ABSTRACT

The chapter outlines the development of Ukrainian freethinking and atheism at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 21st century, which consists of three main periods: before Communism, the Soviet Union and an independent Ukraine. The account begins with a description of the views of the prominent Ukrainian intellectuals Ivan Franko and Lesya Ukrayinka. In the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks came to power in Ukraine, they implemented an antireligious policy and atheist worldview. Special attention is given in the chapter to emerging nonreligious rituals and the activity of the Union of Militant Atheists and the Commission for Research of Religious Ideology. After World War II, the institutionalization of scientific atheism as an academic and ideological discipline took place. The authors illustrate this process in Ukraine with a wide range of archival materials. The propaganda of atheism is demonstrated with the works of Yevgraph Duluman, films, posters, caricatures and the establishment of atheist museums. The authors highlight the shift in the methodological background for scientific atheism during the Perestroika period, which was tied to the desecularization of Ukrainian society. Being associated with the Soviet antireligious policy, atheism is weak in independent Ukraine and unable to compete with mainstream nationalist and religious discourses.