Notes on Stalinism as a Secular Religion
Introduction
As with nearly any claim in scholarly discourse, the assertion that the communism espoused by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin constituted a secular religion is a controversial one. As my previous articles on Marx and Lenin in VoegelinView have argued, Marxism as an anti-theistic ideology came to take on the features of religion, to the degree that it can be labeled a secular religion. This article makes a similar claim about Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) and Stalinism.[1] Before I proceed to the meat of the argument, however, some ground-clearing is needed.
Political Religion Theory and Controversy
In a 2016 article, Erik van Ree argues the contrary position. The view I have been espousing (at least to some degree) mirrors a theory in political discourse known as Political Religion Theory. As van Ree defines it, this is the “assumption that sacralization of secular objects endows these objects with a transcendental, divine aura.” Van Ree finds this view insufficient, in that it “fails properly to distinguish between the sacred on one hand and the transcendental and divine on the other.” Since Stalinism does not, in a technical sense “deify” Stalin, Stalinism cannot be labeled a political religion. Van Ree distinguishes loyalty rituals (Stalinism) from communion rituals (Orthodoxy), and faith apart from evidence (Orthodoxy) from a “faith-evidence hybrid” (Stalinism). [2]
Sacralization without a genuinely transcendent or deified figure falls short of religion in van Ree’s critique. Thus, while Lenin and Stalin may have been accorded sacralized status, this did not render them deities or transcendent beings. Thus, the religion parallel falls short. Van Ree therefore puts the “loyalty rituals” by which oaths of allegiance, portraits of the leaders carried in parades, etc. into the category of sacralization, yet not in the category of religion like the rituals of Orthodoxy, such as carrying icons of the saints in procession. Absent a deified leader these fall short of the moniker “religion” per van Ree.[3]
The issue therefore seems to turn on how we define religion, and whether that definition holds, as a necessary component, belief in a deity.[4] In point of fact, there are historic religions that do not require a deity. Theravada Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintoism, Animism, Pantheism, and even some forms of Secular Humanism do not require belief in a transcendent or supernatural deity yet are usually categorized as religions.[5] Thus in order to be a religion, under my more generous definition of religion, a religious ideology does not have to have a supernatural deity. Stalinism (with Leninism) may not have believed in a truly transcendent order or in a divine being, but that did not inhibit its functioning quite openly as a secular religion.
To his credit, van Ree acknowledges that Stalin saw Marxism as something that needed to be presented to the masses as an object of worship. His sister-in-law’s first wife’s diary recorded in May 1935 a private conversation where Stalin explained the people needed a tsar, or “a person they can worship and in whose name they can live and work.”[6] More public was his December 23, 1946 statement to a group of biographers charged with writing the life-stories of both Lenin and himself. He stated, candidly: “Marxism is the religion of a class. If you want to get involved with Marxism, you can’t avoid involvement with classes, with the mass … We are Leninists. What we write for ourselves will surely be for the people. For them it is a creed.”[7]
On these data van Ree argues that Stalin did not actually believe Marxism to be a religion, but pragmatically needed to present it as such for the uneducated masses. He concludes that “Stalinism lacked the transcendental metaphysical basis credibly to recreate a secularized version” of rituals such as those found in Orthodoxy. “Stalinist loyalty rituals were not about communion but about public allegiance.”[8]
Stalin stated that Marxism is a religion of class, whereas van Ree says Marxist Stalinism is not really a religion. Who are we to believe? Perhaps we would agree that Stalin’s posing of his ideology as a religion was merely a ploy, or a cynical gesture toward the incredulity of the masses, yet that does not settle the debate. If an ideology can devolve (or evolve) into a religion without invoking a transcendent or supernatural order, I will have made my case. If however van Ree’s more narrow version (which would ace out several religions mentioned above from their status as religions) is true, then I would lose the argument. Fair enough.
Joseph Stalin’s anti-religious religion is indeed a paradoxical notion. For this reason, it is understandable why there are scholars who deny that what Stalinism represented can reasonably called a religion. In the first place, the ideology of communism was materialistic atheism. Under the assumption that religion requires a deity to be worshiped, and that Stalinism denied the existence of said deity, then Stalinism could not be regarded as a religion. Much of the debate hinges again on how one defines a religion. Does religion require a deity of the sort we find in Christian theism, a being that is transcendent and supernatural? It turns out that religion is rather a broader category than the natural/supernatural dichotomy would imply. Absent a deity, therefore, what could make an ideology into a secular religion?
