Rozhitsyn Editor (1 results)

Kharkiv: Derzhavne Vydavnytstvo Ukrainy (State Publishing House of Ukraine), 1922. Octavo (17.5 × 12 cm). Original pictorial wrappers; 167 pp. Light soil and creasing to wrappers; wrappers detached from block. Toned throughout due to stock. Private owner stamps to inside rear wrapper and last pages. Some underlining in blue ink to last page only. Still about good or better. First edition of this volume on the demystification of holy relics denying their miraculous healing qualities, published as part of the Soviet anti-religious propaganda campaign of the 1920s. Championing a scientific approach to religion, the volume includes chapters on the medical expertise of relics written by the prominent Soviet physician and later Commissar of Public Health, Nikolai Semashko, and the science of mummifying and preserving human remains by the forensic expert and founder of Soviet forensics Petr Semenovskii. An extensive discussion of public exhumation of the relics of Tikhon Zadonskii and Mitrofan Voronezhskii, and recent legal cases on the forgery of relics written by a former priest turned atheist activist writer Mikhail Gorev (born Galkin), close the volume. The editor and author of the introduction, Valentin Rozhitsyn (1888-1942) was an active anti-religious campaigner, later an employee of the Central Antireligious Museum (1927-1947) in Moscow. His other anti-religious publications include "How people created God" (1922), "Is there life after death?" (1923), and "The origins of the Christian God" (1926), among many others. The volume is typical for the rampant anti-religious activism of the early Soviet period, which in addition to publishing volumes such as this one, saw the formation of anti-religious organizations such as the Militant Atheists League. The League held educational congresses and workshops at schools, factories, and in the countryside, and published periodicals such as "Bezbozhnik" and "Antireligioznik". Its activities also enabled the persecution and exile of clergy and religious communities by the Soviet government throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As James Von Geldern writes: "Among the most important tasks that the Bolsheviks set themselves upon coming to power in 1917 was to emancipate Soviet citizens from the scourge (or as Karl Marx put it, the "opiate") of religion. Along with the literacy campaign with which it was intimately connected, antireligious propaganda was a key component of the "cultural front" during the 1920s. A protracted affair, the struggle against religion was complicated by the difficulty of defining goals as much as working out how to achieve them" (Seventeen Moments in Soviet History: An on-line archive of primary sources). The satirical wrapper illustration of this volume, showing a relic stuffed with straw, is unattributed. As of January 2026, KVK, OCLC show a single copy worldwide, in North America.