The Seeds of Russia’s Propaganda Campaign
Why Atheism Reigned
The dangerous and deleterious effects of propaganda are hanging heavy on most of us these days, as we read of misinformation and “fake news” emanating from home as well as from Russia.
These tactics in Soviet life can be traced back for at least a century, beginning with the state’s anti-religious crackdown that followed the Bolshevik Revolution. State leaders concluded that all religions needed to be eradicated to make way for a new Russia. Proclaiming Atheism as the new state religion, Soviet leaders made radical and utopian promises: that humanity could master the world, and that injustice and evil could be overcome in this life rather than in the next. But Soviet atheism also was very much about power—and propagandists would become crucial in the state’s efforts to undermine competing sources of political, ideological, and spiritual authority.
Images of Atheism, running through October 2 at the Museum of Russian Icons, we encounter the visual propaganda that was plastered on walls and disseminated in journals in the Communist Party’s seven-decade war against religion (ca. 1920–1990). In these works we see the state’s shifting strategies to coerce and win over the hearts and minds of largely illiterate peasants. At times the satirical art promotes a future governed by science and reason, at others its graphic images pit the religious of many persuasions against one another as racist, anti-Semitic and often-blasphemous diatribes. The powerful Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) was prime game for ridicule, yet from the beginning it seemed doubtful that the faithful would abandon their domestic Russian icon corners for “godless ones” filled with atheist materials.
Curator Dr. Wendy Salmond, an art history professor at Chapman University, has mounted a provocative exhibition that draws upon rare collections housed at St. Louis and Rochester universites which are certain to generate passionate discussions especially at a planned two-day virtual symposium in June.
Amy Consalvo, the museum’s director of interpretation, recently deconstructed some of works that make for such a timely examination. In them we find emaciated peasants and a countryside ravaged by locusts pitted against corpulent Russian Orthodox clergy and fat cat capitalists. Under the banner,” Christ is Risen,” clergy are seated at a groaning board while a heinous capitalist stomps on a helpless working class. In a Hummel- like figure, we find an apple-cheeked boy carrying a school blackboard, at work as a protagonist for the Anti-Religious Alphabet. There is a sneering capitalist in top hat and monocle, who is spraying fermented alcohol (i.e. the opiate of the people) from a canister labeled “religion.”
Atheism and science were the antidote to superstition and debauchery, these graphic artists asserted in the leading journal, Atheist at the Workbench, and with Dmitri Moor, the prominent Soviet caricaturist, at the helm (1923–41). Moor employed familiar religious motifs and subverted the visual vocabulary of traditional icon painting to create critical images that were accessible to a semi-literate readership. At its height the journal had an annual circulation of 70,000 in the Soviet Union and was distributed with translated text abroad.
Yet despite the purge of clergy and the seizure and destruction or conversion of church properties, these relentless assaults had little success in eradicating observance and daily practice. Religion remained a powerful force in Russia both during the Imperial regime and in the Soviet Union.
“For them, culture meant religion—religious belief, but especially religious rituals and festivals: baptism, circumcision, confirmation, confession,
burial, Christmas and Easter, Passover and Yom Kippur and Ramadan.
“Their lives revolved around the ceremonies of the religious calendar, because these not only glorified their hard and humdrum existences but gave the humblest of them a sense of dignity in the eyes of God, for whom all people are equal,” the historian Richard Pipes writes, in Russia under the Bolshevik Regime.
With its sung liturgy, its distinctive choral music, its incense, and its gilded icons, the ROC services were multi-sensory and proved a formidable foe. Although the Communists attacked religious beliefs and practices “with a vehemence not seen since the days of the Roman Empire,” Pipes writes, it was not enough.
And as the late journalist Christopher Hitchens notes in his book God is Not Great, “Anti-religious propaganda in the Soviet Union was of the most banal materialist sort; a shrine to Lenin often had stained glass while in the official museum of atheism there was testimony offered by a Russian astronaut, who had seen no god in space. This idiocy expressed at least as much contempt for the gullible yokels as any wonder-working icon…Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it.”
As it would turn out, Roland Elliott Brown notes, in Godless Utopia, Bolshevism turned into a new kind of Tsarism, embued with its own secular practices and rituals. Fascinatingly, it would be Soviet leaders like Stalin, who had once studied to become a ROC priest, who would institute the cult of Lenin and state parades that mirrored feast day processions as state-sanctioned alternatives.
The propaganda machines that spun out lies and misinformation throughout the 20th century eerily foreshadowed Putin’s efforts in 2014 and the current war on Ukraine. At the same time Putin and his oligarchs increasingly aligned themselves with the ROC—whose patriarch has not spoken out against the war crimes being committed in Ukraine.
By as early as 2000 Vladimir Putin had begun to cloak his regime in a type of Orthodox nationalism, employing symbols from both the Imperial and Soviet eras to legitimize his position as absolute ruler in the eyes of the people. In the photographs we see him shirtless, and with a cross around his neck; he is photographed receiving a blessing from the ROC patriarch when he wins the national election. Much as Stalin used language and rituals to create the communist religion around Lenin, Putin has presented himself as a devout Christian, appealing to Russia’s growing spiritual population by attending Christmas and Easter services and receiving a blessing from the ROC patriarch when he wins an election. State parades on Red Square trumpet Soviet power and authority, much as they appeal to the culture’s desire for worship, for community, and for visual experiences.
A partner exhibition has been reinstalled in response to Ukraine’s dire situation that focuses on the intergenerational power of sites and rituals, in this case, in the symbolism of the pysanka egg. These beautiful and meticulously crafted works can be traced back to pagan times, yet they are created each year during the Lenten season as Christians move toward the observance of Christ’s death and resurrection. a series of oil and watercolor paintings by Maine-based contemporary artist Lesia Sochor, conjures this writing tradition passed down to her by her immigrant mother.
“Through time, the pysanka became deeply important in spring rituals symbolizing nature’s birth. In part because of Ukraine’s remoteness, this art form has flourished, “she notes.
“Ukraine is headlining the news with the unthinkable happening,” Sochor writes, in introductory text. “There has been an unjust and cruel invasion of a peaceful country. This exhibit is poignant in that it manifest solidarity with an independent nation.” Pysanka: Symbol of Renewal runs through July 24, 2022.