"Overcoming peasant backwardness": The Khrushchev antireligious campaign and the Rural Soviet Union

Russian Review

Volumn 67, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 296-320

  Stone, Andrew B ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 51249135708     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9434.2008.00485.x     Document Type: Article

References (69)

1. Faith Wigzell, Reading Russian Fortunes (Cambridge, England, 1998). While fortune-telling and divination had always been associated with peasant ignorance in the minds of Russia's intelligentsia, the Soviet government particularly emphasized that such practices had no place in enlightened, post-Revolutionary society.
2. I have chosen 1958 as the approximate start of this renewed antireligious campaign based on changes made in CAROC membership in 1957 and 1958, Khrushchev's 1958 speech "On the Strengthening of ScientificAtheist Propaganda," and the official decision made in December 1958 to liquidate pilgrimages to holy places. See John Anderson, Religion, State, and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States (Cambridge, England, 1994), 26-35.
3. Nikita Khrushchev, Vospominaniia, 2 vols. (New York, 1979);
4. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York, 2003);
5. William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbott Gleason, eds., Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven, 2000);
6. Alastair McAuley, "Social Policy," in Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, ed. Martin McAuley (London, 1987), 138-55.
7. See Tatiana Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Russia, trans. Edward E. Roslof (Armonk, NY, 2002);
8. and Mikhail Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov' pri Staline i Khrushcheve (Moscow, 1999).
9. Glennys Young, Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia (University Park, PA, 1997).
10. Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens (Ithaca, 1998).
11. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants (New York, 1994), 95-100;
12. Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin (New York, 1996), 30-39.
13. On the concept of "speaking Bolshevik" see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).
14. Aleksei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006). Although Yurchak focuses on urban Soviet citizens during the Brezhnev years, many of his concepts, including the "normative shift" and the idea of a "normal life," can also be applied to the Khrushchev years.
15. William Husband, Godless Communists (DeKalb, IL, 2000).
16. Good examples can be found in Dimitry Pospielovsky, The Russian Orthodox Church under the Soviet Regime (Crestwood, NY, 1984), 2:332;
17. and Dmitry Konstantinov, "Orthodoxy and the Younger Generation," in Religion and the Search for New Ideals in the USSR, ed. William Fletcher and Anthony Strover (New York, 1967), 33. Pospielovsky describes a "psychological barrier" between "believers" and the Soviet regime, while Konstantinov takes the attitude of a "militant believer" and claims "young people are ready to wage an endless fight for the triumph of the Orthodox Church in the USSR."
18. Anna Krylova, "The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies," Kritika 1 (Winter 2000): 119-46;
19. Jochen Hellbeck, "Fashioning the Stalinist Soul," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44:3 (1996): 344-73;
20. idem, Revolution on My Mind (Cambridge, MA, 2006);
21. Eric Naiman, "On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them," Russian Review 60 (July 2001): 307-15;
22. Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, "Rethinking the Stalinist Subject," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44: 3 (1996): 456-63.
23. Anderson, Religion, State, and Politics, 56-58.
24. Mikhail Petrov, Krest' pod molotom (Novgorod, 2000);
25. Irina D. Savinova, Likholet'e (Novgorod, 1998).
26. See, for example, KGB instructions to "exert pressure" on intelligentsia with ties to the Church in Felix Corley, Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader (New York, 1996), 210-11;
27. Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants, 12-31, 218-19, 262-80, 313-19.
28. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, 1985).
29. "O krupnykh nedostatkakh v nauchno-ateisticheskoi propagandy i merakh ee ulushcheniia" in O religii i tserkvi: Sbornik dokumentov, ed. F. Garkevenko (Moscow, 1965), 71-77.
30. Such connections also appeared in the 1954 Central Committee Resolution, "Ob oshibkakh v provedenii nauchno-ateisticheskoi propagandy sredi naseleniia," quoted in Joan Grossman, "Khrushchev's Antireligious Policy and the Campaign of 1954," Soviet Studies 24 (January 1973): 375-76.
