It was not until 1954 that the phrase “under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, by an act of the US Congress. Cold War rhetoric was fueling a rise in patriotic religiosity in American life. A vividly instructive comic book series like “This Godless Communism” and the fulminations of Reverend Billy Graham against “demon-possessed Communism” positioned Soviet atheism as the opposite of what is good, godly, sacred, and moral. At precisely the same time, in the aftermath of Stalin's death, Soviet Party ideologues were reexamining the relationship between atheism and the communist project in a very different way. Victoria Smolkin's important new study of the history of Soviet atheism places the state's fluid, quasi-adaptive approaches to eradicating religion at the center of a story about the communist party's failure to fully win over the hearts and minds of ordinary people.

Smolkin has organized the impeccably researched material in this book around three sets of opposition: the political opposition between entrenched religion and Bolshevik governance; the ideological opposition between religious backwardness and secular enlightenment; and—especially in the final decades of the Soviet experiment—the spiritual opposition between indifference (who cares if babushka wants to baptize the kids, why not?), and genuine conversion to a “scientifically” socialist worldview.

The book devotes one full chapter to Leninist and Stalinist tactics to defeat or control the Church in the pre-war years. From the beginning, Bolshevik leaders considered religion to be primarily a political problem, insofar as the powerful Russian Orthodox Church still posed a threat to Bolshevik rule. The anti-clerical campaigns of the 1920s and 30s used brute force to target the physical spaces associated with religion, turning churches into warehouses and so forth. By 1943, however, Stalin had broken the power of the Church, and let religion back in as an ally to the State, “mobilizing patriotism at home and [serving] as a diplomatic vehicle for the Soviet state's ambitions abroad” (56). The bulk of Smolkin's study concentrates on the attempt to reintroduce atheism as a positive worldview and genuine set of convictions in the latter decades of the Soviet period. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the muted but persistent presence of religiosity among Soviet citizens was no longer a political problem, it was an ideological problem, a symptom of unfinished business. Party propagandists, social scientists, and ordinary letter writers could all testify to the fact that neither “ideal communist morality” nor, for that matter, ideal Christian morality, was being upheld. Rural celebrations of religious holidays were accompanied by “drunkenness that lasts many days and mass killings of livestock” (64). The campaign against religion was renewed, on the battleground of education and moral suasion. As Smolkin convincingly argues, the battle against religion had turned into a battle for atheism, an atheism that linked scientific literacy to spiritual and moral ideals. Under Khrushchev, a new generation of atheist activists was trained to be “enthusiastic and relatable,” in order to reach the masses with a message of communist vision. This was not a matter of replacing traditional religions with a “religion of communism,” it was a movement common to most parts of the secularizing, modernizing world to re-ignite faith in rational knowledge as humanity's primary defense against disease, injustice, and death. Soviet science fiction literature of this period is rich with stories that imagine humanity close to being able to conquer not only the cosmos, but also our inner demons.

Nevertheless, Soviet social scientists were ultimately faced with the same kind of evidence that flummoxed other twentieth century proponents of secularization theory: people do not become less religious as society becomes more urban, educated, bureaucratic, and complex. On the contrary, by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the late 1980s, it was impossible to imagine that either the Party (as an ideological force) or the State (as a governing force) could deny the role of religion in socialist society. The Communist Party retained its fundamental allegiance to atheism, and lost the people. The State, on the other hand, signaled its “official recognition of the fact that religious organizations should and must find their place in solving the problems that face [Soviet] society” (235) by embracing the millennium of Russian Orthodoxy as a national celebration.

This book beautifully fills an empty space, and will be of great value to scholars and students across all disciplines in our field.