The record of the meeting was drawn up by Georgy Karpov, a former NKVD officer, whom Stalin subsequently appointed head of a Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church.27 Reported in the press the next day, the meeting signalled peaceful co-existence between organised religion and the Soviet regime. In return for political fealty, the Orthodox Church and its followers were allowed to practise their religion, though without too much active pros-elytising.28
Had Stalin perhaps returned to the religious fold? That was certainly the impression given by the patriarchy, who henceforth referred to him as ‘deeply revered and ‘beloved by all’, and as a ‘wise, divinely appointed leader’ who had become so through ‘God’s Providence’.29 However, there were plenty of pragmatic reasons for Stalin to invite the church into his tent. It played well with public opinion in Britain and the United States, allies in the struggle against Hitler. Stalin didn’t need the church’s support to win the war, which had decisively turned in his favour since the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in January 1943, but every little helped. There had been a popular religious revival in the Soviet Union since the German invasion of June 1941 and it was more expedient to recognise and channel the phenomenon into a mainstream church than to repress it. As Victoria Smolkin has pointed out, Stalin made similar moves in relation to Muslims and Baptists.30 Above all, Russian Orthodoxy would be a powerful ally when the vast territories occupied by the Germans between 1941 and 1944 were recaptured and reintegrated into the Soviet system.31
Another way of viewing Stalin’s relationship with his religious upbringing is to see communism as a ‘political religion’. The idea that when Stalin became a communist he swapped one faith for another is intuitively appealing. Certainly, the parallel between communism and Christianity is compelling. Communism had its sacred texts and ritual practices, its heretics, martyrs, sinners and saints. It also had a secularised eschatology of progress to heaven on earth through predetermined stages of history – slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. Communism, like Christianity, rested on an emotive, faith-based commitment from its adherents.
Stalin’s writings were ‘sprinkled with biblical allusions, invocations and inflections’, noted Roland Boer.32 Trotsky was labelled a Judas in the Short Course History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Stalin was prone to invoke God in his everyday speech: ‘God bless’, ‘God only knows’, ‘it is for God to forgive’ and so on. In a speech to the Baku Soviet in November 1920 on the third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin alluded to Martin Luther’s famous statement to the Diet of Worms in 1521:
Here I stand on the border line between the old capitalist world and the new socialist world. Here, on this border line, I unite the efforts of the proletarians of the West and the peasants of the East in order to shatter the old world. May the god of history be my aid!33
But the political religion analogy cannot be pushed too far. Communism had no deity, not even Stalin at the peak of his personality cult was deemed a god. The agent of humanity’s fate was the party and the people, according to communist ideology. Communism had no churches or temples. Lenin’s body was embalmed and put on public display in Red Square, as was Stalin’s for a time, but their bodies were not deified like the remains of saints. For a conscious, committed Marxist like Stalin, communism was based on science and empirically verifiable laws of social development. To paraphrase Lenin, Marxism was not deemed true because it was omnipotent; it was omnipotent because it was true, or so Stalin believed.34
BOLSHEVIK INTELLECTUAL
According to Napoleon, understanding a person requires you to know something about their world when they were twenty years old.35 Stalin’s world at that age was the fringe of a vast land empire that stretched thousands of miles across ten time zones from Warsaw to Vladivostok, from the Arctic Ocean to the Caspian and Black Seas. According to the 1897 census, 125 million people lived in Russia, most of them peasants, although state-led industrialisation was creating a significant urban working class. Within Russia’s borders were more than 100 nationalities and ethnic groups. Nearly half the population were ethnic Russians, but there were also large numbers of Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews, as well as various Turkic and central Asian groups. Stalin’s Georgians, whose territory had been a Russian protectorate since 1783, numbered about a million. Nearly 70 per cent of Tsarist Russia’s population were affiliated to the Eastern Orthodox Church, though there were many adherents of other Christian traditions, and of Islam and other faiths.
The Russian Tsarist Empire, ruled by the Romanov dynasty for nearly 300 years, was an autocracy in which there was no parliament and political parties were banned. Radical opponents of the Tsar were subject to surveillance, harassment, arrest, imprisonment and exile. Strikes were illegal, as were trade unions, and the nascent underground labour movement was riddled with spies and informers, and plagued by fake organisations set up by the Okhrana. Insidious misinformation was spread by Tsarist agents that named leftist activists as being in cahoots with the authorities, while labour unrest was met with violence and harsh repression. Stalin observed and experienced this first-hand as a political agitator in Tbilisi, Baku and Batumi. Indeed, his first arrest – in Batumi in 1902 – was the result of a strike and demonstration in which many protesters were killed or wounded. While Stalin was under arrest, his childhood friend and close comrade Lado Ketskhoveli was shot and killed by a prison guard.
The political movement Stalin joined believed the working masses were exploited and oppressed by a capitalist system that must be overthrown by a democratic revolution followed by a socialist one. While some radicals thought peasant revolts were the key to revolutionary change in Russia, Marxists like Stalin looked to the urban working class as agents of social transformation. The role of political activists like himself was to educate and recruit workers to the socialist cause and to encourage, support and guide their social, political and economic struggles.
Quite early on in Stalin’s political life, the party that he had joined – the RSDLP – split into two main factions. Stalin sided with Lenin’s Bolshevik faction, so called because it claimed a majority at the party’s second congress in 1903 when the first split occurred. Opposed were the Mensheviks, the supposed minority headed by Julius Martov. In truth, support for each faction was quite evenly balanced and many party members, Leon Trotsky, for example, preferred not to choose between them.
Disagreement about the conditions of party membership was the initial reason for the split. Should the RSDLP be a relatively open party, broad-based and engaged in as much legal activity as possible, as the Mensheviks argued? Or should it be the disciplined, highly centralised and clandestine cadre party that Lenin favoured? In part, this was a dispute about tactics in conditions of illegality and Tsarist repression. But more important were underlying differences about the role of the party. While the Mensheviks envisaged socialist consciousness spreading and embedding spontaneously through the experience of popular struggles to improve conditions and rights, the Bolsheviks thought party members should transmit ‘scientific socialism’ to the masses. A related issue was assessment of the prospects for socialist revolution in Russia. Socialism was a distant goal for the Mensheviks, hence spreading socialist consciousness and recruiting advanced workers into the party was less important to them than day-to-day social and economic struggles and the agitation for political reform that would feed into a democratic revolution in Russia. Believing that socialist revolution could occur sooner than the Mensheviks thought, the Bolsheviks sought a higher level of socialist consciousness among the toiling masses. Lenin believed there were good prospects for an effective alliance between the working class and the poorer peasants. Stalin’s spin on Lenin’s position was expressed in a letter written in 1904: ‘We must raise the proletariat to a consciousness of its true interests, to a consciousness of the socialist idea, and not break this idea up into small change, or adjust it to the spontaneous movement.’36