Sergei Tokarev's History of Religion is a genuine work of scholarship, and it is worth saying so at the outset, because the series it belongs to does not often let one say it. Progress Publishers issued the book in English in 1989, in the "Student's Library" — a teaching series; the companion volume advertised at the back is Yaroshevsky's History of Psychology in the same collection. It is a single-handed comparative survey of the whole field: the tribal cults of Australia, Oceania, Africa, Siberia and the Americas; the national religions of China, India, Egypt, Iran, Greece, Rome and the Jews; and the three world religions, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. It runs to some 137,000 words and it was written by a man who knew the material. Tokarev (1899–1985) was one of the Soviet Union's most eminent ethnographers, and his larger Religion in the History of the Peoples of the World remained for decades a standard reference. History of Religion reads as the teaching distillation of that lifework: the same architecture — tribal, national, world — carried through with a specialist's control of the detail.
Begin with the date, because the spine misleads. The copyright page reads 1989, but the text is older. Its author died in 1985, so nothing in the book can postdate that year, and nothing does: the latest datum inside it is the remark that Muslims "number around 800 million (1985)." There is no glasnost in these pages, no perestroika, no Gorbachev; no mention of the millennium of Russian Christianity celebrated with official blessing in 1988, and none of the visible return of religion to Soviet public life that was under way as the English edition went to press. This is a mid-1980s text — very possibly older in its bones — in a 1989 jacket. The distinction matters for how we read it, and it matters most at the single point where the book touches its own country and its own time.
The first thing to credit is the sheer comparative range, handled without the padding and ritual that deforms so much of this catalogue. Tokarev moves from the initiation rites of the Australians to the ancestor cult of China, from the pantheon of the Yakuts to the theology of Philo of Alexandria, and he is a reliable guide throughout. He is good on the mechanics of belief — the "initial magic" of the pointing-bone, the divination bones of Shang China, the borrowing of Christian baptism from the Near Eastern Mandaean sects and, behind them, the Babylonian cult of Ea. He is good, too, on the things a lesser survey would flatten: he pauses to note that the standard claim that Australian religion "was a purely male domain" may be an artefact of male anthropologists interviewing male informants. That is a scholar's reflex, not an ideologue's.
The intellectual backbone of the book's strongest chapters is Engels — specifically the late Engels of Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity and On the History of Early Christianity. Tokarev credits him plainly: Engels "was the first to analyse so thoroughly the historical conditions in which Christianity developed and its social roots," and the account that follows — Christianity as the levelling cult of a demoralised Roman world, "a way out… not in this world" — is genuine historical materialism doing genuine work. It is not a caricature of religion but an explanation of one, and on early Christianity it remains a serious contribution. Where Tokarev quotes Lenin it is to the same purpose and with a real citation attached: Lenin "even referred to the 'democratic-revolutionary spirit' of early Christianity" (footnoted to The State and Revolution, Collected Works, vol. 25, p. 425). This is a book that argues from texts it names, not from doctrine it invokes.
A surer sign of the real thing is Tokarev's willingness to leave scholarly disputes open rather than resolve them by fiat — including disputes among Marxists, which a lesser Soviet author would have closed with a citation to authority. On the vexed question of whether Jesus existed, he lays out both the "historical" and the "mythological" schools and then concedes: "Marxist scholars also have differing opinions on this question," adding that "it is not so important to Marxist scholars whether a preacher named Jesus lived and died in the first century in Palestine." On the origins of Islam he opens the same way — "Soviet scholars have disagreed about the social base and social roots of early Islam" — and canvasses three rival theories before offering his own, tentatively, "to my mind." This is how a scholar writes who takes his field to be a field of inquiry and not a body of settled doctrine. It is the opposite of the ritual certainty that marks the weakest volumes in this series, and it is worth registering as a positive finding, not merely the absence of a fault.
Most striking is the methodological essay Tokarev appends as his Conclusion, which is the best thing in the volume and the least Soviet. He opens by refusing the easy verdict: "the history of religion is not simply the history of the errors of the human mind." If religion were merely a bundle of mistakes it would have dissolved, as errors do, "with every step man took forward towards the cognition of the world"; its persistence proves it is something else — rite, code, institution, "the relationship between people with respect to… the notions about God or gods." He is explicit that this "is not another version of the simplistic theory of deception," and that "the difficulty in combating religion is not merely in disproving false ideas, as bourgeois atheist educators have suggested." He warns against the mechanical materialism the frame invites — "every ideology, including religious ideology, is relatively independent" — and against forcing explanations where the evidence is thin, insisting that a supposition must never be presented "as an established truth" and that sometimes the honest course is "simply leaving the question open." A textbook writer under a doctrine of certainty, telling students to tolerate an open question, is doing something admirable.
