Open year-round, the open-air “Moskva” pool was oblivious to the infamous Russian winter. The heated water, especially during snowfall, sent up waves of steam. Snow fell on the diving platforms, the pool ropes, and the brightly colored caps of the swimmers; some would have snowball fights with the still melting snow. My mother recalled how strange it was to experience the disassociation between the warm pool and the frigid outside, heightened as pedestrians dressed in fur coats and winter boots rushed past. But in fact, this pool had once been a magnificent, massive church whose empty foundation had been repurposed. The ‘sacrilegious swim’, as my mother would later call it, may best be explained by the Russian proverb: a sacred space is never empty. The church had been physically removed, but this had not been enough to overcome the uneasiness of swimming in what once was (and what still was for many) a ‘sacred’ space.
In this way, the Bolsheviks fundamentally misunderstood the religion of the masses in the Soviet Union. Communism was an ideology, but religion was a way of life. The failure to understand this resulted in an ineffective campaign to ‘convert’ the population to communism from religion. Few Communist leaders understood this the power of the Church — Leon Trotsky was one of them. He wrote
The workers’ relation to the church (I am speaking of the non-party mass worker) holds mostly by the thread of habit, the habit of women in particular. Icons still hang in the home because they are there. Icons decorate the walls; it would be bare without them; people would not be used to it. A worker will not trouble to buy new icons, but has not sufficient will to discard the old ones… As for church-going, the people do not go because they are religious; the church is brilliantly lighted, crowded with men and women in their best clothes, the singing is good — a range of, social-aesthetic attractions not provided by the factory, the family, or the workaday street. There is no faith or practically none. At any rate, there is no respect for the clergy or belief in the magic force of ritual. But there is no active will to break it all.1
For the Bolsheviks, subverting the influence of the Church was a crucial step for the revolution as secularization was “the precondition for birth of the new communist order.”2Consequently, communist doctrine failed to respond to the practice of religion in everyday life. Religiosity was viewed as ignorance and thus, was responded to as an educational problem. They believed that education would “lift the veil of superstition from the eyes of the masses and show them the light of reason,” but it was precisely this thinking that contributed to the failure of soviet atheism.3 Part of this effort of ideological conversion was the physical removal of religion from public view. In other words, the Bolsheviks believed that through the removal and destruction of sacred objects and places, they could banish religion to private life. However, this was demonstrative of an overly simplistic understanding of the depth of religious being. As the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (the site of the future Moskva Pool) — a “palimpsest of the Soviet war against religion”4 showed — a sacred space is never empty…
The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was first completed in 1883. Consecrated the same day Alexander III was crowned, it was destroyed in 1931 under orders of Josef Stalin, the empty foundation remaining until 1958 when it was then turned into a swimming pool until 1994. Then, it was rebuilt in 2003, adhering to the original 1883 design. Commissioned by Tsar Alexander I on December 25, 1812, the Cathedral aimed to at once to commemorate the divine intervention that clinched Russia’s victory over Napoleon and to act as a war memorial for those killed.5 The cathedral, as conceived by Alexander Vitberg (a Swedish, Russian-born architect) in a neoclassical style, would be built overlooking the Moscow River on the Sparrow Hills — the place from which Napoleon’s army had retreated.6 However, after the death of the more liberal Tsar Alexander I in 1825, the attitude towards art patronage changed with the succession of the highly reactionary Nicholas I, the emperor who “froze Russia for 30 years.”7 Nicholas I’s childhood, marred by a period of instability and wars against Napoleon, only strengthened his commitment to preserving sovereign power and thus, the Russian state.8 His “principal esthetic interests were art and architecture.”9 For him, it was Byzantium, not Vitberg’s neoclassicism that was the “purest form of absolute monarchy.”10 He labored to both create an “esthetic genealogy that would link the Russian state with Byzantium” and thus, to promote a national, unified style of architecture.11 In this way, the cathedral was also a demonstration of the power that “monumental forms perform[ed] … in defining and legitimizing… a particular version of national identity.”12 Along with moving the actual location of the Cathedral to the bank of the Moscow River, a few hundred meters away from the Kremlin (where it stands today), Nicholas hired Konstantin Ton — an ‘official’ architect of imperial Russia who was mostly known for government buildings — and fired Vitberg. Ton’s design combined a neoclassical structure with Russian-Byzantine design elements. This enhanced the Kremlin Palace’s neoclassical design, simultaneously offering a “juxtaposition of Western and Russian styles” while creating the link Nicholas I so desired between “the westernized monarchy and Russia’s distinctive past.”13 As we shall see, however, with the rise of the Bolshevik party to power in 1917, a stark reversal of the “Orthodox, Autocracy, and Nationality”14 policy of Nicholas’ regime occurred in all spheres of life, especially with regards to religious expression and its visibility.
