The campaign outlined in the previous chapter appears to have envisaged a wide ranging attack involving educational, propagandist, administrative and legal means. Party and state bodies were enjoined to carry out various tasks related to reducing the influence of religion, tasks which they performed with varying degrees of enthusiasm, although the strong impulse from the centre ensured that few remained entirely passive. Yet decreeing change was not the same as carrying it out, and a major concern of this chapter is not only with who was instructed to do what but with the question of whether stated goals were achieved. We shall also raise the question of how religious communities responded to the new campaign and, in chapter 4, how did this in turn affect the practice and thinking of state authorities.

Implementation

Research, education, propaganda

Though both the July and November 1954 Central Committee resolutions had stressed the necessity of improving the quality of research on the religious question, it was the latter that appears to have provided a serious stimulus to such work. In July the emphasis had been upon combatting religious ideas by means of mass propaganda aimed at the masses. By contrast the November decree started with a more detailed and quasi-scholarly analysis of the place of religion in bourgeois and socialist societies, and called for a further development of the ‘natural, technical and social sciences’ in creating a scientific world view. This stress on research work was re-emphasised in 1959 when the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences adopted a resolution ‘ on the intensification of scientific work in the field of atheism’, and subsequently created atheist sectors in various institutions of the Academy.