“Set thou an ungodly man to be ruler over him.”
(THE 109TH PSALM)
How the materialists like to jeer at the naïve faith of the peasant, fooled by relics, faith healers, and the general hocus-pocus of some branches of Christianity. As I am unmoved by alleged pieces of the True Cross or snippets of St. Bridget’s fingernail, vials of liquefying blood, or mysterious cures at holy wells, this does not strike at the heart of my faith, though I do know people who take such things perfectly seriously, and I suspect—in spite of my robust English Protestantism—that miraculous healing does sometimes take place even in this skeptical age.
But the peasant’s willingness to believe in such fancies is as nothing to the materialist intellectual’s gullible open-mouthed willingness to believe anything. The biggest fake miracle staged in human history is the claim that Soviet Russia was a new civilization of equality, peace, love, truth, science, and progress. Everyone now knows that it was a prison, a slum, a return to primitive barbarism, a kingdom of lies where scientists and doctors feared offending the secret police, and that its elite were corrupt and lived in secret luxury. I saw this myself firsthand when I lived there.
Yet it was the clever people, those who prided themselves on being unencumbered with superstition, those who viewed religion as a feature of the childhood of humanity, who fell for this swindle in the tens of thousands. The more educated and enlightened they were (by their own judgment, anyway), the more likely they were to be fooled. Some were deceived at a distance. Some were deceived after going there and somehow failing to notice what was going on. One correspondent of the New York Times, Walter Duranty, denied the existence of the great Ukrainian famine of 1932 – 33 even though he knew, directly and personally, that it was taking place. Others, who must have had their suspicions, willingly believed those denials and haughtily disbelieved truthful accounts of the misery that were published elsewhere by honest men and doubters of the Soviet miracle.
Denial of the existence of actual starvation, murder, persecution, and injustice seems to me to be much more distressing than believing that a wooden image of the Virgin Mary moved, when it did not, or seeing the face of Christ in a tree-stump, where it is not. Faith in the myth of progress can be just as strong as faith in God, though not necessarily so kind in its effects. At least the belief in miracles sometimes produces genuine cures. Lying about Leninism only abets murder and oppression.
Any student of gullibility among the intelligent and worldly should study first of all the work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb on the Soviet Union. Their perfectly enormous book Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? purports to be a respectable and carefully researched account of the USSR under Stalin. Its picture of a rational paradise of human progress is so wholly and completely false and can now be shown to be so at every turn by libraries full of records and by mountains of human skulls. Yet, on publication in the late 1930s it was generally greeted as a respectable work of scholarship and research. It is a sore shame that its authors did not live to see their work thoroughly shown up for what it was, a mass of self-deceiving lies. These lies served a filthy despotism, but perhaps more importantly encouraged the rational, materialist intellectuals of free nations in dangerous delusions, which still trouble us.
In realizing this, we need to remember that the Webbs were not themselves revolutionary Marxists or even former Trotskyists, but gentle Fabian social democrats, believers in lawful, democratic process, in the inevitability of gradualism, honorable in their personal dealings, honest according to their own lights. They were kind to their domestic servants, modest in their lives, studious, responsible, and serious, by no means stupid or ill-educated or personally callous. Nevertheless, thanks to their utopian opinions, they persuaded themselves (for instance) that the 1937 Moscow show trials were genuine criminal prosecutions. How could they have done that? These were state-sponsored stage-plays, transparently fictional. During these exhibitions, intelligent, educated men, formerly loyal servants of the Soviet regime, made unhinged confessions—after months of torture—to incredible catalogues of sabotage and conspiracy. Much of this was easily proved false at the time. All of it is now known to be untrue. The Webbs also once pronounced that the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, an assembly of lawless toadies and gangsters shivering in fear of the despot Stalin, “may not unfairly be regarded as corresponding to the [British] House of Commons.” The House of Commons has suffered a severe loss of reputation in the years since this was written, but even so, this is a horrible slander on it.
The Webbs’ successors live on today and share many of their attitudes, though they lack a proper fatherland to admire, to tell lies for, or to make fools of themselves over. Cuba, it is true, still just serves for some of them, and the strange continuing cult of Fidel Castro, in defiance of all facts, gives us a faint hint of what the Soviet delusion must have been like when it ruled the minds of so many. The reverence for the tyrant (invariably referred to as “Fidel,” as if a personal friend) and the misrepresentation of his impoverished prison island as a paragon of medical and social achievement are examples of the power of self-deception interesting to any psychologist. But the wretched truth is too widely known, and Cuba is plainly sinking into the past, not striding into the future. China, ludicrously praised by gullible Westerners under the worst years of Mao Zedong, is now plainly a despotism and a police state. But because it is not a utopian despotism, foreign radicals are no longer willing to defend it. Regrettably, they see no need to apologize for their past praise, hoping that it will be forgotten.
