The Godless Five-Year Plan
The Soviet war on God had an office, a budget, and a deadline.
The first atheist state set itself a deadline to finish God by 1937. It missed by 55 million believers, then shot the men who counted them.
They set out to close heaven, and they put a date on it.
Rome persecuted the faith for three hundred years and never once thought to abolish God. It only wanted the Christians to add the emperor to the gods they already kept. What the Bolsheviks tried was new in the history of the world. They were the first state ever to write unbelief into the founding of a country and then go to work on God the way a ministry goes to work on illiteracy, with an office, a budget, and a deadline.
The office was the League of the Militant Godless, millions of members, its own presses, its own museums set up inside the emptied cathedrals. The deadline was written down. By 1937 no working house of prayer was to be left in the Soviet Union, and the idea of God gone from the mind of the people.
Then they went and did it to human beings, one town at a time.
Shuya
In the spring of 1922, with the country starving along the Volga, the state announced it would take the gold and silver out of the churches to feed the hungry. In the textile town of Shuya, the parish offered to raise the full value in cash and keep only the vessels their hands touched at the altar. The state said no. It did not want the money. It wanted the cup.
When the commission came and the town would not move, a man climbed into the bell tower and rang it, and the people came across the snow toward the sound, the bell they had answered their whole lives. The soldiers fired into them. Among the dead was a young woman named Anastasia.
That was the template, and they ran it for fifteen years. The men who had stood at the front in Shuya, the priests Pavel Svetozarov and Ioann Rozhdestvensky and a layman named Pyotr Yazykov, were tried and shot that May. By summer the same machine had reached the Metropolitan of Petrograd and shot him too. Roughly forty thousand churches were closed and stripped and handed over for granaries and clubs and museums of atheism, the cross pulled down while the people who had prayed under it watched. The bells came off the towers and went into the smelters. The clergy were counted as enemies of the people and killed in numbers the state took care never to add up honestly, tens of thousands rising into the hundreds of thousands, the true figure built to be unknowable.
Nobody at the top hated God. The machine does not hate. It removes what it cannot govern, and a church answers to an authority the state cannot buy or jail or replace. That is the one thing it cannot allow, so that is the thing it puts on the schedule. The same administration has run the same move in every century it ever got loose in, wearing whatever coat the age was handing out. But it does not run itself. It is older than the state and older than the men who serve it, older than the name of any people who ever hosted it, and across every century the only thing that changes is the coat. The hand never does.
The Light
On a frozen island in the White Sea, the state made its first prison camp out of a monastery five centuries old. By 1934 the most remarkable mind in Russia was inside it. Pavel Florensky, priest and mathematician and electrical engineer, had gone on wearing his cassock to his work at the state electrification board until they came for him. At the camp they set him to drawing iodine out of seaweed, because the mind was useful and they meant to use it and then shoot him.
He wrote letters home to his children. He described the northern lights with the precision of an instrument, the exact color of the lowest band, the green breaking into a fringe of orange, the sea freezing into discs the size of a good pancake. A censor read every letter and stamped it through, because a censor reads the lines, and what Florensky was saying lived in the space between them. On the page the word God was forbidden, so he wrote the light instead, exactly, and the censor passed it on. To his wife, from the camp, he wrote: do not lose heart.
They shot him in December of 1937. His family was told he had died of natural causes, years after the fact, and for a long time they wrote letters to a man already dead. What got out were the letters, the light on the sea set down so precisely that his son, reading them as an old man, could hear what his father had buried in the weather.
1937
The plan had a year on it, and the year came.
In January of 1937, with the deadline due, the state took a census, and Stalin had a question about belief put on it, because the time had come to measure the victory. Twenty years of work. Forty thousand churches closed, the clergy in the ground or the camps, a whole generation raised from the cradle to know there was nothing above them and no one listening.
Fifty-five million people wrote down that they believed anyway.
Fifty-six percent of everyone old enough to be asked. A majority of the country, on the exact deadline set for the end of God, looked the most powerful machine on earth in the eye and said the thing was still there. The state had spent twenty years, an organization of millions, and the lives of its own priests, and more than half its people had never gotten the message, because the message was never theirs to receive. It was under them, where the plan could not reach.
What the regime did next is the rest of the story. It did not publish the count. It declared the census defective, sealed it, and arrested the men who had taken it. The head of the census board was shot. The statisticians under him were shot. They killed the people who had written the number down, because the number was the one casualty report the machine could not survive. Two years later they ran the census again with no question about God on it, and never asked again.
The Soviet Union is gone now. The League of the Militant Godless dissolved and was forgotten, and the bells are ringing again over the water where the camp used to be. The most total war on God a state has ever waged was fought all the way to its own deadline and lost.
That is the smaller half of the story. The larger half is that it was waged at all. Serious men, with an office and a budget and a date, set out to end God in a Christian country that was sure it could never happen there, and they got twenty years and a generation and forty thousand churches before the thing they were hunting turned up alive in their own census. The machine did not lose because it was weak. It lost because there was one thing in those people it was never built to reach.
It is the same machine. It never died. It only changes its coat, and it is wearing a new one now.
So the dead are worth keeping. Anastasia at the foot of her bell tower. Florensky writing the color of the light because they had taken the word. The men shot for counting the believers. The West was never taught their names. The week we turn two hundred and fifty is a good week to learn them.
<3EKO
Within a single generation, an American senator stood up and said the same machine had crossed the ocean and was already inside his own government.
They burned his name so completely we still use “McCarthyism” to mean a witch-hunt. I wrote a book on what he found, and why they needed him gone.
Rather have it on your shelf in paperback?
If you want me to keep going, you can always buy me a coffee.
Thank you for reading.
I love you.
Previously…
McCarthy’s List
On Tuesday a slate of Democratic Socialists swept the New York primaries. POTUS called them Communists. My algorithm on X was full of the same sentiment: we owe Joe McCarthy an apology. And they’re right.
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