Reading Scientific Atheism Against the Grain. The Soviet Study of Religion as a Methodological Challenge

Reviewing a current publication on the academic study of religion in Eastern Europe the article proposes to read the scholarly output of Soviet Marxist-Leninist so-called scientific atheism not primarily with regard to its anti-religious ideological imprint, but as the expression of a specific discourse on the essence of religion that shows parallels with the Western study of religion of that time. As an example for such a comparison, two texts by the Soviet scholar of religion Iosif Kryvelev are discussed.