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This book discusses the history of Soviet atheism from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 until the return of religion to public life in the final years of the Soviet Union. When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they were armed with a vision: to make Communism a world without religion. More specifically, they sought to remove religion from the “sacred spaces” of Soviet life. They rejected all previous sources of authority, replacing the autocratic state with Soviet power, religious morality with class morality, and backward superstition with an enlightened, rational, and modern way of life. Despite all these earnest efforts, however, Soviet Communism never managed to overcome religion or produce an atheist society. This book examines why Soviet Communism abandoned its commitment to atheism, and whether there was a relationship between the divorce of Communism and atheism, and the divorce of the state from the Soviet Communist Party.

This chapter examines how the Soviet Communist Party tried to boost the political legitimacy of its ideological project to build Communism and produce an atheist society by addressing the people's spiritual needs. More specifically, it shows how, in the transition from socialism to Communism, the moral and spiritual character of the Soviet people—including their worldview and way of life—gained a new significance. The chapter first considers how the state, after building the material base of Soviet Communism, envisioned ideology as an instrument of spiritual transformation by taking into account Soviet people's worldviews and byt. It then discusses Znanie's various initiatives to bring atheism to the masses and how atheists relied on clubs and lectures to compete with religion. It also explores the clash between the scientific and religious worldviews before concluding with an assessment of the Science and Religion journal's renewed engagement with worldview questions.

This chapter examines how the Soviet Communist Party sought to cultivate a socialist way of life in order to overcome ideological indifference and develop atheist conviction, especially among the youth. Using the social sciences and the results of sociological research, the Soviet Communist Party identified a particularly worrisome trend: young people's growing indifference to religion and atheism. The chapter first considers how the party shifted the focus of atheist work to the production of the socialist way of life as a spiritual project before discussing the creative intelligentsia's god-seeking. It then explores the ways that the party tried to address Soviet society's growing interest in spiritual culture, the spiritual consumerism and indifference of Soviet youth, and the debate over the role of atheism in the greater project of building Soviet Communism. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the return of religion to public life and its implications.

This chapter examines the wave of antireligious and atheist campaigns launched during the Khrushchev era, beginning with the Hundred Days campaign of 1954 and again in 1958 until Nikita Khrushchev's forced retirement in 1964. It explains why the Soviet state disrupted the postwar stability of church–state relations and again viewed religion as a problem, and why Khrushchev brought atheism back after it was cast aside by Joseph Stalin. The chapter discusses the Hundred Days campaign and its impact on Soviet religious life, Khrushchev's antireligious propaganda of 1958–1964, and the factors that led to the Soviet Communist Party's renewed offensive against religion, including anxiety about religious revival. It shows that Khrushchev's antireligious campaigns are part of his efforts to redefine the course of Soviet Communism after Stalin's death. For Khrushchev, political de-Stalinization, economic modernization, and ideological mobilization were all necessary to infuse revolutionary vitality back to the ideology of Marxism–Leninism.

This conclusion examines the demise of the Communist project, along with its vision to create an atheist society. Over the course of its history, Soviet atheism developed through direct engagement with religion. These engagements exposed atheism's contradictions, pointing to the deeper crisis within Soviet Communism. The conclusion first considers Mikhail Gorbachev's reintroduction of religion into Soviet public life, highlighted by his meeting with Patriarch Pimen (Izvekov) and the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church, before explaining why Soviet Communism never managed to overcome religion or produce an atheist society. It also discusses the political transformations of perestroika and cites the history of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow as an allegory for the fate of religion and atheism under Soviet Communism. Finally, it asks why the Soviet Communist Party orchestrated the divorce between Communism and atheism, and between the party's Communist ideology and political power.

This chapter focuses on America's confrontation with Western European Communism, which was as meaningful as its clash with Soviet Communism. Although the postwar growth of the French and Italian Communist Parties highlighted economic distress and quickly induced American policy makers to seek economic solutions, the leftist appeal was broader than simply economics, though this was not always immediately apparent to outsiders. In the first postwar years, French and Italian needs for reconstruction entailed a redefinition of national politics and identities. The postwar experience for the two profoundly traumatized nations came to be formulated in terms of national rebirth and renewal, offering, as might be expected, a chance for radical solutions. Communist anti-Americanism and American anti-Communism remained carefully restrained and relatively muted while the two parties remained included in government coalitions, and until the wartime Grand Alliance irretrievably broke down in the spring and summer of 1947.

This chapter presents a memoir of G. A. Cohen, who died on August 5, 2009. Cohen was born on April 14, 1941, into a Jewish Marxist family, and his life and character were woven into his philosophical work in an unusual way. His upbringing, his family, his Jewishness (as distinct from Judaism), and his need to position his own beliefs in relation to Karl Marx and to Soviet Communism all played central roles in his life and work. Armed with the techniques of analytical philosophy, Cohen began his earliest project, resulting in Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, in which he sets out a clear account of the core of Marx's theory of history. This chapter considers Cohen's other writings which articulate his views on subjects ranging from capitalism and socialism to freedom and the nature and consequences of the thesis of self-ownership.

This book begins by presenting the vision of America shared by Palmiro Togliatti and George F. Kennan during the onset of the Cold War. The leader of the fastest-growing Communist Party in the West and the architect of America's containment strategy against Soviet Communism, from their opposite points of view, nurtured a similar pessimism about the United States' role as leader of the Western world. Togliatti's indictment of the United States was occasioned in May 1947 by former Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles's press statements that the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) was an insurrectionary party funded by the Soviet Union. These declarations coincided with the political crisis that a few days later led Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi—allegedly under pressure from Washington—to expel the PCI from the government's national coalition, which had been in place since the last year of the war.

Most of the public sociology literature is about what public sociologists write and sometimes it addresses the policy work they do but far too little of the research addresses the actual political work activism that scholars do. This chapter lays out the story of Fromm anti-war, Socialist Party of America, human rights and Democratic Party campaigning he did in the 1960s and discusses three of his books that helped create the social movements of the New Left era (May Man Prevail? Marx’s Concept of Man, and The Revolution of Hope).