Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

The Bolsheviks, under the leadership of Lenin, had seized power. Marx’s chosen people, the industrial proletariat, had been brought to the promised land: a communist Russia. Those unworthy to live in such a paradise – be they members of the royal family or peasants with a couple of cows – had been slated for elimination. So too had the Church. Even though Lenin himself had havered, fretting that it might prove counter-productive to offend believers, the demands of revolutionary logic had proven remorseless. ‘In practice, no less than in theory, communism is incompatible with religious faith.’21 The clergy had to go. In 1918, their churches had been nationalised. Bishops had been variously shot, crucified upside down, or imprisoned. Then, in 1926, the conversion of a particularly venerable monastery into a labour camp had enabled two birds to be killed with one stone. Still the process of weaning the masses off their opium had appeared to many communists to be grinding far too slow. Accordingly, in 1929, responsibility for religious affairs had been given to an organisation that did precisely what it said on the tin: the League of Militant Atheists. Their stated goal it was to eliminate religion once and for all. Five years, they trusted, would prove sufficient for the task. Organising themselves into missions, they set to work. Entire trains were commandeered. In the remote reaches of Siberia, where Christianity had only patchily spread, shamans were thrown out of planes a...