ABSTRACT

The questions I am concerned with are both historical and futuristic. First, what happened to mainstream religions in the USSR after the 1930s when, under Stalin, they were the object of targeted attack? Second, what happens when restrictions are relaxed in the perestroika period, and what are the prospects for religion in post-communist society? In seeking to answer these questions I shall be concerned with ‘scientific Marxism’ as a mode of thought as well as the religious ideologies of Islam and Christianity as found within the territories of what was, until very recently, the Soviet Union. Because there is such ethnographic diversity within this region (for example, Humphrey 1983; Dragadze 1988), I shall restrict the focus to ritual practices accompanying life crises and illness. In exploring this field I draw principally upon Emile Durkheim’s classic opposition between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’, and show how it can be applied in contemporary communist and postcommunist societies. An important subsidiary theme is the notion of ‘rationality’, as it used to underlie official militant atheism in the Soviet Union.