What Can We Know about Soviet-era Religiosity? A Comparison of Archival and Oral Sources from the Postwar Volga Region

Abstract

Based on materials from archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in the Middle Volga region, this article considers the relationship between archival evidence and oral history in attempts to learn about religious practices in the Soviet Union. Presenting examples of three possible relationships between the two groups of sources - complementarity, convergence, and contradiction - the article argues for a reflexive methodological pluralism, where no type of source is rejected or given exclusive precedence over another, but different types of evidence are juxtaposed to one another, generating new questions.