Based on Victoria Smalkin's book: A Sacred Space is Never Empty (2018, Princeton University Press).
Objective: Case study of the Soviet Communist Party's changing strategies towards religion and atheism, not promoting any worldview.
Key Periods and Strategies
Lenin's Era
Initial approach: Secular state creation, ideological battle against religion.
Early actions: Nationalized church land, removed religion from government and education, reduced religious institutions' autonomy.
Lenin's perspective: Religion part of superstructure; atheism not crucial for communism's rise.
Shift to repression: Famine of 1922, opposition to church property requisition led to harsh treatment of clergy.
Stalin's Era
Continued Lenin's repressive measures, but saw religion as manageable through control rather than eradication.
Introduced the Council on the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1943 for managing church-state relations, leading to temporary religious revival.
Final decade: Relative stability in church-state relations.
Khrushchev's Era
Promoted scientific atheism and propaganda but recognized its failure due to misunderstanding of religion's nature.
Tactics: Aggressive anti-religious campaigns in media, increased administrative restrictions.
Outcome: Increase in religious rites and resilience, leading to policy adjustments.
Brezhnev's Era and Beyond
Identified gaps between atheistic theory and practice, focused on scientific research on religiosity.
Developed positive atheism: Emphasized emotional aspects, tried to substitute religious functions with secular rituals.
Main Strategies and Their Issues
Administrative Restrictions: Closing institutions and persecuting clergy didn't erase religion; instead, it went underground.
Scientific Atheism: Reliance on natural sciences failed to engage the population emotionally, leading to persistent religiosity.
Emotional Connection: Soviet ideologists eventually realized the need for atheism to address human emotions and social needs.
Soviet Realizations and Adaptations
Recognized resilience of religion and the failure of aggressive or purely scientific approaches.
Re-evaluated atheism as needing positive, emotional, and humanistic elements to substitute religious functions.
Illichov's perspective: Atheism must become empathetic and address people's social and emotional needs.
Impact and Current Status
Final years under Gorbachev: Departure from anti-religious campaigns, inviting religion back into public space.
Modern Russia: Continued involvement of the Orthodox Church in state affairs.
Personal and Societal Impacts
Significant religious revival post-USSR collapse, spike in new religious movements and construction of places of worship.
Example of failure: Religious propagandas in rural areas leading to opposite results—more faith, not less.
Conclusion
Atheism’s fight against religion in the USSR evolved from militant to scientific to positive strategies, each with limited success.
Emotional and humanistic connections were found to be more crucial for influencing belief systems than administrative or scientific methods.
Overall persistence of religion demonstrates the complex interplay between belief, politics, and society even under systematic repression.
Reference
A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism by Victoria Smalkin