Download or read book Religious Life in the Late Soviet Union written by Barbara Martin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-18 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the first large overview of late Soviet religiosity across several confessions and Soviet republics, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Based on a broad range of new sources on the daily life of religious communities, including material from regional archives and oral history, it shows that religion not only survived Soviet anti-religious repression, but also adapted to new conditions. Going beyond traditional views about a mere "returned of the repressed", the book shows how new forms of religiosity and religious socialisation emerged, as new generations born into atheist families turned to religion in search of new meaning, long before perestroika facilitated this process. In addition, the book examines anew religious activism and transnational networks between Soviet believers and Western organisations during the Cold War, explores the religious dimension of Soviet female activism, and shifts the focus away from the non-religious human rights movement and from religious institutions to ordinary believers.
Download or read book Religious Life in the Late Soviet Union written by and published by . This book was released on 2023-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book presents the first large overview of late Soviet religiosity across several confessions and Soviet republics, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Based on a broad range of new sources on the daily life of religious communities, including material from regional archives and oral history, it shows that religion not only survived Soviet anti-religious repression, but also adapted to new conditions. Going beyond traditional views about a mere "returned of the repressed", the book shows how new forms of religiosity and religious socialisation emerged, as new generations born into atheist families turned to religion in search of new meaning, long before perestroika facilitated this process. In addition, the book examines anew religious activism and transnational networks between Soviet believers and Western organisations during the Cold War, explores the religious dimension of Soviet female activism, and shifts the focus away from the non-religious human rights movement and from religious institutions to ordinary believers"--
Download or read book A Sacred Space Is Never Empty written by Victoria Smolkin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.
Download or read book Communities of the Converted written by Catherine Wanner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s. The Calvinist-like austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted Soviet evangelicals gave way to a charismatic embrace of ecstatic experience, replete with a belief in faith healing. Catherine Wanner's historically informed ethnography, the first book on evangelism in the former Soviet Union, shows how once-marginal Ukrainian evangelical communities are now thriving and growing in social and political prominence. Many Soviet evangelicals relocated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding the spectrum of evangelicalism in the United States and altering religious life in Ukraine. Migration has created new transnational evangelical communities that are now asserting a new public role for religion in the resolution of numerous social problems. Hundreds of American evangelical missionaries have engaged in "church planting" in Ukraine, which is today home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe. Thanks to massive assistance from the West, Ukraine has become a hub for clerical and missionary training in Eurasia. Many Ukrainians travel as missionaries to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. In revealing the phenomenal transformation of religious life in a land once thought to be militantly godless, Wanner shows how formerly socialist countries experience evangelical revival. Communities of the Converted engages issues of migration, morality, secularization, and global evangelism, while highlighting how they have been shaped by socialism. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Download or read book A Sacred Space Is Never Empty written by Victoria Smolkin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.
Download or read book The Dangerous God written by Dominic Erdozain and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the heart of the Soviet experiment was a belief in the impermanence of the human spirit: souls could be engineered; conscience could be destroyed. The project was, in many ways, chillingly successful. But the ultimate failure of a totalitarian regime to fulfill its ambitions for social and spiritual mastery had roots deeper than the deficiencies of the Soviet leadership or the chaos of a "command" economy. Beneath the rhetoric of scientific communism was a culture of intellectual and cultural dissidence, which may be regarded as the "prehistory of perestroika." This volume explores the contribution of Christian thought and belief to this culture of dissent and survival, showing how religious and secular streams of resistance joined in an unexpected and powerful partnership. The essays in The Dangerous God seek to shed light on the dynamic and subversive capacities of religious faith in a context of brutal oppression, while acknowledging the often-collusive relationship between clerical elites and the Soviet authorities. Against the Marxist notion of the "ideological" function of religion, the authors set the example of people for whom faith was more than an opiate; against an enduring mythology of secularization, they propose the centrality of religious faith in the intellectual, political, and cultural life of the late modern era. This volume will appeal to specialists on religion in Soviet history as well as those interested in the history of religion under totalitarian regimes.
Download or read book Christian Religion in the Soviet Union written by Christel Lane and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1978-01-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christel Lane has written the first sociological study of religion in a communist and militantly atheist society. Christian Religion in the Soviet Union is the result of a detailed examination of Soviet sociological sources and the legally and illegally published reports of religious bodies or individuals, backed up by the observations of the author and of other Western visitors to the USSR. Dr. Lane attempts to assess the impact of the intellectual and material culture of Soviet society on Christian religion. She analyses the religious life in the contemporary Christian churches and sects, describing the scope of their membership and its social composition, the religious commitment of believers and their social and political orientations. Christian Religion in the Soviet Union will be central reading for students of religion in modern industrial society who are working within the disciplines of sociology, comparative religion or theology. It will also appeal to those studying Soviet society from a more general sociological perspective and to a wide readership interested in the contest between Christian religion and Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Download or read book Religion in the Soviet Union written by Walter Kolarz and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive survey of the situation of various religious groups in the U.S.S.R., including Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, Jewish, with contemporary developments under the Khrushchev regime.
