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

Abstract

Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge, by anthropologist Sonja Luehrmann, is a reflexive study of Soviet archives that, in asking how religion becomes a topic of knowledge production in a secular state, poses provocative questions about archives themselves as material and conceptual infrastructures. Based on research conducted between 2005 and 2012 in the religiously diverse Middle Volga region in Russia, as well as in the United States at a private archive in Texas dedicated to recording the history of religious oppression and dissidence in the former Soviet Union, this book centers on document collections related to religious practice in Soviet society from the 1950s to the mid- to late 1970s. From a historical standpoint, given that the documents in these archives were produced in the context of a national project of self-conscious and aggressive secularization, they might appear to be questionable sources on actual religious belief. One way of handling materials produced in this kind of overdetermined ideological context, of course, is to read “between the lines” to glean alternative accounts. Another is to read the materials for what they might tell us about the Soviet attempt to promote atheism after World War II, as well as about the potential legacy of those efforts for post-Soviet religiosity. Indeed, Luehrmann has already written a book on this latter topic, entitled Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic (2011).