31. Pospielovsky, A History of Soviet Atheism in Theory and Practice, and the Believer (New York, 1987), 2:121-42;
32. idem, Russian Orthodox Church under the Soviet Regime 2:327-64;
33. Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov' pri Staline i Khrushcheve, 359-93;
34. idem, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov' i sovetskoe gosudarstva (St. Petersburg, 1995), 100-115.
35. On antireligious measures in the Novgorod region see Petrov, Krest' pod molotom;
36. and Savinova, Likholet'e.
37. David Powell, Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 59-60.
38. On the place of miracle-working icons in Orthodox religious communities see Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (New York, 2004), 170-97.
39. On Khrushchev's reforms in education see McAuley, "Social Policy," 138-52;
40. and James B. Bruce, The Politics of Soviet Policy Formation: Khrushchev's Innovative Policies in Education and Agriculture (Denver, 1976).
41. Akademiia nauk SSSR, Po etapam razvitiia ateizma v SSSR (Leningrad, 1967), 216.
42. "Nauka i religiia nesovmestimy," Pravda, February 3, 1960;
43. and "Trudnym putem," Nauka i religiia 7 (July 1963): 71-74.
44. David Ransel describes this phenomenon as well in Village Mothers (Bloomington, IN, 2000), 169-70.
45. Eve Levin, "False Miracles and Unattested Dead Bodies," in Religion and the Early Modern State, ed. James D. Tracy and Marguerite Ragnow (Cambridge, England, 2004), 253-60.
46. On debates over the role of the laity, parish life, popular religious expressions, and the Orthodox Church hierachy in late Imperial Russia see Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, esp. 19-52 and 98-130.
47. Taubman, Khrushchev, 511-13.
48. and Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Russia, 143-65.
49. Pospielovsky, Russian Church under the Soviet Regime 2:346-53.
50. Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War (Princeton, 2002).
51. Bohdan R. Bociurkiw suggests that antireligious agitators were perceived by the rest of Soviet society as a kind of "atheist sect." See his "Religion and Atheism in Soviet Society," in Aspects of Religion in the Soviet Union, ed. Richard H. Marshall (Chicago, 1971), 53.
52. Khrushchev, Vospominaniia 2:396-97, 421-23;
53. Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, (Bloomington, IN, 1997), 16-17, 213.
54. William Fletcher, "Soviet Sociology of Religion: An Appraisal," Russian Review 35 (April 1976): 180.
55. Peris, Storming the Heavens, 176.
56. Donald A. Lowrie and William C. Fletcher, "Khrushchev's Religious Policy," in Aspects of Religion, 145-48;
57. Pospielovsky, History of Soviet Atheism 2:131-35.
58. "Fanatiki i mrakobesy," July 12, 1959 (Old Believers);
59. and "Trista let stoial monastir'," February 8, 1961 (Orthodox nuns).
60. See also "Ultrapravye pod Flagom Religii," Nauka i religiia 12 (December 1963): 36-39.
61. In her anthropological study of the village of Solovyovo, Margaret Paxson employs the term svoi ("one's own") versus chuzoi ("strange" or "foreign") in a somewhat similar manner, noting that while svoi most often refers to the immediate community, the larger sense of svoi often expands to include Russia or the Soviet Union as a whole. See Paxson, Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village (Washington, DC, 2005), 82-83. I have chosen the term nashi as an alternative to the anthropological context of svoi based on the widespread use of nashi among contemporary Russians for anything related to Russia or the Soviet Union.
62. and Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov' i sovetskoe gosudarstva, 175-76.
63. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 198-237.
64. On the idea of "formal" vs. "constative" meanings in official discourse, and how reproducing the formal did not necessarily entail acceptance of the constative, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 36-125.
65. Corley, Religion in the Soviet Union, 201;
66. Pospielovsky, Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 333-36;
67. Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church: A Contemporary History (Bloomington, IN, 1986), 290-98, 309-15;
68. Nikita Struve, Christians in Contemporary Russia, trans. Lancelot Sheppard and A. Manson (New York, 1967), 138-74.
69. See also Edward E. Roslof's comments on how earlier Renovationist "red priests" were distrusted by both the mainstream Orthodox Church and Soviet officials (Red Priests [Bloomington, IN, 2002], ix-xiv, 74-109).