In June 1965, a meeting on the methodology of atheist propaganda was held in Leningrad, where the head of the methodological office on atheism shared the following story with colleagues. Recently, a local factory worker died in the village of Lisiy Nos. This worker was, according to his comrades, an unbeliever, and the factory director, the party committee and the trade union decided that his funeral would be "civil", "with a civil rally" and a memorial service at the local cemetery. They agreed with the widow that she would deliver the coffin to the cemetery. But when the plant's employees arrived at the cemetery,they saw a local priest who was already conducting a religious funeral. The staff waited until the end of the service, and then the comrades from the factory began to "bicker" among themselves about who would deliver the speech. And while the comrades continued to argue, the priest decided to defuse the situation, " showing how well he learned what he was taught at the theological academy." The priest was well aware of the details of the deceased's life, and he talked about what a good family man he had been, what good children he had raised, even mentioning them by name, and what a good neighbor he had been, and how well he had looked after his homestead. When he finished, the priest said that he would not talk about what a good worker he was, as this is already evident from the fact that so many of his comrades came to see him off on his last journey. The Leningrad atheist worker noted that after such a speech by the priest, "neither the trade union committee, nor the party committee, nor the directorate-no one dared to open their mouths." 1
1. Russian State Archive of Socio-political History [RGASPI]. f. 606. Op. 4. d. 37. l. 76-77.

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This episode illustrates the main purpose of this article: to understand what was the reaction to the "ideological vacuum" of the late Soviet era, which was formed as a result of the state's anti-religious policy; in other words, how the regime sought to fill the "holy place" that was vacant due to the harsh policy of state atheism. While performing their duties under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, government officials, ideologues, and specialists in "scientific atheism" found that their efforts to create "Soviet spirituality" ran counter to the problem of ritual - the same one that was so clearly revealed in the Fox Nose funeral episode described above. It was the rite, the ritual that was the stumbling block in solving the main issue that haunted the ideologists of the Soviet project from its very foundation: what should be discarded and what should be left in the course of the revolutionary rush to a total transformation of society, culture and human nature itself? Should the revolutionary state "produce" some special spiritual content and special ritual forms - create some new Soviet "cosmos"? And if so, who will create this space, what exactly will it be, and how will it be distributed and implemented?

The Problem of death in Soviet Cosmology

Episodes like the Fox Nose funeral were by no means exceptional, and it should be noted that already in 1965, some scientists and ideologists realized that " religion "(in quotation marks) in the sense in which it was actively fought in newspapers, magazines, lectures of the Znanie Society, etc. It was not an opponent of progress, enlightenment, or humanity, but a complex, dynamic phenomenon.2 Moreover, religion did not necessarily contradict modernity.-

2. On atheism in pre-revolutionary times, see: Frede V. Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. For anti-religious campaigns and atheist education in the pre-war period, see: Peris D. Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998 и Husband W. "Godless Communists": Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917 - 1932. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. On atheistic practices in the late Soviet period, see: Luehrmann S. Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011.

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For example, atheists were particularly concerned about the so-called "modernization of religion" 3, which made them think that even if religion was a marginal phenomenon in Soviet public life, this did not mean that it did not play a key role in the sphere of family and personal life; in fact, Soviet atheist religious scholars drew attention to the same issue. the phenomenon of "privatization of religion," which played an important role in the famous theory of secularization, and it is worth noting that the 1960s - 1980s are considered the heyday of this theory in the social sciences in the West4.

As a preliminary remark, we should briefly mention the term "cosmology". If we accept the theory of the sociologist of religion Peter Berger, then we can think of religion as a constructed "sacred cosmos" or, to use his well-known term, "sacred cover"5. Religion, according to Berger, serves to maintain the legitimacy of a socially constructed world, within which it is supported by the state.-

3. On the anti-religious campaign of N. S. Khrushchev, see: T. A. Chumachenko, Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, 1943-1965. Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences. Moscow, 2011; Chumachenko T. A. Gosudarstvo, pravoslavnaya tserkva, veruyushchie [State, Orthodox Church, believers]. 1941-1961 Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1999; Shkarovsky M. V. Russian Orthodox Church under Stalin and Khrushchev (State-Church Relations in 1939-1964). Moscow: Krutitsky Metochion Publishing House, 1999; Anderson J. Religion, State, and Politics in the Soviet Union and the Successor States, 1953-1993. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Pospielovsky D. A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Antireligious Policies. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987, and also his own: Totalitarianism and Religion. Moscow: St. Andrew's Bible and Theological Institute, 2003; Mandelstam Balzer M. (ed.). Religion and Politics in Russia: A Reader. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2010; Stone A. 'Overcoming Peasant Backwardness': The Khrushchev Antireligious Campaign and the Rural Soviet Union//Russian Review. 2008. Vol. 67. No. 2. P. 296 - 320; Штырков С. Revealing Ethnography of the Khrushchev Era: Big Ideology and Folk Custom (on the example of the North Ossetian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic)//Inviolable Reserve. 2009. N 1 (63). pp. 147-161. It is interesting to note that "modernization" also disturbed the church hierarchy. article by N. Schlicht in this issue].

4. See the review of key works on secularization in: Bremmer J. Secularization: Notes Towards a Genealogy/ / Religion: Beyond a Concept. P. 432-437; Berger P. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, New York: Doubleday 1967. P. 1 - 52; Stark R. Secularization, R.I.P.//Sociology of Religion. 1999. Vol. 60. P. 249 - 273; Martin D. On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005; Casanova J. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; Asad T. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003; Berger P., Sacks J., Martin D., Tu Weiming (eds.). The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999; Gorski Ph., Altinordu A. After Secularization?//Annual Review of Sociology. 2008. P. 55 - 85.

Berger P. 5. The Sacred Canopy. P. 1 - 52.

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living human existence in this world. Berger sees this process of constructing the cosmos as a process of ordering chaos and, more specifically, making sense of those "marginal situations" that call into question the reality of everyday life. And, of course, the most "marginal situation" is death, so to some extent we can see the construction of the cosmos as an attempt to comprehend and organize the idea and fact of death. That is why, of all the components of "socialist ritualism," I was particularly interested in how atheism tried to deal with the fact of death. It is worth noting that this issue was repeatedly raised at various ideological meetings, in sociological studies, in reports and notes to various state and party bodies, as well as in my interviews with people who participated in "atheist education". For Soviet atheism and socialist ritualism, as well as for Soviet ideology in general, this question was of great theoretical and practical importance.

As the Leningrad atheist worker noted in his description of the funeral at Lisy Nos, when people were faced with everyday problems and personal grief, atheism could not help them on a practical level, whereas priests were specially trained to meet the spiritual needs of their parishioners. "Priests are carefully taught homiletics at the theological academy," the atheist noted, and, as we have seen, at the worker's funeral described, the priest was quite able to adapt to the circumstances. Atheists, for their part, often noted that, first, they lacked just such practical training; and, second, to borrow the terminology of William James, religion remained a "living hypothesis", not only giving people answers to the most important questions of life, but also creating a cosmos that ordered life a person with the help of a system of rituals. These rites gave meaning to the most important moments of human life, especially death. What could scientific atheism offer in return?

