The Activity of the Commission on the History of Religion of the Communist Academy (Moscow, 1928–1930) and the Study of Religiosity in USSR
The Activity of the Commission on the History of Religion of the Communist Academy (Moscow, 1928–1930) and the Study of Religiosity in USSR

Summary/Abstract: In 1918, the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences was created in Moscow, conceived as the world center of socialist thought. Initially, not only prominent Soviet Marxists, including Lev Trotskii, Gregorii Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, were elected to it, but also wellknown European socialists. The Academy was to become a research and educational institution, but very quickly not only the list of the academicians was changed (all foreign members were excluded from it), but the name of the Academy as well. Since 1924 it was called the Communist Academy, and in 1929 the Institute of Philosophy of the Communist Academy was organized. In April 1928 at the Communist Academy, the Commission on the History of Religion was created on the initiative of Professor Michail Reisner2. At the beginning of June 1928, the Presidium of the Communist Academy approved the “Statute of the Commission on the History of Religion”, which stated that the main task of it was “to conduct research on religion in the spirit of Marxist methodology”3. The main problems that should have been addressed by the Commission were the questions of the origin of religion, the history of early Christianity; the Church’s role in the international labor movement; Islam; socio-economic roots of religion in the Soviet Union and some others.

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