Godless Communists

An interpretation of early initiatives to create an atheistic society in Soviet Russia. It examines how effective Soviet antireligious policies and tactics were at achieving this goal and demonstrates that the majority of Russians stood between the extremes of church and government, with religion being just one of a matrix of social, cultural and economic changes the country faced under the new regime. Drawing on archival and ethnographic sources, journals, newspapers and eyewitness accounts, William B. Husband shows how strategies of accommodation and resistance employed by the masses had a greater impact on the future of religion in Russia than did either atheist extremists or spiritual zealots. He compares the mindset of a faith-based society with the Bolshevik materialist worldview, emphasizing how religion functioned not only as a belief in the sacred but also as an entrenched system for ordering family and community relationships, explaining natural phenomena, and marking life passages such as birth, marriage and death. The work demonstrates how developments between 1917 and 1932 shaped attitudes towards religion and atheism that still endure.