The intellectual movement to interpret fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism as “political religions” has generated lively debates and an intensive publication program for over a decade.Footnote ¹ The scholarly trend has been closely associated with a revival of the concept of totalitarianism, reconfigured to account for the popular appeal and violent fervor of twentieth-century mass movements of the extreme right and left. As theoreticians of political religion have been preoccupied with arguments about the definition of religion and the problems of comparison, two stumbling blocks have become increasingly apparent. First, historians of Soviet communism, who since the early 1990s have empirically and conceptually transformed the study of Stalinism and Soviet history, have either exhibited “utter neglect” of the political-religion concept or have shunned it due to the scientism and official atheism of the regime. As a result, comparisons in the political-religion mode have generally been carried out by scholars not expert in Soviet history.Footnote ² Second, and closely related to this, even sympathetic critics have found secular religion too blunt a tool and too generic a concept to probe the “novel, supranational, but historically specific . . . sense of mission” produced by radical interwar regimes.Footnote ³ Soviet communism as a project, more than fascism, was deeply invested in viewing its own ideology as genuinely scientific.

In the Soviet context, then, a combined analysis of the troika of religion, science, and ideology assumes great significance. For one thing, the political-religion concept hinges on the definition of religion and its applicability, albeit in modern or secular guise, to Soviet ideology. Soviet science was intimately linked to ideology; the regime is notorious for its suppression of entire scientific fields and promotion of ideologically charged pseudo-science such as Lysenkoism. Indeed, the role and nature of ideology—integral to the cults of Lenin and Stalin, high doctrine, the development of new rituals and the propaganda of atheism, and “faith” in science, not to mention mass emotional zeal and the justification of political violence—has itself long represented a Sphinx's riddle in the study of Soviet history.Footnote ⁴

As the books under review suggest, however, sustained investigation of two of the three parts of the triad may be commonplace, but all three are rarely, if ever, considered together. The ideological mission to suppress religion and inculcate atheism is the focus of historical sociologist Paul Froese's Plot to Kill God. Focusing on religion and ideology, he treats science only in passing. By contrast, the relationship between science and ideology, and Stalin's personal role in shaping postwar scientific debate, is the heart of Ethan Pollock's archival investigation, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. He touches on religion only en passant. But the two authors are willy-nilly forced to confront, if only implicitly, the unmarked third side of the triangle. Froese cannot avoid science in the guise of “scientific atheism” and the ideology's claims on scientific truth, and Pollock cannot entirely ignore religion in the context of the apogee of the Stalin cult and the Marxist–Leninist exegesis of canonical texts. What does the study of religion and science in the Soviet context suggest about the nature of the ideology and its particular “sense of mission”?

Froese's Plot to Kill God is a bold attempt to synthesize the existing literature on Soviet antireligious campaigns and “scientific atheism” over the entire sweep of Soviet history. It makes a special effort to cull quantitative data on secularization before and after the fall of communism in 1991 and, above all, to interpret the “Soviet experiment in secularization” in light of the contemporary and theoretical social-science literature on religion. Froese observes that the Soviet antireligious project was unique and unprecedented, because it attempted not merely to suppress religious institutions and everyday expressions of spirituality but to expunge belief in a supernatural realm. But for him the singularity of this “plot to kill God” only makes it all the more exemplary: like a researcher who has stumbled across some bizarre and anomalous phenomenon and makes it the exception that disproves the rule, Froese takes the Soviet experience as a test case for social-scientific generalizations about secularization and religion.

In six stimulating, engagingly written chapters, Froese challenges and modifies the notion of Marxists and social scientists alike that modernization itself inevitably produces secularization. He cogently suggests how numerous factors, including the content and appeal of otherworldly faith, influenced outcomes and the durability of the religious impulse. In an argument relevant to those maintaining that the sacralization of politics filled a vacuum created by secularization, Froese hits hard against Durkheimian functionalism, arguing that the Marxist–Leninist architects of revolutionary rituals to replace religious rites shared with Durkheim the flawed notion that religious emotions were “detachable from their conceptual religious framework” (170). The multipronged Soviet attempt to maintain an exclusive ideological monopoly foundered, he argues, because it “ignored something that appears to be the singular unifying element of most worldviews . . . the idea of a caring God [and] a desire for a personal relationship with the supernatural” (186). However, by strip-mining Soviet history for material with which to test social-science postulates, rather than approaching religion and atheism under communism as one evolving component of a sometimes contradictory civilization in the making, Froese opens himself up to the very same critique leveled against the political-religion literature (about which he is blissfully unaware): that he extracts and simplifies one element of the ideology without grasping the complexity of the whole.Footnote ⁵

