Religion in Soviet Russia: 1917-1942 was written by Nicholas Timasheff, who experienced the Russian Revolution firsthand. He fled abroad in 1921, and spent several years speaking, teaching, and writing. He came to the United States in the mid 1930s, and taught at Berkeley, Harvard, and Fordham. He was a lawyer and sociologist by academic training, and he turns that scholastic discipline onto this subject.
He gives a short broad overview of Russian religious history prior to the fall of the Tsar, and then methodically charts the various policies, attitudes, and shifts that the Soviet regime made towards individual believers, church organizations, and priests. He describes the distinctly hostile nature of groups like the Militant Atheist League, and the continual harassment of clergy and faithful, who often hid their beliefs for many years. On nearly every page, he can cite from Russian newspapers and periodicals with anecdotes to illustrate his observations.
In our time, there has been a great deal of hostility between states and religious groups, and the parallels between the Soviet struggle against the Church, and our own time, are uncanny and alienating.
This is a new edition of the public domain book that was originally published in 1942.
This new edition includes:
A new Foreword written by the publisher.
Several footnotes illuminating the references made by the author.
New format, layout, typesetting.
An appendix that includes two contemporary reviews of the book, as well as one other article the author published on the topic.
Bulkington Book's mission is to build a bridge into the past, before film, television, copyright, and internet swallowed up the world. We found this story worthy of revival, and we hope you find it worth your while.
Our Substack Post, including the Foreword, can be read here:
https://bulkingtonbooks.substack.com/p/foreword-to-religion-in-soviet-russia
the original text can be found here on archive: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.76042
