Abstract
Communist ideology in the USSR envisioned a public sphere in which the presence of religious institutions and manifestations of belief were eliminated. However, lived religious practices circumvented or outright flouted Soviet secular mandates when it came to burial, funeral, and commemorative rites. Particularly after World War II, the Soviet state itself used commemorations of death, sacrifice, and transcendence in transformative rituals that made extensive use of the sacred. Such rituals privileged appeals to supernatural forces over those to an anthropomorphic God as worshiped in an institutional setting. Using ethnographic and archival sources, this chapter provides an analysis of the ritualization of death by those living in a state committed to promoting atheism and a supraethnic sense of nationality.
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