gious studies, which attempted to examine religions objec-
tively in their plurality, free of any religion-based bias. This
inner split endured in Poland into the twenty-first century.
Catholicism exerted a similarly formative influence on the
development of Hungarian religious studies. The study of re-
ligion was conducted only within the theological seminaries
and institutions, and efforts in the direction of a secular re-
search, such as the suggestion by Ernst Troeltsch that an in-
dependent college for the academic study of religion be es-
tablished at every university, were strictly rejected. Among
those who rejected a secularized study of religion was the
Catholic professor Aladár Zubriczky, who concerned himself
with the parallels between Christianity and other religions,
and who viewed Christianity as the veritable paragon of what
a religion should be.
During the period between the two world wars, academ-
ic activities in these three countries kept apace with those in
other comparable states (e.g., the Netherlands, France, and
Finland), and had good prospects for further development.
However, the decisive break came after World War II, when
Eastern Europe came under Soviet domination. At that
point, the academic study of religions was prohibited and
suppressed. In places where the study of religion was already
in existence in the form of established institutions—as for
example in the Czech Republic—these institutions were up-
rooted. Scientific atheism became the sole method according
to which the essential nature of religions was to be interpret-
ed. In many cases religious-studies researchers were personal-
ly persecuted, driven from the universities by the dozens, and
forced into punitive hard labor; the Czech historian of reli-
gion Záviˇs Kalandra, who specialized in ancient Slavic my-
thologies, was even sentenced to death in a sham trial and
executed in 1950.
As a consequence of these developments, the academic
study of religion almost totally vanished from Eastern Euro-
pean academic life for the next four decades, and survived
only in theological seminaries and institutions, where it was
pursued under the guise of the theological disciplines. Specif-
ically, this development went forward in Poland, where in-
ternal political forces were not as thoroughly devastating as
elsewhere in the Soviet bloc and where, consequently, the
publication of religious-scientific works as well as transla-
tions remained a possibility. In principle, it can be said that
this period entailed significant setbacks, not only because of
the near-total extermination of religious studies as a field, but
also because of the further theologization of religious studies
in those places where it partially survived. This resulted in
great difficulties in the theoretical-methodological realm and
in the struggle to achieve self-understanding in which reli-
gious studies engaged after the sweeping political changes
that occurred after 1990.
The time after the change was one of revival for the aca-
demic study of religion. There had been evidence that it was
still nominally active, though dormant, back in the late
1960s during a period of political thaw, and again thanks to
developments that occurred when Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev instituted a policy of perestroika in the 1980s.
Because of this, religious studies as a discipline was able to
officially establish itself relatively quickly. Religious-studies
departments returned to the universities; national societies
for the academic study of religion were established; maga-
zines, books, and translations in the field of religious studies
were published; attempts were also made to re-establish in-
ternational academic contacts. However, the relatively long
cultural isolation into which the totalitarian states had been
driven, which was true of the academic research in general
within these countries as well, had a lingering negative im-
pact on the field which endured into the twenty-first
century.In Soviet Russia, the development proceeded along far
different lines. From the year 1917 onwards, the doctrine of
scientific atheism was regarded as sacrosanct, and its declared
goal was not knowledge, but rather the total abolition of reli-
gion from social life, along with every tradition having any-
thing in common with religion. As attested by the literature
of the era, research was not supposed to have been “objec-
tive”—that is, as impartial as possible—but rather was to di-
rect itself according to the principles of the class struggle, and
thus in accordance with subjective-ideological interests. Al-
though there were attempts at a so-called “Marxist study of
religion,” such as Dmitrii Modestovich Ugrinovich’s 1973
work Introduction to the Theoretical Study of Religion, these
political restrictions were not overcome until the latter part
of the 1990s. However, after the formation of the Russian
Federation in 1993, an entirely different set of problems
arose. These involved legal measures vis-à-vis religious liber-
ty, freedom of conscience, the position of the churches in so-
ciety, and the role of churches in religious and ethical
instruction within the schools. Consequently, the establish-
ment of religious studies as a field along standard academic
principles was persistently delayed.
CONTRIBUTIONS. In spite of these unfavorable conditions,
a large number of religious-academic works by Eastern Euro-
pean scholars have been published since the first two decades
of the twentieth century. Individual researchers concerned
themselves with a wide range of problems from the history
of religion. There also emerged highly specialized schools of
Polish and Czech Arab/Islamic studies, as well as Polish,
Hungarian and Czech Asian studies; moreover, both Czech
Egyptology and Hungarian Tibetan studies are well-known
throughout the academic world. Separate Jewish, Hindu,
Buddhist, and biblical fields of study are all well developed.
The psychology of religion, sociology of religion, and reli-
gious geography are also established in the field. A certain
peculiarity makes for an ongoing interest in the philosophy
of religion as an auxiliary discipline. Philosophy of religion
admittedly belongs to the philosophical rather than religious-
scientific disciplines, but it is nonetheless highly valued; this
is due to its conceptual nature, and to the possibility of tak-
ing advantage of its theoretical-methodological approaches.STUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IN EASTERN EUROPE AND RUSSIA 8773