The beauty of Soviet anti-religious propaganda

Deep in the guts of Russian library stacks exists what remains — little acknowledged or discussed — of a dead and buried atheist dream. The dream first took shape among Russian radicals of the mid-19th century, to whom the prospect of mass atheism seemed the key to Russia’s salvation. When Lenin seized power in 1917, the Bolsheviks integrated it into their vision of heaven on earth.

To the extent that people in the West have heard of this atheist dream, it has come to them mainly through the voices of its enemies. In 1983, Ronald Reagan put Lenin’s rejection of religion at the heart of Soviet unfreedom in his ‘Evil Empire’ speech. That same year, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn blamed atheism for Russia’s catastrophes in his ‘Men Have Forgotten God’ speech at the London Guildhall (in which he also lamented the blasphemies of Monty Python’s Life of Brian).

Even if the whole subject now lies under a layer of dust, visitors to Russia’s magnificent state libraries — Soviet-era temples of learning devoted to the enlightenment of the once-benighted people — can unearth volumes of vividly illustrated anti-religious magazines from the Soviet era that reveal the evolution of a godless utopia.