Victoria Smolkin,A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism

Reviewed by: James M. White, Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources, Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg, Russia

In a famous 1930 propaganda poster by the artist M. Rabinovich, much about the Soviet attitude towards religion is revealed. Entitled The Struggle against Religion is the Struggle for Socialism!!!, the image shows a red tractor driving up a green triangle towards a gleaming modern city of girders: aeroplanes can be spotted in the blue sky. Opposing the two workers driving the tractor, who clasp a banner emblazoned with the words ‘cultural revolution’, stands the godly multitude: a priest, a rabbi, an imam and a sectarian preacher, all being pushed forward by a corpulent kulak. The preacher clutches a bible: the title is written in both Cyrillic and Latin letters, suggesting foreign influence. Here, religion is portrayed as an obstacle in the way of progress and science, a thin veil for class enemies and international opponents. The struggle against it is an uphill one, but it is worth the effort, for the prize is the earthly utopia of technological modernity.

However, little can be gleaned from the poster about the nature of the atheism driving the working class forwards. What was it, precisely? Did it have a positive content? Or was it defined purely negatively as the absence of religion? Tracing communist atheism from the thought of Marx to Gorbachev’s perestroika, Victoria Smolkin’s excellent new book demonstrates that these questions often produced very different answers, since atheism was a category subject to constant change and challenge throughout the existence of the Soviet project, repeatedly transforming in reaction to new ideological, academic and technological trends, as well as developments in religion. What emerges is an atheism repeatedly dogged by sporadic government interest, the surprising persistence of religion (especially in terms of ritual), inadequate and poorly qualified cadres, and a lack of zeal for the cause among even party members. It would appear that the socialist tractor had a truly steep incline to overcome before approaching the ever-receding vision of a communist heaven on earth.

Smolkin structures her book around three oppositions: ‘the political opposition between the party’s commitment to ideological purity and [the] state’s pursuit of effective governance; the ideological opposition between religion, superstition, and backwardness and science, reason, and progress; and the spiritual opposition between emptiness and indifference and fullness and conviction’ (5). This fits nicely with the chronological narrative, since each of these three oppositions came into prominence in sequence. During the rule of Lenin and Stalin, religion was primarily a political problem: the Russian Orthodox Church commanded considerable resources that could be used against the fledging state and so had to be quashed and countered with militant atheism. The near-destruction of the Church removed the political threat, which allowed Stalin, in 1943, to instrumentalize it via a concordat that subordinated Orthodoxy to state interests: concomitantly, militant atheism faded from view.

Then, under Khrushchev, religion came to be seen principally as an ideological problem: to counter this, atheist cadres strove to show that scientific achievements, especially in the Space Race, not only demonstrated the absence of God but were also organic developments of an atheist worldview. However, the uncanny ability of believers to combine beliefs in science and God helped to undermine this strategy. Equally, the endurance of religion, despite the pressures put on believers by Khrushchev’s legal restrictions against religion and the predictions of the secularization thesis (that modernization led to a decline in religion), posed troubling questions for Marxist-Leninist ideology: why, for instance, did religion, routinely depicted as a consequence of poverty and ignorance, continue to persist, and even thrive, as material conditions and educational standards improved? And why did it find adherents not only among the elderly but also among the young?

To find answers, workers in the state’s atheist apparatus now tried to ‘know’ religion through the recently revived discipline of sociology (although this combination of scholarly and ideological work brought its own share of tensions). The solution to the problem was deemed a spiritual one: atheism had to offer something positive in place of religion that could structure people’s lives and provide answers to existential questions. One major initiative in this regard was the development of socialist rites of passage to replace church baptisms, weddings, and funerals; once again, however, citizens and party members were found to be simply combining the two sets of rituals. It also proved difficult to mobilize the cultural intelligentsia behind the project to create truly affecting, emotional rituals. This question of mobilization became increasingly prevalent in late socialism, as the key problem came to be identified not as religion per se, but rather indifference to the ruling ideology. As the state’s project to build communism remained revolutionary, a lack of zeal was impossible to ignore.

This summation of Smolkin’s basic argument cannot capture the many nuances and insights that she brings to her picture of an atheism in a continual state of flux: indeed, her historicization of atheism is why this study is so important, since she offers a holistic picture of atheism’s development across the seven decades of the Soviet Union’s existence. This is especially the case when we consider that most studies in English have focused on atheism and the battle against religion in the early Soviet state: comparatively little work has been done on the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. Delivered in a highly readable narrative, her cogent analysis and challenging conclusions offer much to historians of religion and the Soviet Union: there is also no doubt that students and the interested general public will find the work intriguing and illuminating.