Victoria Smolkin is assistant professor of history at Wesleyan University.
"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’s important new study of the history of Soviet
atheism places the state’s fluid, quasi-adaptive approaches to
eradicating religion at the center of a story about the communist
party’s failure to fully win over the hearts and minds of ordinary
people. This book beautifully fills an empty space, and will be of
great value to scholars and students across all disciplines in our
field."---Yvonne Howell, University of Richmond
"Learning about atheism is a fascinating way to enrich one’s
knowledge of religion, and vice versa; Smolkin reminds us that the
boundaries between conceptual social categories are more porous
than we often realize or admit . . . . Smolkin’s impressive first
book broadens our perspective on what qualifies as “sacred,” and
educates us on the power and limitations of human conviction in
driving the great cycles of historical change."---Anais Garvanian,
The Graduate Journal of Harvard Divinity School
"Delivered in a highly readable narrative, [Smolkin’s] 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."---James M. White, European History Quarterly
"The book is written in an accessible way . . . Smolkin offers
highly interesting insights from her research in Eastern European
archives and interviews, conducted in Russia and Ukraine during
2008 and 2013, relevant not only for scholars of religion and
history, but also for an interested audience."---Christian Föller,
Religion and Society in Central and Eastern Europe
"Atheism appears to be a straightforward concept, but for Soviet
communists it was not. Victoria Smolkin’s A Sacred Space Is Never
Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism explores how the meaning and
implementation of atheism were debated and redefined over the
course of the entire history of the Soviet Union. . . . Like many
recent monographs on Soviet history, this book provides a new
answer for why Soviet communism failed. But Smolkin does not
provide one piece to that puzzle; she provides the piece. For
atheism’s failure in the Soviet Union was intrinsically entwined
with communism’s. . . . This beautifully written book—which
addresses universal themes such as why there is a need for religion
in a modern society—will be of interest to a wide array of readers
in any field."---Laurie Manchester, American Historical Review
"Smolkin makes a major contribution to the study of religion and of
ideology in the late Soviet period. She demonstrates effectively
that ideology did matter to the Soviet project, even—indeed
especially—in the Brezhnev era, and that religion served as the
barometer of ideological health. . . . A real strength of Smolkin’s
analysis is precisely the connection she makes to the broader
ideological problem of indifference and commitment. Whereas several
recent works have rightly sought to bring Soviet antireligious
measures into the broader scholarly discussion of secularization
and state secularism, Smolkin rightly demonstrates that
secularization in the sense of removal of religion from public life
or indifference to religion was not the objective of the Soviet
regime. Rather, the goal was belief in a sacred antireligion, a
convinced atheism. This important book should be read by all
scholars interested in religion in the USSR, ideology in the late
Soviet period, and secularization and secularism in the twentieth
century."---Heather J. Coleman, Journal of the American Academy of
Religion
"In her fascinating overview, Smolkin demonstrates the paradoxical
nature of the atheistic propaganda in the Soviet Union. . . .
Smolkin’s book, which is based on the deep investigation of the
variety of documents representing the ideas and spirit of the
propagandists of Soviet atheism, considerably supplements our
understanding of the interdependence of religion and atheism in the
Soviet domain."---Elena A. Stepanova, Journal of Religion in
Europe
"One of the greatest strengths of Smolkin’s book is the varied and
comprehensive nature of the materials she draws on. Having worked
in state and party archives, surveyed atheist publications, and
interviewed key figures from the Soviet study of religion, Smolkin
is able to provide an overview of atheist work that has no parallel
in the current literature. This well-written book makes essential
reading for anyone interested in the history of Soviet ideology or
in comparative histories of modern religion and
secularization."---Sonja Luehrmann, Canadian Slavonic Papers
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