... And an Atheist Bestseller

When the new edition hit the bookstores late last year, 100,000 copies were snapped up in a matter of days. The smash seller? A revised and expanded version of the Atheist's Pocket Dictionary, first issued in 1973 and put out by a state-run political publishing house called Politizdat. The 280-page paperback, though "designed for propagandists, lecturers and organizers of atheistic work," has some of the appeal of forbidden fruit; few books are ever published in the U.S.S.R. that deal with religion, even in a backhanded way.

Definitions in the Atheist's Dictionary are written to conform with the basic Marxist line that religion is either 1) pure superstition or 2) "the opium of the people." God? An idea "used to justify and protect the social order of exploiters." Heaven? It distracts people from "the real tasks of the Communist rearrangement of life on earth." Conversely, hell dampens "the rage of the working people against their oppressors by planting a hope that the latter will be punished after death." Easter fosters "ideas of a class peace and forgiveness." Christ's love-thy-neighbor teaching is "egotistical and antihumane."

The Russian Orthodox Church wins grudging praise for gradually surrendering to "the strengthening of Soviet power" and for denouncing "fascist aggression" during the "great patriotic war" (World War II). Still, its essence is defined as "reactionary." Judaism comes off less well, though the lexicon avoids antiSemitism. Zionism is dismissed as "an ideology of chauvinism and a policy of anti-Sovietism by the big Jewish bourgeoisie closely connected with imperialistic circles of capitalist countries."

The word is not all negative, however. Atheism, readers learn, expresses the interests and aspirations of the working class and "serves the cause of spiritual liberation of the working masses from the burden of prejudices and delusions of the past."

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