“How long have the priests been fooling us!” Blasphemy, sacrilege, and violence in Soviet Russia

In revolutionary Russia, blasphemy, which was perceived as closely related to the previous political system and the state church, disappears from the legal sphere and remains only in the narratives of church representatives and folklore. Instead, the concept of “insult to the feelings of believers” appears in public discourse and is recognized by the new secular authorities. Believers themselves identified the actions of the new authorities as blasphemy or sacrilege. The article shows that specific actions against sacred objects, which fell into the category of blasphemy during the imperial period of Russian history, were explained by representatives of the Bolshevik authorities by rational concepts of “exposing the age-old deception”. The “enlightenment” ideological context contributed that the campaign to “dissect the relics” was carried out, involving representatives of the human sciences. The direct creators of the enlightenment discourse interpreting the actions described were originally educated people from a “duhovnoje soslovie”, who had been raised on the struggle against “people’s religiosity”, perceived as “superstition”. Particular attention is paid to the conceptual apparatus used to interpret the events by its different participants. Having gained a monopoly on both the creation of a normative framework and media accompaniment, the bolsheviks gained a unique opportunity for interpretation. For example, they declared all church property to be “national patrimony” and presented the forcible seizure of the church property as a humanitarian project of “famine relief”. Accordingly, the declaration by church leadership of such actions as “sacrilegious” was devoid of any normative basis and could be interpreted as anti-state. Meanwhile, in folklore interpretation they remained as blasphemous or sacrilegious.