Report Arianna Publishing
Of Raffaele Panico

Source: Arianna publisher
The new Russia, nineties. In Moscow, following the changes, unpublished documents come to light, after further 70 years of silence. Documents that date back to the culminating moments of anti-religious persecution. Not the usual written documents, but also vintage films with impressive gruesome images. Let's observe, backwards, the history of the “Kiev Castrate Sect”, how this was dismantled in 1920 thanks to the new Bolshevik forces in power. A film remained unpublished for a long time. Thanks to the researcher Marco Dolcetta, Italian essayist writer director, teacher at the Sorbonne in Paris “History of religions”, we have an idea of ​​how intense and irreverent the propaganda activity of the new regime established in 1917 by Lenin on the religious question. The film was made thanks to the zeal of the anti-religious section of the Interior Ministry of the Soviet regime which, dal 1920, would have given life, Then, to the so-called League of the Godless militants, a seemingly autonomous institution whose mission was to eradicate religious sentiment in the Russian population. Filmed in Ukraine, former Soviet Union, it is the documentary account although "stuffed" with fiction, on the activities of an Orthodox Christian agricultural-religious community. The scenes in the film highlight the self-inflicted mutilations on the body by believers to mortify the flesh and leave no room for desires, to carnal physical appetites. The sexophobic dilemma of religions. Bolshevik propaganda exposed the kind of life that took place in the churches. In the video you can see the followers of the "Kiev Castrati Sect" dancing: of the possessed, possessed as in the tradition of voodoo and in the ecstasies of the dervishes of southern Turkey. The Klisty, the religious sect to which Rasputin also belonged, danced in the same way. More oddities: the children put in the oven, religious people who try to fly and rites of all kinds to bring rain against the impending drought. While religious fanatics wait for rain and messages from the divine, with propitiatory rites, Bolshevik propaganda focuses on and teaches the modernization of the new Soviet man. In the film while the religious people are blamed, you see Soviet activities using technologies and intelligence of work, that is, the extraction of water from wells, or its conveyance into irrigation canals: it is the logic of socialist materialism.
In Ukraine, in that spring of 1920, despite all the rites and exorcisms of the religious community, it won't rain, therefore for the authors of the film God does not exist. To the documentary about the community, the account of the process to which the members of the community itself are subjected takes over, accused, and therefore condemned, also of armed subversion and pro-tsarist resistance to the Soviet regime. The trial thus ends with a death sentence for all the accused. This ideology emerges from the trial documents: religion is understood as spiritual slavery that weighs on the masses and forces them into anguish and abandonment to perpetual work for the benefit of others. In perfect correspondence with these statements, the article is already there 13 of the program of the Russian Communist Party which affirms the complete, progressive annihilation of every religious prejudice that is part of the new economic order systematically and consciously implemented. These people were, Like this, executed. They had already self-harmed by amputating their sexual attributes with the intention of not falling into the temptations of the flesh. They were considered perverse, of maniacs, so the indictment ended like this: “The death of these people is a symbol of the just and systematic struggle of the proletariat against any and all religions.” The film then ends with the practice, considered abhorrent, of baptism in the river, which was the religious initiation of this community canceled by the October revolution.
Request. Professor, where he found a copy of the film on the persecution of religious sects?
Marco Dolcetta. In Moscow, near Red Square there is the headquarters of the Russian Institute of Philosophy and Religion. I met the director of the institute, il Professor Andrej Kalov, professor of history of religions at Moscow University, and provided me with some videotape.
D. Anti-religious repression was conducted after the revolution in a drastic manner by the Bebosniks, the League of the Godless Militants, but who were they?
Sweetie. The director of the Institute, the prof. Kalov, he explained this situation to me. The league of godless militants became an autonomous apparatus of the Ministry of the Interior and Soviet Propaganda. In the 1925 counted 80.000 members, to then become, In the 1932, strong with good 5 millions of militants. The password was: we want to burn the churches of the whole world in a universal fire. Immediately after taking power, the communists begin the progressive subjugation of the Orthodox Church by demanding acts of loyalty and submission to the new Soviet state on the part of Patriarch Sergius. But the main impact force was “The League of the Godless Militant”, created by fellow Bolshevik Jaroslavski, President of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. In homage to the communist doctrine, religion was pointed out as the opium of the people, the Godless militants gather above all young and very young people, recruiting them mainly from the dispersed and abandoned masses after the tragedy of the civil war. During the forced collectivization of the countryside, at the end of the years 20, the Party and the State abandon any residual tolerance, and the Godless are at the forefront of eliminating religious teachings from schools, denounce devout priests and peasants, identified as class enemies to be liquidated. Yaroslavsky nel 1928 states that the aim of the League will be to make the Vatican, in a hundred years, the largest anti-religious museum in the world.
