russian history 44 (2017) 1-24 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/18763316-04401003 brill.com/ruhi * This research was supported by grant No 15-18-00119 from the Russian Science Foundation. Confessions in the Soviet Era: Analytical Overview of Historiography Gregory Freeze Professor of History, Brandeis University freeze@brandeis.edu Abstract Confessional scholarship—like the confessions themselves—had a tumultuous experience during the Soviet era. In contrast to burgeoning scholarship on religious history in the West, Soviet historians ignored the religious dimension, at most margin- alizing and demonizing religious institutions and believers. Although some Western works sought to fill this gap, the result—quantitatively, not to mention empirically and analytically—could not compensate for the shortfall in the Russia itself. From the mid- 1980s, however, that grim picture began to change: politics in the ussr (perestroika) and the “cultural turn” in the West (revalorizing religion and rejecting the theory of “secularization”) generated a revolution in the empirical depth, thematic diversity, and intellectual sophistication of research on confessional history. Keywords Soviet religious policy – historiography – Russian Orthodox Church – confessions – secularization – religious history Scholarship on Confessions: From Near Extinction to post-Soviet Recovery The first decades of Soviet power virtually eliminated religious history as a field of serious scholarly inquiry. The state, determined to eradicate religion, produced antireligious agitprop, but even that faded during the full-scale