Dissent on the Margins

"Dissent on the Margins offers an excellent contribution to religious studies and serves as a welcome new resource for those interested in the history of lived religion in the Soviet Union."--Kathleen Hiatt, Journal of Chruch and State "Dissent on the Margins is an amazing piece of research and analysis: sophisticated in its conceptualization, exhaustive in its research (in hitherto-secret state, party, and even police archives), this study shows how a small religious group survived decades of Soviet repression, won legalization in 1991, and has since expanded its flock to several hundred thousand adherents. A must-read for historians, political scientists, and sociologists of religion." --Gregory L. Freeze, Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of History, Brandeis University "This thoughtful and skillfully researched monograph tells the history of the Jehovah's Witness in the Soviet Union and three of its successor states. It recounts the troubled relationship between state and 'sect,' arguing that the survival of Witness communities shows the limits of state power even in a repressive country like the USSR. The historical sections draw on an impressive, and carefully referenced, body of archival material but Baran also takes her story forward into the first decade of the twenty-first century. It will appeal not only to students of Soviet history but also to all those following the religious situation in the post-Soviet space today." --Miriam Dobson, author of Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin "This is the first comprehensive treatment in English of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Soviet Union."-- Hiroaki Kuromiya, Nova Religio "Baran has produced an excellent work that analyzes the Soviet Union from the perspective of a marginal group while making it relevant to the Soviet story as a whole."--Andrew Drozd, Slavic and East European Journal "...[T]his book offers an unusually well-informed, longue durée account of Soviet and post-Soviet religious history. Moreover, it rewards readers with insights from a fascinating array of voices." --Journal of Modern History "Baran s book can be considered extremely successful. She has given us an entirely new and comprehensive account of how this organization was created and how it functioned in the USSR from the beginning of the 1920s to the 1950s."--Slavic Review