Talk: The Story of Soviet Atheizm

From the Russian Revolution in 1917 to Gorbachev’s glasnost, generations of Soviet illustrators waged satirical war on all religions — “the opium of the people” as Karl Marx had called them. But these images represented neither unfettered philosophical critique, nor the creative visions of independent-minded cartoonists. Their themes were dictated by the agenda of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and their purpose was to justify often-brutal Soviet anti-religious policies, from the mass repression the clergy and the destruction of historic temples to the hounding of religious minorities and the isolation of religious communities from the wider world.

Drawing on decades’ worth of anti-religious imagery from the new book Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda, author Roland Elliott Brown and multi-award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson — author of the book’s foreword and the creator of a humorous adaptation of Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto — will discuss the history of Soviet atheism, the evolution of Marxist-Leninist graphics, the ethics of cartooning, and modern-day cartoon controversies.

Roland Elliott Brown is the author of Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda with FUEL Publishing. His writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Spectator, IranWire, and The Moscow Times.

In English