Most of the people who would have apologized for Stalin in his day have now found other causes—the cultural and sexual revolution, campaigns to tax the Western poor to provide money for Africa’s rich, and above all, the intolerant and puritan secular fundamentalism that gathers around the belief in manmade global warming. Others are devotees of the idea that the introduction of Western democracy into the Muslim world is possible. These beliefs allow their supporters to feel superior to others and to pursue a heaven on earth whose righteousness reflects on them. It is quite dangerous to challenge them, even though it is not dangerous at all to challenge Christianity or faith as a whole. The danger is not usually melodramatic or fatal, though it sometimes is. The climate change zealots (for example) issue no Fatwas, order no assassinations, and do not drag filmmakers from their bicycles and stab and behead them. They simply seek to drive their opponents from public debate by scorn, misrepresentation, and smears.
One of the fiercest orthodoxies of modern times was for a short while the state-sponsored cult of regime change that led to the Iraq invasion. The British weapons scientist David Kelly dared to cast doubt on the official justification for war in a confidential meeting with a journalist. Having been detected, he was exposed to interrogation and humiliation in public and soon afterward killed himself, presumably after intolerable pressure of some kind was put on him. This is perhaps the most frightening example of modern secular intolerance. But the facts later refuted that cult so utterly that—too late, alas, for Dr. Kelly and thousands of victims of the war—it lost its state-derived power to punish and marginalize.
The twenty-first-century successors of the Webbs can best be described as Homeless Utopians. They are sure there is no heaven, and they are coming to fear that there may be no earthly paradise either. But they continue, despite all previous failures, to hope for one. It may not offer them any great delights, but their faith enables them to feel superior to their neighbors. Holding tightly to the idea that what science cannot explain does not need explaining, they are still as ready as their fellow-traveling forebears were to slander the kingdom of heaven while mistakenly praising the fanciful utopias of man. They also like to believe that reason is all on their side.
The Webbs do us the great favor of explaining why people of this kind have always—at least in the years since the French Revolution—been so attracted to utopian states and to utopian movements and leaders. They declare that “it is exactly the explicit denial of the intervention of any God, or indeed of any will other than human will [my italics] in the universe, that has attracted to Soviet Communism, the sympathies of many intellectuals, and especially of scientists in civilised countries.”
The Webbs did express some very mild doubts about the Soviet system, but it is clear from their tone that they were exhilarated and inspired by explicit denial of God. It swept away one of the great obstacles they themselves faced in their own country. They plainly envied the Bolsheviks the freedom this gave them. Consider this approving reference to the thoughts of Lenin—the absolute atheist, lover of violence, and begetter of the 1917 putsch—that brought the Russian Bolsheviks to power:
Lenin insisted, as the basis of all his teaching, on a resolute denial of there being any known manifestation of the supernatural. He steadfastly insisted that the universe known to mankind (including mind equally with matter) was the sphere of science; and that this steadily advancing knowledge, the result of human experience of the universe, was the only useful instrument and the only valid guide of human action…When the Bolsheviks came into power in 1917, they made this defiant and dogmatic atheism the basis of their action.1
Note the approval implied in the words “resolute,” “steadfastly,” and “defiant.” The Webbs were impressed, even awed, by Lenin’s renunciation of the spiritual.
Before discussing the suppression of religion, the Webbs explain, “So far we have described the positive and creative aspects of the cult of science in the USSR.” (These include laudatory sections on such subjects as “The Leningrad Institute of the Brain” and “The Campaign against Rheumatism,” which I commend to those with a strong sense of the ridiculous.)
The Webbs creditably admit that “there is also a negative and destructive side: the violent denunciation and energetic uprooting, from one end of the Soviet Union to the other, of religion, and especially of the Christian religion.” But there follow various denunciations of the evils of the Orthodox Church, tending to suggest that at least some of the attack on it was justified.
The Webbs go on to remark: “Whatever may have been the shortcomings and defects of the Greek Orthodox Church, it must be recognised that the attitude taken up by the Communist Party has excited a pained surprise and intense disapproval among earnest Christians in Western Europe and the United States, which has militated against any friendship with the USSR.”
