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Medientyp:
E-Artikel
Titel:
The Social Scientist Meets the “Believer”: Discussions of God, the Afterlife, and Communism in the Mid-1960s
Beteiligte:
Dobson, Miriam
Erschienen:
Association for Slavic East European and Eurasian Studies, 2015
Erschienen in:Slavic Review
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.5612/slavicreview.74.1.79
ISSN:
0037-6779
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Beschreibung:
<p>In this article, I use the transcripts of interviews carried out under the auspices of the Institute of Scientifi c Atheism in the mid-sixties. Informants were asked about diverse aspects of their religious practice and belief, allowing scholars—both then and now—to consider the nature of Soviet “secularization.” Following Charles Taylor, I suggest that this was not simply “a story of loss, of subtraction”; instead, informants' rather heterodox conceptions of the aft erlife indicate moments of individual creativity. In particular, I fi nd that among the poor and marginalized, visions of the aft erlife sometimes articulated a desire for social equality considered missing from Soviet society. I also probe the Soviet state's problematic dependency on atheism. The regime's legitimacy rested on its claim to ensure progress and modernity, and religion— the epitome of backwardness—was a useful antithesis. The interview was a ritual that enacted the superiority of Soviet values (reason, rationality, and enlightenment). And yet the encounter between atheist-interviewer and “believer” could oft en prove unpredictable, suggesting that the religion-atheism binary was in practice rather more brittle than the authorities might have hoped.</p>