Official Russian Orthodoxy recently memorialized the centenary of the assassinations of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his Romanov family in Ekaterinburg, with Patriarch Kirill leading thousands of mourning Orthodox believers in a solemn icon-carrying procession for 21 kilometers. It was a well-publicized, vivid manifestation of how the official church has attempted to revitalize itself, even as competition from “usual suspect” Protestant Evangelicals and less familiar sources has flourished throughout Eurasia. This issue explores some of the more obscure yet fascinating dynamics of religious fermentation and competition, on the peripheries of Russian religious practice and in one of its cultural centers, St. Petersburg.
In the post-Soviet period, from Transcarpathia in the mountains of Ukraine to Far Eastern Mongolia, and everywhere in between, new thirst for spirituality in diverse contexts has led to politically meaningful ritual reform as well as textual reinterpretations emerging out of the biblical traditions of Russian Orthodoxy and other Christianities. In some cases, this has resulted in new creative versions of Judaism, while in others it has linked with world trends vaguely termed “New Age” spirituality. Such processes are characterized under the rubric of “desecularization” by the talented researchers of Russia who study it.Footnote1
Our lead article is by Julia Andreeva, a field-based, deeply immersed researcher of a burgeoning new religious movement called “Anastasia” for its striking female prophet, or more conventionally called “Ringing Cedars of Russia,” from a 2005 foundational text by its main proponent, Vladimir Megre. While many of its followers are based in St. Petersburg and Leningrad oblast, Andreeva’s 2008–16 interviews also took her to the regions of Pskov, Belgorod, and Kaluga, as well as Krasnodar krai. The elusive Anastasia herself is said to be the “last” in a line of ancient Slavic or “original” people called Vedrussy, a semiotic mix from the Russian words Ved (authentic knowledge, root of ved’ma, or witch) and Rus (old Russia). The secret wisdom she imparts to followers through her propagandist Vladimir Megre includes messages of ecological awareness as well as “back to the land” philosophies. She, through Megre, urges the “power of positive thinking” and the prioritizing of human well-being, a message of human superiority and perfectibility that can sometimes contradict consistent ecological advocacy.Footnote2
Author Julia Andreeva distances herself from membership in the Anastasia group with several linguistic techniques, for example calling her interlocutors “informants,” and terming much of their discourse “clichés.” A friend had introduced her to the exhilarating community synergism stimulated within the Anastasia reading groups and non-urban settlements, but that friend later lost interest. Julia also used the social network Vkontakte to gain interviews. She writes: “I never hid that I am a researcher but usually they could not understand that it is just my work” (email July 20, 2018). Anastasians considered her “a bit strange” version of “our” [one of us], hoping that she would look for land for a family homestead and “promote their ideas.” While she has maintained “close relationships with some Anastasians,” they see “social sciences and humanities as useless and abstract.” In an earlier email (October 21, 2017), she explained that her research on the Anastasians was for her European University candidate’s thesis, focused on their “reconstructing of traditions and history, building ecovillages, and making pilgrimages to places of power.”
The fieldwork of Aleksandr Lvov also features a recently constructed community. He calls them “Judaizers,” although they do not use this term and have asked him to suggest a name for the group. Based in remote villages in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia, several families associated with conversions or attempted conversions to Judaism came to their recently found faith through reevaluations of the Old and New Testaments. Lvov, whose interviews were conducted in 2011–12, emphasizes that these families are living in a region (Irshava) that in past centuries has frequently endured politically destabilizing changes of empires and diverse hegemony. While they have claims to being “Central Europeans,” they are on the periphery (or crossroads) of many cultural and religious trends. Their main roots stem from the Russian Orthodox sect called the Subbotniks, worshipping on the Sabbath, which they consider Saturday, not Sunday, according to scripture. These “Sabbatarians” are known for close biblical interpretations, and thus Aleksandr Lvov terms them “textual rationalists.” One of his most colorful interlocutors has combined literal readings of the bible with intense internet study, leading to connections with Israeli rabbis and the conversion of his family to Judaism while visiting Israel.
