God is not back: the long-term effects of Soviet secularism

ABSTRACT

How effective was Soviet secularization and what is its long-term legacy? This paper investigates the lasting effects of Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands Campaign (1950s) on the current level of Orthodox religiosity in eastern Russia using an original district (raion)-level dataset that combines historical and contemporary evidence. By employing various matching techniques and an instrumental variable approach, I identify significant effects of the Virgin Lands cultivation on diminishing the role of religion even 60 years later. Moreover, I demonstrate that the resettlement of Communist Youth League (Komsomol) members and the destruction of traditional social relations may have worked as key mechanisms that contributed to the legacy effects. This study offers one of the first micro-level empirical investigations into the impact of Communism-driven secularization, and contributes to the emerging inquiry into the historical legacy of communism.

KEYWORDS:

• Communist legacy
• secularization
• Russian orthodox church
• mass movement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2024.2318988.

Notes

1. To provide one such example, Chen et al. (2020) find that the semi-voluntary “Send-Down Movement” in Communist China, during which educated and talented young people were encouraged to move to work in rural areas, has resulted in higher contemporary educational attainment levels among the resettled villages.

2. Accessed 20 June 2020 through the East View Pravda Digital Archive. https://www.eastview.com/resources/gpa/pravda/

3. Regional ROC data are from Sreda (2012).

4. The keyword search included “Orthodox Church (Pravoslavnyi Khram),” “Monastery (Monastyr’),” and “Cathedral (Sobor).” Data were accessed between3 June 2020 and 20 June 2020. The keyword search included “Orthodox Church (Pravoslavnyi Khram),” “Monastery (Monastyr’),” and “Cathedral (Sobor).” Data were accessed between3 June 2020 and 20 June 2020.

5. Accessed June 2020. https://www.gks.ru/storage/mediabank/munst.htm

6. GAEZ v4 data, FAO (https://gaez.fao.org). For an application of the data in historical social sciences research, see Carillo (2020).

7. An urban okrug or a city is coded as an urban district.

8. The897 census data were compiled and aggregated for modern-day Russian districts by Lankina and Libman (2021). The data are publicly accessible at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JO8C7A.

9. Since food can be centrally allocated, the choice of industrial sites was mostly based on natural resource deposits, such as the industrial towns built around the Kuznetsk Coal Basin in Siberia. The Gulag sites, on the other hand, are more correlated with their proximity to railways (Zhukov and Talibova 2018), thus not linked to the land index.

10. It is also worth noting that under Soviet practice, Komsomol membership did not automatically lead to later enrollment in the Communist Party. Therefore, it is possible that some regional elites in the990s may have been members of the Komsomol without being part of the Communist Party.

11. Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults in Tomsk,962, digitized by the Memorial Society, retrieved from http://histor-ipt-kt.org/DOK/Tom/D 434–1.doc. Accessed on 20 June 2020.

12. For some discussion on potential mechanisms, Becker, Nagler, and Woessmann (2017) argue that the instillation of scientific knowledge could lead students to question the credibility of religious interpretations of natural phenomena; this could possibly apply to the Soviet context.