Tatar Union of the Godless

The Tatar Union of the Godless was an atheist political group in the Soviet Union, specifically in the territory nowadays known as Tataristan, consisting mainly of Muslim socialists and intellectuals. It was part of the Society of the Godless, an organisation which existed from 1925 to 1947. Its demands for greater Tatar autonomy within the USSR came into conflict with the advocates a federal system grouped around Joseph Stalin. In 1928, the leaders of the Tatar Union of the Godless were arrested, stripped of Bolshevik Party membership, and some sentenced to death, [* "The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State" by Aelexandre Bennigsen and Marie Boxup, 1984, Services Book Club, Lahore] although the sentences were dropped or commuted in 1930. The Tatar Union was renamed the "Tatar Union of the Militant Godless" along with the rest of the Society of the Godless following Stalin's ban on religion in 1929. The disgraced leaders of the Tatar Union continued to live as Soviet citizens, albeit in enforced political obscurity, until the purges of 1937, when Mirza Sultan-Galiev and other Tatar Bolsheviks and intellectuals were swept up and subsequently executed. In 1947 the Tatar Union of the Militant Godless, which had long ceased to independently represent the Central Asian socialist intelligentsia, was subsumed along with the Society of which it was a part into "Znaniye" (Knowledge), a general bureau of state propaganda.

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