The Russian Orthodox Church especially alarmed the Bolsheviks. A survey of Russian peasants in the mid-1920s suggested that fifty-five per cent were active Christian worshippers. This was almost certainly a large underestimate; and there can be no denying that the Russian Orthodox Church constituted part and parcel of the Russian identity in the minds of most ethnic Russians. In 1922 Lenin arranged for the execution of several bishops on the pretext that they refused to sell their treasures to help famine relief in the Volga region. Anti-religious persecution did not cease with the introduction of the NEP, and Lenin’s language in Politburo discussions of Christianity was vicious, intemperate and cynical.25
Yet generally the Bolsheviks became more restrained in the mid-1920s. The OGPU was instructed to concentrate its efforts on demoralizing and splitting the Church by indirect methods rather than by physical assault. This policy took the form of suborning priests, spreading disinformation and infiltrating agents; and when Patriarch Tikhon died in 1925, the Church was prevented by the Soviet authorities from electing a successor to him. Metropolitan Sergei, who was transferred from Nizhni Novgorod to Moscow, was allowed to style himself only as Acting Patriarch. Meanwhile Trotski had observed the rise of a ‘Living Church’ reform movement in the Church that despised the official ecclesiastical hierarchy and preached that socialism was Christianity in its modern form. The adherents of this movement were reconcilable to Soviet rule so long as they could practise their faith. Trotski urged that favourable conditions should be afforded to ‘Living Church’ congregations in order that a wedge could be driven down the middle of the Russian Orthodox Church.26
Other Christian denominations were handled less brusquely. Certain sects, such as the Old Believers, were notable for their farming expertise and the central party leadership did not want to harm their contribution to the economy as a result of clashes over religion.27 Non-Russian Christian organizations were also treated with caution. For instance, the harassment of the Georgian and Armenian Orthodox Churches diminished over the decade. Islam was left at peace even more than Christianity (although there was certainly interference with religious schools and law-courts). The Politburo saw that, while secularism was gaining ground among urban Russians, Muslims remained deeply attached — in towns as in the villages — to their faith. In desperation the party tried to propagate Marxism in Azerbaijan and central Asia through the medium of excerpts from the Koran that emphasized communal, egalitarian values. Yet the positive results for the party were negligible: ‘the idiocy of religion’ was nowhere near as easy to eradicate as the communists had imagined.
They had a nerve in being so condescending. Leading Bolshevik cadres themselves were intense believers in a faith of a certain kind. The works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were like prophetic works in the Bible for most of them; and Lenin as well as Marx and Engels were beatified. Marxism was an ersatz religion for the communist party.
Real religious belief was mocked in books and journals of the state-subsidized League of the Militant Godless. Citizens who engaged in public worship lost preferment in Soviet state employment; and priests had been disenfranchised under the terms of successive constitutions since 1918. In local practice, however, a more relaxed attitude was permitted. Otherwise the middle strata of the Azerbaijani government would have had to be sacked. Even in Russia there was the same problem. Officials in Smolensk province decided that since a disavowal of God did not appear in the party rules, it should not be a criterion for party membership.28 Such pragmatism, as with other aspects of the NEP, stemmed from a sense of short-term weakness. But this did not signify any loss of medium-term confidence: both the central and local party leadership continued to assume that religious observance was a relic of old ‘superstitions’ that would not endure.
Not only priests but also all potentially hostile groups in society were denied civic rights. The last remaining industrialists, bankers and great landlords had fled when Vrangel’s Volunteer Army departed the Crimean peninsula, paying with their last roubles to take the last available ferries across the Black Sea or to hide in haycarts as they were trundled over the land frontier with Poland.
As the ‘big and middle bourgeoisie’ vanished into the emigration or into obscurity in Russia, the Politburo picked on whichever suspected ‘class enemies’ remained. Novelists, painters and poets were prominent victims. The cultural intelligentsia had always contained restless, awkward seekers after new concepts and new theories. The Bolshevik leaders discerned the intelligentsia’s potential as a shaper of public opinion, and for every paragraph that Lenin wrote castigating priests he wrote a dozen denouncing secular intellectuals. The most famous representatives of Russian high culture were held under surveillance by the OGPU and the Politburo routinely discussed which of them could be granted an exit visa or special medical facilities:29 the nearest equivalent would be a post-war British cabinet deciding whether George Orwell could visit France or Evelyn Waugh have a gall-bladder operation.
In summer 1922 the Soviet authorities deported dozens of outstanding Russian writers and scholars. These included a philosopher of world importance, Nikolai Berdyaev, who was interrogated by Dzierżyński. Berdyaev complained that he, too, was a socialist, but one with a more individualist outlook than Dzierżyński. His assertion was rejected; for the Bolsheviks treated non-Bolshevik varieties of socialism as an acute threat to the regime. The deportations taught the intelligentsia that no overt criticisms of the regime would be tolerated; and in June 1922 the Politburo drove home the lesson by reintroducing pre-publication censorship through the agency of a Main Administration for Affairs of Literature and Publishing Houses (which became known as Glavlit and which lasted until its abolition by Gorbachëv). The aim was to insulate Soviet society from the bacillus of ideas alien to Bolshevism.30
The dilemma for Politburo members was that they badly needed the help of intellectuals in effecting the cultural transformation essential for the creation of a socialist society. Scarcely any writers of distinction were Bolsheviks or even sympathizers with the party. An exception was the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovski. Not all central party leaders regarded him as a boon to Bolshevism. Lenin remarked: ‘I don’t belong to the admirers of his poetic talent, although I quite admit my own incompetence in this area.’31 A warmer welcome was given to the novelist Maksim Gorki even though he had often denounced Leninism and called Lenin a misanthrope before 1917. Gorki, however, had come to believe that atrocities committed in the Civil War had been as much the fault of ordinary citizens in general and of the Soviet state in particular; and he began to soften his comments on the Bolsheviks. Even so, he continued to prefer to live in his villa in Sorrento in Italy to the dacha he would obtain if he returned home.
Trotski and Zinoviev persuaded the Twelfth Party Conference in 1922 that as long as writer-Bolsheviks were so few, the regime would have to make do with ‘fellow travellers’.32 Writers and artists who at least agreed with some of the party’s objectives were to be cosseted. Thousands of roubles were thrown at the feet of those who consented to toe the political line; and Mayakovski, taking pity on the plight of his friends who opposed Marxism-Leninism, discreetly left his banknotes on their sofas. But acts of personal charity did not alter the general situation. Large print-runs, royalties and fame were given to approved authors while poverty and obscurity awaited those who refused to collaborate.