num_pages: 192
description: The iconography of Soviets against God! Weve finished the earthly tsars and were coming for the heavenly ones! Thus spoke the Soviet Unions first atheist propagandists as they declared war on the opium of the people across the USSR. Soviet atheism is the great lost subject of the 20th century. Pope Pius XI led a crusade of prayer against it; George Orwell satirized it in Animal Farm ; the Nazis called it a Jewish plot; Franklin D. Roosevelt pressured Stalin to abandon Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn blamed it for Russias catastrophes; and Ronald Reagan put it at the core of his Evil Empire speech. And yet because the Soviet Union promoted atheism almost entirely for domestic consumption decades worth of arcane and astonishing anti-religious imagery remains unknown in the West.Drawing on the early Soviet atheist magazines Godless and Godless at the Machine  and postwar posters by Communist Party publishers author Roland Elliott Brown presents an unsettling tour of atheist ideology in the USSR. Here are uncanny imaginative and downright blasphemous visions from the very guts of the Soviet atheist sinister priests rub shoulders with cross-bearing colonial torturers greedy mullahs a cyclopean Jehovah and a crypto-fascist Jesus; Russian cosmonauts mock God from space while vigilant border guards nab American Bible smugglers. Godless Utopia is the occult grimoire of a lost socialist anti-theology.
language: English
title: Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda
publisher: FUEL Publishing