![]() ![]() Our economic and social systems make the rich richer and keep the poor poorer. The government is paralyzed by toxic polarization. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit for more information.This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. She contributes regular feature articles and photos to The Moscow Times, Fodor’s, Russian Life, and Reuters and is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander + Roberts, a leading American tour operator. Jennifer is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Concise History. Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate food, travel, and culture writer and photographer currently based in Riga, Latvia, and Massachusetts. Follow Roland on Twitter ( or visit the book’s Facebook Page: He has also worked as a regular contributor and editor for the London-based news site IranWire, where he wrote about politics and human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran. He has written articles for The Guardian, The Spectator, Foreign Policy and The Moscow Times. Many of the later illustrations highlight Soviet success in space exploration to underscore the tenants of atheism, but all too soon, the Soviet Union and the anti-religious campaign limp towards their own demise in the 1980s.īrown is a London-based journalist and arts writer. World War II offers the Church a brief respite and the opportunity to show its loyalty to the Soviet State during the critical years 1941-1945. The decades just after the Russian Revolution were the most violent and active of the anti-religious campaign when the Government sanctioned the widespread destruction of church property, the imprisonment of priests and nuns, and the closure of all religious-affiliated schools and charities. He traces the rise in significance of the Church during the crucial 250-year Tatar Mongol Yoke and its subsequent relegation by Tsar Peter the Great to the status of the Government Department until 1917. In it, Brown examines the anti-religious campaign through a unique collection of illustrations, posters, and the cover art of two prominent atheist magazines gathered for the first time in an English-language publication with full translations of the illustrations, as well as a very cogent overview of the history of the anti-religious campaign.īrown begins with the violent beginning of Christianity in Russia, when Grand Prince Vladimir baptized Russia at the point of a sword, then ordered the pagan idols to be burnt in Kyiv. The iconography of the anti-religious campaign is front and center of Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda, a fascinating new book by Roland Elliott Brown, published by FUEL Media. For a superstitious peasant, the images of an idealized Soviet worker smashing the idols of Orthodox Christianity must have been as horrific as they were ultimately compelling. ![]() But while it lasted, the anti-religious campaign was a sustained and virulent attack on the centuries-old bedrock of Russian culture and left a wave of violence and destruction in its wake.įaced with an almost feudal society and a population of predominantly illiterate peasants, the State cannily deployed one of its most potent propaganda weapons: the vibrant graphic art illustration in posters and atheist magazines that were distributed throughout the USSR. In the arc of Soviet history, few government programs were as tenacious as the anti-religious campaign, which systematically set out to debunk organized religion as "the opium of the people." This political storm of heaven lasted from the earliest days of Bolshevik power up until the early eighties, when it simply ran out of steam, as did the Soviet State.
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