The article examines the study of the veneration of locally revered saints by Soviet ethnographers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The expeditions were carried out by the staff of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum, the State Academy of the History of Material Culture, the Society of Local History and the Union of Militant Atheists. Ethnographers showed interest in the study of local cults of saints, striving not so much for historical studies of the veneration of saints in Russia, as for the anthropological study of the syncretic features of the worship of saints, in which folk ideas and pre-Christian practices in the form of so-called “Orthodox paganism” were preserved to the greatest extent.