Note that they merely describe this surprise and disapproval among others (patronized as “earnest”) rather than expressing it themselves. Surprise is “pained” and disapproval “intense.” These are very different words from “resolute” and “steadfast.” It appears that they regret the action (if they regret it at all) because it has damaged the image of a government they admire. They are not against it because it is bad in itself.
The Webbs’ account of the Bolshevik state’s persecution of religion, beginning on page 1007, is relentlessly complacent, self-deceiving, and defensive. They suggest without any good evidence that, following Lenin’s coup d’etat of November 1917, there were “spontaneous mass conversions to atheism.” They seek with painful diligence to avoid blaming the state for the killing of priests and the destruction of churches in the postrevolutionary period, attributing these events to “popular excesses,” saying, “The Soviet government failed, for some years, to get control of the popular feeling”—although they also admit that this government “doubtless sympathised with it in all but its worst excesses.” All but the worst? We shall see.
The Webbs’ summary of the revolutionary campaign against the church is a useful starting point for examining this endless and ingenious fury, even so. This was not mere mindless smashing, intimidation, murder, and abuse, though there were plenty of these things. The Webbs correctly—and highly significantly—record that the schools were immediately secularized, religious teaching having been forbidden by Anatoly Lunacharsky’s education decree on October 26, 1917, one of the very first broadly political acts of the Lenin putsch. There was then a second, still more devastating decree (on January 3, 1922), which utterly banned the teaching of religion to children, even singly, in churches, church buildings, or private homes.
Those who nowadays characterize the teaching of religion to children as a form of abuse—and I will come to that shortly—might be surprised to find their views so closely prefigured in this proclamation, which conceded that:
Theological instruction for individuals over eighteen years of age who are able to discuss religious questions intelligibly can be authorised in special establishments opened by permission of the Soviet authorities… Collective teaching and isolated relations with young people under the age of eighteen, no matter where carried on, will be prosecuted with all the rigour of revolutionary law.
Such “rigour” could include the death penalty.
While Christian education was suppressed, official anti-Christian fervor was rampant. Hundreds of “Anti-God museums” appeared, mocking especially the Orthodox cult of relics, based on the belief that the corpses of saints did not decompose. Perhaps this is why, soon after, so much money and effort was used to try to prevent the corpse of Lenin from rotting, as if “science” could do what God could not. The Webbs once more assert, with their touching inability to understand the workings of Soviet despotism, that atheist propaganda was originally undertaken by individuals, only later supported by the weekly magazine Bezbozhnik (“The Godless”). Judging by the Webbs’ account, this journal somehow seems to have just happened to be published—in a state where the Communist Party controlled every drop of ink, every ream of paper, every printing press, every train, every delivery van, and every newsstand.
Likewise, a conference, which just happened to be held in 1925 in a country where conferences were rather closely supervised by the secret police, just happened to adopt theses laying down the lines on which religion “should be combated.” Coincidence is plainly hard at work in these matters, at least as far as the Webbs are concerned.
The mysterious passive voice is again in evidence as the Webbs record that a “Union of the Godless” was “established.” At an “All-Union conference of Anti-religious Societies,” which was somehow held in a country where every meeting hall was controlled by the state and a passport was necessary even for internal travel, this body changed its name to “The League of the Militant Godless.”
The Webbs describe how very energetic campaigns for anti-religious propaganda were launched. (The passive voice appears yet again, as they strive to avoid the blazingly obvious truth that the state was engineering all these things.) And this movement somehow grew so that “From 9,000 cells and branches, it sprang year by year to 30,000, 50,000 and 70,000, with an aggregate membership, paying tiny fees, counted by millions.”
Despite recording the mysterious flourishing of this body (coinciding as it did with confiscation of church property and execution, imprisonment, exile, and harassment of priests and believers), the Webbs go on, with the amazing self-delusion of the fellow traveler—to equate the position of Christians in the USSR with that of atheists in 1930s Britain:
The social atmosphere in the USSR is unfriendly to any form of supernaturalism; just as the social atmosphere of the United States or Great Britain is unfriendly to any dogmatic atheism. But so far as the present writers could ascertain in 1932 and 1934, there is, in the USSR today, nothing that can properly be called persecution [my italics] of those who are Christians, any more than there is of Jews, Moslems or Buddhists. There is no law against the avowal of belief in any religious creed, or the private practice of its rites. There is no exclusion from office of men or women who are believers.
