In the past few years as a part of the ethnology of religion, everyone has been talking more frequently about the need to create an "anthropology of secularism," which would teach contemporary secularism as an ideology and a political practice. To Western academics, secularism is usually perceived as an aspect of political liberalism, and the aim of its examination is as a criticism of liberal ideas about the privatization of religion and the world outlook of a neutral state. But this point of view forgets that in the 20th century, many attempts to create a secular state were made by "non-liberal" political movements, including Soviet communists. Based on archival material about the atheistic propaganda of Brezhnev and Khrushchev and interviews with former cultural workers in national republics of the Volga, the given talk will show how attention to Soviet atheism can change and enlarge our understanding of the political aims and social consequences of secularism.
