From the Russian Revolution to the beginnings of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the 1980s, Communist Party propagandists waged war on all the gods.

Drawing on decades’ worth of vivid, alarming, and rarely-seen anti-religious propaganda illustrations directed against what Karl Marx had once called “the opium of the people”, author Roland Elliott Brown will unfold the strange tale of Soviet atheist ideology, from its origins in 19th-century radical thought to its implosion along with the USSR and its legacy in Putin’s Russia.

Roland Elliott Brown is a London-based journalist and arts writer and the author of Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda. From 2013 to 2017 he was a regular contributor and editor for the London-based news site IranWire, where he covered politics and human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran. His writing has also appeared in the Guardian, the Spectator, and Foreign Policy.