The article deals with the problem of religious practices adaptation to conditions of the Soviet imprisonment and prison camp detention in the 1920s — the 1940s. Christian religious practices are taken as example. Actions, items, spaces, texts of religious life mutated under impact of interdictory conditions: religious procedures and rites were simplified and reduced down to substitution of action with narrative about action; items of religious attributes were made of make-shift materials and divided into parts; each part began to symbolize the whole or these parts were excluded altogether; lack of special spaces for religious rites and actions led to their conduct virtually in any point of space accessible to prisoners.