A Sacred Space is Never Empty
By Victoria Smolkin
Princeton, 360pp, £35/$40
This book’s title comes from a Russian proverb – as such it provides an aptly ironic leitmotif to its theme and subtitle: A History of Soviet Atheism. Whatever the later, fraught history of Russia after the Communist Party was dissolved in 1991, we know that 70-odd years of official atheism in the former USSR came to an end that year. Victoria Smolkin, a history professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, has done an excellent job of describing its tragi-comic trajectory.
