The Pushkin Club invites you to a discussion by Roland Elliott Brown, author of Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda, an illustrated history of Soviet communism's decades-long battle with what Karl Marx had called, "the opium of the people". Roland will examine how the style and techniques of Soviet propaganda have survived the discarding of Marxism-Leninism.
When Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, he menacingly described the country as part of Russia’s “spiritual space”, an allusion to the legend of the baptism of ancient Rus’ by Prince Vladimir of Kyiv in the Dnieper River in 988. Implicit in the whole post-Soviet Russian project has been the complete rejection of one major plank of Soviet ideology: official atheism; now, much of Russia’s war propaganda centres on the threat of a “godless” west.
How did this ideological inversion take place, and how did Russian methods of “spiritual propaganda” change? Join Roland Elliott Brown as he explores the evolution of Russian propaganda, from the militant atheism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to the erection of a 56-ft. statue of Prince Vladimir outside the Kremlin in 2016—a forbidding omen, it now seems, of Putin’s designs on Ukraine.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Roland Elliott Brown is the author of Godless Utopia: Soviet Anti-Religious Propaganda, which he worked on while living in Moscow and St Petersburg, on and off, from 2017 to 2019. He has reported from Iran for Foreign Policy magazine, and has contributed to The Guardian, The Spectator and The Critic.