Soviet Youth on Orthodox Believers in the Time of Nikita Khrushchev's Anti-Religious Campaign (Case-Study of Kineshma, Ivanovo Region)

Abstract

The paper aims to analyze a unique source - thirty-eight school essays written in Kineshma, a provincial Russian town, in 1964. The essays are entitled “Who is going to church now?" I intend to address the question whether Soviet atheist propaganda was in fact efficient and to what extent patterns provided by anti-clerical rhetoric reached out for young Soviet people in the provinces. The paper presents the Soviet students' perception of the Orthodox believers as well as religiosity itself: the opposition of believers to socialist modernity and progress, the victimization of female and child religiosity, as well as the social stigmatization of believers.