Death as a theoretical problem

The failed civil funeral of an ordinary Soviet worker illustrates that by the mid-1960s, specialists in atheist education were acutely aware that the Soviet system was being destroyed.

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the cosmology that was offered "instead of religion" was far from perfect and incomplete. "Socialist ritualism", which was revived in the late 1950s and began to be systematically developed and implemented by the mid-1960s, was a possible answer to these questions, and it was, in my opinion, the most striking example of an attempt to" sacralize " the Soviet reality. Socialist ritualism, in the context of the broader project of creating a Soviet cosmology, had both a theoretical aspect and practical and material aspects, and I would like to focus on them in order to understand how the Soviet government coped with the task of constructing a new cosmos in the late Soviet period.

The end of Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign did not mean the end of the struggle against religion: This was especially evident in the ruling party's insistence on expanding and improving atheist education. The ideological elite criticized the state of affairs in this area and began to pay unprecedented attention to ideology in general and atheism in particular at party plenums (June and November 1963), at special conferences and seminars. The state allocated considerable funds and resources for the creation of new organizations designed to conduct atheist propaganda, including the Institute of Scientific Atheism of the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee, the main educational institution that trained ideological cadres in this area. Finally, on January 2, 1964, the Central Committee made it clear that reform of atheism was once again a state priority: this became clear from the decree "On measures to strengthen atheist education of the population", which called for increasing atheist propaganda in quantitative and qualitative terms.

In the early 1970s, about twenty years after the party leadership raised the issue of religion again, and almost a decade after the failure of Khrushchev's anti-religious campaign raised the question of revising atheist approaches, Soviet atheism was once again the focus of the party's attention. The party sought to make up for the negative consequences of the 1968 events in Czechoslovakia, the emergence of a dissident movement, the stagnation of the economy and the certain ideological fatigue that ordinary citizens of the country began to feel, when it became increasingly obvious that the "construction of a new state of affairs" was being implemented.

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communism" is hardly possible within the time frame set by Khrushchev in 1961.6 As a result, after some easing of ideological pressure in the mid-1960s, the Brezhnev elite put forward a new concept of "developed socialism" and called for an intensification of ideological work.7
Brezhnev's approach to ideological renewal, formulated at the XXIV Party Congress in March 1971, emphasized the formation of a new Soviet personality, whose communist morality and worldview should be "focused on a constant and uncompromising struggle against the remnants of the past"8. In the resolution of the Central Committee of July 16, 1971, which followed the congress and was called "On strengthening atheist work among the population", the Soviet ideological apparatus was criticized for its lack of belligerent attitude towards religion. As the resolution emphasized, the rejection of the" administrative excesses " of the Khrushchev era does not mean the rejection of the struggle against religion, its traditions, practices and anti-scientific views.

By the end of the 1960s, Soviet social scientists, ideological workers, and party and state officials had already collected an unprecedented amount of material on Soviet religiosity - or, to use official language, on religious survivals; 9 the picture revealed by statistics and sociological research and summarized in the Council for Religious Affairs (SDR) was alarming .10 Despite a decade of administrative and propaganda campaigns, attempts to replace the influence of religion with "positive" atheistic measures, religion remained an integral part of everyday life in the USSR. As Alexander Okulov, director of Insti, said-

Anderson J. 6. Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. P. 74 - 75.

7. См. Sandle M., Bacon E. (eds.) Brezhnev Reconsidered. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

8. XIV Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union-Documents. Moscow, 1971-

Alymov S.9 . The concept of "survival" and Soviet social sciences in the 1950s-1960s. 2012. No. 16, pp. 261-287.

10. See Chumachenko T. A. Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR. 1943-1965 and Smolkin V. "The Holy place is never empty": atheistic education in the Soviet Union, 1964-1968//The Untouchable Reserve: A debate about politics and culture. 2009. N. 3 (65). pp. 36-52.

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tut of scientific atheism, at a meeting of the Moscow regional party committee: "Millions of people are still drawn to religion. In the Moscow region, every second child is baptized. Why is this done? This is a big problem. In some areas, this percentage is increasing, and we need to understand this, because this is a big, large-scale, state and dialectical problem."11 Among other things, atheists saw a sign of failure in the fact that religious observance remained high in many parts of the country, and even showed signs of rising in some regions. 12
This concern was particularly heightened by the fact that evidence of "survival of remnants" applied not only to rural areas and the periphery, but also to the very center of Soviet culture - Moscow. For example, Alexander Plekhanov, Moscow's representative to the Council on Religious Affairs, reported that between 1971 and 1976, more than 400,000 religious rites were recorded in Moscow - baptisms, weddings, and funerals. 13 Moreover, these figures did not cover those Muscovites who managed to avoid registering their rites or those who intentionally performed them. rites outside Moscow 14. Forced to re-evaluate their work, atheist workers had to admit that their assumptions about the decline of religion, and hence their approaches to atheist propaganda, were wrong. After more than fifty years of Soviet rule, many theoretical questions remained unresolved, and practical goals were not achieved.

Death as a political issue

The area in which the situation was particularly unclear and most alarming was the rites. Despite strict statements, even the management's position was not entirely clear. On the one hand, Soviet propaganda was consistently condemned-

11. RGASPI. F. 606. Op. 4. D. 106. L. 104.

12. RGASPI. F. M-1. Op. 34. D. 129. L. 22. Statistics showed that in 1965 23-8% of children born in the USSR were baptized, and in many regions, such as Ukraine and Moldova, the figures were much higher: 51-5% and 57%, respectively. In Central Asia, 90 % of boys were circumcised.

13. Central Archive of the City of Moscow (TSAGM). f. 3004. Op. 1. d. 101. L. 166.

14. Ibid., pp. 51-52. To give just one example: between January and August 1975, 26 children from Moscow families were baptized in the Gorky region.

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la participation in religious rites as a sign of ideological weakness. This was especially true in cases where members of the party or the Komsomol took part in the rites: indeed, during the Khrushchev campaign, the leadership made great efforts to "improve discipline" not only among the general population, but also in the ranks of the party. Party directives drew attention to the" conciliatory "attitude of party and enlightenment cadres towards religious beliefs and rituals, while referring to the participation of Communists in rituals and the ambivalent attitude of the intelligentsia towards these issues, which the party accused of" idealizing " religious ideas and traditions in the spiritual history of the country.15 Soviet readers regularly found editorials in Pravda criticizing the "conciliatory approach" to religious issues, especially Communists who, citing the influence of their wives or mothers (and especially the role of grandmothers in the case of a child's baptism), themselves "secretly" participated in religious rites.16
However, behind closed doors, even the ideological elite itself faced great challenges in defining a clear line regarding religious practices. This was especially true during the Brezhnev era, when the party's attitude to religion became more complex, partly as a reaction to the reality that sociological research revealed, and partly as a result of international pressure on the regime to respect freedom of conscience and the constitutional rights of believers. It is also worth noting that factions within the political apparatus itself and conflicts between "democrats" and "nationalists" made it difficult to clearly define the place of religion in the history and culture of the country - especially in view of the increased public interest in the "spiritual heritage" of Russia.17
15. Accusations of inconsistency by the intelligentsia were a constant motif of the atheist apparatus, since even writers who initially supported the cause of atheist education, such as Vladimir Tendryakov, then moved away from this position. See About erroneous assessments of religion and atheism in some works of literature and art. RGASPI. F. bob. Op. 4. d. 98. L. 9-21.

