ANTI-RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA AND THE VISUALIZATIONOF EVERYDAY RELIGIOSITY IN GEORGIAIN THE 1920S AND 1930s
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32653/CH222%25pKeywords:
anti-religious propaganda in the USSR, everyday religiosity, visual agitation, anti-religious cinema, anti-religious museum, Georgian cinema, the Caucasus, D. RondeliAbstract
The article examines the visualization of everyday religiosity in Georgia within the framework of the aggressive anti-religious campaigns orchestrated by the Union of Militant Atheists during the 1920s and 1930s. Given the resiliently high level of religious devotion among the local populations of Transcaucasia, and Georgia in particular, Soviet propagandists during the “Cultural Revolution” were forced to develop highly specialized tools for agitational visual policy. These strategies included the compilation of “religious-everyday maps” during regional ethnographic expeditions, the curation of photographic collections documenting Caucasian religious cults for display in anti-religious museums, and the production of targeted anti-religious cinema. As primary case studies of this visual strategy, the article analyzes field materials recovered from a 1931 anti-religious ethnographic expedition to Georgia, alongside David Rondeli’s silent film Ugubziara (1930, State Film Industry of Georgia) – a work largely overlooked in contemporary research. The instructional and methodological guidelines accompanying this film demonstrate that early Soviet anti-religious cinema was systematically leveraged to disseminate natural-scientific education and public health/medical views. The ultimate objective of this visual atheist campaign was to systematically dismantle and violate the perceived sanctity of local religious imagery through deliberate “exposure.” The author concludes that these state-produced sources – religious-everyday maps, expeditionary photographs, and archival film documents derived from local materials – constitute highly valuable visual anthropological data. While they were historically engineered to demonstrate the ostensible absurdity of religious belief, they ironically preserved a vivid, realistic, and highly granular record of the diverse and unique religious practices of the Transcaucasia under the pressures of “militant atheism.”
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