Ebook: A sacred space is never empty: a history of Soviet atheism

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. This text presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.