By Gerry Downing 1997

I have reposted this piece to shown that there is a Marxist revolutionary approach to religion and women’s oppression and that the early Soviet government of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks attempted this in a serious way. This stands in contrast to the Menshevik methods when they were in power in southern republics like Georgia during the Civil War and in stark contrast to the brutally ignorant policies of Stalin and the bureaucracy after they triumphed in 1924. This is the method of Lenin as recounted by Dale Ross (D. L. Reissner), the first editor of the Spartacist League’s  ‘Women and Revolution’:

‘The Bolsheviks viewed the extreme oppression of women as an indicator of the primitive level of the whole society, but their approach was based on materialism, not moralism. They understood that the fact that women were veiled and caged, bought and sold, was but…