About the attitude towards religion in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Before the funeral, Comrades Budyonny, Shchadenko, and Kivgella consulted with me about the funeral arrangements, specifically on the following question: "Many Cavalry soldiers," said Semyon Mikhailovich, "have expressed a desire for priests to attend the funeral. What should we do? Perhaps we should agree to this?" After some thought, I said that we could take this step. After consulting with Comrade Sergushev, we gave the provincial party committee's consent. And here we stand on one side of the mass grave - all representatives of the party, Soviet organizations, workers and communists and the command of the cavalry corps, the Red Army soldiers and political workers, and on the other side of the mass grave stand priests and deacons. We deliver our Bolshevik funeral speeches, including Kaganovich and Budyonny, and the priests and deacons perform their religious rites and prayers. I confess, for the first time in my life, and probably not only me, I had to participate in such a combination. Later, we were reported that this evoked a very positive response among the Cavalry Army soldiers. "Look," many said, "the Communist-Bolshevik Party is doing as Lenin tells them: since there were believers among the dead, it means they must be honored in a religious manner. The Voronezh Bolsheviks and our command did just that. This means that all those whisperers are lying about the Communists forcing people to be atheists." Agitation against God and religion is one thing, but in life, let everyone understand it as they wish. No one is forcibly imposing anything, and priests are not arrested; they were even buried together." In short, this fact alone was one of the revealing aspects of the enemy's provocations.

...

7) The Provincial Committee hereby informs representatives of the Orthodox and religious cult that it is permitted to conduct religious services with the ringing of bells in a completely free manner.
8) All of the above must be strictly and consistently implemented and enforced. Violations or failures to comply will be punished under martial law.
Chairman L.M. Kaganovich. Secretary P. Bulargin.”

I must note that there was some debate regarding point 7 (regarding religious services, especially with bell ringing); some comrades objected, or at least had doubts. Noya and Comrade Sergushev argued with the comrades that it was necessary to counter the counterrevolutionary propaganda that had unfolded, claiming that the Bolsheviks were planning to close all churches, confiscate and melt down bells, arrest and shoot the clergy, and so on. With this point in the order of the Provincial Military Revolutionary Committee, we dealt a blow to counterrevolutionary propaganda and strengthened our position among the wavering elements of the workers. After our clarifications, the Provincial Committee unanimously adopted this point.

...

The meeting was in the garden, so it turned out that during the second half of my report, the gathering began to gradually disperse; that is, some began to slowly get up and leave. Naturally, I was perplexed, not understanding what was going on. The meeting leaders were also very confused, and they sheepishly told me, "The thing is, the sun was just setting, and some of the believers went to pray to Allah, after which they'll return immediately, but we'll give them a proper talk." I calmed them down, suggested calling a break, and during the break I told them how Lenin had instructed us to take into account even prejudices, including religious ones, overcoming them not by command and coercion, but by deep, long-term ideological propaganda work among the masses, especially among those communists and their sympathizers who still retained the threads that connect faith in Allah with faith in communist ideas.

Kaganovich L.M. Memorial Notes
archive.org/details/kaganovich…
#USSR #soviet #Russia #russian #bolsheviks #socialism #communism #politics #religion #humanrights #workerrights #history #book

@kuchinster — 2025-11-25 12:36:54
Speech by Joseph Stalin on the draft constitution, November 25, 1936. Extraordinary VIII All-Union Congress of Soviets of the USSR

The constitutions of bourgeois countries are usually based on the belief in the immutability of the capitalist system. The main foundation of these constitutions is the principles of capitalism, its basic pillars: private ownership of land, forests, factories, plants, and other means of production; the exploitation of man by man and the existence of exploiters and exploited; the insecurity of the working majority at one end of society and the luxury of the non-working but secure minority at the other end; and so on and so forth. They are based on these and similar foundations of capitalism. They reflect them and enshrine them in law.

In contrast, the draft of the new Constitution of the USSR is based on the fact of the elimination of the capitalist system, on the fact of the victory of the socialist system in the USSR. The main basis of the draft of the new Constitution of the USSR is the principles of socialism, its fundamental foundations, already won and implemented: socialist ownership of land, forests, factories, plants, and other means of production; the elimination of exploitation and exploitative classes; the elimination of poverty for the majority and luxury for the minority; the elimination of unemployment; labor as the duty and honor of every able-bodied citizen according to the formula: “those who do not work shall not eat.” The right to work, that is, the right of every citizen to a guaranteed job; the right to rest; the right to education; etc. The draft of the new Constitution is based on these and similar foundations of socialism. It reflects them and enshrines them in law.

...

Bourgeois constitutions tacitly proceed from the premise that nations and races cannot be equal, that there are nations with full rights and nations with limited rights, and that, in addition, there is a third category of nations or races, for example, in the colonies, which have even fewer rights than nations with limited rights. This means that all these constitutions are essentially nationalistic, that is, constitutions of dominant nations.