The last claim was a gross untruth, while being narrowly and technically correct. The law did not bar believers from office as such. But open piety meant automatic expulsion from the Communist Party, which in turn meant exclusion from office. The Webbs—who may genuinely not have grasped this—add, equally reassuringly, “The Soviet government has more than once intervened to moderate the provocative activity of the Union of the Godless.” Perhaps so. If its aim was to undermine Christian piety, its aggressive crudity was likely to have been counter-productive from time to time. The people were distressed when jeering Bolsheviks lampooned the great festivals of Christmas and Easter in the city streets. The Socialist G. P. Fedotov recalled meeting one such procession:
The population, and not only the faithful, looked upon this hideous carnival with dumb horror. There were no protests from the silent streets—the years of terror had done their work—but nearly everyone tried to turn off the road when they met this shocking procession… The parade moved along empty streets and its attempts at creating laughter or provocation were met with dull silence on the part of the occasional witnesses.
Despite an attempt in 1923 by more intelligent Bolsheviks to restrain this kind of persecution by mockery, it returned later with renewed force under the direction of the regime’s chief God-baiter, Emelian Yaroslavski. A state that controls the waking lives of the rising generations can in fact erase faith by the use of relentless strength and consistency. And that is what happened.
The Bolshevik leadership genuinely hated and despised the thing they sought to destroy. A fair example of the league’s later propaganda is a 1929 issue of Bezbozhnik showing two smirking workers dumping Jesus Christ, open-mouthed and goggling, from a red wheelbarrow on to a garbage heap, along with some empty wine bottles. Behind them, a third proletarian is energetically smashing a church bell with a hammer. In the background, vast factory chimneys—the spires of Communism—pour soot into a vacant socialist heaven. The caption urges workers to abandon the old, allegedly drunken religious holiday of the Transfiguration and instead celebrate “Industrialization Day.” Much more offensive and sometimes obscene imagery was often used by this organization, whose pornographic and shocking parodies of religious ceremonies were an echo of the “Worship of Reason” in the French Revolution, when prostitutes dressed as Reason were paraded in churches.
Priests almost invariably appear in Bezbozhnik’s cartoons and posters as sinister drunks. (One interestingly appears in the same form in the work of the modern anti-Christian British children’s writer Philip Pullman.) Religious grandmothers, an enemy who could not easily be stifled even in a totalitarian state, are portrayed as crow-like witches trying to entice children into dark ecclesiastical portals; scavenger birds sit on the roofs of decrepit churches, while nearby the new enlightened state school shines with the virtue of science. The Almighty himself is portrayed as a red-nosed old booby in thick spectacles, wearing a White Guard cap and smoking a cigar. A particularly brutal cartoon depicts the Last Supper as a boozy debauch. Two of the apostles are under the table; bottles roll on the floor of the Upper Room; disciples reel, leer, or brawl with each other, haloes akimbo. Jesus—bottle in one hand, glass in the other—is depicted as saying (I translate fairly freely): “Drink ye all of this, for this is my own bathtub hooch, which is being drunk for you, for us and for many. Hurrah!” An explanatory text claims that the “so-called ‘Last Supper’” clearly proves that religion establishes, proclaims, and morally excuses drunkenness. “To fight against religion is to fight against drunkenness.”
The anti-drinking message is strong, as shown in that blasphemous lampoon of the Last Supper, and is an attempt to bracket the church with a tragedy that has always been the plague of the Russian poor. Yet, as I observed myself seventy years later, long after the war against Christianity had been effectively won, drunkenness was still a dreadful scourge across Russia, defying all attempts to suppress it. The main effect of a ban on alcohol sales, in 1990 Moscow, was a grave shortage of sugar, which had all been used to make moonshine vodka. Public and private drunkenness continued at appalling levels, as anyone could readily observe, wrecking family life and poisoning a society already in great pain. Far from providing a new materialist type of man with liberation from drink and ignorance, the “new civilization” left him more enslaved to alcohol than before and deprived of hope in either this world or the next.
1This passage, and much of what follows, can be found in the second volume of the 1940 edition of their crowning work (published by Longmans, Green), as part of Chapter XI, entitled “Science the Salvation of Mankind.” This is preceded by Chapter X, significantly called “The Remaking of Man.” Presumably, they were correcting the final proofs as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact joined the USSR and the Third Reich in the most cynical military alliance in human history.