Into the Cosmos Page 26
motivated antireligious agitation and scientific enlightenment. The first
approach cast atheists as merciless crusaders whose primary objective
was to unmask church dogma and the clergy to destroy religion’s influ-
ence among the population. Religious institutions were depicted as a
politically subversive even antirevolutionary force, and the battle against
them focused on the repression and persecution of the clergy, the requi-
sition and destruction of church property, and the undermining of be-
172 Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock
lief in material manifestations of the supernatural (such as the relics of
saints, holy wells, or miraculous icons).51
Although the iconoclastic antireligious campaigns of early militant
atheists are generally well known, the second approach—scientific en-
lightenment—has received less attention.52 The historian James T. An-
drews has argued that Bolsheviks “saw science enlightenment as an
inherently transformative venue for shaping Russian culture.”53 Unlike
politically motivated antireligious rhetoric, scientific enlightenment cast
religious believers as victims rather than perpetrators, and atheism as
the war of light against darkness. Such popular science education had
its roots in the prerevolutionary decades and mobilized both those who
propagated a utopian view of the potential of science to triumph over na-
ture, as well as those who saw their work as a civic mission and were
more committed to the practical, rather than the ideological, function of
scientific. The objectives of the scientific intelligentsia—who did not nec-
essarily see the eradication of religion as an end in itself, but rather as a
means for overcoming nonscientific thinking, dovetailed with the explic-
itly antireligious mission of Bolshevik atheists.54 For Bolshevik atheists
the story had clear heroes and villains: unlike science popularizers, they
presented science as the untiring enemy of religion, a constant thorn in
the sides of religious authorities who persistently sought to circumscribe
and silence scientific advancement. Religion was embedded into a narra-
tive of humankind’s historical attempts to manage its powerlessness in
the face of the sublime forces that governed the universe, and depicted
atheism as the gradual evolution of humankind’s understanding of the
cosmos. Naturally, this tale of progress concluded with the human tri-
umph over nature.55
What makes the early Soviet enlightenment project peculiar, though,
is that the dream of scientific enlightenment was never dependent on
the cult of pure reason. Alongside the efforts to disenchant the universe
by laying bare its foundations ran a related, but not overlapping, current
of scientific thought—a mystical, utopian understanding of science and
technology and its potential to overcome space, time, and death itself.56
Popular scientific enlightenment, the historian Jeffrey Brooks has noted,
put forth science as a modern ideal but it also represented its virtues
as more akin to magic than logic.57 The boundaries between scientific
enlightenment and technological or mystical utopianism were especially
permeable in the case of speculation about cosmic journeys. Russian and
Cosmic Enlightenment 173
later Soviet scientific thought was propelled by fantastical leaps of imagi-
nation—most famously, the cosmist philosophy of Nikolai Feodorov—
that was central to Russian visions of human space travel.58 Indeed, as
the historian Asif Siddiqi has shown, it was an enchanted cosmos that
propelled the imagination of Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, the “grandfather”
of Soviet space technology, and made the space program possible.59
Perhaps because the border between these two traditions was so
porous, the battle over the cosmos was often depicted quite literally.
The stakes of the conflict hinged on the question of who ultimately had
authority over the cosmos and its contents, and Soviet atheist rhetoric
mobilized art, science, and even military technology in the service of
antireligious agitation.60 The atheist journal Bezbozhnik, for example, illustrated deities and angels fleeing the heavens as they are being chased
and assaulted by proletarians, “godless” airplanes, and even artists. One
cartoon depicted an artist who had climbed an enormous ladder beyond
the clouds in order to beat emaciated angels out of the heavens with an
oversized pencil.61
Early atheist propaganda is also striking for the way it mobilized
professional scientists in the mass campaign against religion. Nikolai
Petrovich Kamenshchikov, a professor of astronomy at Leningrad Uni-
versity and a public atheist, published works that exploited astronomy in
the service of atheism, as did a number of other prominent scientists of
the time. Such publications, usually intended for uneducated and often
illiterate audiences and written in an accessible vernacular, outlined the
blows astronomy dealt to religion, beginning with Copernicus’s heretical
heliocentric cosmos.62 They sought to undermine religious cosmologies
by attacking popular understandings of time and space.63 Exemplary of
this genre was Kamenshchikov’s book Chto videli na nebe popy, a chto
videm my (What the priests saw in the skies, and what we see), whose purpose was to unmask such concepts as heaven, hell, purgatory, and
apocalypse.64 The cover illustration showed the night sky split in half:
on one side, a distraught priest raised his hands to a heaven occupied by
angels, saints, and even a Buddha; on the other, the skies, empty of dei-
ties and seemingly infinite, await discoveries by the enormous telescope
in the foreground. For these early atheists the battle with religion was not
just historical. Indeed, in perhaps one of the most peculiar episodes of
engagement of scientists in antireligious work, Soviet astronomers (Ka-
menshchikov among them) critiqued the Vatican’s historical relationship
174 Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock
with scientific progress in an open, published letter addressed to Pope
Pius XI.65 By asserting the authority of astronomy over the past, future,
and nature of the universe, atheists sought to win a battle for the hearts
and minds of the population, which they seemed to believe hinged on
their ability to claim the heavens.