And note what the book does not do. Marx's most famous sentence about religion — the "opium of the people" — appears nowhere in it; the slogan-Marxism one expects is simply absent. Nor is there any triumphalist teleology. The Conclusion does not claim religion is withering under socialism, does not promise its extinction, does not treat the USSR as the place where the history of religion ends. It closes instead on Engels' sober formula: religion "is still basically the expression of people's powerlessness in the face of his environment." That is a diagnosis, not a boast, and a reader braced for Soviet crowing will be surprised by its restraint.
The frame does leave marks. When Tokarev turns from explaining a religion to judging it, the historian gives way to the editorialist, and the verdicts arrive pre-written. Early Christianity was "a step backwards in comparison with the ethics… of the Stoics"; its triumph "corresponded to the general cultural decline… and regress into barbarism." The Christian ethic of forgiveness "was for the benefit of the exploiters," and the doctrine of sin "kept the masses from contemplating genuine struggle with social evil." Some of this is defensible social analysis; some is the reflex by which every religious idea is cashed out, in the last instance, as a device of class rule. The functionalism can be crude: religion offers "the oppressed masses… illusory consolation, hope in reward after death," and at the same time frightens them "with the threat of punishment."
It is worth pausing here, because the caricature the book mostly avoids is also one the Marxist tradition itself never quite held. Marx's "opium" line — the one Tokarev omits — is the tail of a sentence far more sympathetic than its reputation: religion is "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions." The point was not that believers are dupes but that religion answers a real distress, and that the distress, not the answer, is the thing to abolish. Tokarev's own best formulations — religion as the cry of "powerlessness," as consolation the powerless genuinely need — are closer to that fuller Marx than to the atheist slogan. When the book is flat it is because the mandate has supplied a verdict; when it is subtle it is because the scholarship has quietly outrun the mandate. The seam runs right down the middle of the Conclusion.
There is one subject on which History of Religion is not subtle, not flat, but wholly silent — and it is the subject a Soviet history of religion is least entitled to skip. The book says nothing about the most consequential episode in the recent history of religion in its own country: the Soviet state's decades-long war against it.
The scale of the omission is easy to measure, because Tokarev handles religious persecution fluently everywhere else. Rome persecuted the Druids; Claudius "destroyed the Druid religion in Gallia." The Tokugawa shoguns persecuted Christians and in 1614 forbade the religion outright. In Korea "Buddhists were persecuted… driven from the capital and large cities." The Babi movement in Persia "was brutally suppressed" and its leaders "brutally executed in 1850." Pharaoh Ikhnaton "ordered that all their temples be closed down." Persecution, suppression, closed temples, executed clergy, cursed heretics — the whole vocabulary is present and in constant use, applied without hesitation to Egypt, Persia, Rome, Japan, Korea, colonial Polynesia. It is applied to the Soviet Union not once.
Search the book for the machinery of the actual Soviet campaign and every term returns nothing. The League of the Militant Godless — the mass organisation that ran the anti-religious drive of the 1920s and 1930s — is absent; the word "godless" occurs a single time in the whole volume, and it describes Anaxagoras, expelled from Athens in the fifth century B.C. Yaroslavsky, who led that League, is not named. Neither is the closing and demolition of churches, mosques and synagogues; the arrest, exile and execution of Orthodox priests, Muslim clergy, Baptists, rabbis; the anti-religious museums installed in requisitioned cathedrals. "Scientific atheism," the discipline in whose name Soviet universities taught this very subject, is not mentioned. The 1917 revolution appears exactly once, as a chronological marker for the slow economic development of the Volga peoples. The tell is sharpest in the comparison the book itself invites: it can report that after the Chinese revolution of 1911 "the Church was separated from the state" and "services were discontinued in the Temple of the Sky." The far more sweeping disestablishment carried out in Russia after 1918 — separation, closure, confiscation, prosecution — is a historical event when it happens in Peking and a blank when it happens in Moscow.
What stands in its place is more revealing than mere silence would be. The book's one present-tense sentence about religion in the USSR reads: "In the USSR and other socialist countries the Church changed its political orientation in support of the state, advocates peace and social progress, stands behind the government of the Soviet Union and that of other socialist countries in their efforts for peace and friendship among nations and for the liberation of colonial countries from imperialism." A survey that has just spent four hundred pages tracing how states coerced, suppressed and remade the religions under them arrives at its own state and finds only a Church that loyally "advocates peace." The war is not merely unmentioned; it is overwritten with a picture of harmony. This is the reflexivity test in its purest form. The category of persecution, which the book wields against every other power, cannot be turned on the power that published it.
