A Sacred Space is Never Empty is a fascinating, thickly documented and erudite historical account in the political science tradition of the atheist program pursued by the Soviet state and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Taking this approach to Soviet political history, it discusses in depth the ideological and policy debates among Communist Party and Soviet state leaders as they attempted to facilitate the Marxist–Leninist prediction of the eradication of religion from socialist/communist society. Although atheistic policy and practice may seem a bit esoteric vis-a-vis the larger political program of communism, Victoria Smolkin demonstrates the ultimate centrality of the fight against religion to the ethos of Soviet political culture. Her concluding chapter convincingly argues that the open observance of the millennium of Christianity in Russia in 1988—in the context of perestroika and glasnost—struck a critical blow to the Soviet Communist self-identity that ended up crumbling in the collapse of the USSR.
The literature and folk culture of Russia more than many other nations emphasizes the peculiarity and the supra-empirical nature of the Russian soul, its mystery always beyond rational explanations. Thus, perhaps the problem of atheism in the Soviet Union was the Russian core culture. Smolkin keeps her focus largely on the Russian cultural case (with Ukraine and Belarus partaking in the East Slav cultural tendencies as well), with only occasional diversions to consider minority cultures or non-Orthodox faiths in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, her analysis is not culture bound as it is organized on conceptual frames that reach well beyond the specific case. In fact, although more or less chronological in treatment, her chapters focus on the conceptual problem for atheism at each stage, with overlap clearly discussed as one stage dissolves into the next. From the early militancy of the Lenin and Stalin eras which gave way to accommodation during World War II; through the antireligious attacks of the Khrushchev era after 1958 which hamstrung the churches organizationally but drove believers underground; to the questions posed by new sociology and ethnographic studies of religion showing faith secularizing but not going away; through the attempts to build attractive patriotic-atheistic rituals that did come to be accepted but did not displace the religion remnants in the culture thanks to family and tradition; through the final unsuccessful project to construct a socially affirming spirit around atheism—each new chapter revealed new challenges and stages of partial success and ongoing ultimate failure in the atheist program.
Smolkin previews her conclusions by starting her “Introduction” with a description of Gorbachev's April 1988 meeting with Patriarch Pimen and other Russian Orthodox hierarchs, the event that signaled the beginning of the latter-day legitimization of religion in the communist state. The step by step path through atheist policy and practice that the author describes led to the “Death of the Communist Project”—a phrase that is part of the subtitle of the “Conclusion” section—which could not be completed on account of the inability to convert Russians to atheism, even though the ideological, institutional, and political power of religion had been brought under control. “The central paradox of Soviet atheism,” Smolkin argues, was that “Soviet atheism was about not secularization or secularism but instead conversion” (p. 241). In a word, Smolkin finds that the greatest problem for Soviet atheism in the end was not religion, but indifference toward religion and religious issues. The atheist activists could find no means to create and mobilize the Soviet people around a “spirit” of communism, even as they convinced most citizens of the value of rationalistic science and, perhaps, even socialist politics. Communism, in short, required a spirit at its core that atheism did not possess and could not create. It was the emptiness that could not exist in the place of religion or some other form of spiritual culture.
Acknowledging important works in the sociology of religion on secularization and on de-secularization debates, the author does not engage her work with that broad literature extensively. With the great depth of analysis of the Soviet case, this is not a shortcoming. Nevertheless, it would be a next step for the insights of Smolkin's work to be assimilated and expanded upon in that broader literature. The debates about “believing but not belonging,” “spiritual but not religious,” religious economy/markets, supply versus demand drivers of religion and similar themes could use the findings of Smolkin to elucidate aspects of the pros and cons here.
The author adopts an analytical strategy that is both incredibly insightful and severely limiting. Taking as her object the entire Soviet Union and its history of atheist policy and practice means that she can identify extremely important processes that determined the warp and woof of that history. On the other hand, we do not see here Soviet believers or religious groups except as categories of problems for the atheists. Nevertheless, atheist practice and the evolution of its policy perspectives were shaped in significant measure by the reactions the atheists received from the believers in a recursive process, as she herself indicates (p. 241). The author has avoided close attention to the religious side of that recursion other than citing the collective sociological data that the Soviets began to take seriously from the late 1950s when sociology itself became a legitimate pursuit in the USSR. By and large, viewing matters on the scale of the whole society meant assessing the push-back of the Orthodox Church against the atheist program. But Smolkin does not cite church authorities except in a few critical instances, and the more detailed response of a broad range of religious actors across the various stages of atheist development is not articulated. (Robert Goeckel's recent book, Soviet Religious Policy in Estonia and Latvia: Playing Harmony in the Singing Revolution [Bloomington, IN, 2018], which examines a shorter historical span and focuses only on Estonia and Latvia, includes the religious and church voices much more fully in the interactions with atheists.)
One related specific criticism of this excellent book: although she mentions the human rights problems of believers, the fact that the number of prisoners of conscience in the late 1970s and into the pre-perestroika 1980s was extremely high is one indicator that the persecution and imprisonment problems for believers were not over after the Khrushchev antireligious campaign ended in 1964. There is a significant literature on these human rights abuses that was, in my opinion, too briefly alluded to, even though one would think that they should be seen as a replay of Stalinist gulag practices that had been discredited long ago, thus extending her analytical frame more fully up to the end of the USSR.
A Sacred Space Is Never Empty is elegantly written and evokes the ethos and practice of Soviet atheism in extraordinary ways. Smolkin's work should become a core reference for all studies of Soviet Communist theory and practice, and it should stimulate a diverse set of research connections between studies not only of the Soviet Union but of religion around the world. Its conclusions regarding the nature of the collapse of Soviet communist legitimacy and claimed monopoly on truth also should serve as a warning about attempts to establish religion-based monopolistic structures for 21st Century Russia that are likely similarly flawed.