In 1917, both pre- and post-revolution, disillusionment with tradition made the time ripe for the socialist utopia championed by the Bolsheviks. This socialist utopia included an atheistic moral doctrine that was not interchangeable with but rather taught alongside communist ideals. Scientific atheism — the official party term — was both a position of “the ultimate purpose of human existence, a moral code of conduct.”15 But, as Victoria Smolkin argues in A Sacred Space Is Never Empty, this was not a systemic approach nor coherent guideline that helped create the new world as much as an understanding of a ‘thing’ to be excluded when trying to preserve power.16 This is echoed in events following the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power as Lenin viewed the peasantry as too dull and dim-witted to actually assume the role of the revolutionary body. Religion was thus a political problem. The church was not only symbolic, but it was also wealthy — a dangerous combination the Bolsheviks foresaw as a “political weapon” that could stir “transform private religiosity into public action.”17 The Bolsheviks thus faced the Herculean task of not just spreading communist dogma to a people that they considered too backward and lacking “ideal discipline and class-consciousness”18 to understand it but also neutralizing the ideological grip of the Church over this group. In any case, religion had to go. The revolution could not happen “until religion was exorcized from the body politic”19 and until institutions were brought under state control to prevent contradictions within newly disseminating communist philosophy.
A number of decrees against the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) were issued. Despite the “Freedom of Conscience” law (July 14th, 1917), which stated “no one may be persecuted…for his convictions in matters of faith,” these legalities were misleading as to their true intentions. The “Freedom of Religious Conscience” decree (February 2, 1918), was simple enough, proclaiming that “[t]he church is hereby separated from the state.”20 This decree abolished subsidies from the government and all “local autonomous and self-governing institutions,” banned religious instruction in all “public and private educational establishments,” and declared church property “the property of the people.”21 This decree set the stage for what would come in August 1918, the ‘final’ cleavage of church and state. Actualizing the confiscation and nationalization of Church-held, profit-producing property and other ‘capital’, preventing the display of (and sequestering) any and all “articles offending the religious feelings of the labor masses,” and conclusively ending any religious instruction in non-theological institutions were all part of this effort.22 On February 26, 1922, a clear confiscation decree was issued. All the precious metals and stones in church possession “were ordered confiscated to provide means for the relief of the famine”23 but which actually provided the means to purchase “weapons, military supplies, and other essential materials” to finance the revolution.24 An article from the New York Tribune remarked that the valuables could not possibly “be turned to account for the relief of the famine districts” as every Russian port was “already clogged with grain imported from abroad.”25 By carrying out such a staged, public confiscation of church property, the Bolsheviks hoped to diminish the social standing and power of the Church. However, this did not undermine the church as deeply as the Bolsheviks had hoped.
On December 5, 1931, 7 years after Lenin’s death, 14 years after the November Revolution, and 9 years after the beginning of a fervent anti-religious campaign to promote communism as an ideology, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was demolished. Ordered by Secretary-General Joseph Stalin, the demolition “symbolized the victory of the communist ideology.”26 Korney Chukovsey, one of Russia’s most famous children’s poets, had paid witness to the demolition.
