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The Social Scientist Meets the “Believer”: Discussions of God, the Afterlife, and Communism in the Mid-1960s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Miriam Dobson
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Abstract

In this article, I use the transcripts of interviews carried out under the auspices of the Institute of Scientific Atheism in the mid-sixties. Informants were asked about diverse aspects of their religious practice and belief, allowing scholars—both then and now—to consider the nature of Soviet “secularization.” Following Charles Taylor, I suggest that this was not simply “a story of loss, of subtraction”; instead, informants’ rather heterodox conceptions of the afterlife indicate moments of individual creativity. In particular, I find that among the poor and marginalized, visions of the afterlife sometimes articulated a desire for social equality considered missing from Soviet society. I also probe the Soviet state’s problematic dependency on atheism. The regime’s legitimacy rested on its claim to ensure progress and modernity, and religion— the epitome of backwardness—was a useful antithesis. The interview was a ritual that enacted the superiority of Soviet values (reason, rationality, and enlightenment). And yet the encounter between atheist-interviewer and “believer” could often prove unpredictable, suggesting that the religion-atheism binary was in practice rather more brittle than the authorities might have hoped.

Type
Redefining Community in the Late Soviet Union
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 74 , Issue 1 , Spring 2015 , pp. 79 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2014

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23. This comment was made at a meeting of scholars held at the Institute of Philosophy's Atheism Section in June 1960 to discuss “The Reasons for Religion's Survival and Methods for Overcoming It,” a volume which the team had been charged with writing by the CPSU Central Committee earlier that year. ARAN, f. 1922, op. 1, d. 1002,11. 84-89, 115-18.

24. ARAN, f. 1922, op. 1, d. 1002, 1. 45. A few years later, a Ukrainian study would make a similar argument: A. A. Eryshev gave examples of economically more developed villages that nonetheless had high levels of religious activity and compared them with others where people “lived materially worse” but were for the most part nonbelievers. Eryshev maintained that the relationship between economic factors and religiosity should be understood in more general terms, and he linked the postwar religious revival to the difficult economic circumstances of those years. Eryshev, A. A., “Opyt konkretnosotsiologicheskikh issledovanii religioznosti naseleniia na Ukraine,” in Klibanov, A. I., ed., Konkretnye issledovaniia sovremennykh religioznykh verovanii: Metodika (Moscow, 1967), 143.Google Scholar

25. ARAN, f. 1922, op. 1, d. 1002,1. 55.

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30. Criticism of empirical approaches is particularly strong in Mitrokhin, L. N., “0 metodologii issledovanii sovremennoi religioznosti,” in Klibanov, , ed., Konkretnye issledovaniia sovremennykh religioznykh verovanii, 35–52.Google Scholar

31. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 18,1. 53.

32. Ibid., 1.54.

33. Ibid., 1. 58. For a discussion of Stalin's use of the term vintik (which he famously adopted in the 1945 Victory Parade), see Davies, R. W., Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (Bloomington, 1989), 80–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar What is particularly striking is the extent to which Mandrygin's comments also made it into print, in Mandrygin, L. V., Vnutrennyi mir veruiushchego iprichiny religioznosti (Moscow, 1965), 20.Google Scholar

34. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 18,1. 4.

35. Smolkin, ‘“Sviato mesto pusto ne byvaet.'“

36. Explaining the methodology he had used, the lead researcher on a 1962 project explained that he had recruited 25 students enrolled in evening classes in the atheism department at the University of Marxism-Leninism, 116 students from the Institute of Engineering and Construction, 10 scientific workers from the medical institute, 30 agitators from the party raikom, and 5 members of the regional board of the Knowledge (Znanie) Society. Tepliakov, M. K., “Materialy k issledovaniiu religioznosti naseleniia Voronezha i Voronezhskoi oblasti,” in Klibanov, , ed., Konkretnye issledovaniia sovremennykh religioznykh verovanii, 144–45.Google Scholar Luehrmann also notes that teachers and academics recruited their students. See Luehrmann, , Secularism Soviet Style, 9.Google Scholar

37. Smolkin, “'Sviato mesto pusto ne byvaet.'“

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39. Using anonymous questionnaires, the researchers had obtained answers from one in every twenty-seven members of the adult population. RGASPI, f. 606, op., 4, d. 131 (Otchet Voronezhskogo opornogo punkta Instituta, 1968), 11.3-7, 38-40.

40. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 131,11. 3, 6.

