In this article, I use the transcripts of interviews carried out under the auspices of the Institute of Scientifi c Atheism in the mid-sixties. Informants were asked about diverse aspects of their religious practice and belief, allowing scholars—both then and now—to consider the nature of Soviet “secularization.” Following Charles Taylor, I suggest that this was not simply “a story of loss, of subtraction”; instead, informants' rather heterodox conceptions of the aft erlife indicate moments of individual creativity. In particular, I fi nd that among the poor and marginalized, visions of the aft erlife sometimes articulated a desire for social equality considered missing from Soviet society. I also probe the Soviet state's problematic dependency on atheism. The regime's legitimacy rested on its claim to ensure progress and modernity, and religion— the epitome of backwardness—was a useful antithesis. The interview was a ritual that enacted the superiority of Soviet values (reason, rationality, and enlightenment). And yet the encounter between atheist-interviewer and “believer” could oft en prove unpredictable, suggesting that the religion-atheism binary was in practice rather more brittle than the authorities might have hoped.

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The Social Scientist Meets the “Believer”: Discussions of God, the Afterlife, and Communism in the Mid-1960s

The Scientific Revolution

The chroniclers of medieval Rus were monks, who celebrated the divine services of the Byzantine church throughout every day. This study is the first to analyze how these rituals shaped their writing of the Rus Primary Chronicle, the first written history of the East Slavs. During the eleventh century, chroniclers in Kiev learned about the conversion of the Roman Empire by celebrating a series of distinctively Byzantine liturgical feasts. When the services concluded, and the clerics sought to compose a native history for their own people, they instinctively drew on the sacred stories that they sang at church. The result was a myth of Christian origins for Rus - a myth promulgated even today by the Russian government - which reproduced the Christian origins myth of the Byzantine Empire. The book uncovers this ritual subtext and reconstructs the intricate web of liturgical narratives that underlie this foundational text of pre-modern Slavic civilization.

The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus

The two-volume Cambridge History of Atheism offers an authoritative and up to date account of a subject of contemporary interest. Comprised of sixty essays by an international team of scholars, this History is comprehensive in scope. The essays are written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including religious studies, philosophy, sociology, and classics. Offering a global overview of the subject, from antiquity to the present, the volumes examine the phenomenon of unbelief in the context of Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish societies. They explore atheism and the early modern Scientific Revolution, as well as the development of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and its continuing implications. The History also includes general survey essays on the impact of scepticism, agnosticism and atheism, as well as contemporary assessments of thinking. Providing essential information on the nature and history of atheism, The Cambridge History of Atheism will be indispensable for both scholarship and teaching, at all levels.

The Cambridge History of Atheism

Israel and the Near East

Atheism in the Russian Enlightenment

The autocratic rule of both tsar and church in imperial Russia gave rise not only to a revolutionary movement in the nineteenth century but also to a crisis of meaning among members of the intelligentsia. Personal faith became the subject of intense scrutiny as individuals debated the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, debates reflected in the best-known novels of the day. Friendships were formed and broken in exchanges over the status of the eternal. The salvation of the entire country, not just of each individual, seemed to depend on the answers to questions about belief. Victoria Frede looks at how and why atheism took on such importance among several generations of Russian intellectuals from the 1820s to the 1860s, drawing on meticulous and extensive research of both published and archival documents, including letters, poetry, philosophical tracts, police files, fiction, and literary criticism. She argues that young Russians were less concerned about theology and the Bible than they were about the moral, political, and social status of the individual person. They sought to maintain their integrity against the pressures exerted by an autocratic state and rigidly hierarchical society. As individuals sought to shape their own destinies and searched for truths that would give meaning to their lives, they came to question the legitimacy both of the tsar and of Russia s highest authority, God."

Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia

When Russia’s “Westernizers,” Nikolai Stankevic, Vissarion Belinskij, and Mikhail Bakunin first encountered Hegel’s ideas in the 1830s, they gravitated toward a conservative interpretation, centering on the proposition that the “rational is real.” This article studies the preconditions for that interpretation, demonstrating that it was grounded in the writings of the late Hegel and of the circle of adepts who popularized his ideas and writings immediately after his death. These adepts later came to be known as Center and Right Hegelians. They influenced the early reception of Hegel in France as well as in Russia. Stankevic, the first of the Westernizers to subject Hegel to systematic study, learned about Hegel through these mediators.

