Central Committee, RKP, On Anti-Religious Agitation and Propaganda among Women Workers and Peasants. September 15, 1921

Original Source: Vestnik agitatsii i propagandy, 15 September 1921; republished in Em. Iaroslavskii (ed.), Na anti-religioznom fronte. Sbornik statei, dokladov, lekisii, tsirkuliarov za piat' let, 1919-1924 (Moscow, 1924).

If one looks at how significantly the Revolution has decreased religious sentiment among workers and peasants, any observant person would agree that the Revolution has affected the female half of the Russian people much less in this respect. One has only to glance at any peasant procession, visit a church, listen to conversations on religious subjects, look at who attends sermons, and the preponderance of women immediately becomes obvious. During peasant processions, male figures appear solitary among masses of women. The principal reason for this is rooted in women's political backwardness. Women are less involved in the work of the Party, of the unions, of soviet establishments. They play a less prominent role in them. Economically they have still not been freed to the extent that men have by the Revolution. The economic-domestic tenor of a woman's whole life still keeps her in a backward existence, in the captivity of former attitudes which still survive from a time when hardly any ideology other than a religious one was available to her.

This, of course, is not peculiar to Russian women, female workers and peasants. West-European women as well represent a most rich soil for the growth of all kinds of religious organization. Everyone knows what a powerful influence the Catholic clergy has among women in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, England, Holland and other European countries. It was not for nothing that Wilhelm, wishing to express the most apparent characteristics of conservatism, its narrowest limits, into which the life of women should be squeezed, said that women should know the three K's "Kuche, Kirche, Kinder" (kitchen, church and children). All clerical church organizations, monastic and Jesuit societies recruited their most fervent supporters among women. The so-called Catholic parties in European parliaments, as well as the Christian-Socialists-that is, in plain words, papists-depend in exactly the same way, to a great extent, upon the support of women, among whom they carry out intense work influencing them through their press, by means of sermons, and by different kinds of public ceremonies (mystery plays, church processions, special concerts, to which the greatest artistic talents are attracted), and also through the individual influence of confessors. This influence of the Church in individual countries was so powerful at one time, that when the question was raised in Belgium about the extension of the general franchise to women, this threatened at first to strengthen the influence precisely of the Catholic party.

Of course, the Revolution caused an enormous change among us in attitudes towards religion and especially in attitudes to the former state church. Through agitation, the exposure of all kinds of frauds, the revelations concerning relics and other facts, the consciousness of masses of workers and peasants was cleared of the rubbish with which it had been choked for centuries. A significant number of women workers and some peasant women have completely broken with the Church. Those sectarian groups, who have not yet the strength to break completely with religion, but who have come a long way from the vulgar teachings to which, until very recently, the state church had still held them, have grown stronger. This can be said not only about Orthodox women, for this process is also going on among Muslim, Jewish and Catholic women, and others. The task of the Communist Party is to facilitate this process.

How to facilitate it is a question which is explained in the Party program. "Only the realization of balance and consciousness in all mass socio-economic activities will bring a total disappearance of religious prejudice." Thus, the more balance and consciousness we can bring into the socio-economic activity of the masses, the more quickly and more completely will this dying out process occur. Now, when we have still done so little to pull those masses out from under the influence of the spontaneous powers of nature and the disorganization of all our daily economic activities, we cannot count on the process of the disappearance of religious prejudice being a particularly rapid one.

Let us take as an example this year's crop failure, hunger, and food shortage. How do the priests explain them? They say that these calamities are a punishment, god's wrath against sin. It is necessary to plead with this god, pray to him to soften his anger. And because of these sufferings from hunger, a return to religious attitudes is appearing in the most backward sector of the peasantry and even in some workers, both mate and female. Arguments of this kind can be heard: "Well, your hand won't fall off when you cross yourself, your head won't fall off after you bow, and god, perhaps, will take pity." Naturally, it is not difficult for us to make use of this kind of sermon to demonstrate all the evils of such an outlook on the world. We need to show only that people are capable of eliminating all these incredible sufferings by the systematic rebuilding of all our lives, by subordinating the forces of nature. Therefore, every possible resource should be used on behalf of our anti-religious agitation. Somewhere, they cleaned out a bog, turning it into a meadow. They built ditches for irrigation, introduced proper crop rotation and improved ground cultivation, or ran electricity into a village somewhere. We should freely use this to show that the matter has nothing to do with human sins or with the wrath of a non-existent god, but in how little we were able to introduce planning and organization into our lives.

What place should we allot to anti-religious propaganda today? Should it be the first order of business, as some Communists think? One should bear in mind that overcoming religious prejudices is generally an extremely slow process among women workers and peasants. By no means should we avoid answers to the questions brought forward by the masses in this area. It is absolutely necessary to use any appropriate moment to demonstrate the injuriousness of the religious outlook. For example, in that same question about hunger and drought it is certainly not difficult to show the working woman or peasant that belief in sin and punishment from god takes away a person's strength, makes him spineless, a toy in the hands of some sort of awe-inspiring punitive forces. It is not difficult to demonstrate that only the man who believes that he will attain freedom only "with his own hands" will be able to invest all his strength in the rebuilding of the economy, the rebuilding the whole of life.

But at the moment there is no point at all in putting anti-religious agitation in a place of first importance. There is no necessity for introducing this question as the order of the day at non-party conferences. It is perhaps much more useful to discuss it at Party conferences, because few Communists can distinctly outline to themselves the Party's program in this matter. Whereas at non-party conferences, which at the moment are examining economic questions for the most part, the question about religion should only be put when a significant majority of the conference demands it. Speeches on this issue should perhaps be as quiet and self-restrained as possible. They must be thoroughly prepared as much in the matter of organization as in form and content. Instead of petty attacks on priests, we have to touch upon the subject of the general outlook of women workers and peasants, to come out against religion as a world view, as a system, taking into account the attitudes of the majority of the assembly and its relationship with existing religious groups, church organizations, sectarians and others. It is especially important to connect questions of anti-religious propaganda with our economic measures. Without serious preparation for making a stand against religion, it is better to refrain from it (i.e., making a stand). This is particularly true for the organization of important anti-religious public debates in the provinces, which always attract the mass of the population, especially women. Such public debates must be treated in a particularly serious manner, and must be arranged only after thorough preparation.

The experience of our work has shown that sometimes we have success with anti-religious propaganda even among the most religiously inclined women if only we can connect that propaganda with issues which are vitally important for women.

Our propaganda was of this kind on the issue of religious freedom among women in the East, about their release from the tradition of bride price, from the harem and other forms of slavery. It was not difficult for the Eastern woman to understand our correctness, when on the one hand, the Communist Party came out against women's being sold from their very childhood for cattle, money, and other things, and on the other hand, the older order stood with its defender-the mullah.

Our anti-religious propaganda and agitation should be of precisely this sort: concrete, deeply thought-out, related to the vital issues of the masses, with their daily economic habits, with thoughtful work, and work accompanied by wide-ranging cultural enlightenment. Our task is to replace a religious explanation of the world with a scientific one.

Source: William G. Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), pp. 201-204.