At the end of the 1920s, during the height of atheist enthusiasm,
the Commissariat of Enlightenment proposed the construction of “a new
type of enlightenment institution,” a monument to technology and sci-
entific materialism: the Moscow Planetarium.66 Designed according to
the most progressive principles in Soviet construction and city planning,
and armed with the latest German equipment, the planetarium concen-
trated the hopes of the Soviet enlightenment project and the individuals
whose task it was to make it reality.67 The planetarium’s location, next to
the Moscow Zoo, was emblematic of the didactic vision planned for the
space: a visitor, with the guidance of educational lectures, could physi-
cally and intellectually follow the path of evolution and uncover the mate-
ria
l nature of the universe. Underscoring the ideological significance and
transformative potential of the planetarium, the constructivist Aleksey
Gan described it as “an optical scientific theater” whose primary function
was to “foster a love for science in the viewer.”68 In this new “mechanized”
theater the workings of the universe would be revealed to the masses; the
experience enlightens the viewer and “helps him forge within himself a
scientific understanding of the world and rid himself of the fetishism of
a savage, of priestly prejudices, and of the civilized Europeans’ pseudo-
scientific worldview.”69
When the first Soviet planetarium opened its doors in Moscow in
November 1929, the confidence that the light of science would defeat the
darkness of religion was paramount. In the years before World War II
the planetarium hosted more than eighteen thousand lectures and eight
million visitors. It organized a young astronomer’s club; a “star theater,”
comprised of Moscow actors, that put on plays about Galileo, Giordano
Bruno, and Copernicus; and a “stratospheric committee” that investigat-
ed the atmosphere and issues of reactive motion. Among its members
the committee could count the mechanical engineer and “tireless space
crusader” Fridrikh Tsander as well as the “father” of the Soviet space
program, Sergei Korolev.70 The main question that worried atheists was
not if their conquest of the heavens, the assault of scientific materialism on religious mentalities, would ultimately be victorious. Rather, the ques-
Cosmic Enlightenment 175
tion was when and through what means victory would finally be achieved.
By the time Ostap Bender, the paradigmatic Soviet conman of Il’ia Il’f
and Evgenii Petrov’s novels of the period, waged war with Catholic priests
for the soul of his accomplice Kozlevich, he simply declared the nonex-
istence of God a “medical fact.”71 After winning the stunned Kozlevich
away from the priests, he tried to comfort Kozlevich’s fears that “he would
not make it to the heavens” by confidently stating “the heavens are be-
coming desolate. It’s no longer that epoch . . . Angels now want to come to
earth . . . , [where] there are municipal services, a planetarium, where it is
possible to look at the stars while listening to an antireligious lecture.”72
Whether Kozlevich would have found these assurances comforting is an-
other question.
