In the early decades after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks struggled to establish atheism in the Soviet Union. While some believed religion would fade as socialist reforms took hold, people continued practicing their faith. In the late 1920s, the government established "Museums of Atheism" housed in former churches and monasteries to promote scientific atheism and expose the "crimes" of religion. These museums grew in popularity and by the late 1980s some had wait times of two hours to enter. After the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s, most Museums of Atheism closed, with some rebranding as Museums of Religion.

1. Museums of the totalitarian
era: ХХ century

2. In the decades after the Russian Civil War, the
Bolsheviks struggled to find the best way to establish a
climate of atheism across the Soviet Union

3. At first, many hoped and believed that religion
would naturally disappear once the social change
they hoped to bring about came into effect
But though church jewels and other valuables
had been plundered and nationalized, members
of the clergy arrested, and saints’ relics exhumed
and put on show to disprove their apparent
incorruptibility, people continued to believe.

4. In museums such as these, people saw various religious
icons, statues, and paintings, alongside images depicting
scientists like Copernicus being persecuted by priests.

5. What unites these people?

6. As time went on, Leninists in the party
realized they would have to take active
steps to stamp out religion for good. At the
15th party conference in late 1927, Joseph
Stalin criticized what he perceived to be a
“slackening in the struggle against religion,”
and pushed for more stringent anti-religious
policies. At the highest level, this ranged
from forbidding educated believers from
becoming Communist party members to
the mass slaughter of thousands of Russian
Orthodox priests and bishops

7. But on the ground, the party wanted to
encourage ordinary workers to renounce their
faith. The outcome was a boom in anti-religious,
pro-scientific propaganda: posters, booklets,
films, radio programs, public lectures, city tours,
and scientific observatories

8. In the late 1920s, the government agency tasked
with this challenge, the Commissariat of
Enlightenment, landed upon a new tactic. These
were the museums of atheism

9. Initially, there were just 30 anti-religious
museums across the great expanse of the Soviet
Union. But within four decades, there were
hundreds of them, housed in the country’s most
significant former monasteries and places of
worship

10. Anti-religious museums adopted a three-prong
line of attack. According to Paine, they would
expose “the crimes and tricks of the clergy”;
promote science as a modern analog to religion;
and demonstrate how religion had been the
“handmaiden of bourgeois capitalism”

11. ” It would have no place in the glorious future of
the Soviet Union. More than that, Paine writes,
“they adopted a deliberate policy of sacrilege,”
where icons and relics were stripped of their
mystique and treated as ordinary objects

12. Throughout the museums, sacred icons from the
Orthodox church were placed alongside so-called
“primitive” statues and objects from around the world.
They might include amulets, voodoo figures, or even
the trappings of so-called “witch doctors” from faraway
cultures

13. Such museums were tremendously popular
with Soviet visitors—though whether this was
genuine interest in the future of atheism or
simply a welcome break from the production
line is unclear.

14. Often, people came on structured group tours,
in which workers from factories or offices would
come all at once for a guided visit: Some
museums might have as many as 17 group tours
in a day. By the late 1980s, the New York Times
reported, the Sunday afternoon wait to enter
the Kazan museum might be as much as two
hours.

15. • Scientific atheism was taught in schools,
alongside history and geography, but in a 1975
survey, many people still professed to find
atheistic dogma boring.

16. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early
1990s, most of its anti-religious museums went
with it. A few still exist, rebranded as Museums
of Religion

17. Of course, there were other
museums in the USSR

23. In the USSR, the museum performed an
important ideological task -
not to entertain, but to educate people, to
acquaint them with the main achievements of
socialism, to propagandize Soviet history

24. Source
N. FROST
«How the USSR Turned Houses of Worship Into
Museums of Atheism. In these Soviet churches,
religion was banned»
www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-
antireligious-museums-of-atheism