The author explores the preparations for the Soviet 1937 census. (The results of this census were famously cancelled by the authorities for reasons of alleged falsification, and people involved were subsequently persecuted). In this census, for the first time in Soviet history, the question was included about the respondents’ religious affiliation. In this connection, a special reference book has been created that covered the full list of religions in the USSR.

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.

In this article, the author speaks self-consciously as a man of faith addressing both believers and non-believers, but with the latter especially in mind.

The paper attempts at achieving the conceptual understanding of the desecularization, the idea first proposed by Peter L. Berger in late 1990s. The idea still lacks theoretical elaboration as the sociology of religion is usually late in such theoretical enterprise; this paper tries to fill the gap. In doing so, the author starts with using categorical language of the secularization theory, which was developed in the course of the twentieth century. Yet he adds other theoretical frames and takes a new approach concentrating upon actors, patterns, regimes, and levels of desecularization.