“stop сelebrating Easter!”: “Komsomol Easter” campaign in Soviet anti-religious propaganda (on the centenary of the first anti-Easter campaign, 1923-2023)

The article examines the part of the “Komsomol Easter” campaign in the anti-religious propaganda of the Soviet government in the 1920s. Drawing on the data of eight state archives - journalistic materials of the leaders of the Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks - the article presents the content of the “Komsomol Easter” campaign program developed by I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov and analyzes how the original plan of the Soviet ideologist was implemented both in the urban environment and rural areas. The party leaders’ attitude to the format of the first anti-Easter campaign is discussed as well as the dynamics of changes in the main trends of the “Komsomol Easter” and “Komsomol Christmas” campaigns’ format. Special attention is paid to the part of “Komsomol Easter” in the campaign of urban and rural cultural bonding undertaken by the Soviet government in the 1920s and 1930s. The article examines the social conflict escalated in the context of the anti-religious policy of the Soviet government and the development of anti-Easter celebration. An attempt is made to highlight the importance of the “Komsomol Easter” campaign for the development of a new Soviet ideology and atheistic worldview of the population. The article analyzes the tendency of Soviet ideologists to turn the anti-Easter campaign into a platform for economic and labor mobilization of the population in the political situation of industrialization and collectivization at the turn of the 1920s-1930s. Presented is a set of reasons for which the Soviet government suspended its attempts to continue developing the “Komsomol Easter” campaign as the main means of fight against the tradition of celebrating Christian Easter by the population.