| For more than seventy years the Soviet Union devoted immense educational efforts and cruel repression in order to eliminate all aspects of religious belief and practice, not only in the many Soviet Republics, but, following World War II, in the satellite nations of eastern Europe. But, after the fall of Soviet Communism, the freedom to conduct honest opinion surveys revealed that atheists were few and that religious belief was about as prevalent as it could have been before the great campaign to instill scientific atheism began. That is, the campaign produced a great deal of suffering, but it would border on exaggeration even to call the results “meager.” I utilize various data from this massive attempt at forced secularization to assess the fundamental sources of religious faith and the strength of religious institutions in ways that only intense persecution, both intellectual and social, could reveal. Put another way, the Soviet efforts to force secularization can be seen as a huge social experiment that tested ideas fundamental to the social theory by imposing them on tens of millions of people. My dissertation explains the results of this experiment. |
