POWER AND «OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE»: ANTI-RELIGIOUS AGITATION AND PROPAGANDA IN SOVIET UKRAINE IN 1944–1991

The article analyzes the implementation mechanism and organizational system of anti-religious agitation and propaganda in Soviet Ukraine. The author recorded a conflict between the republican and all-union centers for religious cults regarding the implementation of religious policies and atheization of the population. It is analyzed how the change in the state leadership of the USSR in 1954 led to a radical reassessment of the ideological struggle with religion as a relic of class formations in the minds of people.It was established that in the 1960s cinematographic works were actively involved in anti-religious propaganda. The actual number of regional commissioners to the Council for Religious Affairs also increased, committees for assistance were set up in all cities and districts of the regions, public councils for the coordination of anti-religious work were organized under the regional committees of the Communist Party of Ukraine. It was found out that within the framework of the atheistic education of society, the Soviet leadership introduced the concept of Soviet «non-religious» holidays and rituals, honoring the leaders of communist labor. The structural formalization of organizations responsible for the introduction of the new Soviet rituals in the 1970s is analyzed.The article describes the employment of the media resource and state publishing houses that published millions of copies of atheistic periodicals and literature for the sake of «eradicating the religious consciousness of the masses» by the party leadership. The reduction of state influence on the affairs of believers since the mid-1960s and the harsh criticism of the liberal course in relation to religion at the All-Union Conference of Commissioners for Religious Affairs in 1972 are analyzed. It is proved that, despite the «Perestroika», the idea of religion as a reactionary ideology and the need to transform the society of mass atheism into a society of general atheism prevailed in atheistic education.The author found out that in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine a discussion on the importance of rethinking the strategy of religious policy to establish a dialogue with churches and guaranteeing believers the possibility of religious freedom began only in 1990.

Attacked from the Right and the Left

This chapter analyzes the challenges Local 65 faced during the early years of the Cold War. Its position within the labor movement changed quickly once the Republican-dominated 80th Congress (1946–48) took office. By late 1948, the union had undergone an investigation by a subcommittee within the House of Representatives designed to root out Communist activity within the New York City distributive trades. Local 65 had broken away from the United Retail and Wholesale Employees of America (URWEA) and maintained an independent status with other “seceding” locals in New York City to form first the Distributive Trades Council (DTC), then the Distributive Workers Union (DWU). The chapter also examines Local 65's attempts to deal with the changing context that had brought it from occupying a central place in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to a marginal place outside of the increasingly anti-Communist labor movement.

How the Not-So-Powerless Prevail: Industrial Labor Market Demand and the Contours of Militancy in Mid-Twentieth-Century São Paulo, Brazil

Extensive interviews and confidential police and judicial records are used to explore the life of Marcos Andreotti (1910–1984), a lifelong Communist labor leader active in the industrial ABC region of greater São Paulo. The intensified persecution faced by Andreotti in the early Cold War years is placed within the trajectory of Andreotti’s working life as a skilled electrician. The labor market demand for skilled workers, it is shown, provided the foundation for Andreotti’s sustained militancy and decisively shaped his philosophy of shop floor organizing based on a dialectic between the skilled and the unskilled. This essay sheds new light on the poorly understood foundations of working-class political and labor militancy, while highlighting unexpected continuities between the era of Andreotti, before 1964, and the world of the “New Unionism” in the late 1970s, which began in ABC under the leadership of Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

A Tale of Dvo Metallurgical Enterprises: Marketization and the Social Contract in Russian Industry

Students of post-communist labor relations have argued that the social contract would deteriorate with privatization, as managers secured ownership rights and enterprises reoriented toward the market. To examine this expectation, we investigated the state of labor relations in two enterprises in the metallurgical industry. In St Petersburg, marketization brought little positive change in production and the social contract decayed, while Tula's management embarked on an ambitious reform program, rewriting the social contract. We attribute the variations in the outcomes to differing regional conditions that affected the mutual dependence of labor and management and, hence, “exit options” of both parties.