Here the key term helps in some surprising ways. Religion is from the Latin religio which is most easily translated as “to bind.” Note the term’s etymological link with “ligament” or that tissue which binds a muscle to a bone. Central therefore to religion is the notion of its power to bind one person, or institution, to another. Sometimes this is the binding of a devotee to a deity. Sometimes it is the binding of a disciple to a human guru or rabbi. Strengthening the bond involves cultic activity, including reverence accorded to adepts or leading human figures in the movement. The surprising factor is that the original term got caught up in debates between early Christians and the Roman emperor cult. Religio was a term of art in the promotion of the worship of human emperors who had accorded themselves the status of deity. In a polytheistic system such as Rome embraced that was a bit less of an issue than it was for Judaism and Christianity, which are monotheistic. This helps explain why the Roman slur on Christians was “atheists,” i.e., they did not worship the Roman gods, including the emperor. Now, whether the emperors actually believed that they were born gods, or had achieved divine status, or merely used their claimed divinity as a ploy to garner power for themselves probably differed from emperor to emperor. It is largely a question for psychology rather than history. One could say the same about Stalin. Here is the tantalizing connection of ancient and modern terms in this dispute for my thesis. Tsar is just a linguistic variant of Caesar. In other words, the religion of Stalinism, in Stalin’s own words, to become a tsar (even after his own complicity in machinations to kill the actual Tsar Nicholas), mirrors the Caesar worship of ancient Rome. In both cases it was Orthodox Christians who proved the most intractable foes to this new religion granting transcendent powers as well as pride-inducing public rituals to mere mortals.
In atheistic materialism, the philosophical foundation of Stalinism, there is no transcendent, supernatural arena. That did not halt the human religious impulse, however. It did not stop Stalin from creating a transcendent status for himself. In the closed universe of the materialist, the most powerful human being becomes godlike (within a particular culture, at least). Such a deity would be natural rather than supernatural, but the adulation of such a figure by a group of followers turns such veneration into a de facto religion.[9]
Secular Transcendence and Stalinism
Under a totalitarian system such as that overseen by Stalin, the “Leader” (note the oft-reverential capitalization) becomes an alternative to traditional transcendental figures such as a Christ or Messianic figure. In fact, the historical literature is replete with suggestive metaphors for Stalin, either used by him, or by his most enrapt followers, or by the very ethos he cultivated.
Another feature of religion is its insistence on exclusive allegiances and its struggle to embrace tolerance of difference. Allegiances must be pure, and in more extreme expressions of religion, lack of enthusiasm in members hewing to the core doctrines of their faith can lead to punishment by the authorities in that religion. Further, religion tends to confer ultimacy upon its beliefs. This is not my own idea, but that of theologian Paul Tillich, whose definition of religion as “ultimate concern” heavily influenced church-state jurisprudence in the American context.[10]
In applying such insights to Stalin we may turn to Stalin historian Dmitri Volkogonov. He observes:
Uniformity of thought, the rule of a single political force and a system of obligatory ideological myths gradually shaped the population. Stalinism, as the materialization of Lenin’s ideas, arose not only from the peculiarities of Russian history—the specifics of Marxism planted in Russian soil, the traditions of tsarism, populism and Jacobinism—it was also to a great extent the manifestation of ideological faith. Russia has always been a country of faith, the USSR no less, if only of the faith of anti-Christianity. Stalin was the embodiment of the system’s drive for ideological faith.”[11]
We next survey some important revelations of the Stalinist approaches to the religion of secular anti-religion, decade by decade.