41. The published results of an earlier study in Voronezh gave 38 percent as atheists and 24 percent as “nonbelievers who still made some concessions to the religious attitudes of relatives or acquaintances.” Tepliakov, “Materialy k issledovaniiu,” 146. A study in Belorussia put the level of atheism as high as 68 percent. E. G. Filimonov, “Problemy konkretno-sotsiologicheskikh issledovanii religioznosti v sovetskoi literatury (196166),“ in Klibanov, ed., Konkretnye issledovaniia sovremennykh religioznykh verovanii, 229.

42. According to a Soviet publication from 1966, four surveys conducted by the Institute of Scientific Atheism in 1964-65 resulted in 906 interviews with Orthodox believers (veriushchie—priverzhentsy pravoslaviia). In fact, as we shall see, a small number of Christians of other denominations were also included. It was noted that “systematic individual work” with them had already been carried out by agitators and propagandist-atheists. Of the 906 interviews, 139 were conducted in the Tambov and Ivanovo regions. Andrianov, N. P., Lopatkin, R. A., and Pavliuk, V. V., Osobennosti sovremennogo religioznogo soznaniia (Moscow, 1966), 5, 43 Google Scholar.

43. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 133,11.122-23; RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 134,11. 85,106, 178-79.

44. The names of interviewers and informants have been changed throughout.

45. Gregory Freeze distinguishes between anticlerical sentiment (“a kind of diffuse hostility … directed mainly at clerical foibles or individual clerics“) and anticlericalism (a doctrinal movement in which “the ‘ism’ has real meaning“); the latter, he suggests, was relatively weak in nineteenth-century Russia. Anticlerical sentiment seems the most appropriate description here. Freeze, Gregory L., “A Case of Stunted Anticlericalism: Clergy and Society in Imperial Russia,” European History Quarterly 13, no. 2 (April 1983): 177–200.Google Scholar

46. On these aspects of antireligious propaganda in the 1920s, see Peris, Daniel, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, 1998), 75–86.Google Scholar

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50. Dragadze, “The Domestication of Religion.“

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53. Ibid., 11. 68-69.

54. Steve Smith explains that while the Orthodox Church never embraced the doctrine of purgatory developed by Catholic theologians, it did take up “the idea that the soul is subject to a particular judgment between the third and fortieth days after death and that it then exists in an intermediate state in the abode of the dead (Hades) until the Last ludgment. During this intermediate period the soul receives a foretaste of the blessings or damnation that will be its final fate.” Smit, Stiv [Steve Smith], “Spasenie dushi v Sovetskoi Rossii,” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 64, no. 2 (2009), at magazines.russ.ru/ nz/2009/2/ssl6.html (last accessed October 16, 2014).Google Scholar Elizabeth Warner suggests that the forty-day transitional phase is particularly important in folk beliefs. Warner, Elizabeth A., “Russian Peasant Beliefs and Practices concerning Death and the Supernatural Collected in Novosokol'niki Region, Pskov Province, Russia, 1995. Part I: The Restless Dead, Wizards and Spirit Beings,” Folklore 111, no. 1 (April 2000): 67–90;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Warner, , “Russian Peasant Beliefs and Practices concerning Death and the Supernatural Collected in Novosokol'niki Region, Pskov Province, Russia, 1995. Part II: Death in Natural Circumstances,” Folklore 111, no. 2 (October 2000): 255–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55. According to Steve Smith, the belief that the spirit required a body of some kind in order to be individuated “meant that folk conceptions of the soul frequently construed it as a small child, or a homunculus.” Smit, “Spasenie dushi.“

56. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 134,11.178-79.

57. Ibid., 1.106.

58. Ibid., 11. 68-69.

59. Ibid., 1. 69.

60. Ibid., 1.157. Also cited in Andrianov, Lopatkin, and Pavliuk, Osobennosti sovremennogo religioznogo soznaniia, 41.

61. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 134,11.180-81.

62. Wigzell, Faith, “Reading the Map of Heaven and Hell in Russian Popular Orthodoxy: Examining the Usefulness of the Concepts of Dvoeverie and Binary Oppositions,“ Forum for Anthropology and Culture, no. 2 (2005): 347–50.Google Scholar

63. It has been argued that it was easier for a single person to preserve their faith within Soviet society than for those with a family; it was also, perhaps, more necessary. Beliakova, E. V., Beliakova, N. A., and Emchenko, E. B., Zhenshchina vpravoslavii: Tserkovnoepravo i rossiiskaia praktika (Moscow, 2011), 432.Google Scholar

64. Wigzell, “Reading the Map,” 355. See also Generozov, la. K., “Russkie narodnye predstaveleniia o zagrobnoi zhizni na osnovanii zaplachek, prichitanii, dukhovnykh stikhov,” in Sobolev, A. N., ed., Mifologiia slavian (St. Petersburg, 2000), 239.Google Scholar

65. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 134,1. 3.

66. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 133,1.124.

67. Ibid., 1.85.

68. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 134,1. 86.

69. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 133,1.106.

70. Andrianov, Lopatkin, and Pavliuk, Osobennosti sovremennogo religioznogo soznaniia, 42.

71. Avetis'ian, A. A., Kritika sovremennoi religioznoi sotsial'noi filosofii: Ocherki po istorii religii i ateizma (Kiev, 1964).Google Scholar

72. Sheinman, M. M., Khristianskii sotsializm: Istoriia i ideologiia (Moscow, 1969).Google Scholar

73. Druianov, L. and Kurochkin, P., “Pravoslavie glazami uchenykh,” Nauka i religiia, 1966, no. 5: 37.Google Scholar

74. Yurchak, , Everything Was Forever, 22.Google Scholar

75. See, for example, the oral history interview with Arkadii Darchenko in which he describes how, as students, he, his wife, and friends voluntarily participated in construction projects. Darchenko, Arkadii Olegovich, “Our Entire Generation … Welcomed Perestroika,“ in Raleigh, Donald, ed., Russia's Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives (Bloomington, 2008), 141–42.Google Scholar

76. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 133,1. 65.

77. Ibid., 1. 65.

78. Ibid., 1.66. On the connections between atheist work and space travel, see Smolkin-Rothrock, Victoria, “Cosmic Enlightenment: Scientific Atheism and the Soviet Conquest of Space,” in Andrews, James T. and Siddiqi, Asif A., eds., Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture (Pittsburgh, 2011), 159–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

79. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 133,1.124.

80. Ibid., 1.115.

81. Yurchak, , Everything Was Forever, 25.Google Scholar

82. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 133,11. 85-87.

83. Ibid., 11.77-79.

84. Ibid., 1.79.

85. Ibid., 11.77,85. Others did the same. For example, one interviewer noted that it was “interesting” that his informant (a pensioner from Ivanovo) believed that the devil takes the form of a person and lives among people, getting up to his dirty tricks and making them do bad things. See RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 134,1.68.

86. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 133,11.1-3.

87. Klibanov's first expedition to Tambov, in 1959, it was later noted, was primarily academic in nature, but it was defended on the grounds that the findings would help local propagandists improve their work. See Krasnikov, N. P., “0 nekotorykh voprosakh raboty s veruiushchimi,” in Krasnikov, N. P., ed., Voprosy preodoleniia religioznykh perezhitkov v SSSR (Moscow, 1966), 5.Google Scholar Other scholars were keen to stress that their projects involved sustained contact between the person conducting the research and their subject, with one noting that a number of visits took place over a period of one to two months and that many of these relationships continued long after the end of the project. Tepliakov, “Materialy k issledovaniiu,” 145.

88. In a 2010 interview, R. A. Lopatkin noted that their work did not always meet with approval from the ideological department of the party's Central Committee. See “Remir Aleksandrovich Lopatkin: K 80-letiiu so dnia rozhdenia,” Gosudarstvo, religiia, tserkov’ v Rossii i za rubezhom, 2010, no. 4: 239-47.

89. Simon Huxtable explores this convergence of interests in a chapter of his dissertation on the Institute of Public Opinion based at the editorial offices of Komsomolskaia Pravda. Party leaders and government figures were initially very interested in the findings of this sociological work. See Simon Huxtable, “A Compass in the Sea of Life: Soviet Journalism, the Public, and the Limits of Reform after Stalin, 1953-1968” (PhD diss., University of London, 2013), chap. 4, “'This Number Says a Lot': The Institute of Public Opinion and the Rebirth of Polling in the Soviet Union (196068).” On the potential for common ground between party ideologues and writers in the 1960s, see Polly Jones, “The Fire Burns On? The ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ Biographical Series and the Rethinking of Propaganda in the Brezhnev Era,” in this issue.

90. Yurchak, , Forever Was Forever, 25.Google Scholar

91. Wigzell, , “Reading the Map,” 360.Google Scholar

92. This kind of heteroglossia I describe for the 1960s continued into the post-Soviet era. See Zigon, larrett, “Aleksandra Vladimirovna: Moral Narratives of a Russian Orthodox Woman,” in Steinberg, Mark D. and Wanner, Catherine, eds., Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies (Bloomington, 2008), 85–113.Google Scholar

93. Vitaly, Bezrogov, “Between Stalin and Christ: The Religious Socialisation of Children in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia,” Forum for Anthropology and Culture, no. 5 (2009): 301–38.Google Scholar

94. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 134,1.106; RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 156,11. 62-63.