Smolkin A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

A History of Soviet Atheism
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4008-9010-1
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 360 Seiten, EPUB

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smolkin, Victoria

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Alternative Glaubensformen Agnostizismus, Atheismus, Säkularer Humanismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xv

Introduction 1

1 The Religious Front: Militant Atheism under Lenin and Stalin 21

2 The Specter Haunting Soviet Communism: Antireligious Campaigns under Khrushchev 57

3 Cosmic Enlightenment: Soviet Atheism as Science 84

4 The Ticket to the Soviet Soul: Soviet Atheism as Worldview 106

5 “We Have to Figure Out Where We Lost People”: Soviet Atheism as Social Science 142

6 The Communist Party between State and Church: Soviet Atheism and Socialist Rituals 165

7 The Socialist Way of Life: Soviet Atheism and Spiritual Culture 194

Conclusion Utopia’s Orphan: Soviet Atheism and the Death of the Communist Project 228

Notes 247

Bibliography 303

Index 333

Über Autor(innen)

Victoria Smolkin is assistant professor of history at Wesleyan University.