Soviet man in search of morality.
November marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Red revolution in Russia. The parades, speeches, and the rumble of rocket launchers around Red Square all celebrate the birthday of the U.S.S.R. and the new communist age confidently established by Lenin in 1917.
How stands the Gospel of Marx in the Soviet Union today? Derek Sangster, editor of the British gospel paper “Challenge,” interviewed Anatoli Krasnov-Levitin, an influential figure in the movement for human rights in the Soviet Union who is particularly noted for his influence on young people. Mr. Krasnov-Levitin now lives in Switzerland but keeps in close touch with his homeland. Here he talks about the changing face of the Soviet Union today.
At first sight, Marxism-Leninism seems triumphant in the Soviet Union. The truths of Marxism are drummed into young people in every school, institute, and university. Generations of people have known nothing but Marxism-Leninism. And this ideology is probably going to influence millions of people for a long time yet.
However, if we look deeper, things aren’t going as well for Marxism-Leninism as they might seem.
When 1 was young, the majority of young people raved about Marx and Engels and knew their works almost by heart. It was like this up and down the country, from Moscow and Leningrad to the remotest villages. Old people treated all this with skepticism, sighed for the czarist order, and went to church.
Now the roles are reversed. The ardent Marxists and adherents of Soviet ideology are old-age pensioners. Young people laugh and tell jokes about Lenin, and some of them turn to the church.
An acquaintance of mine in Moscow—previously an important Soviet diplomat and a prominent KGB worker (quite a common combination, by the way)—complained to me about his son. “I only want to pass on to him a few names like those of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but he doesn’t even want to hear about them.”
Another lad, also the son of a KGB worker, wandered into a church by chance and was so impressed that he was baptized. He later delivered a sermon about Christ at the district conference of the Young Communist League in the Dzerzhinsk district of Moscow. As a result, he was dismissed from the Young Communist League and expelled from school. He was also thrown out of his home—by his mother. “I don’t need religious fanatics here,” she said.
Even the Communists and KGB workers don’t take Marxism very seriously.
In 1973, when I was in a labor camp for the last time, there was a lad there who had been sent to prison for hooliganism. He dreamed of becoming a doctor and asked advice from the local doctor about this. The doctor said, “To get in, you’ve got to pass in Russian language, maths, biology, and, well, recitation.”
Bewildered, the boy asked me, “What’s this ‘recitation’? And why do you need it in medical school?”
I smiled. “Recitation” is the students’ name for Marxism-Leninism, which is taught in all institutes.
The position of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union today is reminiscent of the position of the Russian Orthodox Church in czarist days. Then Orthodoxy was the official ideology. Every person born of Russian parents was considered an Orthodox Christian, and God’s law was taught in all secondary schools. Even Lenin had to marry in church and before that to go to confession and take communion.
As a result there came about a certain haziness: It was impossible to tell who was really Orthodox and who was Orthodox only according to his passport. And Orthodoxy lost all authority among the intellectuals, who were simply too embarrassed to go to church lest they be taken for bootlickers and the government agents.
In the same way, it is now awkward in respectable intellectual society to let it be known that you are a supporter of Marx and Lenin. If you identify yourself that way in a group of people they will exchange looks and fall silent. And the thought will flash through everyone’s mind, “He might be a KGB agent.” In the Soviet Union today, the younger, the cleverer, the more politically honest you are, the further you are from the authorities and the official ideology of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
Is this success or failure? And would Marx, Engels, and Lenin be pleased with it?
There is indeed a noticeable thirst for religion nowadays among Soviet citizens, mainly among young people. What most attracts young people to faith in God is the need they feel for moral renewal, their thirst for truth and justice. This is the main thing that Christianity can offer man now.
A student at one of the institutes, active in the Young Communist League and a member of the YCL Committee, returned home after a YCL meeting. He had a feeling of disgust. At the meeting there had been lies, intrigues, and vile bureaucratic phraseology that no one believed.
Suddenly he remembered seeing a little book, a gospel, that his parents had owned. By the time he finished reading it, he was already a Christian. Here he found what the Young Communist League could not give him: truth.
That was ten years ago. Now he has a family and is an outstanding specialist in his field. He will remain a believing Christian all his life.
Soviet man is now deeply disillusioned because Soviet ideology has deceived him. Hoping to find truth and justice, he has found instead lies, oppression, universal slavery. He is searching for truth. And in the course of this search many turn to Christ and find in him the truth they are seeking.
