Based on the extensive collection of interviews with Soviet, mostly Ukrainian, Jews born before World War II, the essay examines changes in their reading experience and reading priorities from Bible-centered religious booklore to kulturnost’ — a broad bookish culture of the Soviet intelligentsia. 

This article traces changes in the practice of sacramental confession in the Soviet period, from 1917 to 1991. The combination of secularizing pressures, church closures, and fewer priests, meant that the routine, institutionalized aspect of confession before 1917, which had made individual confession something familiar to the average Orthodox Christian believer, vanished, replaced in most cases by the general confession. On the other hand, for religious “virtuosi,” confession became a more central element of religious life.