One of Karl Marx’s most famous quotes is that religion is ”the opium of the people”. According to Marxist doctrine, religion is a mechanism that the ruling classes create to facilitate the oppression of the masses. The lower classes feel comfort in the idea that their present suffering will be transformed to happiness in the hereafter, and thus they lose focus on the necessary class struggle. Religion is seen as an obstacle in the way of socialist revolution, which will be built on the discontent of the masses turning into rebellion against capitalist injustice. The fight against religion is also considered to have an intrinsic value, or as Marx himself put it: ”The abolition of religion as people’s imagined happiness is to demand their real happiness.”

The criticism of religion as expressed in Marxism itself is not unique, but it is the perspective on religion that comes after the shift to socialism. Once the revolution had swept away capitalism’s injustices, it was assumed that religion would also disappear. After all, the masses would not have to mask their unhappiness anymore, and the ruling classes would no longer impose these doctrines upon the public. With hindsight, we know that the reality looked very different. The peoples of the socialist countries, in spite of brutal repression, remained in their faiths. The Catholic Church played such a crucial role in socialist dictatorships. What is less known is that the Soviet regime, which for decades systematically tried to destroy religions, in the process created what was essentially its own religious belief in the form of state-sanctioned socialist atheism.

During the Soviet revolution, the fight against religion was a low priority for the Bolsheviks, who were busy trying to secure political, military and economic power. The Bolsheviks even considered taking advantage of the Russian Orthodox Church as a channel for recruiting revolutionaries. The revisionist movement that arose in the church, however, did not grow successfully, and the Communist Party adopted an increasingly hostile attitude toward the church. In a telegram to a leading cardinal in 1919, Lenin stated: ”The party’s goal is to ultimately destroy the ties between the exploiting classes and the organisation of religious propaganda, while helping the beleaguered masses to actually liberate their minds from religious superstitions, and on the same scale to organise science teaching and anti-religious propaganda. ”

In the late 1920s, Soviet leaders organised the Standing Commission for Religious Affairs and also the League of Militant Atheism, which would spread anti-religious propaganda throughout society. The league, which had close to 100,000 offices throughout the Soviet Union, focused not only on eradicating religious beliefs, but also on attacking the socialists who were mistaken about how best to fight religion. Among other things, the Trotskyist view that religious belief would be abandoned as soon as the farmers had a tractor was ridiculed. Experience had shown that even prominent people in Soviet society clung to their religious beliefs – something which was considered to refute the previous hypothesis that faith would disappear by itself in the transition to a socialist system.

In 1937, the USSR conducted an extensive opinion poll that showed that the public still had strong religious beliefs, but the poll was declared to be defective and misleading. The party leadership took a note of the results, and Stalin’s regime began a systematic assault on believers that led to thousands of people being executed and thousands more being sent to Gulag camps. During the Stalinist terror, the League of Militant Atheism had the power to give orders to schools, universities, the armed forces, the Soviet press and other institutions in their objective to locate and eliminate religious beliefs. This paranoid league also actively sought the believers among its own members, who, among other things, were tasked to look for religious meetings and attend them to gather information. The league tried to ensure that their members would not be tempted to believe in religious messages, so their visits, for example, to church fairs, were strictly regulated. In addition, members were encouraged to monitor their peers and report ‘suspicious, believing deviants’.

Initially ignoring minority religions, the Bolshevik struggle against religion was mainly directed against the Russian Orthodox Church, which had had close ties to the Tsarist regime and oppressed the smaller religions. But the regime was not content with persecuting, imprisoning and murdering the leading church representatives and confiscating its assets. Other Christian groups, as well as Jews and Muslims, were subjected to even harsher repression. In the end, organised religion was essentially banned, apart from a severely oppressed Russian Orthodox Church. By 1940, 97 percent of the Russian Orthodox churches that existed in 1916 had been closed. The Soviet regime devoted itself not only to the brutal treatment of religious organisations and believers; it also launched propaganda campaigns aimed at filling the gap that the absence of religion would create, namely with what the party considered to be the right beliefs.

