The subject of the paper is the religious revival in the post-war USSR, understood as the limited return of religious practices to the public space, marked by an effort to officially register a religious community. Two types of such revival could be observed in northern Kazakhstan: one on the wave of patriotic intensification of the “Great Patriotic War;” the impetus for the other being the gradual liberalization and abolition of the Gulag system after 1956. The first type was characterized by adaptation with the Soviet system and the intermingling of religious elements with Soviet war mythology. The second type, on the other hand, meant long years of functioning in a religious underground and as a result in two parallel and mutually contradictory realities: the Soviet public sphere, represented first and foremost by the school and the workplace, which was hostile towards religion, and the private sphere, where religious traditions – ridiculed at school – were cultivated, mainly through the involvement of women.