Soviet Fear of Religion 1929
GOD AGAINST MARX—that is the great duel going on in Russia to-day, for it is the fear of religious success, Paul Hutchinson tells us, in effect, that has driven the Soviet State to inaugurate a reign of terror to eradicate the last vestige of vital religion from Russian life.
Mr. Hutchinson, who is managing editor of The Christian Century (Undenominational), had just come out of Russia, and was in Warsaw, Poland, when he penned a letter to his magazine to tell what he had observed in “two crowded weeks” in Russia. He is afraid to mention names or places or dates, for he had been warned that any specific refer-ence would be tantamount to signing the death-warrant of those immediately concerned. But he tells his readers that they must take his word for it that he has personal knowledge “that the Soviet Government is to-day closing churches wholesale; sending hundreds and probably thousands, of persons to jail for the sole crime of religious activity; reverting to the old G. P. U. (secret police) terror, under which persons are arrested, tried and sentenced without public trial, the employment of counsel, and frequently without letting even the families of the accused know where they are confined or with what they are charged.” Why this terrific assault on religion? As Mr. Hutchinson sees it:
“In the first place, the Soviet Government has been astonished, and badly frightened, by the success of the reforming religious movements in Russia. This has been particularly true of the Protestants. Numerically, Protestants are still lost in the Russian mass. But the rate of growth in recent years has been phenomenal. In the past two years this growth had begun to reach respectable figures—figures in the millions. If this rate had been maintained for another five years, the Protestant constituency would have been numbered in the tens of millions. A government committed to the establishment of an atheistic nation could not regard such an outlook cheerfully.
“In the second place, the Government has been aroused by the success of the Protestant churches in organizing the young people. It was asserted by Bukharin at the last convention of the Communist party that the membership of Protestant young people’s societies had passed that of the Comsomols—the ‘teen age organization of Communists—and that the rate of growth was much more rapid. There was probably some exaggeration in this, in an effort to secure party action forcing governmental suppression of the church societies, such as followed. But it is undoubtedly true that the young people’s societies of the churches were growing at such a rate as to excite the apprehension of the Communists, who place their hopes for a communized Russia so entirely in the coming generations.”
Christians in America can do nothing to help their brethren in Russia, thinks Mr. Hutchinson, because the Soviet Government is under a mental war strain, believing that the rest of the world is in combination to crush it. Recognition, he believes, would relieve this strain, and he writes:
“Once this strain is eased, the Government will feel less necessary the stern repression of certain elements. Out of that might quickly come a lessening of the drive against religion. But that is all something that might come to pass, and in a future that I fear is still remote.
“In the meantime, gentle women and noble men—Orthodox, Protestants, Zionists, and of many other groups—are being sent by the hundreds, perhaps by the thousands, to the loneliness of exile in Siberia, in central Asia, in the Caucasus, because they have dared to preach or profess a religion that you and I take too much for granted.”
 Source: The Literary Digest for October 5, 1929
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