Dissent on the Margins

How Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses Defied Communism and Lived to Preach About It

Bibliographic Data

ID19996899
AuthorsEmily B Baran (0000-0002-5854-0128, corresponding author)
Year2014
Pages400
Publication date2014-04-02
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueDissent on the Margins (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199945535.001.0001
OpenAlexW4244982827
Open LibraryOL27556455M
ISBN9780199945535
LanguageEN
Citations received14

Dissent on the Margins offers a compelling history of how a small, American-based religious community, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, found its way into the Soviet Union after World War II, survived decades of fierce persecution, and emerged as one of the region’s fastest growing religions after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Through the story of this marginal, often misunderstood faith, this book explores the shifting boundaries of religious dissent, non-conformity, and human rights in the Soviet Union and the successor states of Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova. Soviet Jehovah’s Witnesses offer a fascinating study of dissent far outside the intellectual dissident circles in major urban centers. Witnesses, often rural, poorly educated, and utterly marginalized from society, resisted state pressure to conform. They instead constructed alternative communities based on adherence to religious principles established by the Witnesses’ international center in Brooklyn, New York. The Soviet state considered Witnesses to be the most reactionary of all underground religious movements, and used extraordinary measures to try to eliminate this threat from their territory. Yet Witnesses survived, while the Soviet system did not. After 1991, Witnesses faced continuing challenges to their right to practice their faith in post-Soviet states, as these states grappled with where to set the proper limits on freedom of conscience in line with European norms and domestic concerns

Conscience · Dissent · Faith · Persecution · Political science · Politics · Reactionary · Religious persecution · State (computer science) · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Christianity and atheism · Church history · History · Jehovah's witnesses · Soviet Union

Tools

Open DOILibgen