When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the
Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power
used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror-to
turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality.
Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet
Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating
an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the
first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of
archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on
the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria
Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must
make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was
reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive
beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its
engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that
removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not
enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail
Gorbachev-in a stunning and unexpected reversal-abandoned atheism
and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space
Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life,
for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.
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