Victoria Smolkin (2018). A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism. Princeton University Press

Since the turn of the century, a reappraisal of secularization thesis in social sciences of religion resulted in a growing body of research on diversity of secularism, or rather secularisms. In recent years, we have seen an expanding interest in atheism, or again rather atheisms. Atheism traditionally understood as either an ideological stance in the Enlightenment or militant repression of religion in the Soviet Union is now studied as a spiritual phenomenon and as historical experience. Victoria Smolkin book – the monumental exposition of the history of Soviet atheism – analyzes it in its complexity and multidimensionality tracing its development from an ideological precept of Marxism-Leninism to the state policy of expunging Russian Orthodoxy from the Soviet public life, to social science methodology in the study of religion, to philosophical inquiry into the nature of spirituality and moral commitment. Smolkin generally structures the argument around the “three sets of oppositions: the political opposition between the party’s commitment to ideological purity and state’s pursuit of effective governance; the ideological opposition between religion, superstition, and backwardness and science, reason, and progress; and the spiritual opposition between emptiness and indifference and fullness and conviction” (p. 5). As she supposes, these sets of oppositions could be usefully reformulated into three questions that puzzled the Soviet authorities in their efforts to deal with religion: “What kind of state Soviet Communism should produce” (p. 5); “What kind of society Soviet Communism should produce” (p. 5); and “What kind of person Soviet Communism should produce” (p. 5). Although the ideological view on religion hardly changed in the course of Soviet history, atheism had to be “reimagined in fundamental ways” (p. 3), which reflected the Soviet government’s self-reinvention and reinterpretation of its goals. Thus, these oppositions and questions, in fact, conform to the stages of