MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | AUDIENCE(S)
MONDAY, APRIL 7 | 6 p.m. | DANIEL FAMILY COMMONS | USDAN UNIVERSITY CENTER
Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, Wesleyan University
The Bolshevik Revolution renounced traditional religions, offering in their place Marxism-Leninism—an ideology that gave new meaning to individual, family, and social life. Yet even with the state’s embrace of secularization and the Party’s support of aggressive antireligious campaigns, Communism never managed to “overcome” religion and the Soviet Union never became a mass atheist society. Indeed, religion and believers continued to preoccupy the Soviet leadership until the country’s collapse. What role did atheism play in the Soviet project? How did official atheism impact the lives of ordinary Soviet people? And how did the encounter with “lived religion” affect the political elite’s understanding of the state’s role in the spiritual life of Soviet society? Put differently, could Communism abandon atheism and remain Communist?