Pravda, 16, 15, 1972. Cit. по: Anderson. J. Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. P. 110, 115 - 116. As Anderson notes, the party's new appeal to religion and atheism in 1971 led to a sharp increase in the number of press articles and propaganda materials.

Mitrokhin N. 17. Russkaya partiya: Dvizhenie russkikh nationalistov v SSSR. 1953-1985 gody [Russian Party: The Movement of Russian Nationalists in the USSR, 1953-1985]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003 and Takahashi S. Church or Mu-

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On the other hand, the official "curators" of Soviet atheist work in the Central Committee, M. A. Morozov and E. I. Lisavtsev, issued directives emphasizing the infallibility of the old party line in religious matters. For example, when the directors of the Houses of Scientific Atheism met Morozov and Lisavtsev in 1967, a provincial official asked if the local press could still be used to criticize those who participate in religious rites, wanting to understand "what is the best course of action in such a delicate case?"18 Lisavtsev's reply was unequivocal: "There is an instruction from Lenin concerning this delicate matter. He is in favor of expelling Communists who perform religious rites from the party: As far as publishing is concerned, we once did not hesitate to openly criticize our shortcomings. This shows our strength, not our weakness. " 19
However, while Lisavtsev and Morozov followed a clear line in their public speeches and internal party discussions, other officials involved in spiritual development were more hesitant.20 When a similar question was asked at the All-Union seminar on atheist education of young people, I. I. Brazhnik, Deputy Chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs, answered less unequivocally:

Question: What should be done in cases when the religious rite of baptism is performed by non-religious parents? How to treat such parents? This is very important to know.

Answer: I can cite cases when Komsomol tickets are presented because there is no other document, and when baptizing, you need to present a document so that the baptism is carried out with the consent of both parents, so that the rights of the parent who does not want the child to be baptized are not infringed. And such a baptism happens because grandparents, mothers-in-law baptize, despite the objections of their parents.

seum? The Role of State Museums in Conserving Church Buildings, 1965 - 1985//Journal of Church and State. 2009. Vol. 51. No. 3. P. 502 - 517.

18. RGASPI. F. 606. Op. 4. D. 68. L. 4-8.

19. Ibid. 8.

20. Morovoz and Lisavtsev were the authors of an editorial in Pravda on the party's position on religion and atheism (January 12, 1967).

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There are many facts of children being baptized by non-believing parents, the reasons are different, and it is necessary to act in these cases in the same way. One measure of punishment and demands for communists and Komsomol members, the other for non-party members. We need to understand the reasons. In relation to the Communists and Komsomol members, the approach is the same: this is the lack of principle shown by these people, and we must act accordingly.21
But then another participant asked Brazhnik a question: "If a party member has an old mother or father - believers. Before death, the mother or father bequeaths to the son to bury them with the priest, should the communist fulfill the last request?" Hawk Moth replied to this: "I think I should." 22

Such doubts about issues that seemed both marginal and central at the same time were widespread. For example, in 1974, the same A. Plekhanov, the Moscow representative of the SDR, reported to V. A. Kuroyedov, the chairman of the SDR, that a major employee of the Council organized a religious funeral for his deceased father in the Moscow Trinity Church and that several other members of the Council were present at the service.23 As a practical problem, death and its attendant rituals affect everyone, from ordinary citizens to the highest representatives of the most anti-religious institution. Again and again, we had to admit that there are situations when people simply lose ground without the established order that was provided by the religious worldview and rituals performed by religious specialists.

So death was not just a political problem, but a philosophical dilemma at the heart of Soviet cosmology. To begin with the very fact of the inevitability of death:" One cannot but speak of such a natural pattern, which we are powerless to change, cancel, which leads to the survivability of religiosity, as human mortality, " notes V. I. Evdokimov, Deputy Head of the Department of Religion. Director of the Institute of Scientific Atheism, at a seminar on atheistic education of young people. "At one time, there was a scale on which religion inspired exceptional fear

21. RGASPI-M. F. M-1. Op. 34. D. 130. L. 52.

22. Ibid.

23. TSAGM. F. 3004. Op. 1. D. 99. L. 56.

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mortality rate. This is of course an exaggeration, an extreme. But the absolute rejection of the role of this factor will also be exaggerated. Only the presence of this factor can explain the increased religiosity of older people, when a non-believer becomes a believer all his life in his declining years."24 In order to combat this phenomenon, ideologists considered it necessary to fill the sacred space with "positive" content: this was the decisive factor in the war against religion and this was supposed to be the main reason for this. characteristics of the Soviet atheist project. As the historian of religion V. F. Zybkovets noted, " communist atheism is positive atheism. We are not only fighting against religious rites, but we are also promoting non-religious communist customs, because without such rites we will not be able to cope. People have died and will continue to die, and they must be buried. " 25
However, there were many obstacles to solving the problem of death. As many have pointed out, the emphasis on criticism of religion - the" negative "aspect of atheism - was unable to transform the Soviet worldview, and M. Kichanova, a young employee of the Institute of Scientific Atheism, argued that atheism, as it has existed so far, has not yet solved many of the" problems of humanism that we need in terms of developing a new way of thinking." in order to solve the problem...the most important one."The most important problem was defined by Kichanova as follows:" what ways can we determine to fill the need in a person that makes him turn for help not to earthly forces, not to social organization, but to otherworldly forces?" We would like to create a harmonious spiritual world for a person who does not need to turn to otherworldly forces. " 26 Another young researcher, A. Galitskaya, pointed out the ways in which religion provides comfort and order in the face of chaos, grief and death, and her comments are worth quoting here:

24. RGASPI-M. F. M-1. Op. 34. D. 129. L. 34-35.

25. RGASPI. F. bob. Op. 4. D. 14. L. 104.

26. RGASPI. f. bob. Op. 4. d. 12. L. 28.

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.. at present, the range of problems of atheism needs to be somewhat expanded, to include those problems that are related to a person's personality, a person's attitude to life and oneself, that is, those problems on which religion grows. [...]

In essence, we tacitly assume that people should not suffer, that they will not suffer under communism. But in reality, it is ridiculous to say that a person will not always suffer for one reason or another, not social. And this religion perfectly uses and has managed to give comfort (italics mine) to a person, so in grief a person turns to religion, because religion has managed to create comfort out of this problem.

Or take a problem like human immortality. Of course, dialectical materialism has generally decided that man is mortal. But what consolation is there for a person when they say that you are mortal, and matter is eternal? We do not use these problems, and religion flourishes on these problems.

