USSR anti-religious campaign (1928–1941)

The campaign began in 1929, with the drafting of new legislation that severely prohibited religious activities and called for an education process on religion in order to further disseminate atheism and materialist philosophy.

This labeling led to the 1929–1930 purge of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, in which up to 100 scholars, their assistants and graduate students were arrested on forged charges and given sentences that ranged from three years of internal exile to the death penalty.

[33] All forms of behaviour and policies of the Churches were treated in the official propaganda as insincere and aiming to overthrow Communism (including both believers that were pro-soviet and anti-soviet).

Even acts of loyalty by religious leaders to the system were considered to be insincere attempts to curry favour in order to retain their influence over the believers and protect religion from its final liquidation as the sworn enemy of the workers.

Textbooks for schoolchildren tried to evoke contempt for believers; pilgrims were depicted as morons, repulsive-looking alcoholics, syphilitics, plain cheaters and money-grubbing clergy.

Fr Gapon, the leader of the Bloody Sunday March in January 1905 who was praised by Lenin, was turned into a Japanese spy, and Patriarch Tikhon was alleged to have been affiliated with British capitalists.

Accusations of lechery and Sexually transmitted disease were used against clergy wherever possible, since the propaganda maintained that the only reason why an intellectual would become a priest would be by moral decline and dishonesty in order to exploit people.

Black marketing was one of the easiest accusations to put against believers, because after the abolition of the New Economic Policy the sale of a cross or icon could be categorized as illegal private enterprise, since the state did not produce these.

Under the same policy, it was claimed that the mass closure of churches represented a voluntary decline in religion of the population (and closed supposedly as a result of demands of the workers).

Churikov, a small merchant from the Volga area who had established highly successful Orthodox agricultural communes began to be targeted by the state in the late 1920s.

He had a great reputation among the thousands of those who participated in his communes and reportedly had a gift for curing alcoholism through prayer, sermon, and appeal for love of God and man and working for the common good.

The supreme procurator Andrei Vyshinsky claimed that the only public organizations that were allowed to do this were those "whose aim is active participation in the socialist construction and in national defense".

[58] Massive numbers of believers were effectively imprisoned or executed for nothing except overtly witnessing their faith, especially if they were charismatic or of great stature and spiritual authority, because they were therefore undermining the antireligious propaganda.

[61] Alexander Yakovlev, the head of the Commission for Rehabilitating Victims of Political Repression (in the modern Russian government) has stated that the number of monks, nuns and priests killed in the purges is over 200,000.

At Easter a crowd of 8,000 people reportedly participated in a service carried out in the square in front of the church around priests dressed in civilian clothes and impromptu sang the hymn "Glory to Thy Passion, O Lord!"

[63] Metropolitan Pimen (Pegov) of Kharkov was hated by the communists for his success in resisting the local Renovationists; he was arrested on trumped-up charges of contacts with foreign diplomats and he died in prison in 1933.

In prison he was tortured by being made to eat salty food without adequate drink and by restricting the oxygen in his dirty, crowded and unventilated cell; he contracted dysentery and died.

[64] Metropolitan Serafim (Meshcheriakov) of Belorussia had been an active leader of the Renovationists before he returned to the Orthodox church with much public penance, thus incurring the enmity of the Soviet state.

The regime was annoyed with him because he was a popular and outstanding medical doctor that had "deserted" them to the Church, he had been a charismatic bishop and he had chosen the most militantly anti-Sergiite faction (M. Joseph).

At the same time he was also a professor of electrical engineering at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, one of the top counsellors in the Soviet Central Office for the Electrification of the USSR, a musicologist and an art historian.

Bishop Manuil (Lemeshevsky) of Leningrad had angered the government by his successful resistance to the Renovationists as early as the imprisoning of the Patriarch in 1922 when few were daring to declare public loyalty to him.

He was officially accused of treasonous ties to foreign agents in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and he was exiled to the distant northern-Siberian town of Eniseisk for three years.

In 1941 after the war broke out, his unique expertise in treating infected wounds caused the state to bring him to Krasnoyarsk and make him chief sturgeon at the main military hospital.

The camp authorities became aware of this and warned him that a new trial was probably awaiting him that would have a possible maximum sentence of fifteen years for wrecking Soviet industrial effort by taking workers from their jobs.

Renovationist M. Serafim (Ruzhentsov) was alleged to have led a subversive espionage network of monks and priests, who used altars for orgies and raped teenage girls that they infected with venereal disease.

These activities contributed greatly to the temporary halt in persecution in the early years of the 1930s and to the decision to run the anti-religious terror campaign covertly; Stalin could not afford total alienation of the West as he still needed its credits and machines for industrialization.

The journal was criticized for failing to become "the organ of militant atheism" as Lenin had ordered by being too philosophical and abstract in argumentation, as well as detached from the real anti-religious struggle.

In 1937, Grekulov, a Soviet historian published an article in an official journal that praised Russia's conversion to Christianity in the 10th century as a means that culture and learning entered the country.

[80] The tone was changing at that point though, especially following the annexation of the new territories in eastern Poland in 1939, as party leaders, such as Oleschuk, began to claim that only a tiny minority of religious believers were class enemies of state.

[5] The anti-religious campaign of the past decade and the terror tactics of the militantly atheist regime, had effectively eliminated all public expressions of religion and communal gatherings of believers outside of the walls of the few churches (or mosques, synagogues, etc.)