Greek: 4
Ecclesiastical singing (Slavic): 5
Ecclesiastical singing (Georgian): 4
Since he had failed to graduate, Stalin could neither go to university nor become a priest. He was qualified to teach in a church school but instead got himself a job at the Tbilisi Meteorological Observatory, where he lived on the premises and kept records of instrument readings. This was the first and last normal job he ever had.
Stalin continued his studies of radical thought and extended the scope of his political involvement. A key influence was Lado Ketskhoveli, whose younger brother Vano also worked at the Observatory. Lado, from Gori, had been expelled from the Tbilisi seminary for leading a student strike in 1893. In 1896 he was expelled from a seminary in Kiev and the next year he returned to Tbilisi where he joined a group of Georgian Marxists and contacted Stalin’s cohort of seminarians. Lado became the young Stalin’s mentor, and the conduit for his connection to both the illegal revolutionary movement and workers’ study circles. An intellectual as well as an activist, Lado was Stalin’s first political role model.
AN ORTHODOX STALIN?
By the time he dropped out of the seminary, Stalin had spent a decade being educated by the church. There was no book that he studied more intensively than the Bible. He was well versed on matters theological, had a detailed knowledge of church history and an intimate acquaintance with the rituals of Eastern Orthodoxy. While his education had a significant secular component, immersion in Christian thinking was at its core.
Many have wondered about the long-term impact on Stalin of his religious education, the most radical claim being that he remained a secret believer who continued to pray and read the Bible. Like the conspiracy theory that he was a secret police agent, the hypothesis of a hidden ‘Orthodox Stalin’ has no evidentiary basis. When it came to religion, Stalin was a model of Bolshevik orthodoxy.
Having left the seminary, he turned his back on all religion. As a Marxist socialist he was a self-proclaimed atheist and the movement to which he belonged made no bones about its anti-clericalism or that it wanted to destroy organised religion and eradicate supernatural thinking at all levels of society. The Bolsheviks saw the Russian Orthodox Church as integral to the capitalist status quo and a fundamental obstacle to their modernising project of socialist enlightenment.
The Bolsheviks espoused religious freedom but reserved the right to campaign against religion. As Stalin himself wrote in 1906:
Social-Democrats will combat all forms of religious persecution . . . will always protest against the persecution of Catholicism or Protestantism; they will always defend the right of nations to profess any religion they please; but at the same time . . . they will carry on agitation against Catholicism, Protestantism and the religion of the Orthodox Church in order to achieve the triumph of the socialist world outlook.17
The Bolsheviks’ leader, Lenin, was among the most implacable opponents of the church and was fond of quoting Marx’s aphorisms that religion was the sigh of the oppressed, the opium of the people and so on. Opposed to Lenin on the religion question was Anatoly Lunacharsky, a socialist poet, philosopher and lover of the arts who described himself as intellectual among Bolsheviks and a Bolshevik among intellectuals. He was an exponent of what he called ‘god-building’ (Bogostroitel’stvo). Lunacharsky believed that socialism was a secular religion and that socialists should seek to build bridges to Christians. Christian doctrine was scientifically false and the church was indeed a reactionary institution, but the ethics, values and sentiments of Christianity were laudable and overlapped with those of socialist humanism. In Lunacharsky’s version of Christian socialism there was no deity. Socialism was an anthropocentric religion whose God was humanity: ‘It is not necessary to look for God. Let us give him to the world! There is no God in the world, but there might be. The road of struggle for socialism . . . is what is meant by God-building.’18
Lunacharsky’s views were set out in a two-volume work, Religion and Socialism, published in 1908 and 1911. Stalin possessed a number of Lunacharsky’s books and pamphlets but Religion and Socialism is not recorded as being among them. Still, it seems likely that Stalin read or was at least familiar with the two books.19
God-building never did gain much traction among the Bolsheviks and Lunacharsky reconciled with Lenin in 1917. As the Bolsheviks’ commissar of enlightenment from 1917 to 1929, he abandoned god-building but strove to moderate the Bolsheviks’ anti-religious fervour. Even so, Bolshevik policy towards the church was highly repressive.20 Soon after they seized power, they separated church from the state and schools from the church. While freedom of religious conscience was guaranteed by a constitution adopted in 1918, so too was the right to anti-religious propaganda. Priests, capitalists, criminals and other undesirables were categorised as second-class citizens with limited political rights. In 1922 the Bolsheviks expropriated church valuables and responded to popular opposition to their confiscation decrees with show trials and executions of priests and lay believers.21
Anti-religious propaganda and the promotion of Soviet atheism was a major Bolshevik priority from the early 1920s. It included sponsorship of an anti-religious newspaper, Bezbozhnik (Godless), and the creation of a League of the Godless, both of which were headed by that ubiquitous Stalin acolyte, Yemel’yan Yaroslavsky. Stalin was not enamoured of some of the propaganda, which he considered ‘anti-religious trash’, and in 1924 he decreed ‘hooliganish escapades under the guise of so-called anti-religious propaganda – all this should be cast off and liquidated immediately’.22
In 1927 Stalin explained to a visiting American labour delegation that while the communist party stood for religious freedom, it ‘cannot be neutral towards religion, and it conducts anti-religious propaganda against all religious prejudices because it stands for science . . . because all religion is the antithesis of science’. Referring to the recent Scopes trial in Tennessee about the illegality of teaching evolution theory, Stalin assured the delegation that Darwinists could not be prosecuted in the USSR because communists defended science. But he was unapologetic about the continuing persecution of priests: ‘Have we repressed the clergy? Yes, we have. The only unfortunate thing is that they have not yet been completely eliminated.’23
The Bolsheviks’ anti-religion campaign moderated in the mid-1920s in the context of ‘NEP socialism’.24 The New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin after the end of the civil war, permitted a revival of private peasant agriculture and was accompanied by some social and cultural relaxation, although no independent political activity outside the communist party was permitted. The Bolsheviks sought to persuade believers by propaganda and education until the return to a more coercive approach at the end of the 1920s when Stalin launched the campaign to forcibly collectivise Soviet agriculture. Peasant adherence to religion was deemed as pernicious as their attachment to land ownership. In 1929 the party declared a ‘merciless war’ against counter-revolutionary religious organisations.25
Another ebb in the tide of anti-religious militancy came in the mid-1930s with the introduction of the so-called ‘Stalin Constitution’ of 1936, which guaranteed religious freedom and restored the voting rights of priests. But the church suffered again in the Great Terror of 1937–8, when 14,000 churches were closed and 35,000 ‘servants of religious cults’ were arrested. By 1939 there were fewer than a thousand Orthodox churches in the USSR compared to 50,000 in Tsarist Russia.26
The great turning in Stalin’s policy on religion was his famous meeting with the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church in September 1943. The meeting took place in his Kremlin office and he began by noting with approval the church’s patriotic support for the Soviet war effort. In the course of a meeting that lasted an hour and twenty minutes, Stalin readily agreed to the appointment of a new patriarch, the opening of more churches, the freeing of arrested priests and the organisation of courses, seminaries and academies to educate the clergy. He even offered state financial support for the church and promised to allow the creation of candle factories to mass-produce a religious prop that had hitherto been handmade.