Speaking of the past. From
marxists.org
"For this reason the reactionary power by which the peasants had hitherto been dominated had to be destroyed, so that the peasants should become supporters of Bolshevism spiritually as well as materially. That was possible only by way of a struggle against the Church, in the most radical form by way of an intensive propaganda against religion in general.
“This struggle, which was waged directly thru the “League of the Godless” but with the support of the State, was scarcely distinguishable in character and content from the one which was waged earlier in western Europe by the bourgeois materialists and free thinkers. It had nothing whatever to do with Marxism. And the philosophical polemics of Lenin dating from the time prior to the Revolution (in the complete edition of his works, collected under the title “Materialism and Empiriocriticism”) are quite on the level of bourgeois materialism; which, of course, is quite natural since his struggle in Russia was directed against the same sort of opponents. The propaganda in Russia was distinguished from that of western Europe only in the circumstance that it was waged with still more primitive arguments and cruder instruments, because it was directed against a still more barbarous superstition. The procedure has, of course, been described before: the muzhik’s understanding of the arguments based on natural science is rather limited; but he sees and hears these godless ones direct the fiercest sort of attacks against God, give utterance to the most terrible blasphemies, — and no flash of lightning from heaven strikes the evil-doers. That proves to him that God doesn’t exist, or at any rate doesn’t care about what people do here below. And so he draws his conclusions: he lets the priest go hungry, converts the cross into kindling wood and the church into a stable, hangs pictures of Marx and Lenin in his room and perhaps burns candles to them. The younger generation, however, takes up with the youth groups which educate themselves in national economy and natural science, and it takes over Materialism as a recognized and matter-of-course doctrine. In Russia a new generation is growing up, and has been growing up a sufficient number of years to form a new stratum of adults to whom religion is only an historical phenomenon, a superstition of elderly people belonging to the past. The russian Church has gone under with Czarism.”
