Book no. 759. G.M. Livshits. Aspects of the History of Atheism in the USSR 1920-40. Minsk, Nauka i tekhnika, 1985, 216 pp.
Yes, I know… Both the title and uniform of this Soviet book are so forbidding that I am hardly surprised I never read it when I bought it (1986) and did not recognise it recently when cataloguing my Russian library for sale. But I am committed to reading, or at least looking into, every book I have never read in this library, before it goes.
Did I really buy this book even? Certainly, and I see now why: one or two references indicate that it was published in advance of the 1988 millennium of Russia’s conversion to Christianity. Although by then persona non grata in the USSR, I was intensely interested in this event, because there was a fight at the top of the Communist government about whether and how it should be celebrated, and friends of mine in the catacomb church (including Sam1 himself) had been arrested and interrogated by the KGB as part of a diehard campaign to head off a national commemoration. The fight could have gone either way, but actually went Gorbachev’s, who used it to enhance his popularity.
Very unusually, Livshits’s book proper (164 pages) is preceded by someone else’s Introduction a whole fifth as long, and followed by an unsigned afterword that is a warm tribute to Livshits (d. 1983) not just as a scholar, ‘an ardent propagandist and populariser of Marxist-Leninist doctrine on religion and atheism’, but ‘a lovely man’, ‘a good person’, and even ‘a caring father and loyal friend’. More extraordinary still, the book was published by Belorussia’s top non-fiction house, but in only 1690 copies! For a work of propaganda for state atheism in the build-up to the millenium of Russian Christianity this is bizarre — one would have expected about 100,000.
The book consists of six chapters, from ‘The origin of religion and its primitive forms’ through ‘Judaism: the early stages of its development’ and ‘A critical study of the Old Testament’ to ‘The origin of Christianity and its initial development’, ‘A critical study of the New Testament’, ‘Religion and church in the service of the exploiting classes’ and ‘The Communist attitude to religion’. On the face of it, Livshits has written a mere compilation from 154 published sources of the pronouncements on these subjects by forty authorities ranging from Lenin’s wife Krupskaia and narkom Lunacharskii to serious ethnographers, anthropologists, and the Soviet Richard Dawkins of the day, E.M. Iaroslavskii.
But you cannot read the book without feeling Livshits is doing it with a dedicated scrupulosity. Utterly unexpectedly, the total impression is of objectivity. Certain quoted Communist adherents to ‘scientific atheism’ contend that Christ was ‘a real historical person’; others ‘show’, or even ‘prove’, that he never existed. Every source is dated and referenced. A wealth of facts about religion from animism, totemism, fetishism and shamanism to the Egyptian gods, Judaism, Mithraism, Christ’s life, Christian churches, festivals and rituals, Russian non-conformist sects, Islam and Buddhism, is just presented and the action moves swiftly on in finessed sentences. So where is Livshits’s own position, what are his views? Of course we get ‘opium of the people’ arguments and the all-embracing assumption that Livshits is himself a Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialist scientific atheist…but is he? The very unusual sense of an objective author made me begin to wonder. After all, there is every bit of information in this book that a young Soviet person excluded by the established atheism from access to facts about Judaism and Christianity, say, could want! There are phrases here and there that it is very easy to overlook: it turns out, for example, that ‘the Russian believing masses’ (p. 190) exist and there is ‘boredom at anti-religious meetings’ (p. 192). Of course, Livshits’s approach is strictly historical. Spiritual, ethical and existential issues of believing are never mentioned. But could the open space that Livshits’s objectivity leaves at the heart of his book encourage the reader to make up their own mind about religion and even, perhaps, take his/her leap of faith as an individual? Was Livshits a believer even? Was this book printed in so few copies precisely because the authorities were afraid of its influence?
I asked Sam1 his view in a brief email. He said I could be right. In the USSR Livshits was one of only two people (both Jews) permitted to work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The other person, Iosif Amusin, was twice arrested under Stalin. Given that Livshits was Jewish, ‘it would be very difficult, almost unreal, to work on the ancient Qumran community near the Dead Sea and be indifferent to questions of faith’, for example Qumran’s connections with John the Baptist and early Christianity. It seems that Livshits’s work was attacked by militant Communists and on one occasion they succeeded in getting a book by him withdrawn. He was under threat during the postwar zhdanovshchina and the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ (i.e. antisemitic) campaign. The unsigned eulogy to him that follows his text seems really sincere. Perhaps the word ‘loyal’ there means he never betrayed anyone.
Livshits’s text turned out to be so interesting that I have read it twice. I then read the Introduction by A.A. Kruglov. This keeps intoning that the Bolsheviks’ separation of the Russian Orthodox Church from the state created ‘the first genuine freedom of conscience in the history of mankind’. He means freedom to make ‘scientific atheism’ the established state religion. There is no mention anywhere of the estimated 20,000 bishops, priests, monks and nuns murdered by the Bolsheviks during the first five years of their rule, the tens of thousands of ordinary believers also killed, and all those sacked from their jobs for their religious beliefs right up to the end of Communist power. Sam1, incidentally, is the expert on this period of the ‘first genuine freedom of conscience’ in the world.
