Almost forty years ago, I read the first books by the recently deceased Russian philosopher Tatiana Goricheva (1947-2025). I found her intellectual and spiritual journey, recounted in “Speaking of God is Dangerous: My Experiences in Russia and the West” (Herder, 1986), fascinating. The Berlin Wall had not yet fallen, and with it the tragic history of Soviet communism. In those years when terrorism and Gonzalo’s thought (Shining Path) were rampant in Peru, Goricheva’s testimony was a practical denial of the inconsistency of Marx’s critique of religion. The stubborn reality and essentially religious nature of human beings discredited Marx’s position, captured primarily in his short text “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844).

For Marx, religion would be the “opium of the people,” as it would dull the revolutionary impulses of the proletariat, thus prolonging oppression in favor of the bourgeoisie. Religion would be merely a creation of the ruling class and a sort of salve to soften the real situation of misery and exploitation. From this perspective, what should be done is to put an end —through class struggle—to these material conditions of exploitation: in a communist society, where all material needs would be met, the idea of ​​a sublimated God would disappear. Logically, in the Soviet Union of the late 1980s, whose citizens had been educated in Marxist atheism, there should be neither believers nor the problem of God.

The case of Tatiana Goricheva is precisely proof of this fallacious argument. Her story is moving. She is—let’s put it this way—a granddaughter of the 1917 Revolution. Her parents were raised atheists, and so was she. However, until her conversion to Orthodox Christianity at age 26, the education she received didn’t satisfy her restless soul. A leader of the Communist youth and a philosophy professor, she began with Marx, continued with Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger; she passed through the practice of yoga and ended up in the Russian Orthodox Church. This intellectual transition was dramatic for her and for young people who shared the same concern. She founded a seminary to study the Church Fathers. Other similar centers emerged, and there was no shortage of KGB spies, interrogations, and job losses, yet the wave of conversions could no longer be stemmed.

Naturally, this type of intellectual was not popular in the Soviet Union. In 1980, Goricheva had to choose between prison or exile. She chose exile, moving to Paris. In the West, she realized that, even though she enjoyed freedom, speaking about God was also dangerous. She found herself in a society—European society—where religious convictions tend to be confined to the private sphere of each individual, with little public resonance. She remained undeterred and continued her intellectual work and the testimony of her life, encouraging initiatives that revived the sluggish spirit of the Christian West.

What remains of the Marxist critique of religion? Theoretical solidity? No. Reality has refuted its claim. Religion is not a human creation superimposed for comfort and tranquility upon human anguish; it is an essential condition of human nature, as Góricheva rightly points out in another of her books: Seeing today the conversion in Russia of thousands and thousands of young people educated in pantheism, one can say, without exaggeration, that ‘God can, from the stones lying there, raise up children of Abraham.’ Without having received any religious education in our childhood, our first visit to Church is often a miracle for us whose memory will never be erased (“We, Soviet Converts.” Meeting, 1986).