Download or read book Religion in the New Russia written by James H. Forest and published by Crossroad Publishing. This book was released on 1990 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanist and ecumenist Forest (a contributing editor of Sojourners, editor of Forum for the World Council of Churches, and director of the Peace Media Center in Holland) has travelled widely in the Soviet Union, visited many religious centers, and talked with adherents of nearly every faith. He mainly lets them speak for themselves, revealing their past experience, present status, and vision of the future. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Believing in Russia Religious Policy after Communism written by Geraldine Fagan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive overview of religious policy in Russia since the end of the communist regime, exposing many of the ambiguities and uncertainties about the position of religion in Russian life. It reveals how religious freedom in Russia has, contrary to the widely held view, a long tradition, and how the leading religious institutions in Russia today, including especially the Russian Orthodox Church but also Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist establishments, owe a great deal of their special positions to the relationship they had with the former Soviet regime. It examines the resurgence of religious freedom in the years immediately after the end of the Soviet Union, showing how this was subsequently curtailed, but only partially, by the important law of 1997. It discusses the pursuit of privilege for the Russian Orthodox Church and other ‘traditional’ beliefs under presidents Putin and Medvedev, and assesses how far Russian Orthodox Christianity is related to Russian national culture, demonstrating the unresolved nature of the key question, ‘Is Russia to be an Orthodox country with religious minorities or a multi-confessional state?’ It concludes that Russian society’s continuing failure to reach a consensus on the role of religion in public life is destabilising the nation.
Download or read book Free at Last written by James H. Forest and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Religion in the Soviet Union written by F. Corley and published by Springer. This book was released on 1996-08-27 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet government's attitude to religion in theory and practice is shown in this wide-ranging collection of annotated texts from the newly-opened archives. Included are documents from the KGB, the Central Committee, the Council for Religious Affairs and numerous other official bodies. For the first time in English we see the bureaucrats' own view of how religious believers should be controlled, following the story from the persecutions of the early Soviet years to the openness instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Download or read book Religion And Modernization In The Soviet Union written by Dennis J. Dunn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the surprise of many students of the Soviet Union, religion has shown itself to be a force still powerful in Soviet society. In contrast, the impact of religion in developed Western societies has declined. Dr. Dunn points out that the study of this antinomy can shed light on the entire concept of "modernization" in the U.S.S.R. The study of the
Download or read book Religion and the Cold War written by Philip Emil Muehlenbeck and published by Vanderbilt University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The influence of faith in the conflicts that defined the Cold War
Download or read book Religious Policy in the Soviet Union written by Sabrina Petra Ramet and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a sweeping and comprehensive analysis of the history of religion in the Soviet Union, tracing its fortunes through the chaos of the 1920s, and the anti-religious persecution of Stalinism, to the slow strangulation of Brezhnev, and the liberalization under Gorbachev. Bringing together fifteen of the West's leading scholars on this subject, the book examines the policy apparatus, atheist education, cults and sects, and recent changes in legislation and policy, presenting hitherto unknown material for the first time.
Download or read book Christianity And Government In Russia And The Soviet Union written by Sergei Pushkarev and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-28 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Translated from the Russian. These essays were written over the course of more than 40 years. Their authors--Pushkarev, Rusak, and Yakunin--have all been exiled or imprisoned for their outspoken views.
Download or read book Women of the Catacombs written by and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The memoirs presented in Women of the Catacombs offer a rare close-up account of the underground Orthodox community and its priests during some of the most difficult years in Russian history. The catacomb church in the Soviet Union came into existence in the 1920s and played a significant part in Russian national life for nearly fifty years. Adherents to the Orthodox faith often referred to the catacomb church as the "light shining in the dark." Women of the Catacombs provides a first-hand portrait of lived religion in its social, familial, and cultural setting during this tragic period. Until now, scholars have had only brief, scattered fragments of information about Russia's illegal church organization that claimed to protect the purity of the Orthodox tradition. Vera Iakovlevna Vasilevskaia and Elena Semenovna Men, who joined the church as young women, offer evidence on how Russian Orthodoxy remained a viable, alternative presence in Soviet society, when all political, educational, and cultural institutions attempted to indoctrinate Soviet citizens with an atheistic perspective. Wallace L. Daniel's translation not only sheds light on Russia's religious and political history, but also shows how two educated women maintained their personal integrity in times when prevailing political and social headwinds moved in an opposite direction.