There are clear signs that the Communist Party and the Soviet state increasingly took the position that secularism would not be based on the mere absence of beliefs and traditions. Instead, the emphasis was on converting the public and the elite to a new faith: the scientific socialist atheism. Religions are usually defined by them giving the answer to the meaning of life, defining a moral code that people should follow, creating a series of rituals that must be followed and focusing on the worship of the sacred. The socialist atheism preached, as opposed to Christianity, that the reward for a good life was to be found in the earthly world. This imposition of utopian socialism, which would be possible if people strictly followed the Marxist-Leninist message, however, is reminiscent of religious beliefs – something that of course can also be said of other utopian political ideologies.

After the revolution, the Bolsheviks worked to create a non-religious alternative to marriage ceremonies and funerals, which of course is important for people who do not believe in religions. But they could also offer socialist alternatives to confirmations or baptisms, which are specifically religious ceremonies. In Estonia, for example, the party seemed to replace the ecclesiastical confirmations of so-called ‘summer celebrations for young people’, whose purpose was to mimic the former church’s traditions and replace the Christian message with atheistic socialism. In 1957, around 10,000 confirmations were celebrated in Estonia, compared to only 36 summer celebrations for young people. Two years later, the traditions were equally as common. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were about 500 confirmations annually, compared to around 6,000 summer celebrations.

The Soviet leaders, especially Stalin and Lenin, came increasingly to be worshiped as saints. There was a striking resemblance to the worship of the communist leader Kim Jong Il that was going on in North Korea during his life, and which seems to have continued after his death in 2011. The embalming of Lenin’s body is reminiscent of Russian Orthodox beliefs that Saints’ bodies are longer than ordinary people after death. That the body was exhibited to the public is also in line with church traditions in Russia, where Saints’ bodies have traditionally been treated in this way. When Yugoslavia’s Vice President, Milovan Djilas, visited Lenin’s tomb in the 1940s, he remarked: ”When we went down into the mausoleum, we saw women in shawls making the sign of the cross as if they were going to visit a saint’s resting place.”

At the end of the 1960s, there was a poll among the population of the Voronezh region in Russia that included a question about religious faith. Interestingly, the researchers asked not only how many were non-religious or atheists among the respondents, but they also added the category ‘active atheist’, to which 12 percent of respondents claimed to belong. Given the strange circumstances that prevailed in the Soviet Union, there is reason to believe that this category, and to some extent even the category of atheist, referred to the alternative belief that the party and state had created.

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Especially during the 1930s, the League of Militant Atheism staged a comprehensive campaign to expand its membership and spread the ‘faith’ beyond the big cities like Moscow and Leningrad. The number of members increased from about 100,000 individuals in 1926 to 5.5 million in 1932. These numbers may, of course, have been greatly exaggerated. The availability of objective information from the Soviet era is, for obvious reasons, limited. But opinion polls conducted by the Soviet regime and studied after the fall of communism suggest that traditional religious beliefs continued to be popular with the public. It also appears that scientific socialist atheism did not quite get the foothold it was supposed to get.

The experience ultimately does not surprise, because history shows that it takes a relatively long time for the violence and oppression to suppress religious beliefs and replace them with new belief systems. Many turned in silence to the traditional religions as a way to keep not only their faith but also their social identity, in protest against Soviet socialism. This was not least the case amongst the non-Russian communities in the union, whose distinctive cultural attributes were rarely tolerated by the Soviet state. The same was true of communist states in Central and Eastern Europe that were dominated by leaders in Moscow.

Maybe the alternative belief system that Soviet leaders provided was not very competitive. No one can, despite everything, prove that either Islam or Christianity makes true or false promises of paradise in the afterlife, because the question is by definition impossible to answer. But the scientific socialist atheism promised a socialist utopia on earth, which unlike any life after death can be studied objectively. Soviet citizens quickly realised that the earthly utopia is not going to materialise in their lifetimes, if ever. The experience of the Soviet Union thus shows not only how dangerous it is to aggressively attack religious faith with the state’s power structure, but also confirms Marx’s idea that the ruling classes want to control what we believe in, especially in authoritarian societies where the state defines beliefs as scientific truth.