The 1920s
Historian Robert Service has noted: “Stalin thought godlessness the beginning of righteousness and had no compunction about the mass slaughter of clerics.” The violent nature of the approach of Stalin and his henchmen to religious believers must be held firmly in view here. The viciousness was in large part because two totalizing religions cannot occupy the same space. “In the Russian Orthodox Church alone the number of active priests tumbled from around 60,000 in the 1920s to only 5,665 by 1941,” Service calculates. “No doubt many of them fled in disguise to the towns in order to escape the attentions of the armed squads that were searching for them. But many priests were caught unawares and either imprisoned or executed.”[12]
This feature of Stalinism was found in his earliest days as leader of the Bolshevik cause. Stalin’s speech at the funeral of Vladimir Lenin on January 26, 1924 gave ominous evidence of this impulse. Volkogonov notes that his speech, delivered before the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets, “acquired the precise semi-catechistic, semi-religious form he desired.” In the text the repeated refrain of “we swear” took the form of an oath. For instance, “We swear to you, Comrade Lenin, that we will carry out your commandment with honour!” Volkogonov concludes: “Largely as a result of Stalin’s efforts, Lenin and Leninism were made into a pseudo-religion, a canon of revolutionary dogmas, the violation of which would be punished by death in the 1930s.”[13] It is often noted that Joseph Stalin spent many years as an Orthodox seminarian in his youth (1894-1899).[14] It is hard to imagine a person so steeped in a tradition in his formative years would completely purge and divest himself of its highly religious ethos.
The 1920s laid much of the groundwork that would see fruit in anti-religious purges of the 1930s. Local party branches undertook anti-religious activity including, the Komsomol (Union of Communist Youth), the Young Pioneers (children under 15 years of age), the League of the Militant Godless, Museums of Scientific Atheism, Trade Unions, and additional local and regional groups. One historian specializing in such sources writes: “to be sure, special conferences on antireligious propaganda, under the auspices of the Central Committee Agitation—Propaganda Department, became almost an annual event (1926, 1928, 1929, etc.), but they were not widely publicized.”[15]
Destruction or repurposing of church properties also took a toll. Drawing on documents discovered after the fall of the iron curtain, Edvard Radzinsky speaks about secularized use of religious property, and public rituals of desacralization: “Such churches as survived were converted into storehouses. Children were told at school to bring icons for a public bonfire, and were given posters of Lenin to hang in their place.” Note the similarity here again to the Roman emperor cult and the striking of coins with the imperial image proclaiming the ancient Caesars to be gods. The winning over of a priest to anti-religion was trumpeted. “Newspapers published letters to the editor announcing that some former priest had broken with religion forever. The slogan ‘religion is the opium of the people’ was displayed everywhere and anywhere.”[16]
Purgation of religious influence in higher education served a key role in this process as well. Beginning in 1929, special anti-religious sections began to be established in all institutions of higher education. That year saw the application of a “massive purge of the Russian Academy of Sciences” in which “most of its non-Marxist scholars and almost all of those who were practicing members of the Church were arrested, most of them subsequently perishing in the camps and prisons.”[17]
When Stalin was told of the plans to celebrate his 50th birthday in 1929, He stated:
“’I regard your greetings as addressed to the Party of the working class who bore me and reared me in its own image and likeness.’” On this rhetoric Radzinsky comments: “The use of biblical language—‘in its own image and likeness’—was deliberate. So was the statement that he was born not of woman, but of The Party. As he became tsar he resolved also to become a god. A Bolshevik Trinity, a triune godhead was emerging. Marx, Lenin, and himself. Gods of the earth.”[18]
The 1930s
Robert Service notes: “The destruction continued through the 1930s. Only one in forty churches was functioning as such by the decade’s end; the others had been reduced to rubble or recommissioned for secular functions. . . .” As another graphic and highly public symbolic repurposing, Service points out that: “The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was blown up; the plan was to use the site for the construction of the world’s tallest building, which would house a Palace of Soviets with a massive statue of Lenin on its roof.”[19]
Efforts to co-opt the youth into the cult of Stalinism involved continuous anti-religious propaganda. The League of the Militant Godless, just to mention one organization targeting the minds of Russian youth, ramped up its literary production during this period. They published 12 million pages of anti-religious literature in 1927, but this number grew to 800 million pages in 1930. By 1941 some 67 books and brochures were printed and their circulation reached 3.5 million copies.[20]
