League of Militant Atheists

The League of Militant Atheists (SVB) traced its origins to the newspaper Bezbozhnik (The Godless), founded by Yemelyan Yaroslavsky in 1922. The network of correspondents and readers around the paper coalesced in 1924 as the Society of Friends of the Newspaper Bezbozhnik (ODGB), and in April 1925 the first All-Union Congress formally established the 'Union of the Godless' (Soyuz Bezbozhnikov). At its Second Congress in Moscow in June 1929, attended by 1,200 delegates and addressed by Nikolai Bukharin, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, it was renamed the 'League of Militant Atheists'.

The organization's slogan, "The struggle against religion is the struggle for socialism", was later escalated to "The struggle against religion is the struggle for communism." This reflected the Party's position that the eradication of religion was an intrinsic task of socialist construction. The SVB organized cells in factories, collective farms, schools, and military units, and made membership mandatory for all Komsomol members. Its publishing output was vast: in 1930 alone it produced 800 million printed pages of atheist books, pamphlets, and periodicals, including the scholarly journals Antireligioznik and Voinstvuyushchii Ateizm, published in multiple languages. It promoted 'godless collective farms,' antireligious museums, substitute rituals and holidays, and 'individual work': one-on-one sessions where atheist tutors sought to persuade believers to renounce their faith.

Although operating within the formal framework of Soviet church-state separation laws, the SVB was the primary enforcement vehicle for the physical repression of clergy and the closure of places of worship. Its 1929 Congress resolved on total social ostracism of the clergy and pressured trade unions to refuse all work for churches. The 'antireligious five-year plan' adopted in 1932 on Stalin's orders aimed at the complete elimination of religion from Soviet territory. Resistance was widespread: lynchings of antireligious agitators were reported, peasants hid their beliefs, and even within the Party the SVB was regarded as meddlesome and ineffective.

When Germany invaded in 1941, paper shortages forced the closure of Bezbozhnik, and the SVB effectively suspended operations. After Yaroslavsky's death in 1943, Fyodor Oleshchuk served as acting chair. The League was formally dissolved in 1947, its assets and personnel transferred to the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge (Znanie). Its institutional legacy persisted in postwar Soviet atheism and resurfaced with renewed intensity during Khrushchev's antireligious campaign.