Great work on this Stalin issue - I have created links to a new page where I think your content should be integrated. Look on the main article here. --Pile 11:35, 25 November 2007 (CST)

Stalin Wasn't an Atheist

He was Orthodox. In fact, he wanted to make Moscow the third Orthodox Rome. The Vortex Empire 10:30, 18 November 2007 (CST)

Doubtful: Stalin was an atheist: The Pope? How many divisions has he got? — Josef Stalin, to French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval, in reply to a suggestion that the Soviet Union should encourage Catholicism in order to propitiate the Pope, in Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, "The Gathering Storm," ch. 8, (1948), said, 13 May 1935, quoted from, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations

Stalin is quoted as saying "You know, they are fooling us, there is no God...all this talk about God is sheer nonsense" in E. Yaroslavsky, Landmarks in the Life of Stalin, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow 1940

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_atheists#Politics_and_law says that stalin is an atheist and uses my above quote to prove it

I assure you that Stalin followed Dialectical Materialism, an inherently materialist philosophy, in which you cannot possibly be religious

There is a Soviet poster ridiculing Judaism—as printed in the official government journal Atheist

“Communism begins where atheism begins…” (Karl Marx)

“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion” (Karl Marx)

“I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.” (Karl Marx)

“The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain, till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed. See this sword? The prince of darkness sold it to me.” (Karl Marx)

“With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the fact of the world and see the collapse of this pygmy giant. Then will I wander god-like and victorious through the ruins of the world. And giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.” (Karl Marx)

“Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism.” (attributed to Vladimir I. Lenin)

“Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.” (V.I. Lenin)

“There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.” (V.I. Lenin)

“We do not fight against believers and not even clergymen. WE FIGHT AGAINST GOD to snatch believers from Him.” (Vechernaia Moskva, a Soviet newspaper)

“Let us drive out the Capitalists from the earth, and God from Heaven!” (early Soviet slogan)

The official journal of the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences published a government directive Atheistic Education in the School as a resource on how to separate God from human society. The opening paragraph is revealing: “The Soviet school, as an instrument for the Communist education of the rising generation, can, as a matter of principle, take up no other attitude towards religion than one of irreconcilable opposition; for Communist education has as its philosophical basis Marxism, and Marxism is irreconcilably hostile to religion. ‘Marxism is materialism,’ says V. I. Lenin; ‘as such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as the materialism of the Encyclopedaists of the eighteenth century or the materialism of Feuerbach.’” Another excerpt reads: “‘Religion’,” Marx said, “is nourished not on heaven but on earth, and with the annihilation of that perverted reality, of which capitalism is the theory, religion will perish of its own accord.’”

“The World has never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized and tenaciously malevolent as that preached by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin and at the heart of their psychology, HATRED OF GOD is the principle driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends, Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails a destruction of faith and nationhood. Communists proclaim both of these objectives openly, and just as openly put them into practice.” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

There is a graphic entitled “On Press Day: Long Live the Bolshevik Godless Press!” which depicts the cover of a Soviet magazine in which propagandists drop newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets from an airplane… the wings of the plane are painted with the word “atheists.” From the article: “Ko dniu pechati,” by D. Mel’nikov, in the September 1931 issue of Bezbozhnik u stanka (The Godless at the Workbench).