Content area
Full Text
Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States by John Anderson. Cambridge: CUP, 1994, xi + 236 pp.
Religion in the Soviet Union: an Archival Reader by Felix Corley. London: Macmillan, 1996, xiv + 402 pp.
These two books, although quite different in structure, share a common subject and area of study. But whereas Corley's span is from the first days of the communist takeover to the collapse of the Soviet system in August 1991, Anderson deals only with the post-Stalin religious policies of the Soviet and post-Soviet states. The two volumes thus complement each other, and each is a valuable contribution to the field of study.
At the very beginning of his book Anderson makes its scope and focus clear, delineating a threefold purpose: to provide 'a general overview of religious policy in the post-Stalin years', and 'a detailed study of policy making in the religious sphere'; and to demonstrate `continuity and change in the religious policy of the Soviet state and its successors'. The volume achieves this three-fold aim on the whole. As he claims, he focuses on Soviet policies and institutions set up to combat religion, whereas most other authors have focused on the religions themselves, their history and policies under Soviet rule. However, Anderson's is hardly a pioneering work: Thrower and Powell, for example, have thoroughly researched the subject of Soviet religious policies as well.
Anderson makes the valid point that the reasons for the renewed intensive persecution of religion under Khrushchev and, less vigorously, under his heirs are to be found in Khrushchev's declared aim of constructing communism within two decades, and in the sociological studies of his era indicating ideological disarray and a growing interest in religion among young people in the Soviet Union. What Anderson fails to mention is that the axiom of the incompatibility of any faith in God with communism goes back to the very founding fathers of Marxism. To this reviewer's surprise Karl Marx's name and his militant pronouncements against religion are mentioned neither in the text nor in the bibliography.
A western reader, used to the foreign correspondents' reports of the time about the persecution of the Evangelicals in the USSR, will be surprised to discover that between 1958 and 1964,...