UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title "A Sacred Space Is Never Empty": Soviet Atheism, 1954-1971 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/39q3d8tq Author Smolkin-Rothrock, Victoria Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California “A Sacred Space Is Never Empty”: Soviet Atheism, 1954-1971 by Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Yuri Slezkine Professor John Connelly Professor Thomas W. Laqueur Professor Olga Matich Fall 2010 © Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock All rights reserved 2010 For my family i TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ii Acknowledgements iii-v Abstract 1 Introduction 1-12 Chapter One Cosmic Enlightenment: Scientific Atheism and the Soviet Conquest of Space 13-44 Chapter Two Khrushchev’s Utopia and Girls Who Turn to Stone: Building Communism and Destroying Religious “Survivals” 45-88 Chapter Three Making Sense of Life’s Questions: Atheism’s Appeal to the Spiritual 89-131 Chapter Four Soviet Atheists and the Journey from Religion to Atheism 132-158 Chapter Five Science and Religion Reconsiders Science and Religion 159-183 Chapter Six The Institute of Scientific Atheism Studies Soviet Religiosity 184-217 Epilogue Questions Without Answers 218-232 Bibliography 233-252 ii Acknowledgements Most dissertations are a collective effort, and this dissertation perhaps required more effort from a larger collective than most. For this reason, it is a pleasure to express my gratitude to the many institutions and individuals whose support was critical to this project. I have been immensely fortunate to have been trained in Berkeley’s History Department, where, over the course of my graduate studies, I have had the chance to work with faculty who are unparalleled scholars and remarkable people. First, I would like to thank my advisor, Yuri Slezkine, without whom I might not have become an historian, and certainly would not have remained one. As a teacher, he has challenged and supported me at exactly the right times, and has consistently motivated me to ask difficult questions and not to settle for easy answers. As a scholar, he has been an inspiration, an example of how rigorous scholarship can also be a great story. I have benefitted from our many conversations, and am grateful for the enthusiasm he has shown for this project from the start. I am also grateful for his generosity as a reader and his insightful feedback, which has been fundamental to shaping this dissertation. Working with him has been enormously rewarding, and it has also been a great deal of fun. It is likewise a pleasure to thank the other members of my committee, John Connelly, Thomas Laqueur, and Olga Matich. John Connelly has been a critical reader who has consistently challenged me to make difficult, but necessary, choices. Working with Tom Laqueur has greatly expanded my understanding of how Russia is part of a bigger story, and Tom has also been a model of how one tackles the big questions. The courses I have taken with Olga Matich, especially her course on contemporary Russian literature, have provided valuable insight into the Russian literary imagination, and into the peculiar mentality of the late Soviet period. I have been fortunate to have them as teachers and models of rigorous and visionary scholarship, and each of them has challenged and inspired me at critical stages of this project. I am grateful for their perceptive comments and kind encouragement, and honored that they agreed to serve on my committee. My thinking about religion, atheism and the Soviet experience also owes much to formal and informal intellectual exchanges with many people in the Berkeley community and beyond it. My experience in Victoria Bonnell’s course introduced me to the ways that sociological theory can provide insight into Soviet experience, and my conversations with Edward Walker have continuously challenged me to articulate the relevance of my work to the broader social sciences. Victoria Frede has provided great insight into the intellectual history of atheism in Russia, as well as valuable feedback on chapter drafts. I have also benefitted tremendously from my studies of religion in early modernity with Thomas Brady and Viktor Zhivov. Professor Brady’s course on “Immanence and Transcendence” stimulated me to examine the Soviet case from new and productive perspectives. It also revealed the degree to which the story of Soviet atheist attempts to grapple with life’s big questions is both particular and universal. My independent study with Professor Zhivov opened up the world of early modern Russia and Russian Orthodoxy, and has served as a crucial foundation for my work on religion in the Soviet period. I am also grateful to Professor Zhivov for his intellectual generosity and his wonderful hospitality in Moscow. I would also like to thank Berkeley’s Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Berkeley Program in Eurasian and East European