"Godless Communists"

Author: William B. Husband

Publisher:

Published: 2002-09

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 9780875805955

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"Godless Communists" offers a fresh interpretation of early Soviet efforts to create an atheistic, scientific society. Husband shows that religion, contrary to Bolshevik assertions, was not merely an expression of gullibility and ignorance but a firmly entrenched system for ordering family and community relationships. The Bolsheviks' efforts to abolish the Church failed because they underestimated how tightly religious beliefs were woven into the fabric of the Russians' daily lives. Exploring the confrontation between secularism and the lower classes' traditional beliefs, "Godless Communists" illustrates how developments between 1917 and 1932 shaped the attitudes toward religion and atheism that endure in Russia today.

The Russian Orthodox Church, 1917-1948

The Russian Orthodox Church, 1917-1948 PDF

Author: Daniela Kalkandjieva

Publisher:

Published: 2017-10-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781138577992

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This book tells the remarkable story of the decline and revival of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century. Following 1917, the Bolsheviks' anti-religious policies led to a significant decline in the church in the 20s and 30s. However, in 1939, Stalin gave the Patriarch of Moscow jurisdiction over orthodox congregations in Poland and later encouraged the church to promote patriotic activities in resistance to the Nazis. He agreed a Concordat with the church in 1943 and continued to encourage the church in the immediate postwar period. Based on extensive original research, this book puts forward a great deal of new information and overturns established thinking on many key points.

Religion in the Soviet Union

Religion in the Soviet Union PDF

Author: Walter Kolarz

Publisher:

Published: 1961

Total Pages: 572

ISBN-13:

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Comprehensive survey of the situation of various religious groups in the U.S.S.R., including Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, Jewish, with contemporary developments under the Khrushchev regime.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty PDF

Author: Victoria Smolkin

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-10-29

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 0691197237

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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.

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