D. We acted deeply, in the rural world, for centuries remained outside of any modernization.
Sweetie. The League's activity was well planned, here is an official text that says so: One of the most important tasks, especially in the countryside, it is the fight against religious holidays. As opposed to holidays, the local cell of the Godless must promote joint walks through the fields with explanations on the adoption of agricultural machinery, on the use of church bells for industrial needs etc., the practical work of the anti-religious cell must also manifest itself in changing religious denominations in cities, in the villages, in the streets and in making religious images disappear from buildings. A vast work of enlightenment must be done in the fight against the uses of the church, against baptism, the wedding blessing etc. And then we need to move on to the practical work of introducing red baptisms, of weddings and secular funerals . Birth reports, red weddings, secular funerals must be done with great pomp, in order to attract the attention of the people. To see, even – the text continues – a sort of breviary was written for the use of the Militants: Primo – every Godless militant must be aware of the resolutions made in party meetings regarding anti-religious action, as well as the plenary deliberations of the central committee of the League of the Godless Militant. Second – the struggle against religion is a part of the general class struggle of the workers against capital, therefore, it is absolutely necessary that the Godless militant has exact knowledge of the international economic situation. Third – the militant Godless must show that religion in all countries and among all peoples is equally a weapon of counterrevolution and a means of oppression and exploitation of workers.".
D. And they had newspapers, official bodies bulletins, I don't know, the radio...
Sweetie. The official newspaper of the League of Godless Militants was published weekly and until December of 1990. Then everything changed without actually changing anything. In fact he continued the publications with the same director, with the same editorial staff and the same format, changing only the title to Science and Religion. I went to the northern outskirts of Moscow and met the director of Science and Religion, Georghe Kavasvilj, the editor of the magazine that, until the fall of communism it was called the magazine of the godless militants, and today Science and Religion.
D. And after the fall of communism, how did the atheism question evolve after the long journey, outlined so far, from the advent of communism until today?”
Sweetie. We can follow precise data along the lines of the League of the Militant Godless. In the 1910, Orthodox believers, according to official estimates, were gathered in 25.000 community; In the 1939 they were alone 50. This demonstrates how the decades-long attack on the sacred carried out by the Godless militants and, Therefore, from the entire Soviet apparatus, it effectively crushed Orthodox religious sentiment within three generations, the one most attacked by ideologists. Curiously, this fury also occurred against Judaism, but only after Lenin's death. The Islamic world, Instead, it was not affected by the Soviet propaganda apparatus because it was peripheral, distant provinces and had the ability to amalgamate very different peoples. The official creed of the Godless was set out in a manual, a sort of counter Gospel of about 800 pages, for example, let's read:
“Today God no longer exists, Lenin came down to earth and everyone began to live happily – and also – Man today can know the truth: it is not an irrational act of faith, of omen or a vision, There's nothing mystical about it, it is a truth composed of human certainties, a faithful mirror of the real world…”
One of the most curious propaganda manifestations was the so-called Venturina, repeatedly proposed by the leaders of the League, to the boys of the League militants. Travels in the rural world, where there was a particular contact, they almost pay, with nature, similar in some respects to the naturalist movement of the late nineteenth century in Germany. The young Russian militants played a sort of quiz game, with erudition prizes up for grabs with a view to religious demystification, thus making the indoctrination of the little ones pleasant. One of the suggested rites, on this occasion, it was the replacement of sacred images and symbols in homes and families with effigies and portraits of Marx and Lenin.
D. Child's play?
Sweetie. Let's even say child's play, although it was intended to establish the new man, fruit of state planning, according to guidelines typical of the totalitarian states of the mid-twentieth century, approach that intended to modernize the people, to indoctrinate him according to greater ethical State perspectives, e autodeterminalo. The Russian Cosmist movement also emerged from this Soviet vision, later celebrated by the first man in the cosmos, Yuri Gagarin, a few decades after the victory against National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy in 1945.