Book Discussion - A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism

This month we will be discussing A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism by Victoria Smolkin. We will discover the various ways that the Soviet government attempted to turn the USSR into a godless society and evaluate the failures and successes of their experiments.

Length: 339 pages | ~10 hrs audiobook

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools―from education, to propaganda, to terror―to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society.

Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments.

Here's an interview with the author, if you haven't finished the book but still want to have full context: https://youtu.be/4PjCGnKNeyQ