Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge . By Sonja Luehrmann

Abstract

The study of religion in the post-war Soviet Union is virtually a terra incognita for English-language scholarship. During the Cold War, Western scholars were interested in religious freedom in the communist world. But since the collapse of the Soviet system already a quarter-century ago, there have been few serious studies of religious life in the late Soviet period, despite the fact that archives are now at least somewhat accessible for such study and that the topic is of great interest and importance. The challenges to such studies are, however, also significant. The greatest difficulty is that the primary sources are in archives of Soviet institutions whose main task was to control religious communities and ultimately to eradicate religion itself. The sources themselves are, therefore, characterized by hostility toward the very religious communities a scholar may wish to study. It is precisely to this methodological problem that Sonja Luehrmann’s monograph is devoted.