Such a whitewash is either ignorant or mendacious. Faced by subsequent revelations of Lenin’s own merciless brutality, Marx’s defenders have tried to do likewise. As the horrors of the Stalin terror became known, Lenin’s apologists tried to uncouple the two, absolving Lenin of the psychopath’s later “distortions”. History is a battleground for chroniclers of Soviet communism. The caption decries “gullible sectarian(s)” who hear “prayers from ‘over there’” as “Ave Maria, Slander of the USSR, Anti-Sovietism (and) Our Father” issue from the speaker. The impact of Western radio broadcasts is reflected in a 1977 poster portraying old women and a hippy kneeling before prayers broadcast from a transistor radio. In a 1984 poster headed “Cultural Exchange”, a shifty young man, “Ivan Lowlife”, swaps an icon with a tourist for a pair of jeans a snake with the name “anti-Sovietism” crawls out of a smuggled bible which a tourist is selling to a Russian a “weasel” hippy streetseller (blue jeans, long hair, shaded glasses) sells crosses and icons from a suitcase. In another (1981), a priest pumps a cross and roubles tumble out of its spout.Īs the system began to collapse, the lure of Western culture came under fire. A handsome young man arm wrestles with a decrepit old priest to the slogan “Reason against religion” (1977). Yuri Gagarin floats in space, above a caption reading “There is no God!”. Some contrast the rationalism of modern science with the superstition of believers. (Ironically, just a year later it was Stalin who consigned more than 1.5 million believers, intellectuals and peasants to slave labour in the gulag.) When the Vatican became outspoken in its condemnation of communism, one poster portrayed the Pope as a spider with a skull in a papal mitre for a body, directing the burning of books by Marx, Lenin and Darwin.Īs the years progressed, the attacks changed. On the cover of a 1928 edition of the leading anti-religious magazine Bezbozhnik (“Godless”) a white man sits on a camel, holding a crucifix and whip, lashing a line of African slaves, roped together at the neck. A lynched black man hangs from the Statue of Liberty (1930), blessed by Christ, under the heading, “In the country of the Lord God”. The USSR’s imperialist foes do not escape attention. In one, dated 1930, a hag-like babushka (granny) drags a child by her hair towards a church while the child struggles to go the opposite way, to school. In others, older believers are shown as primitives from a past era holding the younger generation in bondage to superstition. Priests and believers consume Christ’s body in an orgy of cannibalism: two gorge themselves on his spilled intestines. Jehovah, Allah, the Christian God and Buddha are ridiculed as powerless fat buffoons. The earliest drawings are blasphemous and designed to shock. Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda by Roland Elliott Brown, FUEL, £24.95 Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda by Roland Elliott Brown traces the propaganda of that campaign by bringing together more than 100 examples of Soviet anti-religious cartoons and posters, covering the years 1922 to 1985. The project eventually failed, but not before it had cost thousands of lives. It must collapse under its own weight and make way for a humane, rational order.” In 1917 it fell to their disciple Lenin to transform their doctrine of sociology and economics into one of political action. Friedrich Engels, his co-author of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, agreed: “The Christian world order cannot be taken any further. “Communism begins with atheism,” declared Karl Marx.
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