Furthermore, the Soviet system has poisoned human relations. One seems to see in everyone a KGB agent, an informer, a betrayer—if not actually, then potentially. There is no faith in human nature. The Russian writer Anatoly Kuznetsov now living in London tells in his book Babi Yar how even his own mother began to suspect he was a KGB agent after he had talked to her about politics.
The great Russian poet Boris Pasternak speaks about this in these words:
I have long ceased to be faithful to everyone
whom I once confided in.
I lost man right from the time when he was
lost to everyone.
In Christianity, Soviet man is seeking for this lost man. He is seeking and finding. That man is the Son of Man and the Son of God, Jesus Christ.
Soviet man is further alienated from Marxist philosophy by the utter inability to answer the eternal nagging questions: From where and how did the universe come into existence? What is the purpose of man? Marx’s well-known words, “Philosophy has explained the world; it is a question of changing it,” were, if I am not mistaken, parodied by Bernard Shaw in this way: “Being unable to explain the world, Marx decided to change it.” This lack of answers to the important questions forces Soviet young people to look for explanations in philosophy and religion.
Chronology
Krasnov Levitin
21 September 1915 Born in the town of Baku in the Azerbaidzhani Republic, on the shore of the Caspian Sea. His father, Emmanuil Ilich Levitin, was a Justice of the Peace.
1920s The family lived in Leningrad. His father was now an official of the Supreme Soviet of the People’s Economy.
24 April 1934 First imprisonment. Investigation after a denunciation led to his arrest by the secret police (GPU).
1935 Graduated from teacher-training college and worked as a teacher of Russian literature.
1935–40 While working as a teacher, graduated from the evening class of the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute.
1940s Postgraduate course at the State Scientific Institute of Theatre and Music.
1941 Took part in the defense of Leningrad, but was demobilized because of illness.
1942 Evacuated. Ordained deacon in Ulyanovsk by Metropolitan A. Vvedensky of the “Living Church.”
1944 Joined the Orthodox Church as a layman. Senior lecturer in the Central Asian University. After returning to Moscow wrote a dissertation “Belinsky and the Theatre.”
8 June 1949 Second imprisonment. Sentenced after a denunciation to ten years imprisonment.
1956 Rehabilitated. Taught Russian literature in schools. Began to write articles for the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate.
1958 Began to distribute his articles in samizdat (literally “self-publishing,” and referring to poems, essays, stories, and so on, that are passed from hand to hand to evade censorship). Dismissed from his teaching post.
1960s Wrote many samizdat articles on church and society and was active in the Democratic Movement.
12 September 1969 Third imprisonment. Eleven months pretrial investigation in prisons in Moscow and southern Russia; released for lack of evidence.
December 1970 Investigation again on the same charges. Arrested. Sentenced to three years imprisonment.
May 1973 Released. Continued writing in samizdat and activity in the Democratic Movement.
20 September 1974 Emigrated from the Soviet Union and settled in Lucerne, Switzerland.
As a religious person I believe we must insist on truth in all things, and there are at present two views of the U.S.S.R. that are in my opinion quite wrong.
The first is that Marx and Engels are absolute bearers of the truth, some sort of prophets. I can only say that this is a kind of Marxist hysteria. The other misconception is that anything remotely connected with Marx and Engels is linked with labor camps and prisons. This point of view, too, savors of hysteria.
As I see it, socialism existed long before Marxism, and the Marxist stage in the history of socialism is already coming to an end. Some countries have avoided the Marxist stage altogether. This is a credit to them.
A number of Marxist tenets are correct, but to elevate Marxism to a universal system explaining world history is simply ludicrous. And it is no mere chance that history has disproved most of Marx’s prognoses. Were he alive now he would, as an honest scholar, renounce them.
But this is not the chief flaw of Marxism. Its chief flaw is that it tries to link an epicurean, materialist philosophy with true socialism—socialism that is wholly based on selflessness, on mutual love, on altruism.
Our Russian philosopher Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovev parodies Marxist philosophy in the following way: “There is nothing in the world but matter, man is no more than an ape, we die and the weeds grow on our graves—so let everyone give up his soul for his friends.” The soul of man, according to Tertullian, is by nature Christian, and there are many noble people who reason more or less like this. Such inconsistency does them credit.
However, the majority of people reason: “If I am an ape, then I must live like an ape.” And that is why we see so horrifying a decline in morals in many countries where socialism has gained the upper hand. Atheism (and consequently Marxism) is a sickness of contemporary socialism. The true interest of world socialism requires that atheism be overcome.
D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.