Despite such efforts, however, Stalin’s popularity was sporadic at best. In agrarian and rural regions “hatred of Stalin was visceral.” Upon the starvation resulting from collectivized agriculture, this is hardly surprising. “He had identified himself so closely with agricultural collectivization that he could not easily dissociate himself from its horrors. And in the towns there were millions of inhabitants who had no reason whatsoever to regard the period of his rule with affection,” Service adds. Relief from social conditions was hard to find for the peasantry. Yet “religious belief remained a solace for most people. In the USSR census of 1937, fifty-seven per cent of the population disclosed that they were believers—and the real percentage was probably a lot greater in view of the state’s aggressive promotion of atheism.”[21]
In the 1930s, attacks on religion reached such a fevered pitch that even members of a major official organization created to eradicate religion found the resulting persecutions to be over-zealous. Historian Shiela Fitzpatrick writes of the League of the Militant Godless: “The League of the Godless . . . had little to do with starting the antireligious movement. While its leaders were in some ways exhilarated by seeing a mass movement take off so unexpectedly, they were also alarmed.” It seems another group was seeking to outdo the Militant League of the Godless in militancy and godlessness! “At the end of January (1930), the leaders were already expressing concern at the lack of preparation and tact shown in the closing of churches and taking down of church bells, the adverse impact on tempos of collectivization, and, of course, the fact that it was all happening without the league. . . .” At a meeting of the organization in March, 1930, one leader stated “’ . . . the closing of churches and the taking down of churchbells happened without any participation of the League of the Militant Godless.’”[22] By contrast, Pospielovsky has noted that, at least in the 1920s, the League was trying to foment more anti-religious action on the part of communist youth organizations.[23] Perhaps they were overly successful in that endeavor.
Per Fitzpatrick, by the 1930s the most egregious anti-religious actions were in fact taken by the Union of Communist Youth. Parallels with the more famous German group known as the Hitler Youth, arising in the same decade, of course come readily to mind. Two brothers in this communist youth organization, Vasilii and Sergei Smirnov, became especially notorious. They broke into a small village church, went into the basement, disinterred the wife of a former estate-owner, stood the corpse up, and poked the body with a stick. They then organized a dance at the church building for the local youth, seized church valuables, and dressed horses up in religious regalia such as vestments and crowns. The Union of Communist Youth burned icons in the public squares of villages, and in one instance “took the icons to a local fair and set up a mock execution, shooting at the icons and then hanging labels on them,” announcing the alleged offenses for which the saints were being posthumously executed.[24]
The village faithful resisted these desecrations to the degree they could, by various forms of protest, including passive resistance, such as refusing to sow seed for the upcoming crop under collectivization. The drive toward collectivization begun in 1930 led to three years of struggle between peasants and the state. Still, “by the end of 1932, peasant agriculture was more than 60 percent collectivized—and the grain-producing areas of the country were on the verge of a famine that marked the climax of the struggle over collectivization.”[25]
Stalin did not publicly decry these antireligious actions, but did at least complain about the revolutionary action of taking down church bells. The unpopularity of such acts led the Central Committee finally to condemn “the forcible closing of churches without the consent of the population” on the grounds that such fomented counter-revolutionary fervor.[26]
In general, Stalin regarded attacks on religion as ultimately successful, and with some reason. As Fitzpatrick has catalogued, “At least half the churches that had been working at the end of 1929 were closed by 1933,” by the estimate of one Western observer. Ministers of religion declined in number from 79,000 in 1926 to 31,000 in 1937. While Soviet policy was to ban priests and even their children from participation in the collective farms, at the local level this was only sporadically enforced. Some villages made the priest a full member, others placed them in positions of honor, still others sought them out for loans to make payroll. These efforts at easing persecution were accentuated by the Constitution of 1936 that “guaranteed freedom of religion and restored civil rights to priests.”[27]
Alas, the resurgence of religion led to a predictable crackdown in 1937 when religious activism began to effect local elections. The mutual fears of government and governed led to even more strident reactions. “Wandering holy men and women distributed mysterious ‘letters from Heaven’ and ‘letters from Jerusalem’ warning of the coming apocalypse.” Peripatetic monks began to foretell the end of the world, as well as the rise of the Antichrist, and to urge believers to avoid all interaction with the state.[28]
The 1940s
