Annotation: After the revolution, when the Bolsheviks began to build a new world, they expected that religion would soon die out. The Soviet government used a variety of tools – from education to propaganda and terror – to realize their vision of a world without religion. Despite the pressure on believers and the monopoly on ideology, the Communist Party was never able to overcome religion and create an atheist society. A Sacred Space is Never Empty is the first study to cover the history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Based on extensive archival material, historian and Wesleyan University professor Victoria Smolkin argues that understanding the Soviet experiment requires understanding Soviet atheism. The author shows how atheism has been reinterpreted as an alternative cosmology with its own set of beliefs, practices, and spiritual obligations. Smolkin connects this phenomenon to religious life in the Soviet Union, communist ideology, and Soviet politics.

“A sacred space is never empty. And the place for the best book on the history of Soviet atheism has been taken up by this study from Victoria Smolkin.”

Yuri Slezkine, historian

“In 1988 – on the eve of the 1000th anniversary of the baptism of Rus – in a public opinion poll, the Soviet authorities found that their ideological policy had failed. Citizens did not so much strive for religious faith as they rejected atheism. This survey data, as well as the decision of Mikhail Gorbachev and his circle regarding rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church, are described in Victoria Smolkin’s extremely interesting book A Sacred Space is Never Empty.”

Maxim Trudolyubov, journalist