Thus, I want to say that the subject of atheism should be problems, maybe it is not purely philosophical, maybe it is philosophical, ethical, psychological, which are related to a person's personality, his attitude to life. These issues should be addressed by atheism. " 27
When Galitskaya asks the question " But what consolation is there for a person when they say that you are mortal, and matter is eternal?", she means the following: how should an atheist answer such a question in light of the fact that their war is directed not just against religion, but against the immaterial and supernatural in general? Even if ideologues emphasized the need to address the ideological vacuum created by the struggle against religion, in practice Soviet efforts to formulate the "positive content" of atheism continued to limp, especially due to the inability to solve the problem of death. Galitskaya's question meant, therefore, that the scientific truth of atheism offered no consolation, and this, as we saw in the episode on the Fox's Nose, left the Soviet people perplexed, without an answer to the last question of life. Galitskaya noticed that the way that people looked like-

27. Ibid., pp. 35-36.

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The concept of life and death "has not just a theoretical, scholastic meaning, but, first of all, it is a practical problem." In the next section, I would like to draw attention to the latter aspect-the" practical " problem of death that official Soviet atheism was forced to solve.

Death as a practical problem

How the Soviet government and its dominant ideology "coped" with the problem of death shows how this ideology worked in its practical, everyday implementation. In the first years of Soviet power, after the separation of church and state, the state assumed new bureaucratic responsibilities, for which the Civil Registry Office was created. But the ritual aspect of the human life cycle was ignored. (Revealing in this sense are shots from the film by D. Vertov, "Man with a movie camera", where birth, marriage, divorce and death take place in one office space and are reduced to the act of painting and receiving a state document). As will be shown below, the well-known attempts to create " red " rites in the 1920s and 1930s remained only a negative example for subsequent generations, and with the consolidation of Stalinism, the issue of rites related to the human life cycle became marginal and was not actually discussed.28 In the Khrushchev era, however, for one decade-

28. For rituals and celebrations in the early Soviet era, see: Peris D. Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998; Stites R. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989; Petrone K. Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the time of Stalin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Most of the research on the late Soviet period, with the exception of the book by Krystel Lane (Lane C. The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society: The Soviet Case. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), mainly focused on the role of rites in public life, most often on ceremonies in which the political elite participated. See Binns Ch. The Changing Face of Power: Revolution and Accommodation in the Soviet Ceremonial System, Part I//Man. December 1979. Vol. 14. No. 4. P. 585 - 606, а также его же The Changing Face of Power: Revolution and Accommodation in the Soviet Ceremonial System, Part II//Man. March 1980. Vol. 15. No. 1. P. 170-187; also Tumarkin N. Lenin Lives: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983; Tumarkin N. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and the Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Работа Кэтрин Мерридейл (Merridale C. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth Century Russia. New York: Viking, 2001) examines the significance of death in Russian cultural memory, but does not address the role of rituals in shaping ideas about death. Comparatively

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The attitude of the Soviet authorities to ritualism is radically transformed.

At the beginning of the Khrushchev era, the question of ritualism was not raised at all, because it was not perceived as relevant. Here are two illustrative examples. (1) Alexey Adzhubey, Khrushchev's son-in-law, writes in his memoirs that he and Rada, Khrushchev's daughter, did not have a wedding as such. In 1949, they, like everyone else, went and signed at the registry office (only, unlike the others, they had a bodyguard with them). Adzhubey does not see anything strange in this, on the contrary, he writes that for the older Khrushchevs, the very idea of the rite was alien. 29 (2) In 1956, the Central Committee receives a letter forwarded by the writer Alexey Surkov from the Writers ' Union, from a certain citizen Kubrikova, who writes that 40 years after the October Revolution, it is time for the Soviet Union to return to the Soviet Union. the state should provide the Soviet people with new traditions, since after October nothing was created to replace religious rituals. It is significant that the Central Committee responds to Surkov to transfer gr. Kubrikova said that "creating and implementing rituals" is "impractical" 30.

The Central Committee's response to Kubrikova's letter indicates that, at least until 1956, the creation of rites was not a political priority. However, it does record some general confusion - among ordinary citizens, intellectuals, and the party leadership - about how to approach this existential problem and who should deal with it; it was clear that the party had to pay attention to such deeply personal issues. And during the Khrushchev period, as already mentioned, the situation changed in a significant and even unexpected way. By the end of 1964.,

Recently, Malte Rolf published a large study on mass holidays throughout Soviet history, with a focus on the Stalinist period: Rolf M. Das sowjetische Massenfest. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006. Vladimir Glebkin's insightful work examines the ritualization of Soviet public life: Glebkin V. Ritual in Soviet Culture. Moscow: Yanus-K, 1998. See also Polishchuk N. S. Rite as a social phenomenon (on the example of "red funeral")//Soviet ethnography. 1991. N. 6. p. 25-39; Kampars P. P. and Zakovich N. M. Sovetskaya grazhdanskaya obryadnost '[Soviet civil ritual], Moscow: Mysl', 1967; Rudnev V. A. Sovetskie uslugi i obryady [Soviet customs and rituals]. Leningrad: Lenizdat Publ., 1974.

Adzhubey A. 29. The collapse of illusions. Moscow: Interbook Publishing House, 1991. p. 16. 30. Russian State Archive of Modern History [RGANI]. f. 5. Op. 36. d. 11. L. 3.

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Soon after the transition of power from Khrushchev to Brezhnev, the Soviet leadership mobilized unprecedented resources to transform the beliefs and practices of Soviet citizens. Within a few years, the idea of "managing" the spiritual life and creating a "socialist ritualism" became a priority, with plenums and resolutions devoted to it, specialized committees and institutions established, academic disciplines such as ethnography, the sociology of religion, and scientific atheism supported; a new generation of specialized cadres was trained; and entire congresses were convened, conferences and seminars in party, academic, cultural and educational institutions. Atheist education, long neglected in state propaganda campaigns, has become an area of intense debate. For rites that were previously considered only "remnants", special spaces, services and material attributes, ritual art, and even a whole methodology and a group of professionals who were engaged in the actual development of rites were now created. In essence, everything revolved around the question of the future of religion and atheism within Soviet modernity, around a strategy that would help effectively overcome religion and establish atheism; around state policy to control the" spiritual life " of citizens.

Ritualism "without magic movements and spells"

Discussions about the place of rites in socialist society began immediately after the October Revolution, and positions differed significantly.31 Some revolutionaries were fundamentally opposed to any rituals, seeking to eradicate all mass holidays, family rituals and even the military oath - all of which they considered "remnants". The scientific and materialistic consciousness of these people anticipated a society free from the" archaic " need for spectacles and rituals. The Em position is indicative. Yaroslavsky, chairman of the Union of Militant Atheists. As A. Sokolova notes, Yaroslavsky more often saw attempts to create a new ritual as " peregi-

Fursin I. I. 31. On the nature and social functions of ritualism in the socialist society//Questions of scientific atheism. 1972. N 13. P. 163.

