Abstract
Many scholars of religious studies have noticed that there are considerable differences between the concept of“ religion” and the theological approaches toward religion among various regions and countries. For a deconstruction of the concept of “religion, it is worth reviewing the history of religious studies in Soviet Russia, which experienced socialism as a specific type of modernization. Under socialism, religious organizations were prohibited from playing any social role, religious practices were strictly limited in public, and religion was considered to be nonexistent. Nonetheless Soviet scholars continued to research religion under these circumstances, not only in the disciplines of anthropology, ethnography, and oriental studies, but they also created the concept of the“ Study of Religion (nauka o religii),” and after WWII, Scientific Atheism” introduced as a specialized discipline for the religious and atheistic studies.
In this paper I analyze the process of organization and development of the State Museum of History of Religion which was established in 1932. Today it is still considered to be the first and largest museum of religion in the world. In the first decades under socialism, Soviet scholars actively accepted the evolutional understanding of religions from their Western colleagues. Later they chose to only develop positivist and reductionist approaches. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, Soviet religious scholars found an enormous gap between the Marxist-Leninist theory of religion and what empirical research showed
