A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism

361 Pages·2018·60.383 MB·English

by  Victoria Smolkin

A SAcred SpAce IS Never empty

A Sacred Space Is
Never Empty
A HIStory of SovIet AtHeISm
Victoria Smolkin
prINcetoN UNIverSIty preSS
prINcetoN & oxford
Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
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In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
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Jacket design by Amanda Weiss
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978- 0- 691- 17427- 3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018935161
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Miller
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my family

coNteNtS
Acknowledgments · ix
Abbreviations · xv
INtrodUctIoN 1
cHApter 1. The Religious Front: Militant Atheism under Lenin
and Stalin 21
cHApter 2. The Specter Haunting Soviet Communism:
Antireligious Campaigns under Khrushchev 57
cHApter 3. Cosmic Enlightenment: Soviet Atheism as Science 84
cHApter 4. The Ticket to the Soviet Soul: Soviet Atheism as
Worldview 106
cHApter 5. “We Have to Figure Out Where We Lost People”:
Soviet Atheism as Social Science 142
cHApter 6. The Communist Party between State and Church:
Soviet Atheism and Socialist Rituals 165
cHApter 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
[ vii ]

AckNowledgmeNtS
every book reqUIreS a tremendous mobilization of resources and support—
intellectual, material, and moral. I am grateful to finally have the chance to
thank those institutions and individuals that made this book possible.
First, there are the many and diverse forms of intellectual support. This
project was born at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was fortu-
nate enough to work with many remarkable and inspiring scholars over the
course of my graduate studies, including Thomas Brady, John Connelly, Victo-
ria Frede, Thomas Laqueur, Olga Matich, Yuri Slezkine, Edward Walker, and
the late Viktor Zhivov. Thomas Brady’s course on “Immanence and Transcen-
dence” stimulated me to consider how the story of Soviet atheism’s attempts to
grapple with existential questions is both particular and universal. John Con-
nelly has been a rare model of academic discipline and human empathy. Vic-
toria Frede was generous in sharing her expertise on the intellectual history
of Russian atheism. Thomas Laqueur’s visionary work was an inspiration. Olga
Matich was an invaluable guide into the Russian and Soviet cultural imagina-
tion. The late Viktor Zhivov opened up the world of Russian Orthodoxy and
inspired me to compare disciplinary regimes, both religious and ideological,
across time and space. Edward Walker continuously challenged me to artic-
ulate why any of this actually matters. Finally, my advisor, Yuri Slezkine, who
has been at the foundation of this project from the beginning, taught me the
value of asking big questions and showed me that good history can also be a
good story. I am grateful to him for his constant support—o f the scholarship,
but also of the scholar.
In the process of working on this project, I have presented my ideas at
many conferences and workshops. The valuable and challenging feedback I
received on each occasion has undoubtedly improved the book. In particu-
lar, I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the Russian His-
tory Workshop at the University of Pennsylvania; Russian and East European
Reading Group at Yale University; Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton
University; Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Pub-
lic Life at Trinity College; research group on “Religious Cultures in 19th and
20th Century Europe” at the Center for Advanced Studies of the Ludwig Max-
imilians Universität in Munich, Germany; Virginia and Derrick Sherman
Endowed Emerging Scholar Lecture at the University of North Carolina at
Wilmington; and UC Berkeley Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eur-
asian Studies, which has remained an intellectual home, hosting me on mul-
tiple occasions, including its Carnegie Seminar on Ideology and Religion and,
of course, the Russian history kruzhok.
[ ix ]