The 1920's were not a particularly stellar era as far as religious tolerance goes. In Europe and America, long-simmering antisemitic prejudices begain to reach the boiling point, with well-known results a decade later. Anti-Catholic sentiment also became increasingly violent in the mostly Protestant southern United States as the Klan began its second incarnation; in the northern United States, the prejudice against Catholics slowly became less violent, but no less strong - it merely entered a new stage of political subtlety as Yankee politicians fought to keep the Catholic immigrants poor and disempowered. In China, on the other hand, the mostly Protestant Christian missionaries were blamed for the country's problems in increasingly irrational terms, and they met with everything from forcible ejection from the country to murder. In India, in spite of the work of Mohandas Gandhi and his allies, violent incidents between Hindi and Muslims escalated. In Turkey, the Muslim majority continued to slaughter Armenian Christians, in spite of the promises of the new government. Irish Catholics blew up English Protestants and English Protestants shot Irish Catholics. In general, things were pretty much as bad as they had been throughout most of the several thousand years of recorded human history.
A new factor was introduced into this already chaotic mess when atheism became the official state doctrine of Russia. Atheism was hardly a new idea; when Socrates was accused of inventing it, he rather tartly replied that had he ever said anything of the kind, he would have been guilty not of heresy but plagiarism, as atheist tracts had been available at the marketplace for many generations. Virgil mentions a legendary atheist in the Aeniad, and there are historical records of atheists in ancient China and the Middle East. However, almost universally throughout history, atheism had been practiced by a tiny minority and atheists in general were disliked by the rest of the populace. In ancient times, they were often put to death (and apparently in modern times, too; in a famous1922 case an atheist was imprisoned for heresy in England despite the fact that he was known to be a diabetic. He died.) With the exception of a brief period in France following the French Revolution, the atheists had pretty much never been on the winning team until post-revolutionary Russia.
While many Russians had reasons for hating the church (as has been mentioned in previous fun facts, the Russian Orthodox church sometimes had a "kill-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out" attitude towards its enemies),. the real reasons behind the Russian government's embrace of atheism was ideological; as with many radical social reforms, it was thought that every aspect of life should be "modernized" to coincide with the new theories. Several of the prominent rationalist philosophers of the period, including Karl Marx, viewed religion as at best a superstitious holdover from earlier, more primitive days, and at worst a calculated brainwashing tool designed to maintain the status quo. So when religion in Russia was "modernized" along revolutionary lines, atheism was the modernization of choice.
This is not to say that communism and atheism are necessarily linked; in fact, many of the principles of communism strongly resemble the monastic Rule, and early Christians often lived in communitarian groups. South America in particular was famous even in the 1920's for its outspokenly Marxist revolutionary Jesuit priests. However, when Russia became an atheist country, the two became popularly linked in the public mind for quite some time.
At any rate, most of the churches of the west made their dislike of the way Russia had gone rather public. This was entirely unsurprising; if one was to make a laundry list of all the things a nation could do to make a typical 1920's religious leader froth at the mouth, the Russian government had pretty much gone straight and checked everything off. Denying the existence of god (check), legalizing abortion (check), introducing no-fault divorce (check), decriminalizing homosexuality (check), seizing the assets of the previous national church (check), and broadly hinting that other nations should do likewise (check) were all actions not likely to be viewed fondly by certain parties. Since the Russian Orthodox church was the one which (primarily) fell, it was (primarily) Christians who got up in arms about the whole thing; many of the nations of the world with different institutionalized religions seem to have considered the whole thing an intramural affair among the Christian nations - although there were, for example, some notable examples of Jews and Muslims who also spoke out against atheism in Russia, particularly those with relatives there who found their religions illegalized (more on that in a bit.)
So, given the hatred of the communist government by most other Western governments, the hatred of atheism by most Western religious leaders, and the linkage of the two in the common mind, it wasn't long before the myth of the Godless Commie was born. Russians were accused of practicing every kind of immorality; the church pretty much accused Russia of the same things the church had been accusing its enemies of for hundreds of years (with the possible exception, in this instance, of cannibalism), and pretty soon, Russia was rumored to be a nation filled with godless amoral murderous devious homosexual women spies who like to wear pants, listen to jazz, have sex, do drugs, and look at modern art. (Katya denies being amoral.) Even sects of Christianity that traditionally hated each other agreed on their mutual hatred of communism; it would be difficult, for example, to imagine a trio less likely to agree on the finer points of doctrinal policy than, say, a British Anglican, an Irish Catholic, and a Russian Atheist. (:
Of course, there were things that were going on in Russia that the Christian churches would have had real reason to get upset about, had they bothered to try to figure out what was actually going on there before making their accusations. When atheism became the doctrine of the Russian government, it became as mindlessly bigoted about enforcing it as any other state religion, if not more so. Although Russia made strong provisions intended to get rid of religious prejudice in its society, it ironically enough simultaneously introduced as law the ultimate form of religious prejudice - prejudice against all religions in general. Religious practices were outlawed, and those who wished to practice their faiths found themselves forbidden to do so. As is often the case with such oppression, religious sentiment in Russia only grew stronger because of it, and religion was not eliminated, but merely driven underground. Of course, in the 1920's, many even in Russia were unaware of the lengths the government was going to in order to eliminate religion; Katya, for example, didn't fully understand it until she was sent to the Gulag and saw exactly who was in there with her, and the reasons why.
Pleasant dreams.
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