During Adolf Hitler’s WW2 assault on Russia in 1942, Stalin seemed briefly to reconsider his anti-religious ways. Perhaps this was a geopolitical variant of the old saying “There are no atheists in foxholes,” a cliché coined in a war context. “On his orders many priests were brought back from the camps.” Even public displays of piety were allowed or encouraged. For example, “in Leningrad, besieged by the Germans and gradually dying of hunger, the inhabitants were astounded, and uplifted, to see the wonder-working icon of Our Lady of Kazan brought out into the streets and borne in procession. From Leningrad the icon went to Moscow, and was then sent to besieged Stalingrad.” This had been a symbol mocked and removed from public view the previous decade by atheist communist zealots. “It was displayed in each of the three great cities which had not surrendered to the enemy. Twenty thousand churches were re-opened, including those of the Monastery of the Trinity and St. Sergius, and the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev. He and his generals sent troops into battle with the words ‘God go with you.’”[29]
Stalin’s rapprochement with Orthodoxy in 1942 led to some patently absurd developments. For example, not only were church properties to be restored, but permission was granted to print the Bible. Yet this procedure was decidedly Stalinesque when famed dramatist Nikolai Virta (1906-1976) was paid 500,000 rubles by church authorities to screen the sacred writ, and in 1943 proclaimed “both the Old and New Testaments to be completely in accord with party ideology.”[30]
Any opening toward tolerance of religion was short-lived. In September of 1944, the Central Committee promulgated more “scientific-educational propaganda” against religious beliefs. These attacks were mostly verbal, and only rarely reprised the overt violence seen in the 1930s. Still, 1947 evinced an intensification of anti-religious propaganda. The Young Communist League demanded that education take not merely a non-religious, but an actively anti-religious form. Over the ensuing three years numerous articles appeared castigating “the pernicious influences of . . . idealism, mysticism, and clericalism . . . widespread in the contemporary bourgeois natural sciences.”[31]
The 1950s
Stalin died in 1953, so this section will necessarily be short. However, The All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge (Znanie, or “Knowledge” for short) was founded in 1947, but hit its full stride in the 1950s. By 1950 it claimed 243,000 individuals and 1800 institutions in its membership. It was in this same year that the USSR Academy of Science published the first issue of its atheistic periodical Voporosy istorii religii I ateizma. Underlying this increased anti-religious publishing activity was the very conviction that “religion would not wither away on its own, therefore antireligious activity and propaganda should be stepped up.”[32]
Shortly after Stalin’s death Krushchev lurched back and forth between attempts to distance himself from and efforts to embrace the cult of Stalin. January of 1957 represented one deeply ironic moment of embrace. At the Chinese Embassy located in Moscow, Krushchev toasted Stalin and in what might be called a moment of prayer as he asked: “God grant that every communist will fight for the interests of the working class as Stalin did.” One might imagine the millions of the working class starved under Stalin’s policies offering a contrary view when invoking the deity. Such rhetoric also contradicted more official pronouncements and actions distancing the regime from the cult of Stalinism after his death, culminating with the removal of Stalin’s body from its place next to that of Lenin in 1961.[33]
By the end of the decade, “atheist propagandists had to acknowledge the uncanny affinities between evangelical groups and the Soviet apparatus.” A seminar participant in Moscow noted the following Baptist activities that soviets could employ. Such shared features included organized outings, sermons on everyday life and morals, mutual aid funds, distribution of hand-written flyers, and placing such in mailboxes.[34] For an ideology that purported to hate religion, Stalinism demonstrated numerous earmarks of that very approach its official dogmatic pronouncements sought to discredit and decry.
Conclusion
This essay is very preliminary in character, and only scratches the surface of the many ways communist ideology functioned as a secular religion. Encouragingly, there is much effort in the literature in the early twenty-first century to investigate this multi-layered historical phenomenon.[35] In one recent cogent analysis of Soviet secularism, the following observation accords well with my argument: “The state here seems to take the place of God, equally sacralized and lifted out of the realm of human questioning. Such structural similarities between religious and secular efforts to provide people with a transcendent purpose were painfully apparent to atheist strategists” by the post-Stalin era.[36] On the point of removal of ideas from the realm of human questioning, the Stalinist approach was actually far more draconian and restrictive than traditional religion, as a perusal of the Book of Job in the Old Testament can amply testify. Religious complaints to God permeate the sacred writ in ways Stalin would never have dared to allow. His dogmas were never to be questioned by his underlings, with dire consequences for non-conformity.
