From the History of Activity of the Union of Militant Atheists in Kazakhstan

Aigul Junusbayeva

2025

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DOI 10.31489/2025hph2/29-40
Data confidence 70 medium
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Abstract

The article is devoted to one of the little-studied and topical problems in the history of state-religious relations — the activities of the Union of Militant Atheists in Kazakhstan. Studying the history of the Republican UMA will allow us to most fully recreate the picture of state policy towards religion and believers in the 20–40s of the twentieth century. The main goal of the organization is anti-religious propaganda, ideological struggle against religion. An active promoter of anti-religious policy in Kazakhstan was the mass public or-ganization the Union of Militant Atheists, whose main task was anti-religious propaganda and ideological struggle against religion. Since the late 20s of the twentieth century, the UMA intensified mass anti-religious work with the population, and in atheistic propaganda there was a transition from moderate to rude, com-mand-administrative methods of work. In historical literature, the period of the late 20s and early 30s was called the period of “storm and stress.” As part of the “godless five-year plan” announced by the Union in 1932, it was mistakenly assumed that by its end the religiosity of the population would be completely eradi-cated. The UMA organized its own units in factories, manufactories, educational institutions, militant units, in villages and hamlets, led anti-religious propaganda in all types of work contributed to the introduction of new atheistic way of life into the fabric of societal consciousness. The authors of this work came to the conclusion that the activities of the Union, despite the support of the Bolshevik Party and the presence of cells through-out the republic, had been insufficiently organized and often carried out formally and unsystematically. There was an acute shortage of anti-religious literature in the Kazakh language. In the difficult conditions of the Great Patriotic War, party and government bodies placed great hopes on the Republican Union as the most massive public organization with an extensive network of units throughout the republic. The UMA of Ka-zakhstan, without abandoning anti-religious work, focused on anti-fascist propaganda and comprehensive as-sistance to the front. Subsequently, with a change in the state’s political course regarding religion and believ-ers, the UMA ceased its activities.