assured. In one debate the priest asked the Godless who had made the natural world. When they replied that Nature had made itself through evolution there were hoots of laughter from the peasant audience, to whom such a proposition seemed quite ridiculous, and a victory for the priest was declared.30
On the other hand was the Bolshevik propaganda which held up Communism as the new religion. The festivals, rituals and symbols of the Communist state were consciously modelled on their Christian equivalents — which they sought to replace. Soviet festivals were scheduled on the same days as the old religious holidays: there was a Komsomol Christmas and Easter; Electric Day fell on Elijah Day; Forest Day (a throwback to the peasant- pagan
past) on Trinity Sunday. May Day and Revolution Day were heavily overladen with religious symbolism: the armed march past the Kremlin, the religious centre of Orthodox Russia, was clearly reminiscent of the old religious procession, only with rifles instead of crosses. The cult of Lenin, which flourished in the civil war, gave him the status of a god. The very symbol of the Communist state, the Red Star, was steeped in religious and messianic meaning deeply rooted in Russian folklore.
A Red Army leaflet of 1918 explained to the servicemen why the Red Star appeared on the Soviet flag and their uniforms. There was once a beautiful maiden named
In private life, as in public, religious rituals were Bolshevized. Instead of baptisms children were 'Octobered'. The parents at these ceremonies, which boomed in the early 1920s, promised to bring up their children in the spirit of Communism; portraits of the infant Lenin were given as gifts; and the Internationale was sung. The names chosen for these Octobered children — and indeed for adults who also changed their names — were drawn from the annals of the revolution: Marx; Engelina; Rosa (after Rosa Luxemburg); Vladlen, Ninel, Ilich and Ilina (acronyms, nicknames or anagrams for Lenin); Marlen (for Marx and Lenin); Melor (for Marx, Engels, Lenin and October Revolution); Pravda; Barrikada; Fevral (February); Oktiabrina (October); Revoliutsiia (Revolution); Parizhkommuna (Paris Commune); Molot (hammer); Serpina (sickle); Dazmir (Long Live the World Revolution); Diktatura (Dictatorship); and Terrora (Terror). Sometimes the names were chosen on the basis of a misunderstanding or simply because they were foreign sounding and were thus associated with the revolution: Traviata, Markiza, Embryo and Vinaigrette. Red weddings were another Bolshevik ritual, popular among the Komsomol youth. They were usually held in a factory or some local club. Instead of the altar the couple faced a portrait of Lenin. They made their vows of loyalty both to each other and to the principles of Communism. In his satirical novel
of Communism as bravely as you are now opposing the church and the old peoples customs? Are you going to make your children serve as Young Pioneers [the Komsomol organization for younger children], educate them, introduce scientific farming methods, and fight for the world revolution? Then in the name of our leader, Comrade Vladimir Ilich Lenin, I declare the Red Marriage completed.' Finally, there was the Red Funeral, mainly reserved for Bolshevik heroes, which drew on the funereal traditions of the revolutionary movement — with its guard of honour, the coffin set high on a bier draped in red, the dirgelike hymn 'You Fell Victim', the graveside orations and the gunfire salute — originally used at Bauman's burial, that first martyred Bolshevik, in 1905.32
From 1921 the war against religion moved from words and rituals to the closure of churches and the shooting of priests. Lenin instigated this totally gratuitous reign of terror. Apart from the Academy of Sciences, the Church was the only remaining national institution outside the control of the party. Three years of propaganda had not undermined it — in many ways the civil war had made people turn to religion even more — so Lenin sought to attack it directly. The famine of I92I-2 gave him the pretext he needed. Although the Church had actively joined in the famine relief campaign, offering to sell some of its non-consecrated valuables to buy foodstuffs from abroad, Lenin found a strategy that enabled him to accuse it of selfishly turning its back on the crisis. He ordered the Church to hand over its consecrated valuables for sale as well, even though he must have known that it was obliged to disobey the order (the secular use of consecrated items was sacrilegious). This provocation would make the Church appear as it was charged — as an 'enemy of the people'. To rally the public against it the press called hysterically for all the Church's valuables to be sold for the famine victims: 'Turn Gold into Bread!' was the emotive slogan. In a last desperate effort to prevent the pillage of his churches, Patriarch Tikhon offered to raise money equivalent to the value of the consecrated items through voluntary subscriptions and the sale of other property; but his offer was refused. Lenin was not interested in the money; he wanted a pretext to assault the Church.
On 26 February 1922 a decree was sent out to the local Soviets instructing them to remove from the churches all precious items, including those used for religious worship. The decree claimed that their sale was necessary to help the famine victims; but little of the money raised was used for this purpose. Armed bands gutted the local churches, carrying away the icons and crosses, the chalices and mitres, even the iconostases in bits. In many places angry crowds took up arms to defend their local church. In some places they were led by their priests, at others they fought spontaneously. The records tell of 1,414 bloody clashes during 1922—3. Most of these were utterly one-sided. Troops with machine-guns fought against old men and women armed with pitch forks and
rusty rifles: 7,100 clergy were killed, including nearly 3,500 nuns, but only a handful of Soviet troops. One such clash in the textile town of Shuya, 200 miles north-east of Moscow, in March 1922, prompted Lenin to issue a secret order for the extermination of the clergy. The event was typical enough: on Sunday 12 March worshippers fought off Soviet officials when they came to raid the local church; when the officials returned three days later with troops and machine-guns there was some fighting with several people killed. The Politburo, in Lenin's absence, voted to suspend further confiscations. But Lenin, hearing of the events in Shuya, dictated contrary orders over the phone from his country residence at Gorki with strict instructions of top secrecy. This memorandum, first published in full by a Soviet publication in 1990, reveals the cruel streak in Lenin's nature. It undermines the 'soft' image of Lenin in his final years previously favoured by left-wing historians in the West who would have us believe that the 1920s were a hopeful period of 'Soviet democracy' before the onset of Stalinism. Lenin argued that the events in Shuya should be exploited to link the clergy with the Black Hundreds, to destroy the Church 'for many decades', and to 'assure ourselves of capital worth several hundred million gold roubles ... to carry out governmental work in general and in particular economic reconstruction'. It was 'only now', in the context of the famine, that the hungry peasants would 'either be for us or at any rate neutral' in this 'ferocious' war against the Church; later on we will not succeed.' For this reason, continued Lenin:
I have come to the unequivocal conclusion that we must now wage the most decisive and merciless war against the Black Hundred clergy and suppress its resistance with such cruelty that they will not forget it for decades to come . . . The more members of the reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy we manage to shoot the better.
It has recently been estimated that 8,000 people were executed during this brutal campaign in 1922 alone. Patriarch Tikhon claimed to know of 10,000 priests in prison or exile, including about 100 bishops. It was only after 1925, under pressure from Russia's Western trading partners, that the persecution came to a temporary halt.33
