Experiments in the Study and Visualization of Religiosity in Chuvashia in the Context of Anti-Religious Propaganda of the 1920–1930s
DOI: 10.23951/2307-6119-2026-2-100-110
This article examines the impact of Soviet atheist policy and the specifics of the antireligious campaign in the national republics during the 1920s and 1930s, with a focus on Chuvashia. Drawing on archival materials newly introduced into scholarly circulation, the authors show that a high level of everyday religiosity, represented by various religious “remnants,” persisted in the Chuvash Republic. The low effectiveness of direct campaigning, amid persistent religious syncretism and the complex religious landscape in multi-confessional regions of the USSR such as Chuvashia, compelled government ideologists to change tactics and activate the resources of scientific atheism. A key instrument of the new strategy was a detailed academic study of the current state of confessions in the Soviet Union, initiated by the Center (Leningrad Scientific Research Section of N. M. Matorin) and carried out in the regions by local historians. The particular development of religious atheism in the 1920s and 1930s was not coincidental. The practice of compiling religious and everyday maps became an important area in the academic study and mapping of religious sites during the period. The authors examine the phenomenon of religious mapping as a technology for the development, control, and subsequent suppression of religious life. An active promoter of this approach, which combined research and ideological objectives, was the ethnographer K. Elle (1896–1974), a member of Matorin’s Research Group. His work on creating catalogs and maps of historical and cultural heritage sites (using Kiremet’s map as an example) is reconstructed from archival sources. The practice of mapping religious sites in Chuvashia in the 1920s and 1930s, initially conceived as a tool for preserving unique religious and cultural locations and practices for science, simultaneously served as a precise spatial reference for their subsequent elimination as part of the “Cultural Revolution” policy. Moreover, due to the state's repressive policies against religious scholars in the mid-1930s and the curtailment of academic research in religious studies, this work was not fully developed. It did not become an effective tool in the antireligious campaign. However, the implementation of these experiments for mapping religious sites, which became a significant stage in the USSR's atheist policy, has multifaceted informational value for understanding the complex phenomena of Soviet ideological development.
Keywords: religious studies, Soviet antireligious propaganda, cultural revolution, visual politics, religious mapping, Chuvashia, N. Matorin, K.V. Elle
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Issue: 2, 2026
Series of issue: Issue 2
Rubric: ANTHROPOLOGY
Pages: 100 — 110
Downloads: 90