Institutionalized Atheism of the Security Service Officers in Communist Poland, 1944–89

My paper examines religiosity in Communist Poland and evaluates the role of institutionalized atheism as part of the code of socialist morality. It focuses primarily on the “purest of the purest” — the functionaries of the security service, designed to be the first solely atheist segment of Polish society. I argue that the regime’s materialistic, atheistic, and explicitly anticlerical doctrine, demanding undivided loyalty of its cadres, was in fact a kind of religion itself, but not attractive enough to uproot Christian beliefs even out of the security functionaries. The article explores ontological reasons for animosities between communism and Catholicism, the regime’s methods to extirpate religiosity from the security officers, as well as forms of constant surveillance for the security personnel’s religious activity. The research leads me to conclusion that the regime’s atheistic campaign failed due to lack of homogeneity, internal contradictions and inability to create an atheist civilization without Catholic connotations. The findings are based on top-secret documents, recently declassified and available to scholars in the Institute of the National Remembrance (Instytut Pamiêci Narodowej) in Poland.