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As an example of radicalism, he cites a comrade who "even wrote a will: when I die, I will give my corpse to a soap factory and make soap out of it, otherwise you develop a 'communist double faith'. You, they say, are fighting against ritualism, and you yourself have established a lot of all sorts of rituals. " 32
Others, however, were ready to make a concession to popular needs as a kind of transitional, temporary measure, presenting ritualism as part of the old way of life, which would soon be outlived by the fully matured proletarian consciousness. Meanwhile, according to this logic, it is better to have "our" socialist rituals than "their" religious ones. Those who saw rituals as a forced temporary measure sought to purge them of mystical and supernatural elements and create practices that would fit into the modernity type, corresponding to the Soviet enlightenment project. Finally, there were representatives of the third group of the revolutionary elite who opposed the idea of ritualism as an absolutely reactionary phenomenon and believed that religious rites were only one of the historical manifestations of a fundamental human need. They pointed out the existence of ritualism in all known cultures throughout history, while maintaining that there is nothing specifically religious about this phenomenon. On the contrary, they emphasized the educational and transformative potential of the ritual experience and argued that it was in the interests of the State to develop a clear policy on creating a new ritual.33
During the first two decades after the Revolution, the Soviet leadership and atheist agitators created a number of Marxist-Leninist political holidays that symbolized the Soviet public sphere, but they faced serious problems trying to replace the old symbols and rituals that belonged to the private life of the gra-

Yaroslavsky Em. 32. How to conduct anti-religious propaganda. Report delivered on April 20 at the 1st All-Union Congress of GAZ Correspondents. "Bezbozhnik" and Societies of friends of the newspaper "Bezbozhnik". Moscow: Publishing House Bezbozhnik, 1925. p. 21. Cit. by: Sokolova A.D. Funeral rite among Russians in the XX-XXI centuries: from 'new way of life' to our days. http://www.igh.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=i32:pokhoronnyj-obryad-u -russkikh-v-20-n2i-vv-ot-qnovogo-bytaq-do-nashikh dnej&catid=82&Itemid=130 (accessed from October 25 2012).

Fursin I. I. 33. On the nature and social functions of ritualism in the socialist society. p. 163.

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zhdan. For example, in his article "Family and Ritualism" L. Trotsky argued that for the success of anti-religious propaganda, the question of ritualism played a central role:

The rites of the church keep even an unbeliever or a little-believing worker on a leash through the three most important moments in the life of a person and a human family: birth, marriage, and death. The workers ' State turned its back on church rites, declaring to its citizens that they had the right to be born, marry, and die without magical movements or incantations from people dressed in cassocks, cassocks, and other forms of religious clothing.

But if Trotsky was happy about freeing the population from the "religious dope", he realized that "it is much more difficult for everyday life to break away from ritual than for the state," and the new rites served precisely the movement for "new life", emphasizing the emotionality of ritual as an important element of human life, and, therefore, remained a serious political task:"Therefore, anyone who says that: there is no ritualism in everyday work, understanding by ritualism not church tricks, but collective forms of expressing their feelings and moods, is missing over the edge. In the struggle with the old way of life, he will break his forehead, nose and other necessary organs. " 34
Rejecting the radical anti-Religious position, Trotsky warned against ignoring the significance of ritual ceremonies in the course of the revolutionary struggle against religion: "How to celebrate a marriage or the birth of a child in the family? How to pay tribute to a deceased loved one? It is on this need to mark, mark, and adorn the main milestones of life's journey that church rites are based. " 35
Responding to this need, the young Soviet state proposed the rite of " Octobrins "(instead of baptisms)," red "weddings and" red funerals", but the utopianism of early Soviet rites was more often perceived as a parody that did not apply to real life. For example, popular writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny

Trotsky L. 34. On the tasks of rural youth. About the new way of life. Moscow: Novaya Moskva Publ., 1924, pp. 14-15. Also, Sokolova A. Funeral rite among Russians in the XX-XXI centuries: from the "new way of life" to our days.

Trotsky L. 35. Family and rituals//Truth. July 14, 1923. N. 156.

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Petrov was ridiculed by the "Octobrines" in an article in the newspaper Pravda in 1935.:

The newborn was carried to the local police station. The gift-giving ceremony took place here. They always gave me the same thing - a red satin blanket. But for this blanket, the chairman of the local committee took revenge - over the baby's cradle, he delivered a two-hour report on the international situation. The newborn would naturally roll up, but an experienced speaker could easily shout over it. The adults smoked wistfully. The band often played touche. At the end of the report, the somewhat blue-faced baby was given a name: the boy was called Dobrohim, and the girl was called Sledgehammer, hoping that the children would be called that all their lives. Then they all went home with a feeling of unease, and the chairman, left alone, would take out the list and write it down with satisfaction: "Over the past quarter, 8 political food breaks were held, 12 kultshkvals were held, and 42 Oktiabrins were held."

At home, of course, everything was back to normal. Dobrohim was called Dima, and Sledgehammer, of course, Claudia. But the feeling of dissatisfaction remained for a long time 36.

Despite revolutionary dreams of rebuilding society and human nature itself, the task of transforming religious beliefs and practices remained unsolved. Some early attempts by the state to create Soviet life-cycle rituals were unsuccessful, and the general uncertainty about religion, private and family life in the revolutionary project remained marginal for several decades in comparison with the more urgent tasks of political and economic modernization, as well as the war. After the devastating anti-religious campaign of Stalin's "cultural revolution," religion, atheism, and ritualism as such largely disappeared from public discussion. For the late Stalinist period, questions about how to approach the rites of the life cycle within the framework of Soviet cosmology remained peripheral, at least until the above-described episode with the letter gr. Kubrikova Street,

Ilf I., Petrov E. 36. Mother//Collected Works, Vol. 3. Moscow: State Publishing House Of Literary Works, 1961, Pp. 382-383. First published in Pravda (1935).

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recorded in archival sources and indicated a shift in emphasis.

In the late 1950s, the press begins - or, more precisely, returns - a discussion about the Soviet ritual-whether it is necessary at all and, if so, what it should be 37. It is important to note that the discussion of rites begins with the rite of marriage. As you know, this discussion started in the Komsomol, which is understandable, since this issue is more relevant for young people. "Palaces of Happiness" began to open: first in Leningrad, then in Moscow, and then throughout the USSR; the collection of ethnographic materials and conducting sociological research related to wedding traditions also began; new wedding ceremonies were created.38 To some extent, the rite of civil service is also discussed.

Glebkin V. 37. Decree. Classical folklore today: Materials of the conference dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the birth of Boris Nikolaevich Putilov. Saint Petersburg, September 14-17. 2009. Ros. akad. nauk, In-t rus. lit. St. Petersburg: Dmitry Bulanin, 2011. p. 404-428. KeLi K., Sirotinina S. "It was incomprehensible and funny": holidays of the last decades of Soviet power and their perception by children//Anthropological Forum. 2008. N 8. pp. 258-299; Shkuratov S. A. Introduction of new non-religious holidays and rituals in the life of Soviet citizens//The Soviet State and the Russian Orthodox Church: Problems of Mutual Relations in the field of foreign and domestic policy in the post-war years. Shkuratova I. V., Shkuratov S. A. Moscow: Sputnik+ Company, 2005. pp. 21-33-Zhidkova E. Antireligious campaign of the "thaw" times in the Kuibyshev region //Inviolable reserve. 2008. N 3 (59). http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/20o8/3/zhi2.html#_ftm.

