Boris Kandidov

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Boris Pavlovich Kandidov (Russian: Борис Павлович Кандидов, 1902–1953) ^[1] was a prominent Soviet propagandist of atheism and a scientific worker in the study of problems of religion and atheism. He was also a journalist and writer.^[2][3][4]

Career

Kandidov served in the People's Commissariat of Justice, dealt with issues of administrative control over the activities of the Church, during the Civil War. In 1923 he organized an anti-religious exhibition in the premises of the Moscow Military Engineering School. A few months later the exhibition ceased its work, but Kandidov, on a personal initiative, kept the exhibits in his apartment, and in 1929 they became the basis for the Central Antireligious Museum opened in the premises of the former Passionate Monastery (Strastnoy Monastery) in Moscow.^[3] He was a member of the League of Militant Atheists of the USSR. In the late 1920s–1930s Kandidov published a large number of articles on atheistic and anti-church topics. In his publications, he exposed the reactionary activity of the Russian Orthodox Church in the years of the Russian Revolution and Civil War.^[2] He put forward in his book «The Hunger of 1921 and the Church» the thesis: "Every church is a fortress of counter-revolution, every churchman is its agent and a spy!". And on the basis of it justified repressions against believers in God. His book «The Church and Espionage» sustained 5 editions in 1937–1940. His books include valuable documentary materials that are not available in other sources. He, as a propagandist of atheism, occupied the extreme positions among his comrades-in-arms, fought against "a conciliatory attitude towards the clericalism".

In autumn 1939, after the annexation of Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia to the USSR, he advocated the immediate conduct of an anti-church campaign in these territories, which, however, was not approved by higher structures. Kandidov was criticized for "inflection" (in politics), his articles ceased to be published in the central publications. During the World War II, Kandidov was a lecturer in Siberia, the Volga region, the Urals, Kazakhstan and Central Asia. In 1945, while in Kazan, he opposed the softening of the policy of the Soviet state towards the Church and continued to denounce the "reactionary" nature of religion. He wrote a letter to

References