Page 56 - Communism in Ambush

dent who had lost his faith; Stalin
would always maintain that it
was Darwin who was responsible
for that loss." 38 Stalin's adoption
of Marxism happened not long af-
terward. Jonge states that Stalin
often emphasized this point in his
private conversations.
In his book Hitler and Stalin:
Parallel Lives, the English histo-
rian Alan Bullock compares these
Stalin was brought up to be a priest, two men, saying that, in his
but at a young age was drawn into
atheism by some books he read, the youth, Stalin was very influenced
most influential of which was by the works of Karl Marx and
Darwin's Origin of Species. Auguste Comte, which he read in
Russian translations. 39
Actually, this deception hap-
pened not only to Stalin, but to the
majority of a generation of Russian students and other young people.
The myths in scientific garb proposed by Darwin, Huxley, and Lamarck
led many young Russians to become atheists. In A People's Tragedy, A
history of the Russian Revolution, historian Orlando Figes says, "The
scientific materialism of Darwin and Huxley . . . had the status of a reli-
gion among the Russian intelligentsia during Lenin's youth." 40 Figes re-
lates how Semen Kanatchikov, a young worker who later joined the

After Stalin had joined the
ranks of the Communists, he
was arrested several times
under the Tsar's regime. At
left, a series of photographs
of one of those arrests.