This is ironic, because Froese rejects the notion that communism can be considered a religion. When the author notes that some scholars have called Marxism–Leninism a religion, he refers not to the mass of post-2000 political-religion scholarship but to a 1943 work by Joseph Schumpeter (203 n. 33). Froese goes on to argue against the application of “civil religion” to the Soviet case because “unlike any other civil religion, it did not infuse national culture with supernatural meaning” (16, see also 139). Here he tilts against applying a concept sidestepped by advocates of political religion themselves.Footnote ⁶ Civil religion as applied by historians of the United States, for example, refers to applying the symbolic vocabulary of religion to practices of citizenship or the nation (when promoting, for example, reverence for the Constitution or the flag) in the context of the separation of church and state. The etatist, totalizing regimes of interwar Europe attempted far more: the forging of the “new man,” which had Christian antecedents but an Enlightenment genealogy.Footnote ⁷

At this point the debates over the definition of religion within the concept of political religion become important. A number of scholars maintain that the “secular religions” of the twentieth century do not involve the transcendent, and that the use of “religion” in political religion is merely a heuristic device or metaphor.Footnote ⁸ Others would maintain that communism, more than fascism, promised a form of salvation and that this was the key link between traditional religion, Christianity in particular, and Marxism or communism. As Tucker wrote in his study of Marx, “deeply embedded in Marxism is a theme that corresponds to the master-theme of salvation of the soul in the Christian theology of history. Marx, of course, does not use the word ‘salvation.’ Yet, he has the concept of a total regeneration of man.”Footnote ⁹ Igal Halfin argued that Marxism shared with Christianity an eschatological master narrative, tempered by a return to a Gnostic Christian tradition of viewing knowledge as the key to salvation. But in a key distinction, he wrote, “Any comparison I suggest between Christianity and Marxism serves an analytical, not historical, function. My reference to biblical terms throughout is no more than a heuristic device intended to evoke the deep plot of the eschatological master narrative.”Footnote ¹⁰ The key issue for another recent scholar is that the ideology could mobilize “passions and zealotry among heretofore ‘average’ human beings” and generate atrocities in the name of a higher morality in a fashion “akin to religious sentiment at its most intense.”Footnote ¹¹ The question is thus whether religion in political religion is a heuristic device or something more, and whether the concept of political religion furthers our understanding of this twentieth-century zealotry and violence. Rather than maintaining that Marxism–Leninism cannot be considered a civil religion because it did not embrace the supernatural, Froese would have been on firmer ground arguing that the concept of political religion may not fully capture the specific, syncretic, and evolving thrust of the ideology, which incorporated large doses of utopianism and scientism but not spirituality.

Froese is no position to launch that critique because he himself takes one part of Soviet ideology and conflates it with the whole. Party elites in the interwar period, he writes, did not wish merely to undermine traditional religious beliefs but to convert the population to a new belief system: scientific atheism. Several passages in the book demonstrate how he implicitly treats scientific atheism as the equivalent of the ideology as a whole (e.g. 6, 140). Froese has thoroughly researched Soviet antireligious policies and institutions, but like some of the comparativists of the political-religion school he does not display deep knowledge of the Soviet system.Footnote ¹² Notably, he discusses at length how propagandists of atheism failed to connect with their audiences, how they were not versed in the attractions of religion and made crude assumptions that poorly understood scientific nostrums would easily combat superstition.Footnote ¹³ But there is almost no consideration of the particular attraction or plausibility of the regime's ideology to significant portions of the population. At this point, in fact, he likens communist tactics to those of an extremist cult rather than a traditional religion: “By bullying and tricking their captives into worshipping them, Soviet elites sometimes succeeded in their goal of dominating the minds of their citizens” (136). Without reference to evidence or chronology, he writes that “the Soviet system did not brainwash its citizenry but rather produced a population teeming with halfhearted loyalists and silent malcontents” (17). The pioneering work of Jochen Hellbeck on diaries during the Stalin era, the most significant and widely discussed exploration of how the grand historical transformation and intense collectivist ethos of the revolutionary society exerted a powerful pull on individuals attempting to transform themselves into “new people,” finds no place in his study.Footnote ¹⁴

Bullying malcontents implies only top-down coercion, of which there is plenty in Soviet history. But leaving aside the ideological agents of the regime, of which there were also many, the appeal of participating in the creation of a new world, of carrying out heroic feats in a momentous historical transformation, of becoming “cultured” and enlightened, and joining the collective not only drew in loyalists but could even influence critics and victims. This world view hinging on collectivist historicism was novel and particular, something potentially not captured by the concept of political religion and still less by Froese. What portion of the Soviet population was affected by its allure remains a topic of considerable dispute, but its reach and nature cannot analyzed solely in terms of the flaws of the antireligious propaganda drive. “Secularization” was not the major way the Bolsheviks went about altering consciousness; that was called building socialism.