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‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
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A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George Calderon c.1901
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Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
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Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon, 1912
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‘Library Notes’ (3)
Book no. 759. G.M. Livshits. Aspects of the History of Atheism in the USSR 1920-40. Minsk, Nauka i tekhnika, 1985, 216 pp.
Yes, I know… Both the title and uniform of this Soviet book are so forbidding that I am hardly surprised I never read it when I bought it (1986) and did not recognise it recently when cataloguing my Russian library for sale. But I am committed to reading, or at least looking into, every book I have never read in this library, before it goes.
Did I really buy this book even? Certainly, and I see now why: one or two references indicate that it was published in advance of the 1988 millennium of Russia’s conversion to Christianity. Although by then persona non grata in the USSR, I was intensely interested in this event, because there was a fight at the top of the Communist government about whether and how it should be celebrated, and friends of mine in the catacomb church (including Sam1 himself) had been arrested and interrogated by the KGB as part of a diehard campaign to head off a national commemoration. The fight could have gone either way, but actually went Gorbachev’s, who used it to enhance his popularity.
Very unusually, Livshits’s book proper (164 pages) is preceded by someone else’s Introduction a whole fifth as long, and followed by an unsigned afterword that is a warm tribute to Livshits (d. 1983) not just as a scholar, ‘an ardent propagandist and populariser of Marxist-Leninist doctrine on religion and atheism’, but ‘a lovely man’, ‘a good person’, and even ‘a caring father and loyal friend’. More extraordinary still, the book was published by Belorussia’s top non-fiction house, but in only 1690 copies! For a work of propaganda for state atheism in the build-up to the millenium of Russian Christianity this is bizarre — one would have expected about 100,000.
The book consists of six chapters, from ‘The origin of religion and its primitive forms’ through ‘Judaism: the early stages of its development’ and ‘A critical study of the Old Testament’ to ‘The origin of Christianity and its initial development’, ‘A critical study of the New Testament’, ‘Religion and church in the service of the exploiting classes’ and ‘The Communist attitude to religion’. On the face of it, Livshits has written a mere compilation from 154 published sources of the pronouncements on these subjects by forty authorities ranging from Lenin’s wife Krupskaia and narkom Lunacharskii to serious ethnographers, anthropologists, and the Soviet Richard Dawkins of the day, E.M. Iaroslavskii.
But you cannot read the book without feeling Livshits is doing it with a dedicated scrupulosity. Utterly unexpectedly, the total impression is of objectivity. Certain quoted Communist adherents to ‘scientific atheism’ contend that Christ was ‘a real historical person’; others ‘show’, or even ‘prove’, that he never existed. Every source is dated and referenced. A wealth of facts about religion from animism, totemism, fetishism and shamanism to the Egyptian gods, Judaism, Mithraism, Christ’s life, Christian churches, festivals and rituals, Russian non-conformist sects, Islam and Buddhism, is just presented and the action moves swiftly on in finessed sentences. So where is Livshits’s own position, what are his views? Of course we get ‘opium of the people’ arguments and the all-embracing assumption that Livshits is himself a Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialist scientific atheist…but is he? The very unusual sense of an objective author made me begin to wonder. After all, there is every bit of information in this book that a young Soviet person excluded by the established atheism from access to facts about Judaism and Christianity, say, could want! There are phrases here and there that it is very easy to overlook: it turns out, for example, that ‘the Russian believing masses’ (p. 190) exist and there is ‘boredom at anti-religious meetings’ (p. 192). Of course, Livshits’s approach is strictly historical. Spiritual, ethical and existential issues of believing are never mentioned. But could the open space that Livshits’s objectivity leaves at the heart of his book encourage the reader to make up their own mind about religion and even, perhaps, take his/her leap of faith as an individual? Was Livshits a believer even? Was this book printed in so few copies precisely because the authorities were afraid of its influence?
I asked Sam1 his view in a brief email. He said I could be right. In the USSR Livshits was one of only two people (both Jews) permitted to work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The other person, Iosif Amusin, was twice arrested under Stalin. Given that Livshits was Jewish, ‘it would be very difficult, almost unreal, to work on the ancient Qumran community near the Dead Sea and be indifferent to questions of faith’, for example Qumran’s connections with John the Baptist and early Christianity. It seems that Livshits’s work was attacked by militant Communists and on one occasion they succeeded in getting a book by him withdrawn. He was under threat during the postwar zhdanovshchina and the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ (i.e. antisemitic) campaign. The unsigned eulogy to him that follows his text seems really sincere. Perhaps the word ‘loyal’ there means he never betrayed anyone.
Livshits’s text turned out to be so interesting that I have read it twice. I then read the Introduction by A.A. Kruglov. This keeps intoning that the Bolsheviks’ separation of the Russian Orthodox Church from the state created ‘the first genuine freedom of conscience in the history of mankind’. He means freedom to make ‘scientific atheism’ the established state religion. There is no mention anywhere of the estimated 20,000 bishops, priests, monks and nuns murdered by the Bolsheviks during the first five years of their rule, the tens of thousands of ordinary believers also killed, and all those sacked from their jobs for their religious beliefs right up to the end of Communist power. Sam1, incidentally, is the expert on this period of the ‘first genuine freedom of conscience’ in the world.
ADVERTISEMENT
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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