This bookexamines in depth the conflict between Lenin''s logic-driven efforts to stamp out religion and the churches'' passionate attempts to save themselves from obliteration. It looks at both sides objectively and admits that they both presented strong cases. In this thoroughly researched yet accessible study, historian Paul Gabel offers a new understanding of the only effort in world history to upset the universality of religion. Besides the main conflict between the Russian Orthodox Church and the atheist state, Gabel also considers the tensions that this campaign against religion caused within the Communist Party. In addition, he discusses the bitter hatred dividing the Orthodox factions that refused cooperation with the government from those that tried to adapt the church to communism. Was the failure of Soviet communism to eradicate religion simply a matter of practical miscalculation, or was this effort, in light of the persistence of religion throughout history, ultimately unrealistic and doomed from the start? This is the key question that Gabel''s fascinating, insightful narrative attempts to answer.

The editors express their gratitude to the John M. Olin Foundation for its financial assistance and to the Harvard University Russian Research Center for the facilities and staff support that made this project possible. We wish to thank those who contributed their invaluable scholarly advice, including Vernon Aspaturian, Abram Bergson, Steven Blank, Walker Connor, Robert Conquest, Murray Feshbach, Erich Goldhagen, Richard Pipes, and Marc Raeff. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver with Soviet demographic data used throughout the volume. Susan Zayer and Karen Taylor-Brovkin provided able administrative help. For skillful technical assistance with the manuscript we are indebted to Jane Prokop, Elizabeth Taylor, and Alison Koff. Catherine Reed, Susan Gardos-Bleich, Christine Porto, and Alex Sich helped generously in diverse ways. Finally, the editors profited at every stage from the congenial working atmosphere and the encouragement of colleagues at the Russian Research Center too numerous to mention. To all of them goes our deep appreciation.

Provides a systematic and accessible overview of church-state relations in the Soviet Union. This text explores the shaping of Soviet religious policy from the death of Stalin until the collapse of communism, and considers the place of religion in the post

After the 1917 Revolution in Russia, the Bosheviks launched a massive assault on religion. Although we know a great deal about how the Bolsheviks went about doing this&—propaganda, persecution of clergy and laity, seizing church property&—scholars have not devoted much attention to the other side of the story: the people who were being persecuted and how they responded to their persecutors. Glennys Young shows how ordinary Russian peasants devised ways of asserting their religious faith during the difficult period of New Economic Policy, 1921&–28, when the Party-state was ideologically obsessed with eradicating religion. Faced with persecution, torture, and the creation of antireligious organizations such as the League of the Godless, Orthodox clergy and laity organized themselves against the Bolsheviks. They revived factional politics, even using the village soviets, the intended cornerstone of Soviet power in the countryside, to defend their religious interests. When they achieved some degree of success in their resistance, the Bosheviks were forced to respond and adapt their strategies&—a conclusion that scholars have not put forward previously. Based on extensive research in archives and published sources, Young's book will force historians of Soviet Russia to confront religious issues as central to rural politics. Her work also draws upon cultural anthropology and theories of peasant politics, making it of great interest to any scholars studying the processes of secularization and desacralization in other cultures.

Since its founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

The evolution of the ruling Communist Party and its New Economic Policy is explored in the first book to analyze the relationship between the Soviet state and society from 1917 through the early 1930s through the changing fortunes of its peoples.