Sacred Space Is Never Empty

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.

"Honorable Mention for the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies", "Lively and often entertaining prose."---Catriona Kelly, Times Literary Supplement, "Much has been written about the Soviet Union’s war on religion and its vigorous efforts to set up atheism and the Bolshevik revolutionary project as a new faith. Most such accounts treat religion and atheism as simple opposites. Smolkin describes a more nuanced and variable relationship between them."---Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs, "[The] historical backdrop of Russia’s remarkable journey from Orthodoxy to atheism, and back again, is chronicled in Victoria Smolkin’s A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism. It is the first full account of Soviet atheism, from the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. This engaging book is full of striking analysis and counterintuitive insights."---Gene Zubovich, Religion & Politics, "Smolkin’s profound book . . . allows us to see not only the struggle of atheists against religion in the Soviet Union, but also to formulate some important conclusions about the Soviet society. This is one of the decade’s most successful and important scholarly works on this topic."---Nikolay Mitrokhin, Bremen University

Victoria Smolkin is assistant professor of history at Wesleyan University.