It will break me. She will destroy me, ruin me even more than I have already been, and it will be the end of everything I have worked so hard for. Everything I have worked so hard to build, to keep, to kill for and fight for. Yet was it even worth the effort? Am I losing it or rejecting it?
Finally, argued Bolsheviks, Islam’s insistence on dividing the world between believers and nonbelievers ruled out fraternization among different peoples of the Soviet Union as equals—thus hindering the creation of the New Socialist Person, who would transcend his or her religious, ethnic, and racial background to build a socialist order.
The ruling party and state coordinated anti-Islamic education and propaganda with literacy drives and reorganized popular socio-economic activities. They focused on winning a few converts to scientific atheism in each village, with a view to using them as models of rationalism and modern thinking. These efforts went hand in hand with steps to weaken and destroy the extensive religious networks of mosques and theological institutions, and their financial support—the religious trust properties, which were nationalized. (In Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk followed a similar path, except that there were no parallel literacy campaigns and no ideological ballast of historical materialism or scientific atheism; it had more to do with destroying the possibility that the Sultan-Caliph would return on the backs of revived Islamic institutions and clerics.)
Sayfa 393
Tolstoy
I found that for people of my circle there were four ways out of the terrible position in which we are all placed. The first was that of ignorance. It consists in not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity.
People of this sort ... have not yet understood that question of life.... They see neither the dragon that awaits
