Abstract
During the years following the establishment of the Soviet Union Bolsheviks, efforts to eradicate religion highlighted the old cults, against which the atheist heroes and the supremacy of the secular worldview shone all the more brightly. Institutions that preserved religion even as they were devoted to destroying it—the so-called antireligious museums, also known as ‘Museums of Atheism’—were characteristic landmarks in every major city of the USSR until the late 1980s. Using the case of the Museums of Atheism, this chapter assesses the specific transformation of belief imposed by state-sponsored atheism in the broader transnational context of religious reinforcement and dislocation of belief during the last decades of the twentieth century.
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Notes
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M. Weber (1994) ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf: 1917/1919’ in: Studienausgabe der Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe (Tübingen: Mohr), vol. 17, pp. 1–25, p. 9.
- 2.
See, for instance, J. Anderson (1994) Religion, State, and Politics in the Soviet Union and the Successor States 1953–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); S.P. Ramet (1993) Religious Policy in the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
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See N.N. Zlatsen and E.N. Demina (1990) Muzei SSSR, Spravochchnik (Moscow: Ekonomika).
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N.V. Gogol’ (1831) ‘Noch’ pered Rozhdestvom’, in: Vechera na khutore bliz Dikan’ki (Evenings on a Farm near Dikan’ka). V. Evseev (1976) ‘Dikan’ka dalekaya i blizkaya’, Nauka i religiia 6, 13–27, 13. See also K. Stepin (1976) ‘Taina komnaty No. 101’, Nauka i religiia 6, 17–20.
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M.S. Butinova and N.P. Krasnikov (1965) Muzei istorii religii i ateizma (Leningrad: Lenizdat), p. 8; M.E. Kaulen (2001) Muzei-khramy i muzei-monastyri v pervoe desyatiletie Sovetskoi vlasti (Moscow: Luch), p. 135.
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See ‘Instruktsiia Kollegii po delam muzeev i okhrane pamyatnikov iskusstva i stariny Narodnogo Komissariata po prosveshchcheniiu ot 3 yanvarya 1919’. Revoljutsiia i tserkov‘1, (1919), p. 30. See B. Kandidov (1929) Monastyri-Muzei i antireligioznaya propaganda (Moscow: Bezbozhzhnik).
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Dekret SNK RSFSR (20 April 1920) ‘Ob obraščenii v muzej isoriko-chidožestvennych zennostej Trioce-Sergievoj Lavry’, Sobranie uzakonenij i rasporjaženij rabočego i krest’janskogo pravitel’stva, 27, 133.
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Ibid.
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See B. Kandidov (1929) Monastyri-Muzei i antireligioznaya propaganda (Moscow: Bezbozhnik), p. 121.
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See B. Kandidov (1929), p. 180.
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Kandidov (1929), pp. 126–130.
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Ibid., p. 175.
- 20.
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Tarasova and Chenskaya (2002), p. 24. See also V.N. Mordvinova (1930) Muzei Moskvy i Moskovskoi oblasti (Moscow: Gosizdat RSFSR), pp. 38, 41.
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- 35.
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- 37.
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M.R. Elliott (1983), 128.
- 40.
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E. Sturm (1991) Konservierte Welt: Museum und Musealisierung (Berlin: Reimer), p. 55.
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M. Epstein (2001) ‘Ateizm—eto dukhovnoe prizvanie. O Raise Gibaidulinoj’, Zvezda 4, 159–174, 174.
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Polianski, I.J. (2016). The Antireligious Museum: Soviet Heterotopia between Transcending and Remembering Religious Heritage. In: Betts, P., Smith, S. (eds) Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe. St Antony's Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54639-5_11
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