A scholar of Communism, the Cold War, as well as atheism and religion in Russia and the former Soviet Union, Victoria Smolkin's expertise also covers religious politics and secularism, the Soviet space program and East European and Eurasian studies.
Smolkin recently published her first book A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton, 2018), which presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.