38.One of the first institutions to conduct opinion polls in the Khrushchev era was the Institute of Public Opinion at the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. The Institute was headed by B. A. Grushin, who recently published an in-depth analysis: Grushin B. A. Four Lives of Russia in the Mirror of Public Opinion Polls: Essays on the Mass Consciousness of Russians in the Times of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin: Life First. The Khrushchev era. Moscow: Progress-traditsiya Publ., 2001. Leningrad was clearly a leader in the process of reviving sociology in the USSR, see: Voronov A. O. Sociology in Leningrad - Saint Petersburg in the second half of the XX century. St. Petersburg: SPBU Publishing House, 2007, and its own: Sociological Research in Leningrad-St. Petersburg (1960-s - 1990-s)//Sociological Research. September-October 2009. Vol. 48. No. 5. P. 45 - 54. For a brief overview of the development of the sociology of religion in the post-Stalinist period, see: Smirnov M. Modern Russian Sociology of Religion: where and Why? / / Religious Studies. 2007. No. 2 and Sociology of Religion: dictionary. St. Petersburg: Publishing House of St. Petersburg State University, 2011; Shakhnovich M. M. Russian religious studies of the 1920s-1980s. What legacy do we give up?//Essays on the history of religious studies. Shakhnovich M. M. St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg State University Publ., 2006, pp. 181-187; Lopatkin R. Sotsiologiya religii v Rossii [Sociology of Religion in Russia]: past experience and current challenges//State, religion, and Church in Russia and abroad. 2001. N. 4 (28). pp. 34-46. Sociological research was carried out, in particular, by the Leningrad Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism (see Krasnikov N. P. Preliminary results of the study of religious beliefs and rituals).-

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registration of newborns. However, the "socialist funeral" remains more of a problem than a project.

Only in 1964 did ritualism as a whole receive general official guidance and systematic dissemination. The question of ritualism was discussed at the June and November Plenums of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 196339. Soon a Resolution of the Council of Ministers for the RSFSR "On introducing new civil rites into the everyday life of Soviet people" (February 18, 1964) was adopted, a commission for introducing new Socialist Rites was established under the Ministry of Justice of the USSR, and Order No. 194 of the Minister of Culture of the RSFSR of March 13, 1964 "On introducing Civil Rites and Non-religious holidays into the everyday life of Soviet people" was issued.". Subsequent resolutions are adopted in the regions and territories of the RSFSR, and then in the city executive committees, where local commissions are created to introduce a new civil ritual. In the newly established Institute of Scientific Atheism (1964), the first post-graduate students are immediately assigned by party curators to process the collected materials on ritualism (as the author of one of the first scientific works on ritualism, N. Zakovich, said, the collected ethnographic materials were stacked one meter high) 40.

But the process was not limited to directives from the center: materials on conducting rituals were collected locally and the first experiments were conducted. In the Baltic States, Ukraine, and some regions of the RSFSR, especially in model collective farms, efforts were made to hold various public ceremonies and private rites (most often weddings). Already in 1956, "Summer Youth Days" were successfully introduced in Estonia and Latvia.-

stis//Specific studies of contemporary religious beliefs (methodology, organization, results). Moscow: Mysl Publishing House, 1967. pp. 129-137. as well as Institutes of Ethnography, History and Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences and departments of scientific atheism of major universities, including Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev.

39. The plenum was held on June 18-21, 1963, and discussed the report of a member of the Central Committee, L. F. Ilyichev, see: Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, June 18-21, 1963. Stenographic report, Moscow: Publishing House of Political Literature, 1964. As Glebkin and others note, the question of ritualism has been discussed since the late 1950s, especially at the level of the Komsomol, in particular, at the XIII Congress of the Komsomol on April 15-18, 1958. But it was not until the end of the Khrushchev era that" ritual-making " spread to the whole country and began to be carried out systematically.

40. Nikolai Mikhailovich Zakovich, interview. Kiev, Ukraine. February 5, 2009.

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in contrast to the popular rites of religious confirmation. Gradually, the process of creating and introducing new rituals began to develop and in the 1970s became widespread.

How to meet the (spiritual) needs of the population? Ukraine as a laboratory of Soviet ritual making

For the sake of brevity, I will focus on this production of "socialist rites" only on the Ukrainian material, which is very illustrative of the late Soviet period: this material allows us to focus on both the spiritual and material aspects of the issue. As is well known, the Western border republics of Ukraine, Moldova, and the Baltic States have always had a very high level of attendance at church services, 41 and Ukraine was a recognized center of religiosity in the USSR as a whole.42 As Sabrina Rame notes, " in 1946-1989. Ukraine was distinguished among other republics by the largest share of the population of people who were denied access to a religious denomination of their own choice. " 43 Of the 10,797 churches and 2,625 houses of worship in the entire USSR (as of January 1, 1954), 7,710 (63.2%) were in Ukraine, and this proportion was more or less maintained throughout the Soviet Union. 1980s 44. Accordingly, it is in Ukraine that the atheist

41. RGANI. F. 5. Op. 34. D. 54. L. 3-4.

Yelensky V. 42. The Revival before the Revival: Popular and Institutionalized Religion in Ukraine on the Eve of the Collapse of Communism//State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine/Wanner C. (ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 2012; Belyakova N. Evolution of relations between power and Christian denominations in Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic Republics in the last quarter of the XX - beginning of the XXI century. Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences/ Moscow, 2009.

Ramet S. 43. Nihil obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. P. 246.

44. RGANI. F. 5. Op. 33. D. 53. L. 14. In his detailed and archived study of Khrushchev's anti-religious campaigns, Nathaniel Davis acknowledges the difficulties of finding out precise figures about the results of state policy; nevertheless, he provides eloquent data on the significance of Ukraine for assessing the religious situation in the USSR as a whole. He's writing: "Despite the huge losses of churches and priests in Ukraine during the Khrushchev offensive, the Russian Orthodox Church has largely remained Ukrainian in its composition. Of the 7,500 registered church communities after the offensive, 4,540, or 60.5 %, were located in Ukraine. Relevant information

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work in general and the project to create a new ritual were given the greatest importance.

Ritualism in Ukraine is becoming a huge state project. In the 1960s, " socialist ritualism ... In December 1969, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine created a Commission for the Study and introduction of new civil rites in everyday life under the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, as well as commissions under the executive committees of local Soviets of Workers ' deputies in regions, districts, cities, villages and towns.45 The practical work of the new commission begins with the development of public holidays-first the 25th anniversary of the victory of the Great Patriotic War, and then the" New Year", "March 8", "May 1", "Day of Soviet Youth" and holidays by profession ("All-Union Day of Agricultural Workers", etc.). 1970. 13 working groups are created, which include both representatives of ministries and enthusiasts of "ritual-making", which is explained by "the need to accelerate and strengthen the work ... in connection with the noticeable activation of the church's activities at that time. " 46 Work on family and household rituals-"Marriage", "Birth" and "Funeral" - begins by the end of 1971, when an expanded meeting of the commission discusses the work of the Registry Office of the Ukrainian SSR and municipal enterprises of the republic "to meet the needs of the population" 47.

On March 12, 1974, the Politburo of the Central Committee of Ukraine reorganized the commission, renaming it the Commission for the Study and Introduction of New Civil Holidays and Rituals under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR. The project participants see this re-organization as a new period in the commission's activity, seeing the first period (1969-1973) as a period of study and methodological development of a new socialist ritual, and the second (1974-1976) as a stage of introducing a new ritual into the life of the masses.48 In the meantime,

the figure for the period before the attack was 63.4%. The corresponding figure remained close to two-thirds in the 1980s." Davis N. The Number of Orthodox Churches before and after the Khrushchev Antireligious Drive//Slavic Review. Autumn 1991. Vol. 50. No. 3. P. 619.

