The Jewish Correspondent of the Newspaper “Bezbozhnik” as an Anti-Religious Activist

The article makes an attempt to compare handwritten texts of local correspondence received by the newspaper “Bezbozhnik” in the 1920s–1930s, and citizens’ letters published in the newspaper. I consider «a letter to the editorial office of the newspaper “Bezbozhnik’» as the situation of social interaction “here and now” and discuss the roles of the participants, editors and correspondents, in this situation. As a research method, I use the language analysis of texts, its form and content. I review two cases: the implicit editors’ struggle against anti-Semitism in the newspaper and five unpublished letters from Odessa demanding the closure of synagogues. The chosen approach allows me to make some observations about the social and cultural attitudes of Jews in the USSR in the 1920s–1930s: their relation to a cultural and family memory, social responsibility, power and time. These attitudes, expressed in the letters language, I guess, had consequences in the further social and, in particular, anti-religious processes in the USSR.