Indeed, this period of history is saturated with paradoxical elements. An atheistic religion that devolved into a cult of personality is perhaps an anomaly. On the other hand, “ye shall be as gods” is a temptation as old as humanity itself. If religion can be defined in such a way that the supernatural order is not the defining or essential ingredient in a religious ethos, then Stalinism, with its cult, creeds, dogmas, rituals, worshipped Leader, intolerance of heretics, and persecution of other religions, bears many of the earmarks of old-fashioned religion. Tragically, such features represented religion at its worst.[37]
Notes
[1] Online at: https://voegelinview.com/author/dennis-durst/.
[2] Erik van Ree, “Stalinist Ritual and Belief System: Reflections on ‘Political Religion,’” Politics, Religion and Ideology 17 (September, 2016), 143. While the faith-evidence aspect of the argument is outside the scope of this paper, van Ree’s claim that religions operate on faith alone without appeals to evidence is simply wrong, and ignores the vast literature of Christian apologetics, which appeals to all kinds of evidence as part of the grounding of various specified beliefs. Thus the alleged scientific or evidentiary consciousness of Stalin is not uniquely the province of the non-religious or anti-religious.
[3] Ibid., 143-4.
[4] For a deep dive into theories of religion, including definitional debates, see Richard King, ed., Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Methodologies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), passim.
[5] Ilya Somin, “Atheists and Secular Humanists are protected by the First Amendment regardless of whether their belief systems are “religions” or not,” Washington Post (November 19, 2014), online at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/11/19/atheists-and-secular-humanists-are-protected-by-the-constitution-regardless-of-whether-their-belief-systems-should-be-considered-religions-or-not/, accessed July 12, 2021. For an atheist account vigorously defending religion without God, see Ray Billington, Religion without God (New York: Routledge, 2002), 11-17, 91-108.
[6] Van Ree, 156.
[7] Van Ree, 155.
[8] Van Ree, 161. Yet oddly the fear or reverence evoked by Stalin led even those bound for execution to continue to express faith in him while in prison.
[9] On the notion of a closed universe, See James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, 6th ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2020), 59-61.
[10] James McBride, “Paul Tillich and the Supreme Court: Tillich’s ‘ultimate concern’ as a standard in judicial interpretation,” Journal of Church and State 30 (1988), 245-272.
[11] Dmitri Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire: The Seven Leaders who Built the Soviet Regime, edited and translated by Harold Shukman (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 84.
[12] Service, History, 203.
[13] Volkogonov, 95.
[14] Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin: The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 31-56; cf. Sarah Davies, Stalin: A New History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 31-7.
[15] Dimitry V. Pospielovsky, A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Antireligious Policies (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 45.
[16] Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin: The First In-Depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia’s Secret Archives, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 244-5.
[17] Pospielovsky, 46.
[18] Radzinsky, 245.
[19] Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 204.
[20] Pospielovsky, 62.
[21] Service, 250.
[22] Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 60. Details of the history of the League of the Militant Godless between 1922 and 1941 may be gleaned from Pospielovsky, 49-68.
[23] Pospielovsky, 54-7.
[24] Fitzpatrick, 60-61.
[25] Fitzpatrick, 62.
[26] Fitzpatrick, 63.
[27] Fitzpatrick, 211-13.
[28] Fitzpatrick, 214.
[29] Radzinsky, 473.
[30] Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and those who Killed for Him (New York: Random House, 2004), 418.
[31] Pospielovsky, 70.
[32] Pospielovsky, 71-72.
[33] Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-1970, 97; cf. 1.
[34] Sonja Luehrmann, Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in the Volga Republic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 189.
[35] See Marcin Kula, “Communism as Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6 (December, 2005), 371-81; Matthew Feldman, “A Case Study in Soviet Political Religion: Modernism, The USSR in Construction, and Stalin’s Russia,” Religion Compass 5 (2011), 685-97; and Klaus-Georg Riegel, “Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6 (2005), 97-126.
[36] Luehrmann, Secularism Soviet Style, 3.
[37] For both textual and visual evidence of the iconographical presentations of both Lenin and Stalin as cultic figures, see Anita Pisch, The Personality Cult of Stalin in Soviet Posters, 1929-1953: Archetypes, Inventions & Fabrications (Acton, Australia: Austrian National University Press, 2016), 87-189; cf. David Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror Under Stalin, 1927-1941 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 51-66.
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