Froese rightly underscores the exclusivity of Soviet ideology and the strength of the ideological conviction demonstrated by communism's ultimate aim of eradicating religion. However, the specifics of the antireligious propaganda drive can only be understood in terms of the Bolshevik theory and practice of agitprop. Starting in the 1890s, well before the great-power propaganda revolution of World War I, revolutionary Russian Social Democrats elaborated their own distinctive system of mobilizing the population based on a hierarchical ladder of consciousness. Oral “agitation” was the lowest rung, while written propaganda would reach literate and therefore higher-up “elements” of society, and political enlightenment involved a course of study to become more initiated into the movement. The rarified realms of high theory and science, it was assumed, were for intellectuals and theoreticians. In the early Soviet “propaganda state,” different genres with their own styles and conventions were further elaborated within the context of this hierarchy. It was assumed, therefore, that different levels of the ideology would reach different audiences.Footnote ¹⁵ Mass campaigns would employ a far different tone and logic than limited-circulation publications for elites or restricted access publications for the Party leadership. However, these distinctions were unstable and in periodic upsurges of ideological militancy the boundaries came under attack. During the frenzy of infighting and the assault on the non-Party intelligentsia of the Great Break at the end of the 1920s, for example, scholarship and theory came under pressure to adopt some of the style and conventions of agitprop.Footnote ¹⁶

The basic fact that the Bolshevik intellectuals associated religion with backwardness and rural populations, however, consistently placed many branches of official atheism at the lowest end of the hierarchy. This explains much about the sporadic “campaign mode” in which atheist propaganda was disseminated, the poor qualifications of its bumbling cadres, and its mechanical, bureaucratic nature. It is intriguing to think about this hierarchy of consciousness at the heart of the communist approach to knowledge in tandem with the spatial, economic, and juridical hierarchies that much recent research finds at the heart of Soviet “socialist construction.” Large cities and key areas designated as “regime” spaces—purged of social and political “aliens” and far better supplied in the command economy—were in effect designated as bastions of socialism.Footnote ¹⁷ In keeping with this long-standing sociopolitical and geographical pecking order, which was also linked to an ethnic hierarchy, Soviet data from the late 1960s found that “religious believers were overwhelmingly rural, illiterate, and unskilled” (124).

Froese, who teaches at Baylor University, a Christian school affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, suggests at numerous points throughout the book that “humans have a natural religious instinct” (184, 128, passim) that is in part “biological or genetic” (185). He calls this a “largely” (yet apparently not completely) “untestable proposition” but insistently promotes his view that the Soviets’ resounding failure to secularize is the “best available test” of it (184). In my reading, the book itself provides evidence that it was such a decisive a failure only in terms of the totalizing Bolshevik view that religion could be completely and rapidly eradicated. While all the available quantitative data are decidedly flawed, it is clear that larger numbers of people claimed to be atheists than in any other country, perhaps a fifth or more in 1970; the same late 1960s survey in Voronezh showed a relatively low level of religious believers (22 percent, 124). However, despite decades of effort and ideological monopoly it is also clear that significant numbers of believers remained.

One of the most interesting dimensions of Froese's study is that he considers not only Orthodoxy but Catholicism, Islam, and sectarianism and the interrelationships among them. For example, in Lithuania as it was sovietized after World War II Catholicism became associated with national resistance and, with help from the international church, remained the only relatively autonomous institution in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic (88). By contrast, Islam was especially well adapted to go underground, and in Central Asia the Party fused with Islamic tribal structures. Strikingly, Muslim identity remained strong even among those who publicly professed atheism (111). Less convincingly than these arguments about differentiation, Froese takes the large-scale religious revival after the fall of communism as clinching the argument about decisive Soviet failure. If, again, one considers the broader context of ideology as a whole, the late Soviet decline of ideological fervor and post-Soviet inversions of communist ideological norms make extrapolating backwards a perilous enterprise. If one were able to differentiate socially and geographically over time in the same way that Froese does by national and religious groups, one would surely find disparities between the bastions of socialism and the rest of the country.

