The Religious Imaginary and the Repressive State: Science-based Beliefs of Ukrainian and Lithuanian Scientists Born in the USSR

Abstract

The article explores aspects of the Soviet atheistic regime that contributed to the formation of the religious imaginary of believing Ukrainian and Lithuanian scientists born in 1930–1960s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of them did not accept Orthodox, Catholic, or other institutional religions, but instead created their own privatized religious patterns, using science-related elements in their imaginary. This distinguished them from the other national groups participating in the study. In the article, I propose an interpretation for this phenomenon. I analyze 29 in-depth interviews of a larger sample and focus on the biographies of the older cohort of natural scientists from Lithuania and Ukraine to show how the Soviet political and normative context supported their science-based imaginary. This allows us to draw some parallels concerning secularization—gradual in the West but forced in the Soviet case—and the role of science in this process.