The date makes the silence heavier rather than lighter. This is a teaching text, put into the hands of students, and issued in English in 1989 — the year after the millennium of Russian Christianity had been marked with the regime's own participation, at the very moment when churches were reopening, when the atheist establishment was folding, and when the history the book omits was, quite visibly, ending. Whatever excuse a 1955 or a 1970 edition might claim, a volume reaching students in 1989 with its present-day horizon frozen in the loyal-church sentence of about 1985 was handing them a history of religion with the most immediate chapter of their own country's religious history torn out. The best scholar in this catalogue could describe the persecution of Babis in Shiraz and not the persecution of Baptists in Kiev.
The tradition from which this series is written was, on its own terms, no friendlier to religion as a system of ideas than Tokarev was. It regarded religion as false consciousness and expected the raising of humanity to dissolve it. But it drew a line that Soviet "scientific atheism" erased — the line between combating an ideology and persecuting believers — and that line is exactly where Tokarev's frame goes blind.
The Marxist case was that religion is undermined by lifting the material and cultural level of the masses, not by police measures. Trotsky put it plainly in 1926, lecturing on radio and science: "Under the socialist system science and technique as a whole will undoubtedly be directed against religious prejudices, against superstition, which reflects the weakness of man before man or before nature" (Radio, Science, Technique and Society, 1926). The weapon is the broadcast voice "from the Polytechnical Museum," not the closure order — a task of persuasion set against the church, not a campaign of coercion against the churchgoer. In Problems of Everyday Life the argument is the same: you displace the church by giving working people something better, not by decree. It is precisely because this tradition took religion seriously as an ideology to be answered that it refused to treat believers as enemies to be broken.
The principle had a longer pedigree than Trotsky. In Socialism and Religion (1905) Lenin had already drawn the two-sided distinction that Stalinism collapsed: toward the state, religion was to be a private affair, the church disestablished and the believer left unmolested; toward the party, religion was to be combated — but by materialist explanation and propaganda, not by administrative persecution, and without insult to the sentiments of believers. The revolution was to separate church from state precisely so that conscience would be free of the state, not so that the state could hunt conscience down. What the League of the Militant Godless practised in the 1930s — the dynamited cathedral, the arrested priest, the museum of atheism in the looted sanctuary — was a repudiation of that distinction, and it is exactly the distinction Tokarev's frame no longer contains. In his Conclusion the fight against religion is a matter of exposing "false ideas" and outgrowing "powerlessness"; nowhere does it occur to him that a state might fight religion by force, because the state that employed him had done so and could not be described doing it.
And when the Soviet state did break them, it was this tradition's press that kept the record Tokarev's book suppresses. Intercontinental Press, the weekly of the Fourth International, covered Soviet religious repression continuously through the years Tokarev's manuscript was closing. Its issue of 27 March 1978 (vol. 16, no. 12) printed the statement of the exiled General Pyotr Grigorenko, stripped of his Soviet citizenship weeks earlier, who set down the names the official history would not: the imprisoned priest Dmitri Dudko; the Christian Committee headed by Father Gleb Yakunin; and "the Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, and Pentecostalists" whose congregations were being harried, alongside the Crimean Tatars and the Helsinki monitors, into the camps and psychiatric hospitals. Here is the reflexive knowledge that History of Religion cannot hold: a revolutionary-socialist paper, hostile to religion as ideology on the same grounds Tokarev is, documenting the persecution of believers as an outrage — because freedom of conscience is not a concession to superstition but a condition of the emancipation the whole project claimed to serve. Tokarev's Church "advocates peace"; the believers in Grigorenko's list were in prison. Both statements were true in 1978. Only one is in the book.
None of this cancels the scholarship, and the point of an honest introduction is not to let the silence swallow the learning. Tokarev's comparative survey is the real thing — knowledgeable, wide, methodologically self-aware, and unusually free of the ritual invocation that clogs its shelf-mates. On the origins of Christianity, on the varieties of tribal cult, on the internal logic of Confucianism against Buddhism, it can still be read with profit; a student would come away from it genuinely instructed about the religions of the world. It is a better book than the frame it was made to serve, and its author was plainly a better scholar than the mandate required him to be.
But it is a history of religion with a hole in it exactly where its own authority should have been greatest, and the hole is not an accident of scope. Tokarev could name the persecutor everywhere the persecutor was safely foreign or safely dead. He could not name the one at home. That is the boundary of what "scientific atheism" permitted its most learned practitioner to see — and it is why this genuinely valuable book had, in 1989, already been overtaken by the country it declined to describe. Read it for the religions of the Australians and the Mandaeans, of Egypt and Rome and early Palestine. For the religion of the Soviet Union, and for what was done to it, read almost anything else.