Inevitably, science intrudes into Froese's discussion on several occasions. He finds that the low-prestige academic discipline of “scientific atheism” produced little research and few students (131). In atheist universities, scientific findings were “presented as correct or incorrect” based on their “supposed ideological positions” (59), while poorly informed antireligious propagandists invoked science while applying “no actual scientific methods to demonstrate their anti-religious assertions” (132). In other words, scientific atheism became a faith; science in Froese's discussion is simply a cover for ideology. By the absence of scientific methods, he means that “the science of Marxism–Leninism did not include what one normally thinks of as science—the rigorous testing of hypotheses using empirical data” (68). This recalls the notion of the sacralization of science invoked by the theorists of political religion, but several objections arise. First, antireligious propaganda was not science per se. Rather, it was a frequently clumsy and heavy-handed effort to popularize science which, as a broader effort, did have notable effects, although predictably they were much more tenuous in rural areas.Footnote ¹⁸ Faith in science, sometimes dubbed scientism, has also been commonplace in modern Western countries; it neither undermines the importance of science in Soviet history nor proves the persistence of some sort of religious phenomenon.Footnote ¹⁹ Finally, social historians of science have for decades shown the importance of extrascientific and ideological beliefs in the development of science. The leading historian of Soviet science, Loren R. Graham, has repeatedly attempted to show how serious engagement with Marxist–Leninist philosophy on the part of scientists inspired valuable and lasting work in fields including physics and psychology.Footnote ²⁰ If, once again, one does not conflate the propaganda of scientific atheism with the many-leveled phenomenon of Marxism–Leninism as a whole, then the centrality of science to the Soviet mission and the complexity of the relationship between science and ideology are less easy to dismiss.

This proposition is resoundingly demonstrated by Ethan Pollock's Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. Pollock mirrors Froese's statement about the uniqueness of the Soviet case: “the USSR went further than any previous state in placing support of science at the center of its stated purpose” (3). But instead of the sociologist Froese's sweeping treatment of the whole Soviet era, Pollock delves deep into postwar Stalinism; instead of using historical material to test big assumptions, the historian Pollock inductively amasses a wealth of detail to support a few generalizations. At the heart of Pollock's elegant and focused study are six postwar public “discussions” in philosophy, biology, physics, linguistics, physiology, and political economy. Pollock's approach is to analyze in rich detail the archival paper trail behind each discussion, highlighting Stalin's personal role as only one, albeit decisive, factor in shaping the results. The sheer scale of these discussions, involving thousands of leading scholars and apparatchiki, in many cases massive press coverage for mass audiences, the reordering of entire disciplines, and, not least, Stalin's own extensive involvement even as key Cold War international crises unfolded, underscores the high importance both ideology and science assumed in Stalin's time.

Pollock wishes to avoid taking Trofim Lysenko's triumph in the 1948 biology discussion as paradigmatic for the rest. Examining each disciplinary case in detail does convincingly reveal that the discussions were interconnected, that actors were very much aware of precedents, but there was no dominant model. Establishing this allows Pollock to stand back and speak about important commonalities among them all. For example, the basic purpose of the discussions was to reverse the unusual autonomy that scientists enjoyed during the all-out crisis of World War II, to reestablish Party discipline, and to finalize what Stalin in particular viewed as the harmony of Marxist–Leninist ideology and science. Clearly, as well, the incipient Cold War was crucial: the Russocentrism and anti-occidentalism that came to the fore during the late Stalin period was manifested with particular force in science, as international contacts and theories became suspect and academic politics revolved around codifying orthodox readings of Russian scientific icons such as Ivan Pavlov. Anti-cosmopolitanism became another common factor, involving both ideological xenophobia and a novel component of official anti-Semitism. Domestic high politics was intimately involved, as rivals among Stalin's lieutenants, notably Andrei Zhdanov, Georgii Malenkov, and Lavrentii Beria, jockeyed to retain the dictator's favor and protect their own bailiwicks. Stalin's personal interventions and the Stalin cult, which dictated that the leader's revealed opinions (or guesses as to what those might be) trumped everything else, are in almost all the discussions shown to have had decisive import.

