UC Berkeley

This dissertation is a study of Soviet atheist education and socialist life-cycle rituals in the postwar period. The narrative follows two distinct, yet overlapping, life-cycles: that of Marxist-Leninist scientific atheism, as it attempted to transform religiosity and fill the space that had been occupied by religion with a distinctly Soviet spiritual content, and that of Soviet citizens, whose lives were ordered and made meaningful by Soviet beliefs and rituals. By analyzing the efforts of the Soviet Party-State to fulfill the administrative, psychological, and philosophical functions inherited from religious institutions, I examine the resurgence of interest in atheism and rituals and analyze why, despite its totalizing ideological agenda, the Soviet Union did not introduce socialist rites on a mass scale until the Khrushchev era. I argue that ideologists became ever more aware of the contradictions that revealed themselves when they attempted to transform ideological beliefs and rituals into everyday convictions and practices. As a result, renewed attention to the spiritual lives of the revolution's "human material" became central to interpretations of Marxism-Leninism, as well as to the fate of the Soviet political experiment. On a broader scale, my work investigates the significance and functions of private rituals in modern society, and evaluates the state's ability to direct this aspect of individual and social life.