The day was sunny and frosty, with a silver and azure sky. The Number 10 tram took me not to Kamenny Bridge but to Zamoskvoretsky because the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was being blown up in the vicinity. A cannon shot three times, and five minutes later— no sooner— the bluish smoke so beautifully lit by the sun floated up. Boys with red noses (because of the frost) sitting on fences and heaps of earth and talking: “Look at the green light— it’s a signal.”27
Just as in previous instances of property confiscation, the building materials were repurposed in other projects — including for the Moscow Metro28 — and the empty foundation was planned to be turned into a massive Stalinist architectural project: the Palace of the Soviets; a tower topped with a massive statue of Lenin that would pay tribute to “Soviet dominance.”29 It is worth noting that the Palace of the Soviets was first intended to be built near Okhotny Ryad (‘Hunter’s Row’) — a location that offered several advantages such as low building density and proximity to the Red Square and Lenin’s Mausoleum.30 But the new location was chosen seemingly without any evidence that the “decision was made on the basis of feasibility” as “no studies had been conducted, no advance calculations made.”31 The reason for such a drastic change could only be symbolic. The determination of the Bolsheviks to construct an “edifice that would be… as grand… [and] symbolize the power and authority of the new Soviet order”32 was exacerbated by the very large, gaping crater where the Cathedral of Christ the Savior once stood. This empty foundation was a painful reminder of their inability to bring about ideological. The Palace of the Soviets, a place for the “proletariat in place of the palaces of its oppressors” represented a magnificent regime change from imperial autocracy to a “new world built on the ruins of the old.”33 The symbolic violence and destruction of this sacred space thus signaled the ‘successful’ replacement of religion with communist ideology.
However, the Palace of the Soviets was never built. Construction began in 1937 and was abandoned in 1941 when the Soviet Union entered World War II. What’s more, a religious revival had taken place despite the absence of ‘physical’ sacred space — and in an effort to maintain morale, the Church was “allowed limited reentry… into public life,” openly supporting the war effort to confirm its “political loyalty as well as its use to Soviet Power.”34 The spatial chasm where the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour had been remained until 1958 when the foundation was filled in and turned into the Moskva Pool. The new utopia had failed, and along with it, as a result of it, the pro-atheist campaign.
Failures of the Anti-Religious Campaign Despite an intense pro-atheism propaganda effort and the strict suppression of religious practices through spatial destruction, 56% of Russians identified as religious in a 1937 census.35 This is a surprisingly low number when considering the time, money, and resources directed towards the pro-atheist push. The drop in church attendance had been coerced by denying groups spaces to meet — in 1941, about 8% of churches that had functioned in 1914 were left36 — but this was an artificial suppression as it didn’t reflect true religious beliefs or practices. In other words, the ‘visible’ removal had done little to impact people’s religious identities, only forcing religious practice underground. This underground practice flourished as religious sects had “tactics to recruit and retain members under conditions of repression” — skills that had developed under the oppressive autocratic regimes.37
Scientific atheism was also a flawed doctrine, if one could even call it a doctrine. And communism was also unable to “sustain a viable political and economic system,” which contributed to its superstructural “inability to sustain committed believers.”38 Atheists’ unconvincing doctrine was the result of a basic misunderstanding of religious belief in every sense. Attempting to convince the ‘backward’ peasantry through logic and reason, they did not stop to think that the peasant did not think the existence of a tractor “translate[d] into a disproof of God.”39 Rather, the peasantry saw such things as gifts from God, despite the fact that this was scientifically inconceivable and irrational.40 Further, while atheists believed religion was ignorance, they “repeatedly demonstrated their own incapacity to address the most basic questions from their would-be converts”41 as most atheists had not bothered to read the bible. The “scientific proofs” they conjured did little to address the true meaning and intent of religious belief and ‘way of being’.
In conclusion, no fervent religiosity gripped the peasantry that made it so ignorant towards communism. Religion had been a stable ‘way of being’ for which there was no incentive to ‘give up.’ The failure to understand this resulted in a poorly coordinated pro-atheist campaign and misdirected energies in destroying sacred spaces, believing that the visible removal would be enough to convert the masses. The new structures would aesthetically and socially demonstrate the triumph of the Socialist state, just as the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour had unified the nation, but its destruction did not signify a new order.
1. Leon Trotsky, “Vodka, the Church, and the Cinema,” Pravda, July 12, 1923, http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1924-2/socialist-cinema/socialist-cinema-texts/trotsky-on-vodka-the-church-and-the-cinema/
2. Victoria Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 32.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid, p. 241.