Stalin's interventions could be drastic and public: in linguistics, he in one stroke destroyed the dominant (and stridently Marxist) theories of academician Nikolai Marr, whom everyone had assumed would be the equivalent of “patriotic” authorities Pavlov and Michurin; in biology, he decisively endorsed Lysenko and edited his texts. Stalin's involvement could be kept behind the scenes, as when he gave repeated tongue-lashings to the country's top economists, mocking their attempts to compose an authoritative textbook on political economy. But in that case, he chose not to put his thumb on the scale during an endless and frustratingly inconclusive 1951 Central Committee discussion. Because Stalin is so central to the book, Pollock could have done more to trace his world view, particularly his approach to ideology and science, beyond the immediate context of the postwar period.Footnote ²¹ But no one reading this book can come away thinking that Stalin did not take the ideas of Marxism–Leninism seriously: “His memos and top secret documents are saturated with the same Marxist–Leninist language, categories, and frames for understanding the world that appeared in the public discourse” (3). At the same time, the seriousness with which Stalin took science was to him also connected with ideology: Stalin was “determined,” at times “even desperate,” to show the scientific basis of Soviet Marxism and to reconcile the doctrine with scientific thought (3).

Much of the utility of Pollock's work stems from its ability to consider each scientific discussion as a complex event in which Stalin's interventions were but one of a range of factors determining outcomes. These factors included the disciplinary histories and configurations of each field; the personal, scientific, and ideological issues at stake; and the strategies and approaches of scientific and political actors at the discussions themselves. “Each discussion,” he concludes, “included a painful, dangerous, and sometimes imaginative search for acceptable ways of presenting a worldview that was compatible with both canonical texts and scientific discoveries” (213). Despite the common themes that the discussions illustrate, their practical outcomes were in fact wildly different, confusing actors about their ultimate implications and highlighting the contradictions of late Stalinism. Lysenko triumphed in biology, whereas the conference in theoretical physics was canceled in part, Pollock adroitly suggests in his intervention into a long controversial subject, because of fears it would hamper the Soviet atomic bomb project, then at a crucial stage. The “atomic shield” protecting quantum physics from those pushing to make it the equivalent of the now-verboten genetics was, however, not the only factor at play: so was the fact that a conference would not settle scientific–ideological controversy, which was the purpose behind the discussions, but only exacerbate it (91). “Leave them in peace,” Stalin supposedly told Beria, who was in charge of the bomb project, “we can always shoot them later” (91).

By the same token, Stalin enabled Lysenko to triumph because he genuinely believed that the agronomist was correct scientifically and that the “future belonged to Michurin” (the Russian breeder of fruit plants Lysenko claimed as the founder of a neo-Lamarkian Soviet biology), as the dictator told the “people's scientist” in a personal letter from 1947 (48). Stalin's editorial changes to Lysenko's landmark published speech at the Agricultural Academy in 1948 replaced the text's older notions of class-based (proletarian and bourgeois) science to give it a more universalist, objectivist feel.Footnote ²² “Stalin's comments show that he was engaged in the actual substance of the debate and felt himself enough of an expert to school Lysenko,” Pollock observes (52). In general, Stalin's willingness to rebuke and instruct leading scholars and scientists across so many disciplines demonstrated an astonishing degree of arrogance. But, Pollock argues, most readers of Pravda were unaware of Lysenko's errors and understood the affair as a celebration of science. Lysenko's triumph, now notorious, ironically signaled the rising prestige of science in the USSR at the time (71).

Where, then, did ideology end and science begin? Pollock's study suggests that in some respects they were so closely intertwined that they cannot be disaggregated, but in others they were distinguishable not just to scientists, but to contemporary Party and state officials (216). One long-standing division was between the natural sciences and the Marxist social sciences. When Lysenko wrote that “any science is class-oriented in nature,” Stalin wrote in the margins, “Ha-Ha-Ha!!! And what about Mathematics? And Darwinism?” (57). The relationship between Marxism-as-science and the Soviet natural sciences is an exceedingly complex issue, and far more attention to its development beyond the immediate postwar discussions, starting with efforts to “proletarianize” natural science in the 1920s, would be needed to clarify it. For example, Stalin's marginalia against proletarian science in this period appear as an homage to Lenin, who in the early 1920s ridiculed the theoreticians of the proletarian culture movement.Footnote ²³

