The Cold War: Religion


Figure 1.--Stalin was fixated on controlling Poland. He laubched World war II with Hitler to rehain the areas of Polnd that had been part of the Tsrist Empire. He ordered the NKVD to eradicate the Polish groups he saw as infected with Polish nationalism. Amnong them were the Polish iffucers murdered abnd burried in the Katyn Forest. He even risked the war-time alliance with the Western allies by forcing a Communist police state on the Polish people. Ge culd not imagine that the very foundation of the Soviet state would begin to crunme on the Catholic faith and national spirit of the Polish people like these rwo little girls doing their First Communuion in 1968.

Stalin asked derisively, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" He was speaking with future French collaborator Pierre Laval just before World War II. Others had previously expressed similar sentiments. Not only did the Pope have no divisions, but Stalin had very effectively cushed organized religion in the Soviet Union. He no longer saw it as a powerful force. The Orthdox Church was tolerated only as a small organization totally subservient to the Communist Party wih many of its churches destroyed or converted. Othr religions were persecuted without mercy. The Catholic faith in the Ukranian peasantry was a factor in Stalin's horific engineered famine. Religion would play a role in the War, but a limited role. It would be the Cold War in which relgion would play a najor role. This occurred after Stalin's death and it would have surprisd Stalin. And it occurred because the Soviets limited the brutality of their secret police. The NKVD was broken up and the KGB while still brutal operated under restrictions on the use of force and the size of the Gulag. And to Stalin's astonishment if he had been alive, it would be a Pope (John Paul II) who would play a critical role in the destruction of the Soviet Union. And if that alone with have infuriated Stalin, it would be the faith of the Polish people which the Soviets and their Communist Polish allies could not crack that would set the unraveling of Soviet Communism in motion. And if all of this was not bad enough for the Stalinist legacy, The Jewish Refusniks would futher challenge the Soviet behemoth. The force of Christianity is more complicated in Western Europe. Christianity merged with the classical tradition by St. Paul played inherent value on individual human life. This was why the idea of freedom in the form of democracy (political freedom) and capitalism (economic freedom) emerged as part of Western civilization are fundamentally antithetical to Marxist-Leninist doctrine. These values which were throughly ingrained in the secular values of the West were part of the victory over Communism even though Western Europe was becoming largely de-Christianized. And many of the Churches which survived were promoting the same pacifist ideas that Soviet propaganda was promoting. America was different in that the fundamentalist evagelical churches were a beadrock of support for anti-Communism. The Cold War was fundamentally a European struggle betweem America and its Atlantic allies and the Soviet Union, along with the European struggle were efforts promoted by the Soviers but involving national variants to Communize countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and here religions also played a role. Each of the great religions playedca role: Buddhism, Christinity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism played roles. This role varies from country to country, but there were important common threads.

Soviet Atheism Campaign

The Soviet Communist state launched the first atheist campaign in history. There had been many campaigns against specific religions, but never befor a state-organized campaign against all religions. The atheist campaign began as soon as the Bolheviks seized power, but obly with the end of the Civil War did the Soviet state organize a systematic campaign against religion. The Soviet Union and Communist states in general were openly hostile to religion and officially atheist. The intensity of the aheist campaigns they launched varies, but during the Bolshevist and Stalinist era the Soviet campaign was intense. The Soviets took the Marxist position that there was no God. It was far more than a metaphysical matter. They consideed religion a crime and a way of opressing the people. Marx wrote, "Religion is the opium of the people." [Marx] It was a phrase repeated by Lenin. Under Lenin and the Bolsheviks Marx's words were converted into a systematic, often brutal campaign to religion from the life of the people. Religion had been very important in Russian life, especially the Orthodox faith. The primary focus was on Christinity, but there were other religiins in the Soviet Union, including judaism and Islam. The Soviet secret police comenced aabage campaign to destroy religion. It included the confiscation of church property, tearing down churches, arresting and murdering clergymen and nuns, and discouraging the practice of religion in many ways. [Gorbachev, pp. 20-21.] This began nefore Stalin seized control of the state. Undr Stalin's NKVD such actions could be organized with chilling effiency. The historiam nof Salinist oppression writes, " Religious believersm of course, were being arrested uninterruptedly. (there wre nevertheless, certain special dates and peak periods. There was 'a night of struggle against religion' in Leningrad on Christmas Eve, 1929, when they arrested a large part of the religious intelligencia and held them--not just until morning eiher. And there was certainly no 'Chrostmas Tale.'" [Solzhenitsyn, p. 50.] The hostility to religion continues in the surviving Communist countries (Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam).

