out in support of soviet power and forced the abdication of the'counter-revolutionary' Tikhon. They called a church council in 1923, which passed a series of reforms long under discussion that included the replacement of Church Slavonic with vernacular Russian, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, and greater participation by the laity in services and diocesan administration. By 1925, two-thirds of parishes had formally affiliated to the Renovationists. Yet these 'rationalizing' reforms were not popular with a laity whose faith was intimately bound up with the observance of feast days and the cult of local saints and shrines. Moreover, the laity were in a position to impede their implementation since the revolution had strengthened their control of parish affairs; and the clergy, who were the chief supporters of the reforms, relied on them for financial support. In June 1923 the Bolsheviks withdrew support from the ? Renovationists after Tikhon expressed loyalty to the regime. Many of g the faithful questioned his act of accommodation, yet were
e nevertheless delighted as Tikhon set out to destroy the Renovationists. jg In the immediate term, this merely deepened the schism, but by the
The policy adopted towards sectarians and Old Believers - those who broke away from the Orthodox Church in the second half of the 17th century after Patriarch Nikon (1605-81) introduced liturgical reforms -was more conciliatory, since the regime viewed them as politically more progressive, in view of the persecution which they had suffered under tsarism, their emphasis on hard work, sobriety, and strict moral standards, and their openness to forming agricultural communes. Old Believers and sectarians were thus allowed to publish journals, organize conferences, charities, and cooperatives. Even in the early 1920s, however, the OGPU kept a strict eye on them, pursuing a tactic of divide
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and rule. After 1926, as policy towards the Orthodox Church eased somewhat, policy towards the sects - as well as to Islam and Judaism -toughened. Only in 1929, however, with the onset of Stalin's 'revolution from above', did the regime unleash a full-scale onslaught on all forms of organized religion.
Despite its confrontation with Orthodoxy, the government viewed the battle against religion as a long-term matter of education and propaganda. In 1922 Emelian I a ros lavs ky founded a weekly newspaper to propagate atheism among the masses which, incidentally, counted the years from 1917. In 1925 he founded the League of Militant Godless to oppose the anti-religious zealots in the Komsomol, known as 'priest-eaters', who revelled in offending believers by such antics as burning icons and turning pigs loose in church. By contrast, the League favoured public debate with believers on topics such as whether the world was created in six days. Clergy inveighed against the godless as 'debauchers and libertines' and villagers, who now paid for the upkeep of schools, ensured that atheistic propaganda was kept out of the classroom. By 1930 the League claimed to have more than 2 million members; but its record of achievement was unimpressive. Religious observance was on the decline, especially in the cities, but this had more to do with the urbanization, army service, the culture of the radio and newspaper, and the increase in technology than with atheistic propaganda as such. In some ways the history of religion under NEP was less about the clash between church and state than about the clash between a modernizing culture, backed by the resources of the state, and the local communities whose identity was closely bound up with religion.
Despite its militant atheism, the Stalin faction did not scruple to buttress its legitimacy by sanctifying the dead Lenin, inscribing elements of popular religion into the official political culture. During his lifetime Lenin had been adulated but was never strictly the object of a cult. His death, however, aroused popular anxiety expressed in rumours of foreign invasion, economic collapse, and a split in the party. The
We residents of the I Mich settlement, being workers at the Hammer and Sickle, the Kursk railway workshops, the Russian Cable, and other nearby factories, turn to the Soviet with a practical request Our settlement is sited on land formerly belonging to the Vsekhsviatskii monastery, which passed to us as one of the gains of the October Revolution. But that gain has not been realized to the full. Having turned this lair of spongers into a workers' settlement we wish, in addition, to erect on the site of the church, that fortress of reaction, a model workers' community, a fortress to the new way-of-life, with comfortable housing, leisure facilities, and rational recreations. But difficulties arise from the slowness of certain soviet organs and from lack of finance. We thus request the Moscow Soviet to issue an instruction to allow for the speedy sale of church property. Declaration of 153 workers of the ll'ich settlement to the Moscow Soviet
Stalin group responded by sedulous lye u It ivating the myth of Lenin as the incarnation of the proletariat - 'Lenin is with us always and everywhere' - tapping into a deep-seated need for a father figure who would take care of his people. In every club, school, and factory, the Lenin corner replaced the icon corner. Bolsheviks, who hitherto had fought to expose the popular belief that saints' bodies did not decompose, now embalmed Lenin's body like that of some latter-day pharaoh, and placed it in a sacred shrine. It is hard to say how far the regime used the Lenin cult to impose its values on the populace and how far it was responding to popular needs.
The intelligentsia and the arts
The October Revolution gave birth to an astonishing burst of artistic experiment that was unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. It was
18. The model of Vladimir Tatlin's
symbolized in 1С S. Ivlalevich's
