Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The religious revival among the European settlers in Central Asia that became apparent in the 1960s caught the Soviet authorities by surprise because of an assumption that Europeans would serve as agents of secularization among the region’s Muslim residents. The paper focuses on the Protestant and Catholic communities in Kazakhstan to understand the dynamic of religious dissent and accommodation in the Soviet republic. I investigate how ties with churches in Western Europe and the United States influenced the development of religious ideas creating a possible connection between the rhetoric of religious freedom in the Soviet Union and the western concept of human rights. At the same time, I will also explore how Soviet believers developed their own unique set of ideas about the proper role of religion in the larger context of their lives in the Soviet Union. I also pay particular attention to cases of accommodation when the believers attempted to leverage Soviet law and institutions to secure religious freedom without openly challenging the state. I hope to demonstrate that accommodation was as important and successful as dissent as a tool of asserting religious rights in the Soviet Union.