The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest

Author:Robert Conquest
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

10

The Churches and the People

But the end is not yet

St. Matthew

One of the great focuses of village life was, of course, the churches: and moreover they represented an alternative view of life to the one presented by the regime.

That atheism was the official view of the Soviet government; that the Communist Party regarded religion as an enemy: these are, indeed, facts known to almost everybody and freely announced by the Communist authorities on numerous occasions. We will cite only one statement of the position, a particularly forceful and (given its author and its reappearance regularly to this day in his published works) authoritative one.

Lenin, in a famous passage in a letter of 13/14 November 1913 to Maxim Gorki had stated the Party position quite flatly:

Every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness … of the most dangerous kind, ‘contagion’ of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions … are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of God decked out in the smartest ‘ideological’ costumes … Every defence or justification of God, even the most refined, the best intentioned, is a justification of reaction.

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