The Hammer, the Sickle and the Cross
It would be interesting to know both what is behind the new drive against religion in Russia and how it is being con- ducted. As to the methods employed, the authorities can of course close the churches and the mosques (Islam as well as Christianity is under fire); or, if they do not want to go as far as that, they can (as an angry old crone explained to me on a dark February afternoon in what used to be Nijni Novgorod) apply various administrative sanctions, such as forbidding the use of fuel to heat the churches in winter. But it cannot be as easy as it was in the early days to explain to the people what a bad and dangerous thing religion is. In the '20's and '30's the cartoons in the Anti-Religious Museum in Moscow, depicting priests eating babies, swindling peasants and indulging in debauches with members of the aristocracy, at least meant something to the people who bothered to go and look at them; for the Church, which had been very powerful, was a logical Aunt Sally for the Bolsheviks. But to save the present generation of Russians from the religious impulses which are inherent in most of them must involve disputations of a more academic and theoretical kind, rather like those which would be needed to warn Esquimaux against the perils of sun-stroke. And why, at this juncture, M. Malenkov and his colleagues find it expedient to do so is anybody's guess.
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