The beauty of Soviet anti-religious propaganda

Deep in the guts of Russian library stacks exists what remains — little acknowledged or discussed — of a dead and buried atheist dream. The dream first took shape among Russian radicals of the mid-19th century, to whom the prospect of mass atheism seemed the key to Russia’s salvation. When Lenin seized power in 1917, the Bolsheviks integrated it into their vision of heaven on earth.

To the extent that people in the West have heard of this atheist dream, it has come to them mainly through the voices of its enemies. In 1983, Ronald Reagan put Lenin’s rejection of religion at the heart of Soviet unfreedom in his ‘Evil Empire’ speech. That same year, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn blamed atheism for Russia’s catastrophes in his ‘Men Have Forgotten God’ speech at the London Guildhall (in which he also lamented the blasphemies of Monty Python’s Life of Brian).

Even if the whole subject now lies under a layer of dust, visitors to Russia’s magnificent state libraries — Soviet-era temples of learning devoted to the enlightenment of the once-benighted people — can unearth volumes of vividly illustrated anti-religious magazines from the Soviet era that reveal the evolution of a godless utopia. The main anti-religious magazines of the 1920s, Godless and Godless at the Machine, were graphic declarations of war on all religions. Godless published illustrated essays on religion around the world that resembled entries in a children’s encyclopaedia. Godless at the Machine championed Marxism-infused satires and caricatures.

Blasphemous shock and awe were a major part of the Bolshevik aesthetic, which sought to show a still-pious nation just who was in charge. One memorable atheist illustration showed a worker climbing a ladder into the heavens above a landscape of shattered temples to smash the gods.