The campaign that never was

Abstract

A resolution entitled On strengthening the atheist education of the population was issued by the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in July 1971. For some reason this document, rarely quoted by Soviet writers and apparently missed by Western specialists, was not published at the time. 1 In exploring the context in which this resolution was produced, we shall be concerned with two questions: why was it issued at this time, and was it meant to herald a new campaign against religion? For five years after Krushchev's fall in October 1964, his successor Brezhnev struggled for pre-eminence within the leadership. During this period very little attention appears to have been devoted to ideological matters, and even Nauka i re/igiya (Science and Religion) could be found stressing that the key to overcoming religious prejudices was economic development. 2 Nevertheless, no-one questioned the basic premise of official ideology, that the education of the new man presupposed his liberation from religious prejudices and other survivals of the past. 3 From about 1968, this situation changed. Reacting to events in Czechoslovakia and the start of foreign broadcasting of samizdat materials into the USSR, official pronouncements began to take on a more explicitly ideoiogical flavour. In April 1968 a Central Committee plenum called for an uncompromising struggle with alien ideology , 4 whilst two months later candidate Politburo member P. N. Demichev attacked imperialist propagandists who sought to undermine Soviet society by spreading values contrary to those of socialism. 5