Conversions in Central and Eastern Europe The Politics of Religion and Nonreligion across the 20th Century

Introduction. Crossing Boundaries: Conversions in Central and Eastern Europe in the Long 20th Century

Gašper Mithans, Heléna Tóth, and Matteo Benussi

Part I: Conversion, Conviction, and Faith

1. Lev Gillet’s “Great Object of Intercession”: Ecumenism and Conversion Between France, Russia, and Ukraine

Jared N. Warren

2. Conversions from, to, and Within the Evangelical Faith in the Late USSR (1950–1980s)

Nadezhda Beliakova and Vera Kliueva

3. The Politics of Conversion: Institutional Strategies of the Serbian Orthodox Church Toward Religious Alternatives in the 20th Century

Milan Tomašević and Zorica Kuburić

4. “Conversion Without Crisis?”: Inquiry into Religious Narratives of the Bahá’í Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Marko Galić and Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović 

Part II: Conversion, Coercion, and Protection

5. Muslim Conversions to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the Modern Balkans

Stefanos Katsikas

6. Religious Need or Survival Strategy?: Conversions Among Jews in Occupied Kraków and Other Localities in the Kraków District in 1939–1945

Martyna Grądzka-Rejak

7. The Reaction of the Holy See to the Issue of the Forced Conversion of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism in the Independent State of Croatia

Milosav Z. Đoković

8. Fashioning the Orthodox: Converting Greek Catholics to the Romanian Orthodox Church After the State-Enforced Union

Anca Șincan

Part III: Conversion, Power, and Unrest

9. Religion as Social Protest: The Orthodox Movement in Podkarpatská Rus (1919–1938)

Klaus Buchenau

10. Converts and the Rise of Nationalism Among German Evangelicals and Orthodox Slovenians in Interwar Slovenia

Gašper Mithans

11. Sacralizing Ethnos: “Conversions” to Ethnoreligiosity in Eastern Europe 

Branko Sekulić and Matteo Benussi

Part IV: Conversion, Communism, and Atheization

12. “Converting” to Atheism and Tackling Religious Indifference in the Early Soviet Union

Johannes Gleixner

13. Yugoslav Partisans in Need of Catholic Clergy: The Vatican and the Issue of the Yugoslav Partisans on the Italian Peninsula in 1944

Julian Sandhagen

14. Speeding up Atheization in the GDR: Research Serving Worldview Change

Eva Guigo-Patzelt

15. Between Political Exigency and Humanitarian Service: Catholic (Non-)Converts in the Shaping of Socialist Funeral Culture in Hungary, 1970–1989

Heléna Tóth

Biography

Gašper Mithans is a senior research fellow at the Science and Research Centre Koper. He led a project on religious conversions and atheization in Yugoslavia. A Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley in 2020, he has held research grants at Temple University and University College Cork. His research focuses on the history of religions, religion-state relations, and interwar Yugoslavia.

Heléna Tóth is a senior instructor in European history at the University of Bamberg. After being awarded her PhD at Harvard University, she taught European and German history at Boston University and held visiting professorships in East European history at LMU Munich and Göttingen University. Her research focuses on political cultures in Central and Eastern Europe, transatlantic history, and the cultural and social history of socialism.

Matteo Benussi is a sociocultural anthropologist based at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, specializing in religion, ethics, and politics in Eurasia. Benussi has conducted research on Islamic piety movements in Tatarstan, the legacies of the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, post-Soviet heritage politics, as well as halal infrastructures. He is currently exploring the topics of war, poetry, and political ontology in theaters of conflict.

‘Taking conversion as its analytical lens, this volume offers a unique perspective on the dynamics of religious change in Central and Eastern Europe. With studies spanning the entire region and balancing the overtly political with the intimate and subjective, the editors and contributors have crafted an indispensable contribution to both area studies and religious studies.’

Professor James A. Kapaló, University College Cork

‘This volume brings much-needed attention to the religious-political history of regions often treated as imperial peripheries. Yet, modern European history’s most extreme dynamics unfolded in this “shatterzone of empires.” These chapters reveal conversion as a key process amid Ottoman collapse, Soviet atheism, and resurgent Christian nationalism.’

Professor Todd H. Weir, University of Groningen