Stankevič and Hegel’s arrival in Russia

In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill vigorously promoted freedom of conscience as an "indefeasible right." All citizens should be treated as equal under the law, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack of religious affiliation. Under no circumstance should state and society set about determining what constitutes religious truth, or what kind of behavior is appropriate for religious believers. Debating religion and ethics in the press was healthy, but individuals should not be forced to make their beliefs known to the public, nor should they feel compelled to identify themselves with any church. No human being should ever be "accountable to others for his religious belief." (1) In Russia, radicals and liberals were inclined to agree with Mill. All objected to the regime of censorship in imperial Russia that stifled the expression of heterodox views, to the state's denial of a right to privacy, and to the prosecution of dissenters. When the revolutionary movement coalesced early in the reign of Alexander II, participants hoped to take advantage of discontent among peasant sectarians and Old Believers. By making religious freedom one of their demands, they sought to unite with dissenters against the imperial state. Yet, as their activities shifted from London to St. Petersburg, then to the Russian provinces, revolutionaries came to fear that their conception of freedom was fundamentally different from that of peasant dissenters. Not only did the complex of ideas that Mill packaged as an "indefeasible right" have to be separated into two principles, but these principles began to seem incompatible. One was freedom of confession--the right of all religious believers to fulfill the ritual demands of their faith. The other was freedom of conscience--the right to speak and think as they wished, the right to decide which religious or ethical systems to assent to, the right not to identify with any religion at all, and most critically, the right not to be compelled to make their religious beliefs known if they did not want to. This essay seeks to explain why freedom of conscience and confession posed such problems for radicals by concentrating on the experiences of Russia's first revolutionary group, Land and Freedom (Zemlia i volia), in the early 1860s. As is well known, freedom of confession, the right of individuals to practice whatever religion they choose, was conspicuous largely for its absence in imperial Russia. The state practiced religious tolerance to an extent, recognizing several major religions alongside Orthodox Christianity, most notably Catholicism, Lutheranism, Judaism, and Islam. State policies toward these religions remained inconsistent, however, and dissent within them was forbidden: the state prosecuted heterodoxy, targeting Old Believers and sectarians with special vigor. Converting from one denomination to another was made difficult, and conversion from Orthodoxy was strictly forbidden. Adherence to same religion was obligatory. (2) The situation did not change in any fundamental way when Alexander II ascended the throne in 1855, though some Old Believers hoped that policies of greater tolerance would be part of the package of reforms he introduced. (3) Figures who played a key role in the foundation of Land and Freedom--Nikolai Platonovich Ogarev, Vasilii Ivanovich Kel'siev, and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Serno-Solov'evich--looked specifically to sectarians and Old Believers as the segments of peasant society most likely to rebel, an idea they adopted from Alexander Ivanovich Herzen. They would promote freedom of confession in broadsheets that targeted these groups. The first Land and Freedom was an umbrella organization called together between late 1861 and early 1862 by activists in St. Petersburg. Its purpose was to coordinate revolutionaries throughout Russia in anticipation of a major peasant uprising, which was expected in the spring of 1863, when the emancipation of the serfs was scheduled to take effect. …

Freedom of Conscience, Freedom of Confession, and "Land and Freedom" in the 1860s

In 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union raised hopes that a new era was about to begin, not only in former Soviet countries, but in the world at large. Many anticipated that the dismantling of the political system in the East would open up the possibility of creating a new social system in the West, one based on new philosophical and moral conceptions. Not only did that system fail to emerge, but the intellectual renaissance that was supposed to underpin it never took shape either. Ideas appeared to have lost their vibrancy and power as a force in history; the history of ideas as a scholarly field suffered as a consequence. Russian intellectual history (or call it the history of Russian thought, or philosophy) was struck with special force: the collapse of communism made it obvious that the field needed to be reinvented. It remained unclear, however, what values should underpin this quest. The declining fortunes of intellectual history in the West have left at least some scholars feeling nostalgic about its status during the Cold War. David Saunders recently captured this feeling: "The history of Russian thought used to be fashionable. Indeed, in the 1950s and early 1960s it occupied centre stage in English-language writing about Russian history." (1) Among the leading lights Saunders lists are Isaiah Berlin, Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Martin Malia, and Marc Raeff, whose studies defined the field for decades. Those must indeed have been exhilarating times. Berlin, Riasanovsky, Malia, and Raeff knew one another reasonably well: all spent time at Harvard in the late 1940s. There were very few English-language publications in the field when they took their doctoral degrees--almost any topic they chose to write about would represent a major contribution. No less enviable was their confidence about the governing role ideas play in history. This certitude may partly have been a product of wartime experiences. Raeff, Riasanovsky, and Malia were all born in 1923 or 1924; the former two were refugees from Nazism and communism, and all three served in the U.S. Army and Navy during the final years of World War II. For them, as for many in their generation, there could be no doubt that ideas matter. As Riasanovsky remembered, to emphasize the importance of ideas and ideologies was not to insist that their "impact" was "rational." On the contrary, "these could be irrational and utopian." That point, he said, was especially important to Malia. (2) Another shared assumption of their generation was that ideas naturally fall along a political spectrum from left to right. Riasanovsky recalled that this had been the organizing principle behind the course in Russian intellectual history, which he and Malia famously co-taught at U.C. Berkeley: "I introduced subjects from the Russian Right, Martin from the Russian Left (in some relationship to our respective research interests)." (3) This was an uncomplicated division of labor. The first years after 1991 saw the publication of two significant works that maintained the importance of ideas and ideology in history: Malia's The Soviet Tragedy (1994) and Andrzej Walicki's Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom (1995). In The Soviet Tragedy, ideology is essentially what happens when ideas are extended beyond reasonable limits. The ideology that mattered most to Malia was socialism, and he would define it as "a utopia, in the literal meaning of that term: a 'non-place' or a 'no-where.' ... The full reality of socialism is reserved for the realm of faith, 'the belief in things unseen, the hope in things unknown.'" (4) Reason, Malia believed, always followed a logic, even if that logic had disastrous consequences. Reason's cunning, however, ceased to captivate younger scholars. On the contrary, the new generation of intellectual historians would steer away from anything that smacked of determinism or teleology in the realm of ideas. So, for example, Andrei Zorin would describe the "ideological sphere of culture . …

Victoria Frede

Papers

Atheism in the Russian Enlightenment

Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia

Stankevič and Hegel’s arrival in Russia

Freedom of Conscience, Freedom of Confession, and "Land and Freedom" in the 1860s

Russian Intellectual History since 1991: Overcoming the Left–Right Divide