WHEN the editorial board of the journal" State, Religion, Church in Russia and Abroad " asked me to write a few pages with an overview of the state of affairs in the field of studying religiosity in the USSR, I had to think hard about whether this request was feasible and whether I could add something to what was said earlier.1 In the mid-1990s, when I first turned to this topic, I knew about twenty people inside Russia and hardly more than five outside of it who actually did something in this area. In the early 2000s, their number grew to hundreds, primarily due to the emergence of young historians and anthropologists, the publication of the achievements of the middle generation of historians who spent the 1990s in (mostly provincial) archives, as well as various "diocesan" historians belonging to different religions and denominations. A large conference on Soviet religiosity organized in February 2012 at RSUH gathered about 150 applications from people from different countries of the world who are ready to take part in it at their own expense. This figure can be safely increased even further if we take into account those who did not apply for participation in this conference, and then we can imagine the approximate number of academic and confessional-oriented researchers currently engaged in religious research in the USSR. Mitrokhin N. 1. Sovetskaya vlast, tserkva i verushchie v posleboennoi period [Soviet power, the Church and believers in the post-war period]. [http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2008/3/mi10.html]. page 505At the same time, familiarity with the work of colleagues, as well as, of course, applications for the mentioned conference (I had to review them as a member of the Organizing Committee) allows us to talk about the depressing monotony and serious, primarily source-related, shortcomings of about 90% of them. This is what I want to dedicate the pages provided to me by the magazine. In principle, Russian religious studies and the study of religion now lo ... Читать далее