When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used tools like education, propaganda and terror to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality, yet it never succeeded. This history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 draws on archival material and in-depth interviews with proponents of Communist ideological campaigns, and argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. It shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through the process, Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the sacred spaces
of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the experiment, Gorbachev-in a stunning and unexpected reversal-abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life.