45. TsDAVO. F. 2. Op. 13. D. 9747. L. 28.

46. Ibid., l. 29.

47. Ibid.

48. TsDAVO. F. 2. Op. 13. D. 9743. L. 8-11.

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the organizational infrastructure and material base of the socialist ritualism continue to grow. In 1977, the new commission consists of 41 people from the highest departments of the republic: two responsible employees of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, two members of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, three from the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, one from Ukrsovprof, one from the Central Committee of the LKSM of Ukraine, seven heads of departments, 41 deputies. ministers and heads of departments and 8 researchers 49.

At the beginning of 1978, there were already 10,309 ritual commissions in Ukraine, which, under the leadership of party bodies, coordinated and carried out work on all holidays and rituals.50 The "material base" of the new rites was also actively developing: in the republic there were 97 Houses and Palaces of solemn events; 4248 halls and rooms at the executive committees of local Councils of People's Deputies; 4262 rooms in Houses and Palaces of Culture. Meanwhile, official statistics-it is important to note that these statistics remained "for official use" - showed a certain dynamics: in 1978, 74-4% of marriages in the republic were conducted according to the new rite, and the share of weddings from 1972 to 1977. decreased from 4.6% to 3.2%. During the same period, the share of baptisms decreased from 43.9% to 32.7%, while by 1978, 52.1% of the number of newborns received solemn "socialist" registration. It is noteworthy that the commissions not only discussed theoretical or even organizational issues, but also material problems in the most specific details. For example, in order to attract newlyweds and new parents to new rites, advisory assistance was offered to the population on family and marriage relations (258 lectures, 198 consultation points, 45 "schools for newlyweds and young mothers"). In addition, young people who went through new rituals got access to scarce goods-wedding dresses, rings, baby clothes, strollers, etc. Due to the fact that ideological aspirations inevitably required material incentives, the material volume of services increased every year (for example, from 8.7 million rubles in 1977 to 10.8 million rubles in 1978).

49. TsDAVO. F. 2. Op. 14. D. 2649/

50. Ibid.

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Attention was also paid to the material base of funeral rites. In 1978, there were 16 Houses of Mourning, 377 funeral sites, and 414 funeral bureaus in Ukraine. The number of enterprises producing ritual paraphernalia increased from 394 in 1973 to 950 in 1978; more than 50 samples of bas-relief signs and labor symbols for individual tombstones were designed and put into production. 10.9 thousand people were employed in the funeral service, and only in 1978 the material volume of funeral services increased from 25 to 4.2 million rubles. But while the proportion of religious funerals declined from 53.2% in 1972 to 48% in 1978, only 16.5% of funerals were held according to the "socialist" rite.51
Soviet statistics, as is well known, do not give a complete picture of the living religiosity of the Soviet population: for example, they do not reflect the widespread "secret" rites and do not show what exactly local authorities considered the implementation of the "new socialist rite", although the rites could vary greatly from region to region, depending on local material circumstances and circumstances. personal enthusiasm (or lack thereof) of managers. But the archive materials at least provide an opportunity to get acquainted with the issues that both local organizers of new rites and their participants were concerned about. For example, in 1975, at an expanded meeting of the Republican Commission on Socialist rites, the head of the Kharkiv Civil Registry Office complained that the lack of funds and personnel undermined the ideological and educational goals of the new rites:

The conduct of rituals, the quantity and quality of them, and the culture of public service depend on the states. Here is a simple example. The head of the department of Civil Registry office conducts marriage registration. Many guests come to this celebration, bring a lot of flowers. A petal will fall from the bouquet of each of them, and the office of the civil Registry office is already dirty. What should I do? After all, now a new couple will come for reg. marriage. And then the head of the registry office puts on a robe for her ritual costume, takes a broom and sweeps the floor in the room. And then accepts a new pair. And then there are complaints from the newlyweds that their marriage was registered by a cleaning lady, that the manager was absent somewhere

51. Ibid. It can be assumed that the rest remained without the ceremony, and the fact of death was registered in the registry office.

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I had to invite the chairman of the executive committee and these newlyweds. He tried to convince them that their marriage was registered not by the cleaning lady, but by the manager. They did not want to believe it, claiming that the same person was cleaning the room in their presence. What was the manager supposed to do?52

Emails describing such situations regularly pop up in the archives, and they show that the questions of participants and employees of these institutions often coincided. Participants were concerned about the atmosphere of the ritual space, the behavior of the specialist and the solemnity of the ritual itself, while Civil Registry Office employees and members of local ritual commissions complained about insufficient funding, poor condition of the premises, their tightness, and especially about the lack of training of the ritual "personnel" as such. The problem of personnel was one of the main ones for the Soviet ritualism: civil Registry Office employees, whose work was always at the very center of the entire bureaucratic system, were not prepared for the new "educational" work. In order to successfully introduce the socialist ritual and, consequently, "overcome" religion, it was necessary at the most fundamental level to create not only a theoretical basis and material base, but also an army of specialists who would be able to meet the "spiritual needs of the population".

These examples show, among other things, how firmly the material and spiritual aspects of the Soviet space as a whole were connected. Most of all, this strong connection was evident in the way the Soviet system approached the problem of death - both in the philosophical and ideological sense, and in the sense of providing material resources and attributes. The Soviet ideology approached the management of death as a rather marginal, though unavoidable, side of its activity. Even during discussions around the new rites in general, the discussion of death and funerals was most often put in the last place, although at the same time it was realized that this painful question could not continue to remain unanswered. V. D. Ploshchenko, Minister of Public Utilities of Ukraine and a member of the central commission, expressed dissatisfaction with the state of funeral services, stating in 1975, that " burial is an unavoidable phenomenon, reduce them to-

52. TsDAVO. F. 2. Op. 13. D. 9745. L. 50-51: Minutes and transcript of the extended meeting of the Commission 5-6 Chervnya 1975.

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It is not in our power to do this, so what is needed must be allocated immediately." Ploshchenko also indirectly pointed out the well-known corruption in funeral affairs: "What is missing is still spent, but uncontrolled with significant damage to the state and the cost of it often remains unpaid to the state"53.

