Did Atheism Contribute to the Deaths of Soviet Citizens?

The role of atheism in the deaths of Soviet citizens caused by government policies of repression has been a controversial topic. The New Atheists® have hotly denied it, but people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn claim there is a direct connection. The deaths of millions of Soviet citizens was the result of the lack of God and morality in the Soviet Union.

This seems like an obvious conclusion to make, especially for those of us who think belief in God is an important restraint on the dark side of human nature, but it becomes hard to substantiate from the historical record.

After delving into the topic, I've come to the conclusion that atheism was more an effect of Marxist-Leninist ideology and it's repression of any and all dissent in the Soviet Union than it was a cause. The ultimate cause was the ideology and those who promoted it, and atheism was just another tool for contesting competing claims to political, ideological, and spiritual authority. As such it was heavily promoted by Soviet authorities.

Lenin was the main source of the evil since it was he who taught the Bolsheviks that Marxism and Communism must be established by whatever means necessary. As David Satter writes:

In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.” This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”

It was Lenin who established the policies that led to most of the deaths, especially by exterminating people who belonged to certain political classes including religious leaders and believers. Among other things, atheism was adopted to break the hold of religious authority, which had high prestige before the revolution, and establish Marxist-Leninism as the supreme source of all authority. They even went to the extent of establishing an ersatz state religion complete with atheistic rituals.

The subordination of all law, morality, and spirituality to a supreme ideology, a consolidation of political power, was the main method. Atheism was a label used to describe part of that process.

And so it is today, I think. Atheism is more a symptom of the problem of social and cultural degeneration along with all the other signs of impending doom, i.e., gender bending, falling birth rates, lawlessness, progressivism creeping into churches and synagogues, a loss of will even to police our own borders and streets, corruption of and lost trust in all authorities, and all the rest. Like the Soviet Union, we are in the process of casting aside traditional restraints. The emergence of our dark side will increasingly manifest.