World War II

While race was a major factor in World War II, religion played a more limited role. There were, however, some religious aspects of the War. Religion had played a major role in Western life since the Christianization of the Roman Empire. For many in the 19th and 20th century the separation of church and state was a major aspect of modernizing and creating a more just society. It thus came a shock that totalitarianism (Fascism and Communism), the most secular of political movements, were a rejection of Western civilization and a reversion to barbarity. Both sought to destroy religion and replace with a kind of state worship with religious trappings. Christianity in the West helped to develop and save democracy by carving out a space that was beyond the control of the modern secular state. [Burleigh] This is why both the the Communists and NAZIs targeted religion. There were religious leaders who cooperated with the NAZIs (most notably in Croatia, Romania, and Slovakia). German church leaders were often obsequious to the NAZIs who planed to replace Christianity with a state religion. Japan's state religion, Shintoism, was part of the cultural complex which led to Japanese militarism. The most vicious religious conflict was in Yugoslavia where the Catholic Croat Ustache waged war against the the Orthodox Serbs. Hitler made the destruction of the Jews a main German war objective, but the Holocaust was more of a racial than a religious onslaught. While church leaders were often willing to accommodate the NAZIs, there were individual churchmen who heroically resisted. The role of the papacy is a still debated aspect of the War. And the the devotion of individuals was a force to be reconvened with. Stalin after the NAZI invasion paused the atheism campaign to draw on support from the Church. Mussolini unlike Hitler did not attempt to destroy the Church. And in some occupied countries, especially Poland, the Church was a focal point of resistance. Islam was a minor factor in the War, and generally used to support the NAZIs in the Middle East, Balkans, and Soviet Union, an affinity that survived the War.

Cold War in Europe

Stalin asked derisively, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" He was speaking with future French collaborator Pierre Laval just before World War II. Others had previously expressed similar sentiments. Not only did the Pope have no divisions, but Stalin had very effectively cushed organized religion in the Soviet Union. He no longer saw it as a powerful force. The Orthdox Church was tolerated only as a small organization totally subservient to the Communist Party wih many of its churches destroyed or converted. Othr religions were persecuted without mercy. The Catholic faith in the Ukranian peasantry was a factor in Stalin's horific engineered famine. Religion would play a role in the War, but a limited role. It would be the Cold War in which relgion would play a najor role. This occurred after Stalin's death and it would have surprisd Stalin. And it occurred because the Soviets limited the brutality of their secret police. The NKVD was broken up and the KGB while still brutal operated under restrictions on the use of force and the size of the Gulag. And to Stalin's astonishment if he had been alive, it would be a Pope (John Paul II) who would play a critical role in the destruction of the Soviet Union. And if that alone with have infuriated Stalin, it would be the faith of the Polish people which the Soviets and their Communist Polish allies could not crack that would set the unraveling of Soviet Communism in motion. And if all of this was not bad enough for the Stalinist legacy, The Jewish Refusniks would futher challenge the Soviet behemoth. The force of Christianity is more complicated in Western Europe. Christianity merged with the classical tradition by St. Paul played inherent value on individual human life. This was why the idea of freedom in the form of democracy (political freedom) and capitalism (economic freedom) emerged as part of Western civilization are fundamentally antithetical to Marxist-Leninist doctrine. These values which were throughly ingrained in the secular values of the West were part of the victory over Communism even though Western Europe was becoming largely de-Christianized. And many of the Churches which survived were promoting the same pacifist ideas that Soviet propaganda was promoting.

America

America was different in that the fundamentalist evagelical churches were a beadrock of support for anti-Communism.

Thirld World

The Cold War was fundamentally a European struggle betweem America and its Atlantic allies and the Soviet Union, along with the European struggle were efforts promoted by the Soviers but involving national variants to Communize countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and here religions also played a role.

Religious Faiths

Each of the great religions playedca role: Buddhism, Christinity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism played roles. This role varies from country to country, but there were important common threads.

Sources

Gorbachev, Mikhail. On My Country and the World (Columbia University Press: New York, 2000).

Marx, Karl. Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher (1843). Marx wrote this as part of the introduction to a book that criticized philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's 1820 book, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. The journal had a print run of only about 1,000. The phrase only became well known after the creation of the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexsanddr I. Trans, Thomas P. Wjitney. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-56: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Harper & Row: New York, 1973), 660p.









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Created: 4:28 AM 3/24/2018
Last updated: 3:13 AM 3/25/2018