cult of saints,
anti-religious propaganda in the USSR,
Soviet historical science in the 1920s-1930s,
history of religion in the USSR,
Marxism on religion
Abstract
The article analyzes the Soviet scholarship about the veneration of Christian saints published in the 1920s and early 1930s, when a campaign to uncover relics was carried out and an active anti-religious propaganda was conducted in the USSR. The author shows that these publications were heterogeneous in their content and significance. She distinguishes three groups of publications based on their goals, objectives and academic content. First, these were anti-religious brochures and articles exposing the cult of relics as “church deception”, written in line with the state anti-religious policy. The second group includes historical and journalistic texts that described the history of the canonization of certain Christian saints on the basis of documentary materials while criticizing folk and church stories about the miracles around the saints and their relics. The authors of these writings relied on a critical tradition that goes back to both Protestant and free-thinking traditions of the 16th-19th centuries. The third group was the work of ethnographers who studied the cult of saints as a form of folk, everyday Orthodox religiosity.
