The Struggle for Soviet Cosmology
For the Soviet Union, atheism became more than the absence of religion. It was an ideology that had to fill the void of religion itself.
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“Between ‘God exists’ and ‘God does not exist’ there lies an enormous field, which a wise man crosses only with great effort.” In A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, historian Victoria Smolkin shows that Soviet leaders spent a great deal of energy on traversing this terrain — with varying degrees of wisdom. […]