Edited by Damon Murray, Stephen Sorrell. Text by Roland Elliott Brown.
The iconography of atheism: Soviets against God!
“We’ve finished the earthly tsars and we’re coming for the heavenly ones!” Thus spoke the Soviet Union’s first atheist propagandists as they declared war on “the opium of the people” across the USSR. Soviet atheism is the great lost subject of the 20th century. Pope Pius XI led a “crusade of prayer” against it; George Orwell satirized it in Animal Farm; the Nazis called it a Jewish plot; Franklin D. Roosevelt pressured Stalin to abandon it: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn blamed it for Russia’s catastrophes; and Ronald Reagan put it at the core of his “Evil Empire” speech. And yet, because the Soviet Union promoted atheism almost entirely for domestic consumption, decades’ worth of arcane and astonishing anti-religious imagery remains unknown in the West.
Drawing on the early Soviet atheist magazines Godless and Godless at the Machine, and postwar posters by Communist Party publishers, author Roland Elliott Brown presents an unsettling tour of atheist ideology in the USSR. Here are uncanny, imaginative and downright blasphemous visions from the very guts of the Soviet atheist apparatus: sinister priests rub shoulders with cross-bearing colonial torturers, greedy mullahs, a cyclopean Jehovah and a crypto-fascist Jesus; Russian cosmonauts mock God from space while vigilant border guards nab American Bible smugglers. Godless Utopia is the occult grimoire of a lost socialist anti-theology.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Godless Utopia.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Calvert Journal
Roland Elliott Brown explains how Lenin set the groundwork to overthrow the Soviet Union’s religious institutions — and how a raft of brightly coloured propaganda posters became the leader's weapon of choice.
Moscow Times
Jennifer Eremeeva
Students of Russian history will welcome the publication of “Godless Utopia” this month, but so too will art historians, religious scholars, as well as observers of Russia's cultural history and indeed anyone who has embarked on the quixotic search for the elusive Russian soul.
Spectator UK
Rolland Elliot Brown
Blasphemous shock and awe were a major part of the Bolshevik aesthetic, as seen in the covers of Godless magazine.
AIGA
Emily Gosling
Since the Soviet Union’s promotion of atheism was almost entirely targeted at those living within it, the posters, editorial illustrations, and other propaganda associated with it are largely unknown to Western designers.
Guardian
In the Soviet Union, atheism became government policy, enforced by the state and encouraged by anti-religious posters and magazines. These have been collected in Roland Elliott Brown’s [Godless Utopia].
Boing Boing
Cory Doctorow
Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda' collects the most striking examples of the form.
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The 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s were not good decades for Christian, Jews, Muslims or any other religious group in the newly atheist post-October-Revolution Soviet Union, as the chilling anti-religious propaganda in Godless Utopia—the newest book in Fuel Publishing's series on weird Soviet design—makes clear. "The Soviet school is a school of militant godlessness," one 1931 advertisement reads, while others show American lynchings, corrupt and unproductive priests, ignorant Muslims and treasonous Jehovah's Witnesses, to name just a few scenarios. "Another gullible sectarian is glad to hear prayers from 'over there,'" this 1971 poster reads. "They are, as a rule, stained with outright anti-Sovietism." The radio broadcasts "Ave, Maria," "Slander of the USSR," "Anti-Sovietism," "Our Father." continue to blog
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FORMAT: Hbk, 6.5 x 8 in. / 192 pgs / 190 color / 10 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $34.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $49.95 ISBN: 9780995745575 PUBLISHER: FUEL Publishing AVAILABLE: 10/8/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by FUEL Publishing. Edited by Damon Murray, Stephen Sorrell. Text by Roland Elliott Brown.
“We’ve finished the earthly tsars and we’re coming for the heavenly ones!” Thus spoke the Soviet Union’s first atheist propagandists as they declared war on “the opium of the people” across the USSR. Soviet atheism is the great lost subject of the 20th century. Pope Pius XI led a “crusade of prayer” against it; George Orwell satirized it in Animal Farm; the Nazis called it a Jewish plot; Franklin D. Roosevelt pressured Stalin to abandon it: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn blamed it for Russia’s catastrophes; and Ronald Reagan put it at the core of his “Evil Empire” speech. And yet, because the Soviet Union promoted atheism almost entirely for domestic consumption, decades’ worth of arcane and astonishing anti-religious imagery remains unknown in the West.
Drawing on the early Soviet atheist magazines Godless and Godless at the Machine, and postwar posters by Communist Party publishers, author Roland Elliott Brown presents an unsettling tour of atheist ideology in the USSR. Here are uncanny, imaginative and downright blasphemous visions from the very guts of the Soviet atheist apparatus: sinister priests rub shoulders with cross-bearing colonial torturers, greedy mullahs, a cyclopean Jehovah and a crypto-fascist Jesus; Russian cosmonauts mock God from space while vigilant border guards nab American Bible smugglers. Godless Utopia is the occult grimoire of a lost socialist anti-theology.
