Anti-Religious Propaganda in the Ussr in the 1920s - 1930s: Academic Discourse and Conceptual-Theoretical Foundations of the Development of Anti-Religious Cinematography

The article examines the problem of scientific foundations for the anti-religious propaganda in the USSR in the 1920s – 1930s in the context of the development of religious studies. The materials of the journal “Anti-Religious” analyzed by the authors indicate that during the “cultural revolution” research work on the study of religion was accompanied by the collection and creation of visual documents on the ethno-confessional composition of the USSR. Soviet religious scholars and ethnographers created religious maps as well as a corpus of unique photo and film documents on religious groups, anti-religious poster art, theater, exhibition and museum work related to issues of atheism. Materials of a religious studies, collected and created by scientists, and ideas developed by anti-religious propagandists in the 1920s and 1930s, made it possible, among other things, to formulate the concept of anti-religious cinema as a specific genre of Soviet propaganda films. Particular attention is paid to the ideas of anti-religious cinematography, which were formulated in the 1930s by the anti-religious propagandist V.V. Stepanov (1898–1938). For the first time in Russian science, his basic principles of visualization of religious groups in the work “Cinema and antireligious propaganda” (1928) are outlined.