In contrast to these constitutions, the draft of the new Constitution of the USSR is, on the contrary, deeply internationalist. It proceeds from the assumption that all nations and races are equal. It proceeds from the assumption that differences in skin color or language, cultural level or level of state development, as well as any other differences between nations and races, cannot serve as a basis for justifying national inequality. It proceeds from the assumption that all nations and races, regardless of their past and present situation, regardless of their strength and weakness, should enjoy equal rights in all spheres of economic, social, political, and cultural life of society.

...

The distinctive feature of the draft of the new USSR Constitution is that it is free from such reservations and restrictions. For it, there are no active or passive citizens; for it, all citizens are active. It does not recognize any difference in rights between men and women, “sedentary” and “non-sedentary” persons, the wealthy and the poor, the educated and the uneducated. For it, all citizens are equal in their rights. It is not property status, national origin, gender, or official position, but the personal abilities and personal labor of each citizen that determine his or her position in society.

Finally, there is one more feature of the draft new Constitution. Bourgeois constitutions usually limit themselves to establishing the rights of citizens, without concern for the conditions for exercising these rights, the possibility of exercising them, or the means of exercising them. They talk about the equality of citizens, but forget that there can be no real equality between the master and the worker, between the landowner and the peasant, if the former have wealth and political weight in society, and the latter are deprived of both, if the former are exploiters and the latter are exploited. Or again: they talk about freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, but they forget that all these freedoms can become empty words for the working class if it is deprived of the opportunity to have at its disposal suitable premises for meetings, good printing houses, a sufficient quantity of printing paper, etc.

The distinctive feature of the new Constitution is that it does not limit itself to establishing the formal rights of citizens, but shifts the focus to the question of guarantees for these rights and the means of exercising them. It does not simply proclaim the equality of citizens' rights, but also ensures that the elimination of exploitation and the liberation of citizens from all forms of exploitation are enshrined in law. It does not simply proclaim the right to work, but also ensures its legislative consolidation by establishing the absence of crises in Soviet society and the elimination of unemployment. It does not simply proclaim democratic freedoms, but also ensures them by law with known material resources. It is therefore clear that the democracy of the new draft Constitution is not “ordinary” and “generally accepted” democracy in general, but socialist democracy.

These are the main features of the draft of the new Constitution of the USSR.

This is how the draft of the new Constitution reflects the shifts and changes in the economic and socio-political life of the USSR that took place between 1924 and 1936.

"Pravda" newspaper. November 26, 1936

aftershock.news/?q=node%2F1563…
#USSR #soviet #russian #economy #socialism #proletariat #bolsheviks #workerrights #humanrights #democracy #Stalin #constitution #history #СССР #история

@kuchinster — 2025-11-25 13:44:11
From the discussion of amendments to the Constitution proposed by the people

Next is an amendment to Article 17 of the draft Constitution. The amendment proposes to remove Article 17 from the draft Constitution altogether, which refers to the preservation of the right of the Union republics to freely secede from the USSR. I believe that this proposal is wrong and therefore should not be adopted by the Congress. The USSR is a voluntary union of equal Union republics. Removing the article on the right to freely secede from the USSR from the Constitution would violate the voluntary nature of this union. Can we take this step? I think we cannot and should not take this step. It is said that there is not a single republic in the USSR that would like to secede from the USSR, and that therefore Article 17 has no practical significance. It is certainly true that we do not have a single republic that would like to secede from the USSR. But this does not mean that we should not enshrine in the Constitution the right of the Union republics to freely secede from the USSR. There is also no Union republic in the USSR that would want to suppress another Union republic. But this does not mean that the article on the equality of rights of the Union republics should be excluded from the Constitution of the USSR.

#soviet #sovereignty by Stalin #1936

@kuchinster — 2025-10-05 18:16:29
The Looting of Russia
Sep 8, 1999

It has been one debacle after another since the IMF introduced its “shock therapy” program in 1992. Like a battered spouse who sees no alternative but to return to her abuser, Russia comes back to the IMF for more credits. But the hundreds of billions that have fled the country in the 1990’s have cancelled out this “aid,” as well as the meager foreign direct investment, many times over. At the same time Russia has accumulated more than $150 billion in foreign debt, with the burden of debt service now reaching a crushing 29% of export earnings.

At some point any rational, non-corrupt political leader in Russia has to question whether the country’s friendly relations with Washington are worth the price of continued impoverishment. That time may be approaching, as Russia elects first a Parliament and then a President over the next 10 months. There will be calls from across the political spectrum to break, or at least loosen, the chains that bind Russia to its Western tormentors.

cepr.net/publications/the-loot…
#Russia #USSR #soviet #russian #history #politics #USA #US #american #imperialism #Western #deception #lie #anglo-saxons

@kuchinster — 2025-10-05 18:16:35

NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard

Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the “not one inch eastward” formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev’s statement in response to the assurances that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.” Baker assured Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,” and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”

nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-boo…
#Russia #USSR #soviet #russian #history #politics #europe #NATO #imperialism #war #Western #deception #lie #anglo-saxons