One of Pollock's main conclusions is that the postwar discussions underlined the objective nature of science—what he calls a “new hybrid of Russocentrism and objectivity” (134)—and that this paved the way for thaw-era claims for more autonomous science and the eventual clash between science and ideology. A major theoretical step toward establishing the objective status of science was Stalin's famous thesis in his pamphlet on linguistics: destroying the class-based theories of Marr, the dictator declared that language was neither part of the base nor the superstructure. Strengthening the objectivist credentials of science was also closely connected to the question of genres that Froese neglected in the case of scientific atheism. In the first, philosophical, discussion of 1946, Stalin berated leading philosopher and political figure Georgii Aleksandrov for his dry, academic, and nonmilitant tone. He specifically invoked Lenin, who as early as his 1908 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism had developed what some have jokingly called the “quote-and-club” method of polemic against bourgeois and reactionary science. By contrast, in the linguistics and political economy discussions of 1950 and 1951, Stalin was equally adamant that scientific debate be open and at least in appearance not subject to predetermined conclusions; he condemned disciplinary mini-dictators in scientific fields. In direct contrast to his earlier advocacy of a militant tone, he berated the political economists for their propagandistic popularizing, which one economist then termed the “shrieking and vulgar style of cheap, political agitation” (182–3, 196). In the book's conclusion, Pollock implicitly acknowledges that we are dealing with two subperiods: in the immediate postwar years, Stalin was attempting to “integrate all thought into Soviet ideology,” but after 1949 he turned toward reinforcing objective knowledge. Implicitly and tentatively, science was being established “as a subject beyond the Party's ideological reach” (221).

As in the case of Froese, a broader grasp of the development of the Soviet system as a whole could clarify this issue. The Soviet system evolved in cycles of militant attack and retrenchment, crackdown and thaw, stagnation and reform. The conflict between “reds” and “experts” is one of the great themes of Soviet history and was closely connected to these cycles. Periods of ideological militancy tended not only to inject the conventions of propagandistic genres into science but to empower understandings of knowledge as determined by class (“proletarian culture” and “proletarian science”) or the Party (science as political “weapon”). When ideologues were reigned in, as in 1931–2, the authority of specialists was bolstered and more objectivistic theories of knowledge could come to the fore. Pollock's focused postwar study cannot capture or dissect the cyclical quality to these alternations.Footnote ²⁴ But even the ideological crackdown of the immediate postwar years, the so-called Zhdanov period, was followed after Zhdanov's decline in 1947 and death in 1948 by the ascendance of a technocratic faction led by the previously embattled Malenkov.Footnote ²⁵ Integrating these cycles into our conception of Stalinism remains a challenge, as is interpreting their shifting parameters and their ramifications across politics, culture, and science.

What, then, about religion? There was a bitter irony in Stalin's demands for free and nondogmatic academic debate during the very apogee of the Stalin cult, when the venerated leader was hailed ecstatically as the “coryphaeus” of science. The dictator's instantaneously canonized interventions calling for scientific debate led inevitably to its further restriction. To Pollock, this is a key paradox of science and ideology under Stalin, but he sometimes has to resort to religious terminology to explain it. His analogy for the vision of the political-economy textbook was a “Soviet New Testament” to supersede the Marxist bible for the age of socialism; Lysenko, whose chief goal was to annihilate his scholarly rivals, is dubbed a “zealot” (187, 59). But even these analogies are rare. Whether it goes under the rubric of political religion, political culture, or something else, more attention to the workings of veneration in the Stalin cult on various levels could amplify Pollock's already illuminating study. Stalin's role as absolute arbiter of ideological–scientific controversies derived from fearsome political power and the logic of Marxism–Leninism, but also not least from the quasi-sacred aura that enveloped him in the cult. Even so, one earnest schoolteacher, certain that Stalin's call for free and creative scientific debate meant that the leader would welcome criticisms of his own works, went so far as to explain to Stalin: “amicus Plato, sed magis amicus veritas” (Plato is dear, but the truth is dearer) (129–30). As such reactions suggest, there were obvious tensions between Stalin the demigod and Stalin the scientist.

Science and faith were both integral to Bolshevism and Stalinism. Sometimes they worked in tandem; sometimes they clashed. This discussion has tried to suggest that there were significant contradictory tendencies within what we conventionally yet simplistically label Stalinism, just as there were radically different subperiods within the Stalin period. Juxtaposing these two stimulating works suggests that probing science, ideology, and religion (or phenomena associated with it) at once and in tandem is a necessary next step in the Soviet field, for as a conceptual move it can avoid the pitfall of smoothing out those contradictions. Faith, science, and ideology were all pillars of that particular “sense of mission” set in motion by the Bolshevik Revolution. No discussion of Soviet faith can be convincing or complete if it does not give sufficient weight to science.