The separation of Church and State did not exist. In fact under Tsarist rule the church was in essence a wing of the government. Following the October Revolution that would change. Vladimir Lenin spoke openly about his disdain for religion. In his writings he had said “Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression.” For the first three years in power Lenin could not take all of the steps he wanted to “against the fog of religion.” He is well known for saying “religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.” Lenin wanted to wage war against the Russian Orthodox Church but he needed the right opportunity.

According to Victor Sebestyen Lenin had ordered the Checka and the Red Guards “to leave the Church alone, for now. ‘Be very careful in handling the Church. Do nothing hasty. There will come a time for this battle, but wait,’ he wrote to Dzerzhinsky.” For years Lenin waited before launching his assault on the church. During the Revolution and during the civil war he had not been able to act against the church in the manner he wanted to. In 1921 the event he had been waiting for presented itself and Lenin was ready to act.

Famine arrived in Russia and Lenin saw this as his opportunity to destroy the church. Quoting a letter written by Lenin outlined in Sebestyen’s book Lenin “The enemy [he meant the Church] is committing an enormous strategic mistake in trying to drag us into battle at this time…for us this is the moment when we can with ninety-nine chances out of a hundred smash them and secure for ourselves an unassailable position for many decades to come. It is precisely now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and thousands of corpses are littering the roads…that we must carry out the confiscation of Church valuables, with the most merciless energy and crush any resistance. It is now, and only now, that the peasant mass will be for us, or at any rate will not be in a condition to support the clergy…We must seize the valuables now speedily; we will be unable to do so later because no other moment except that of desperate hunger will give us support among the masses. The confiscations must be conducted with merciless determination the greater the number of clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason…[i.e., resisting church looting] the better. We must teach these people a lesson so they will not dare even to think of resistance for decades.”

Sebestyen oulined how successful Lenin’s actions were as follows: “This was the violent beginning of the suppression of religion, which over the next fifteen years or so saw more than 97 per cent of the Soviet Union’s churches, synagogues and mosques closed down. Within two years of Lenin’s edict more than thirty bishops and 1,200 priests had been killed and thousands more jailed.”

Lenin had used the power of the state to destroy organized religion in the Soviet Union.

For more of Lenin’s own words on Religion see Socialism and Religion published in Novaya Zhizn December 3, 1905

For more details about Lenin’s life see Victor Sebestyen’s Book Lenin published in 2017