Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (review)

Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless. By Daniel Peris (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998) 237 pp. $39.95.

In this engaging, succinct, and cogent monograph, Peris investigates the League of the Godless, a nominally voluntary organization founded by the Bolsheviks in 1925 in order to transform "Holy Russia into an atheistic Soviet Union" (1). The mission of the League, which became "Militant" in 1929 and was defunct by 1941, was not so much to suppress religion as to supplant religion with godlessness, that is, atheism. Peris focuses on the League's institutional history and its propaganda efforts; he situates his discussion in the broader context of secularization efforts in modern Europe (particularly revolutionary France) and in Mexico during the 1930s. Acknowledging that "the secularization thesis has come under fire," Peris nevertheless maintains that "the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent reconfiguration of Russian society surely count as one of the great clashes of 'modernity' and religion in European history" (5). Ultimately, Peris is interested in using the story of the League's shortcomings and failures to illuminate the tenor of Bolshevik political culture and the consequent ineffectiveness of Bolshevik efforts to remake Russian society.

Eschewing the tendency in Soviet studies to focus on the policymaking center at the expense of the periphery, Peris examines not only the League's central organization in Moscow but also two provincial organizations, that of Iaroslav' (an industrialized province northeast of Moscow with high literacy rates and, at the turn of the century, 841 parishes and more than 1,500 Orthodox churches) and Pskov (a rural backwater southwest of St. Petersburg with very low literacy rates and 361 parishes and more than 500 churches). The first four chapters of the book focus on the center. They discuss the regime's fluctuating policies toward religion, the League's creation and purpose, its antireligious and pro-atheist propaganda, dissension within the League about how best to vanquish Orthodoxy, and the circumstances that thwarted atheism's expected triumph over religion. The next three chapters focus on the periphery. They investigate League organization and activities in Iaroslav' and Pskov, as well as these organizations' relationships with the central League apparatus.

Peris finds that despite membership levels that at times appeared impressively high, neither Iaroslav' nor Pskov was able to maintain a network of vigorous cells or even an active membership base. As a consequence, neither was consistently able to accomplish the tasks that emanated from the center. Peris argues that an insufficient supply of capable cadres and the multitude of high-priority tasks made the center's demands unrealistic. He also maintains that these demands, together with the provincial League organizations' attempts to fulfill them and to ward off criticism, were part of a political culture that impeded--indeed, prevented--the achievement of the League's ostensive objective of promoting atheism.

One of the most interesting aspects of Peris' book is his analysis of Bolshevik political culture as revealed by bureaucratic relationships within the League, and between the League and the Party. While the bureaucratization of the Bolshevik Party/state is a well-known leitmotif in Soviet history, Peris gives the theme a new twist. As he points out, Soviet Russia's burgeoning bureaucracy "is usually understood to have overwhelmed the 'people'," whereas he is interested in "relations among bureaucratic institutions" (151).

Peris focuses on "the Bolsheviks' bureaucratic manner of envisioning, executing, and measuring social change," in which, he says, at "a certain point the numbers became . . . an end in themselves" (226). In order to fulfill their institutional responsibilities, the higher strata of the League--like the higher strata of most, if not all, other Soviet and party organizations--routinely directed subordinate strata to achieve a wide range and great number of goals, which the lower-level strata were patently unable to accomplish. In response, the lower-level strata attempted to shield themselves from criticism...