Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States

by John Anderson

Release Date: 22 September, 1994

Edition: Paperback

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An interesting topic turned bland.

Religion and its place in a society where the leaders are publicly professed atheists almost seems like a topic that is guaranteed to take on a life of its own. However, I found Anderson's book to not only be dry and uninteresting, I also found it to be rather one sided. Yes, religion was supressed and even attacked in the Soviet Union, but wasn't this a case of reversed roles in religon's (particularly Christianity's) history? For many years religon attacked non-believers. So I found it hard to sympathize too much with much of the church's plight in Soviet Russia. This feeling may be compounded by Anderson's dry way of describing "assaults" on religion. Very little specific examples are given, although this may very well be due to the difficulty in obtaining reliable resources which would depict specific circumstances. Despite that possibility, I still found Anderson's style to be very dry, almost monotone, and not an exciting read. One saving grace is that the historical chronology is set up in a manner which makes it easier to see why the "Soviet experiment" didn't work in Russia, at least with regards to religous persecutions.