Introduction

Abstract

This volume of essays explores the inter-relationship of Communism, science and religion in the Soviet Union and the states of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe that were incorporated into the Soviet bloc after the Second World War. These regimes, which I shall refer to interchangeably as ‘Socialist’ or ‘Communist’, were committed to the application of science, technology and instrumental reason to all areas of social life, and a key assumption of their vision was that religion would wither away as societies moved towards full-blown Socialism. From our current vantage point, more than a quarter of a century after the fall of the Soviet bloc, organized religion, rather than falling into desuetude, seems to have proved surprisingly resilient through the Communist era, and in some regions of the former Soviet bloc religion has undergone a significant resurgence. This, obviously, raises the question of what, if any, impact state efforts to eliminate religion and disseminate science actually had. The scholarly literature has tended to treat Communism and religion and Communism and science as distinct fields. The historiography on Communism and religion has mainly focused on state repression, on the official promotion of ‘scientific atheism’, on collaboration of the churches with the state, on the role of religion in fostering political resistance and on the emergence of civil society in the Eastern Europe (D. Pospielovsky (1984) The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982, two vols. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press); John Anderson (1994) Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); D. E. Powell (1975) Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Study of Mass Persuasion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press); S. P. Ramet (1998) Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press); G. Weigel (2003) The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism (New York: Oxford University Press); B. von der Heydt (1993) Candles Behind the Wall: Heroes of the Peaceful Revolution that Shattered Communism (London: Mowbray).). Relatively little work has been done on the lived experience of believers, although that is now changing (C. Wanner (2007) Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press); C. Wanner (ed.) (2013) State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (New York: Oxford University Press); M. D. Steinberg and H. J. Coleman (eds.) (2007) Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press); P. Betts (2010) Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press), ch. 2; B. Berglund and B. Porter-Szucs (eds.) (2010) Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe (Budapest: CEU Press).). So far as the Cold War more broadly is concerned, it is striking how little attention has been paid to religion as a factor shaping that conflict, despite an enormous historiography on relations between the superpowers in the post-war period (D. Kirby (ed.) (2002) Religion and the Cold War (London: Palgrave); P. E. Muehlenbeck (ed.) (2012) Religion and the Cold War: A Global Perspective (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press); L. N. Leuştean (ed.) (2010) Eastern Christianity and the Cold War, 1945–91 (London: Routledge).). Scholarly work on Communism and science has focused mainly on the Soviet Union and has tended to concentrate on the role of the state in promoting science during the Cold War, especially military technology, on the negative impact of official ideology on scientific endeavour and on the contribution of science and technology to industrialization in the economies of Eastern Europe (L. R. Graham (2004) Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); J. L. Roberg (1998) Soviet Science Under Control: The Struggle for Influence (London: Macmillan); D. Hoffmann and K. Macrakis (1998) Science under Socialism: East Germany in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press); I. V. Bromlei (1986) Main Features of Science Organization in Socialist Countries(Moscow: Institut istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki).). What the present volume seeks to do is to connect these two historiographies and to challenge the implicit assumption that science and religion were counterposed, i.e. that the advance of science was necessarily at the expense of religion. The volume seeks to explore the contradictory and often surprising interplay of ‘science’ (including the social sciences), state-backed atheism and religious belief, seeking, for example, to show how between the 1940s and the 1980s religion and atheism were subject to a continuous process of reconstitution as objects of social science, or how the natural sciences were drawn to occult themes. It seeks to emphasise the modes of interpenetration and coexistence of science, atheism and religious belief and the difficulties of drawing clear boundaries between them, pointing, for example, to the role of scientific expertise in formulating policy in both atheistic education and religious heritage. A secondary theme of the volume is to connect the usually separate historiographies of the Soviet Union and of Eastern Europe (the volume looks at Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) and to encourage comparison of the different ways in which Communism, religion and science were triangulated across the different states of the Soviet bloc. The essays demonstrate that although the governments of the Eastern Bloc adopted the tenets of Stalinist anti-religious policy in the late 1940s, they rather quickly adapted them, according to the specific configuration of the religious field in their country, its sociological make-up, its intellectual and cultural traditions and the extent to which it had undergone secularization in the interwar period.

The volume arises from a conference held at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 16–17 May 2014, entitled ‘Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe’. We would like to thank St. Antony’s College, that college’s Modern European History Research Centre, and All Souls College Oxford for their financial support.