Anti-Religious Propaganda in the Ussr in the 1920s - 1930s

The article examines the problem of scientific foundations for the anti-religious propaganda in the USSR in the 1920s – 1930s in the context of the development of religious studies. The materials of the journal “Anti-Religious” analyzed by the authors indicate that during the “cultural revolution” research work on the study of religion was accompanied by the collection and creation of visual documents on the ethno-confessional composition of the USSR. Soviet religious scholars and ethnographers created religious maps as well as a corpus of unique photo and film documents on religious groups, anti-religious poster art, theater, exhibition and museum work related to issues of atheism. Materials of a religious studies, collected and created by scientists, and ideas developed by anti-religious propagandists in the 1920s and 1930s, made it possible, among other things, to formulate the concept of anti-religious cinema as a specific genre of Soviet propaganda films. Particular attention is paid to the ideas of anti-religious cinematography, which were formulated in the 1930s by the anti-religious propagandist V.V. Stepanov (1898–1938). For the first time in Russian science, his basic principles of visualization of religious groups in the work “Cinema and antireligious propaganda” (1928) are outlined

Art · Atheism · Cinematography · Confessional · Exhibition · Media studies · Movie theater · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Visual Culture and Art Theory