The final years of the 1920s, nearly a decade following the Bolshevik Revolution, marked a turning point in the history of the Soviet Union. The Great Break (sometimes called the Great Turn) is typically remembered for an about-face in economic policy: Vladimir Lenin’s relatively lenient approach of tolerating some capitalist institutions and free markets was suddenly abandoned by Joseph Stalin in favor of a five-year plan of rapid state-led industrialization, the collectivization of agriculture, and the brutal subjugation of wealthy and uncooperative peasants.
What is less often remembered about the Great Break is its ambitious cultural agenda. Having secured absolute power over his rivals, Stalin embarked on a vicious campaign of repression against the Orthodox Church, proscribing any form of public worship and instituting severe restrictions on the conduct of clergy. The Soviet state abolished the Sunday holiday and the observance of other religious feasts in favor of an uninterrupted workweek. There were material considerations that justified this anti-Christian agenda: The Communist Party interpreted the observance of religious holidays as counterrevolutionary because it threatened to interrupt the breakneck speed necessary for Stalin’s industrial program. Whatever time spent at prayer or at a festival was also time away from work.
Although initially justified in terms of industrial progress, the campaigns that eventually included the silencing and seizing of church bells, the destruction of churches (among them Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior), the imprisonment and execution of clergy and religious monks and nuns, and the dissolution of monasteries were clearly also something much more than a severe, if economically justified, means for achieving material goals. A memorandum from the League of Militant Godless, an elite organization founded in 1925 for the purposes of undermining and eliminating religion (Christian or otherwise), expressed well the ideological stakes of these campaigns: “Whoever is for Easter is against socialism.”
The calendar is one place to start with a consideration of Thomas Albert Howard’s groundbreaking Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History, a masterful and panoramic account of the violence perpetrated by secular states in modernity. For one thing, Howard, a professor of history and humanities at Valparaiso University, observes that anti-religious political movements in the modern world have regularly sought to supplant religious observances of time. The French revolutionaries, for example, considered the Gregorian calendar in toto to be a Catholic artifact. They confected their own secular calendar, renaming the traditional months with new titles after the seasons of the year and substituting the seven-day week with a ten-day cycle that avoided any reminiscence of the Sabbath or the Lord’s Day.