FEATURES OF EARLY SOVIET RELIGIOUS STUDIES ON THE BASIS OF ANALYSIS OF LIFE AND CREATIVE ACTIVITY A. T. LUKACHEVSKY
Authors:   St. Tikhon Orthodox University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia, Tikunov V.S. 
Published: April 2021

In the study of the history of early Soviet religious studies (1917–1931), one of the urgent problems is the question of the relationship between the science of religion and ideology, the competence of atheist authors and the scientific nature of their works. Studying the history of science is a fundamental process and religious studies are no exception. An attempt to reconstruct the way in which Soviet scientists carried out an approach to the study of religion in the USSR is of great scientific importance for the formation of modern religious studies. For modern Russian religious studies, the problem of studying its own history, the search for an original tradition in the Russian science of religion, the formation of a general idea of the place that it occupies in the humanities is very urgent. The main applied methods used in the writing of this article were comparative, systemic and structural-func-tional methods. The materials of archival data on the biography and work of the Soviet researcher of religion and an appeal to the current Russian discussion about the Soviet study of religion made it possible to determine in what way Soviet scientists carried out an approach to the study of religion. In the article, we turned to the well-known discussion between K. M. Antonov and M. M. Shakhnovich on the Soviet study of religion. The first position is K. M. Antonova, who expresses that the Soviet study of religion is not scientific in nature. The second position is that it is too early to draw any conclusions, since there is a lot of unexplored archival data that could present religious studies in the Soviet Union in a new light – refer to M. M. Shakhnovich. Taking both sides into account, we turn to the debut work “Essays on the History of Atheism” by one of the first Soviet researchers of religion – A. T. Lukachevsky, who was not only a scientist, but also known as the deputy chairman of the Union of Militant Atheists of the USSR, the International of Proletarian Freethink¬ers, deputy editor of the journal Anti-Religious. In modern religious studies, you can often find references to the works of Lukachevsky, but despite this fact, there are no special works devoted to the activities of the Soviet re¬searcher (or propagandist?), And the references did not go beyond formal statements. The purpose of our work is to find out whether Lukachevsky pursued religious studies in his work, or whether the work is predominantly propagandistic in nature. The analysis of the “Sketches ...” is supported by the recon-struction of the researcher’s biography, which for the first time in the history of Russian science is introduced into scientific circulation, thanks to the archival documents found in the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In this article, we turned directly to the representatives of scientific atheism, thanks to which, as we think, influ-enced the study of this phenomenon. This article contributes to modern religious studies discourse about whether the Soviet science of religion was a science in the full sense of the word.