Studies for providing a wonderful forum for scholarly exchange, and, in particular, for giving me the opportunity to iii present my project to a wide audience at the Institute’s Carnegie seminar. My time at Berkeley would have certainly been much more stressful if not for the patient guidance of the administration of the History Department, and especially Barbara Hayashida and Mabel Lee. I am very grateful to the numerous institutions that have supported this project through its many stages. Berkeley’s Graduate Division, History Department, and Program in Eurasian and East European Studies provided generous funding for exploratory archival research. Early training and archival research were also funded by the Social Science Research Council Pre- Dissertation Research Fellowship and the Fulbright-Hays Heritage Speakers Grant. I am also grateful to Berkeley’s History Department, Graduate Division, and Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for providing necessary funding for travel to numerous conferences where I presented early drafts of several dissertation chapters. These opportunities to present my work to audiences with different geographical and disciplinary backgrounds has been very beneficial in keeping in mind the bigger relevance of the questions driving the dissertation. The majority of the archival research for this project, in Russia and Ukraine, was conducted with generous support from the Allan Sharlin Memorial Fellowship of Berkeley’s Institute for International Studies, the American Councils for International Education ACTR/ACCELS Advanced Research Fellowship, and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertational Research Abroad Fellowship. I am also very grateful to the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, which provided generous funds to complete writing the dissertation, as well as encouragement to engage with ethical and moral concerns across disciplines. I would also like to thank the American Council of Learned Societies Mellon Fellowship for their support of the project. My research in Russia would not have been as memorable and rewarding without the companionship of the researchers and friends with whom I shared my time there. Many thanks especially to Molly Brunson, Kristin Romberg, Christine Evans, William Campbell, Alexis Peri, Inna Razumova, Pasha Belasky, Keeli Nelson, and Erik Scott. It is my great fortune that our paths keep bringing us together. I would also especially like to thank the many friends and colleagues who generously read drafts of this dissertation. The Berkeley Russian history kruzhok continuously provided and intellectually engaging community and a wonderfully lively atmosphere, and my first chapter benefitted very much from my own presentation there. I am immensely grateful to Viktor Zhivov, Edward Walker, Victoria Frede, Emily Baran, Nikolai Mitrokhin, Viktor Yelenskii, Christine Evans, Nicole Eaton, Alexis Peri, and Erik Scott for sharing their vast professional expertise and offering encouragement and support at critical moments in the writing process. Above all, I would like to thank my family, big and small. My grandparents, Alla and Mikhail and Lyudmila and Peter, my parents, Diana and Oleg, and my brother, Vladislav, have consistently been a source of much-appreciated support, as well as invaluable resources that show the many faces of the Soviet experience. My brother’s interest in my work, as well as his encouragement, has kept me going through difficult times, and his art work has also inspired me with creative energy. My mother and father have been an example of consistency and hard work, and have always managed to persevere with a remarkable amount of humor—indeed, maybe because of it. I cannot imagine having completed this project without my father’s timely anekdot or without my mother’s constant and untiring faith in the possibility of the impossible, and in my ability to achieve it. I especially want to thank my husband, Kevin Rothrock, for his infinite patience, perseverance, and good humor. He has devoted more time and energy to seeing this project iv through than I could have ever expected or hoped for, and I am deeply grateful. Our conversations have challenged and inspired me, and have kept this journey consistently interesting. Finally, I want to thank my daughter, Sophia—who was born in the last months of my writing—for her heroic patience with her mother and the infinite joy that she has brought to all of us. Without her wonder and love through the long, difficult days, we might have given up. She has inspired this family to heroism—a selfless heroism without which this project might have never been completed. For this reason, I dedicate this dissertation to my family. v Abstract “A Sacred Space Is Never Empty”: Soviet Atheism, 1954-1971 by Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair This dissertation is a study of Soviet atheist education and socialist life-cycle rituals in the postwar period.