Most of the wider religious community of about twenty extended families he has studied has not formally converted to Judaism, but experimented with various kinds of Orthodoxy, Christian Evangelicalism, and Judaic rituals and dietary restrictions. Exploring new identities, they come from disaffected Baptists, Adventists, and Sabbatarian Christians of various directions. At one point in the early 2000s, their core village, Deshkovitsa, was close enough to the town of Mukachevo to permit them to worship regularly in its local synagogue, where the receptive Rabbi Gofman, an Israeli who headed the Jewish community from the 1990s through the 2000s, welcomed them and encouraged conversions. However, he was reprimanded for his open, liberal approaches to Christians. After he left, their “goy” welcome wore thin, as did, perhaps, their chance for a fully jelled new community identity.
Clear across Eurasia in Mongolia, remnants of a once-vibrant Russian Orthodox diasporic community also have been contending with post-Soviet cultural and political change on a shifting frontier. Covering over a century of change, researcher Alexey Mikhalev, director of the Center for Political Transformation Studies at Buryat State University in Ulan-Ude, emphasizes in his field and historical research that the Russian Orthodox community of Mongolia has become distended and localized. Some of their original members came before the Russian Revolution of 1917, and some arrived in the 1920s out of the Old-Ritualist (also called Old-Believer) communities fleeing Soviet antireligious repression. They were especially from the Semeiskie (literally Familial) groups who already relied less on institutional church support and more on family-based rituals.
Identity-challenged Russians in Mongolia have experimented with and fallen into well-known processes of dual and triple faith. Theirs are eclectic practices imbued with local shamanic and Buddhist ways of life, so that the nonjudgmental Mikhalev finds the most significant unifying concept to describe these border-transgressing, originally ethnically Russian families is that they have “memory of Orthodoxy.” Years of Mongolian influence and intermarriage have meant that the local Russians hold onto loosely coherent commemorative rituals and ideas “without church-going and without the church as a formal institution.” As Mikhalev points out, this makes them attractive to Russian nationalist advocates of the “compatriots project,” drawing wayward Russian diaspora communities from around the world into closer cultural and political loyalty to Moscow and to the mother church of official Russian Orthodoxy.Footnote3
What constitutes a religious community? Are youths in Russia and on its cultural peripheries performing similar kinds of “shop and chop” experimentations with religion and spirituality that researchers among young people in the Americas and Europe have found?Footnote4 Are conventional religious restrictions and orthodoxies, such as Jews being defined primarily by maternal bloodlines, hindering openness to the expansion and revitalization of religious groups? When should a religious community be analyzed as dying or socially irrelevant? What is a sect? What stimulates a new religious movement? These are some of the provocative larger questions raised by the articles in this issue and the previous one.
Notes
1. See especially Zhanna Kormina, Alexander Panchenko, and Sergei Shtyrkov, eds., Izobretenie religii: Desekuliarizatsii v postsovetsom kontekste? (St. Petersburg: European University Press, 2015), a collection derived from a conference held at the European University. Two of the authors here, Julia Andreeva and Aleksandr Lvov, wrote articles derived from that project.
2. This cynical comment about pitfalls of ecology advocacy is mine, not Andreeva’s. It is not clear from her article whether Anastasia actually exists or is a foil for Vladimir Megre’s proselytizing. In an email (July 21, 2018), Andreeva explained that Anastasia is “just a character” and that “in his books and interviews Megre describes her as [an] alive person and even explains why she doesn’t want anyone to see her.” The coincidence of her name being the same as that of one of the murdered Romanov daughters is intriguing but probably relevant only as a general positive cultural association.
3. For an official statement in English on the “Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation (Rossotrudichestvo)” project, see http://rs.gov.ru/en/about. It was established by presidential decree in 2008 and continues to be active.
4. On youth and religious experimentation, see Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). On youth groups and the New Age in Europe, see the path-breaking monograph by the late Galina Lindquist, Shamanic Performances on the Urban Scene: Neo-Shamanism in Contemporary Sweden (Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 1997).