Of course, this issue was still easier to solve from the material side, and already in the late 1960s, the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR took care of the improvement of cemeteries and the improvement of funeral services in general. Between 1972-1975, 8 million rubles were spent on improving burial sites. 54 The Ministry of Public Utilities tried to make funeral paraphernalia cheaper and more accessible: tombstones were offered less, new cemeteries were proposed to be built without fences. But as Ploshchenko explained, the difficulties were both material ("these restrictions on the size of monuments caused objections from a number of manufacturers who believe that the production of large monuments is more profitable") and spiritual ("it was also difficult to overcome the psychological barrier among some of the population who prefer the old forms of monuments, regardless of their artistic value and cost")55. For many, the state of the Soviet cemetery was to some extent a reflection of Soviet life. This is indicative of the criticism of one member of the commission, who insisted that " the cemetery should not be allowed to be full of mass-produced concrete structures. The Soviet people who passed away deserve a more expressive memory, and if there were different people in their lives, then the memory of them should be depicted in different artistic ways, but not with a stamp, as is already being done. " 56
You should pay attention to two things. First, both the bodies that carried out socialist funeral rituals and the public in general - that is, both producers and consumers of state policy in this area - were well aware that this area was in a particularly deplorable state and that it was precisely on the issue of death that state efforts to re-implement the state's policy were being made.-

53. TsDAVO. F. 2. Op. 13. D. 9745. L. 29.

54. TsDAVO. F. 2. Op. 13. D. 9745. L. 24-25.

55. Ibid., l. 25.

56. Ibid., pp. 33-34.

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They faced the greatest difficulties in promoting the spiritual life of citizens. Secondly, death was separated from life even within the organizational structure of the ritual project: if rites related to marriages and births were conducted by local executive committees and civil registry offices, funerals were most often handled by the public utilities through which they were financed; these were the same institutions that managed urban infrastructure, waste disposal, and parks and cemeteries. Therefore, the ceremonial side of the funeral business was often in a particularly unsatisfactory state. It is interesting to note the field studies of A. Sokolova, which collected interviews of people who worked in the commissions for new rites in the Vladimir region in the 1970s-1980s. As Sokolova writes: "It turned out that the scope of the commissions' activities did not include conducting a funeral rite. In most cases, they focused their work on the development and implementation of solemn maternity and wedding rituals, and only registered the facts of death of the population." But there was an important exception to this general rule: in cases of death of " persons of significance to the population - revolutionaries, war veterans, party functionaries, military personnel, collective farm chairmen, etc." - a solemn farewell ceremony was held with the participation of state, party or public organizations. A funeral meeting of "significant persons" could be accompanied by an orchestra and gunfire, while in the event of the death of an ordinary collective farmer, worker or employee, all the care of organizing and conducting the funeral fell on the shoulders of his relatives.57
It should be emphasized that this is not even a matter of avoiding discussion of these issues; on the contrary, certain measures were already taken in the 1970s: for example, funeral services specialists of the Kiev Ministry of Housing and Communal Services took annual advanced training courses; provincial cadres were often sent to Riga, Tallinn and Kiev to get acquainted with these issues. funeral rites. And yet, it seems that the lofty goals that were set in the center were applied with great difficulty on the ground, highlighting the huge gap between ideology and reality, between the material and the spiritual.

Sokolova A. 57. Funeral rite among Russians in the XX-XXI centuries: from the "new way of life" to our days.

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For example, in 1978, the Central Commission for the Study and Implementation of New Civil Holidays and Rituals under the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR received a letter from a resident of the Sumy region, who had heard on the radio about the project to introduce socialist rituals and wanted to share her own experience, pointing out the deplorable state of funeral services in her region and:

In Kiev, a meeting was held on the introduction of new rituals, such as registration of newborns, issuing passports,and registering marriage. Of course, the rite of divorce is not required, but no one said about the last "rite" - this is the death of a person. But in this case, people need help, assistance. Buried with an orchestra, in a big city there are buses for this purpose. And I want to talk about regional centers and localities. In pre-revolutionary times, it is known how funerals were made: all the auxiliary equipment was in the church. There they took a long pass (not a rope) for this purpose, there were special stretchers, they were called maras. The deceased was carried on these marches. We've never carried a dead person before.

Now the deceased is being transported by truck. A man has died - and they are running around looking for a driver with a car. And, sometimes, the car gets caught from under the manure. Only the manure was thrown off it, and then the dead man was thrown on it. Sometimes the manure on that car even smells from the car. Some people have carpets covering their cars, but not all of them have them. In summer, in this case, Christmas trees are used.

Then they look for something to lower the coffin into the grave. In a word, there is no"rite". But it is necessary that city councils, village councils, in general, in their economy, any council should have for this rite: a clean car adapted for this purpose, or a narrow carriage, a pass (instead of a rope) and a beautiful special light stretcher, it happens that the cemetery is not far away and the car is not needed, and it is inconvenient to carry on towels. Death is a great grief and a great deal of trouble, and that would be made easier if the Council had everything it needed for a funeral. It's beautiful when the coffin is carried in your arms, but this requires a device.

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I do not know the address of the relevant organization, but I listened on the radio about the Kiev meeting and the organization of rituals. Please convey my best wishes to the relevant committee, as if such an organization exists in Kiev 58.

This letter is a clear indication of how material difficulties got in the way of meeting spiritual needs, especially during the period of mourning for the deceased. The letter also openly highlights the stark contrast between how funeral matters were handled before the revolution and during the Soviet era. ("In pre-revolutionary times, it was known how funerals were made: all the auxiliary equipment was in the church.") Without a doubt, material poverty finally destroyed the already unstable Soviet cosmos in liminal situations of emotional and social crisis; as a result, people were disoriented, and the sense of cohesion and order was undermined. However, most of all, the ideologists of the" Soviet death "were concerned about the lack of local" cadres "- adequately trained officials with a certain charisma and authority among the local population - those who could bury the" Soviet man " with meaning and dignity. This is what a member of the Commission on new rites at the Odessa Executive Committee told his colleagues in 1975:

However, the most important, the most important problem in the entire multi-faceted system of the service for the introduction of modern rites remains the problem of well-trained, specially trained creative workers in educational institutions.

A man died in the village. Who today or tomorrow can perform the ritual of this sad event from beginning to end in the light of the requirements of the new rite? And in large villages, such events are almost daily: someone died, a new person was born in a family, and there are 3-4 weddings on Saturday and Sunday. We need a trained, capable, highly cultured, highly respected person who permanently lives in this locality, an outstanding personality, who has diction, and is able to evoke emotions in people. We are talking about the fact that the minister of the rite is a specialist in his field, such as a doctor, teacher, agronomist, that is, an official with certain qualifications. -

58. TsDAVO. F. 2. Op. 14. D. 2652. L. 94a-94B.

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responsibilities, equipped places for performing the rite, and various funeral paraphernalia 59.

If you think about the above requirements, then a certain image of a person who is "needed" on the ground emerges ("a trained, capable, highly cultured, highly respected person permanently residing in this locality, an outstanding personality, who knows diction, who can evoke emotions in people"). This image is very similar to the image of a priest.

* * *

The experience of creating and implementing new socialist funeral rites shows that the failures of Soviet scientific atheism are part of the overall failures of Marxism-Leninism as a holistic ideology, especially in its practical implementation. This experience also shows that in trying to displace religiosity and replace it with atheism with "positive content", atheist agitators have encountered unforeseen difficulties in managing spiritual issues. By the end of the Soviet period, atheists, trying unsuccessfully to fill the empty "holy place" with Soviet content, seem to have gradually begun to realize that their failures reflect a deep flaw in the very foundations of Soviet ideology - its inability to meet spiritual needs, both in their existential and material dimensions. After all, neither scientific atheism nor Marxism-Leninism in general could make death irrelevant to Soviet society; the Soviet state simply did not know how to bury ordinary mortal citizens.

Bibliography

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F. 606 (Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the CPSU (AON), 1946-1992).

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Central Archive of the City of Moscow (TSAGM).

F. 3004 (Authorized Representative of the Council for Religious Affairs under the Council of Ministers of the USSR in Moscow).

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Central State Archive of the Highest authorities and Administration of Ukraine (TsDAVO Ukraine).

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