The Death and Rebirth of Soviet Atheist Education
Despite auspicious beginnings, Stalin’s reign did not turn out to be a
fortuitous time for the new theater of scientific enlightenment, and Mos-
cow’s planetarium remained the only planetarium in the Soviet Union
for nearly twenty years. The consolidation of the Stalinist regime in the
mid-1930s was accompanied by the rejection of early ideological utopi-
anism in favor of a more conservative, traditionalist position and more
immediate priorities: industrialization and the inculcation of Soviet pa-
triotism.73 Stalin’s need to mobilize the population for war, and later to
reestablish control in formerly occupied areas, precipitated a reevaluation
of the Soviet state’s relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church, with
the expected ramifications for atheist propaganda.74 As a result, Soviet
atheism, despite protestations of service to the Communist project, was
marginalized throughout the 1930s and 1940s. After the destructive anti-
religious campaigns of Stalin’s “cultural revolution” during the First Five-
Year Plan, atheist agitation largely ceased, as did ethnographic studies of
religion and sociological investigation in general.75
While Stalinist propaganda maintained the commitment to enlight-
enment by advocating literacy, hygiene, and education in the natural sci-
ences, the specifically atheist conclusions to be drawn from scientific pro-
paganda were for the most part cast aside. The successor of the league,
the Society for the Dissemination of Scientific and Political Knowledge,
was formed in 1947 as a voluntary association of Soviet intelligentsia
committed to mass enlightenment through lectures on foreign and do-
176 Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock
mestic politics and the natural sciences.76 Prominent scientists, like the
astronomer B. A. Vorontsov-Veliaminov, continued to give periodic lec-
tures and publish rare pamphlets on science and religion, but explicitly
debunking religious conceptions of the natural world was no longer their
primary task.77 Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s the low priority of
scientific atheism was tacitly understood by the people whose mission it
was to enlighten the population.78
Two new developments converged to bring atheism back into the
spotlight of Soviet public culture: the ideological destabilization initiated
by Stalin’s death in 1953, and Khrushchev’s initiation of de-Stalinization
shortly thereafter; and the growing awareness that while religion showed
no sign of dying out, the state’s methods of atheist education and enlight-
enment were outdated and ineffective. In the new historical context of
postwar reconstruction and ideological transformation, Soviet ideology
in general, and atheist theory and practice in particular, were in desper-
ate need of revision and reform. The revival of the campaign against reli-
gion under Khrushchev, after a nearly thirty-year hiatus during the Sta-
lin era, might appear peculiar in the context of the political and cultural
“thaw,” but it was intimately connected with the moral mission to cleanse
Marxist-Leninist ideology of corruption and fulfill the authentic vision
of Leninism. As the private, spiritual world of Soviet persons—their val-
ues, emotions, and worldviews—became a central policy concern in the
party’s top echelons, the campaign against religion became one of the
primary instruments to revitalize Soviet ideology.
The problem was that, according to reports provided by the Council
on the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church (CAROC) and the Coun-
cil on the Affairs of Religious Cults (CARC)—which included statistics
on the incomes of religious institutions and clergy, pilgrimages to “holy
sites,” and the observance of rituals—religiosity persisted among a sig-
nificant percentage of the Soviet population. Indeed, by many measures
religion showed signs of revitalization during the postwar period, for
which the party blamed “insufficiencies” in atheist education and called
for a serious improvement in the intellectual, theoretical, and practical
quality of “scientific atheism.” The party’s famous 1954 decrees on reli-
gion and atheism—the first on July 7, 1954, and the second on November
10, 1954—certainly announced a reversal of fortune for religious institu-
tions and believers within Soviet borders.79 Yet they hardly pointed to a
new direction in policy. The party again brought attention to the problem
Cosmic Enlightenment 177
of religion and atheism in the July decree “On Great Insufficiencies in
the Propagating of Scientific Atheism and on Measures for its Improve-
/>
ment,” and then scrambled to correct the fallout of its own directives in
November with “On Errors in Scientific-Atheist Propaganda among the
People.” By the mid-1950s Soviet ideologists began to suspect that if the
final revolution was to take place within the realm of worldviews, which
were to become scientific materialist through a targeted and comprehen-
sive antireligious campaign, then they had to work to uncover and under-
stand the reasons behind the widespread existence of “survivals.” And
yet, among the “survivals” held responsible for the population’s passivity
toward building Communism, religion was perhaps the most scrutinized
and the least understood.
The revival of the campaign against religion under Khrushchev, after
a nearly thirty-year hiatus during the Stalin era, might appear peculiar
in the context of the political and cultural “thaw,” but it was intimately
connected with the moral mission to cleanse Marxist-Leninist ideology of
corruption and fulfill the authentic vision of Leninism. The Third Party
Program, announced at the Twenty-second Party Congress (1961), was
the official articulation of new ideals that had been promoted throughout
the 1950s: the abandonment of coercion as a primary tool of government,
increased welfare provisions, and material abundance. Tying together
utopian and pragmatic promises, the program heralded vast increases
in consumer goods, housing, government benefits, and the cultivation of
leisure. Yet what made the program so peculiar was the central impor-
tance of morality in Khrushchev’s promoted vision of modernity.80
To resolve the moral paradox of consumerism, the Soviet abundance
promoted in the Khrushchev era hinged on personal moderation.81 Thus
the satisfaction of Soviet wants depended on transformed personal per-
ceptions of Soviet needs. In a kind of inversion of the Protestant ethic,
which made a private vice (greed) into a public virtue (work ethic), Com-
munist morality made a public vice (scarcity) into a private virtue (asceti-
cism). These ideals were cemented in the new era’s official manifesto, the
“Moral Code of the Builder of Communism,” which prioritized the state’s
dependence on loyal, efficient, and morally superior citizens. The private,
spiritual world of Soviet persons—their values, emotions, and world-