5. Alexander Romanov, “The Royal Manifesto of Alexander I Announcing the End of the Patriotic War Issued,” January 6, 1831. https://www.prlib.ru/en/history/618922. ; Stephen Boss and Jeren Hakiyeva, “Moscow Cathedrals – the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour,” University of Wyoming, University Libraries, October 21, 2008, https://uwdigital.uwyo.edu/object/wyu2961.
6. Ekaterina Haskins, “Russia’s post-communist past: the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the reimagining of national identity,” History and Memory 21, no. 1 (2009). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A196229410/LitRC?u=mlin_b_bumml&sid=googleScholar&xid=a72f6748.
7. Ibid.
8. Nicholas Riasanovsky, “Nicholas I.” Encyclopedia Britannica, July 2, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nicholas-I-tsar-of-Russia.
9. Ibid.
10. Richard Wortman, “Cultural Metamorphoses of Imperial Myth under Catherine the Great and Nicholas I,” Visual Texts, Ceremonial Texts, Texts of Exploration: Collected Articles on the Representation of Russian Monarchy (2013), p. 136. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt21h4wkb.12.
11. Ibid, p. 136.
12. Haskins, “Russia’s post-communist past.”
13. Wortman, “Cultural Metamorphoses,” p. 139.
14. Riasanovsky, “Nicholas I.”
15. Paul Froese, “Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly Failed,” In Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2004), p. 35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1387772.
16. Smolkin, A Sacred Space, p. 22.
17. Smolkin, A Sacred Space, p. 28.
18. Kort, Michael. The Soviet Colossus: History and Aftermath. (London: Routledge, 2019), p. 127.
19. Smolkin, A Sacred Space,p. 26.
20. Vladimir Lenin, “Freedom of Religious Conscience,” February 2, 1918. http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/conflict-with-the-church/conflict-with-the-church-texts/decree-on-the-freedom-of-conscience-and-on-clerical-and-religious-societies/.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Pasvolsky, Lev. “Rulers of the Soviets Come to Grips with the Church in Russia.” New York Tribune, May 14, 1922, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1922-05-14/ed-1/seq-27/.
24. Kort, The Soviet Colossus, p. 147.
25. Pasvolsky, “Rulers of the Soviets.”
26. Haskins, “Russia’s post-communist past.”
27. Kornei Chukovskii, Dnevnik: 1930– 1969. cited in: Konstantin Akinsha, et al. The Holy Place: Architecture, Ideology, and History in Russia (Yale University Press, 2007), p. 122. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bu/detail.action?docID=3420486.
28. Smolkin, A Sacred Space, p. 242.
29. Alexandra Rogers, “Unbuilt Moscow: The ‘New Soviet’ City That Never Was – in Pictures.” The Guardian, March 8, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2017/mar/08/imagine-moscow-city-new-soviets-design-museum-in-pictures.
30. Sona Stephan Hoisington, “‘Ever Higher’: The Evolution of the Project for the Palace of Soviets,” Slavic Review, vol. 62, no. 1 (2003), p. 35. https://doi.org/10.2307/3090466.
31. Ibid, p. 46.
32. Ibid, p. 47.
33. Smolkin, A Sacred Space, p. 243.
34. Ibid, p. 50.
35. Zubovich, Gene. “Russia’s Journey from Orthodoxy to Atheism, and Back Again.” Religion & Politics, December 11, 2018. https://religionandpolitics.org/2018/10/16/russias-journey-from-orthodoxy-to-atheism-and-back-again/.
36. Froese, “Forced Secularization,” p. 48.
37. Smolkin, A Sacred Space, 39.
38. Ibid, p. 45.
39. Ibid, p. 46.
40. Froese, “Forced Secularization,” p. 46
41. Ibid.
1. Caroline Humphrey, “Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet Imagination,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11, no. 1 (2005), pp. 39–58, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3803988.
2. Dmitri Sidorov, “National Monumentalization and the Politics of Scale: The Resurrections of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 3 (2000), pp. 548–72, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1515528.
3. Roland Elliott Brown, Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda. (London: FUEL, 2019).
4. William B. Husband, Godless Communists: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia: 1917-1932. (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003).
5. Dimitry V. Pospielovsky, A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Antireligious Policies, 1. Vol. 1. 3 vols. (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).