If it seemed that atheist methodicians had no qualms about interfering in the private lives of citizens to eradicate religious attachments, they did so in the name of a particular vision of public social relations. Comparable to secularist critics elsewhere, the builders of Soviet socialism often blamed religion for upholding the distinctions of ethnicity, gender, age, and locality that threatened to hamper a vision of statewide solidarity.1 Like other modernizers, Soviet activists failed to fully grasp the complexity of the social relations they set out to transform. But their critique of religion as a force of strife and division also emerged out of encounters between ideological expectations and this on-the-ground complexity, creating a set of constraints that remain effective in post-Soviet religious policy.
Particularly in multireligious regions such as the Middle Volga, atheist activists confronted religious solidarity and religious fragmentation as part of the forces shaping a tangle of neighborly relations among households and between villages. These relations ranged from cooperation to distrust or indifference, but were always at odds with the universal solidarity that Soviet modernization called for. The assumption that penetrating and transforming this tangle necessarily involved anti-religious struggle owed much of its persistence to the unassailable status of the writings of Marx and Engels, including their critiques of religion’s role in obscuring social relations and preserving patriarchal power.2 But Soviet atheist scholarship also elaborated its own changing answers to the question of where exactly the harm of religion lay, answers which over time came to home in on religion’s potential to strengthen social boundaries and increase individual isolation. These ideas evolved in part out of encounters with historical patterns of neighborliness that ordered the coexistence between social groups at a local level—patterns that, like religion itself, seemed at once too fragmenting and too solid for the Soviet state to tolerate.
By the term neighborliness, I am referring to the ambivalent set of relations between households and villages that evolved in this region, whose inhabitants had lived with religious and linguistic diversity for centuries and where religious affiliation had served as a marker for legal and political distinctions up until the Bolshevik Revolution. Comparable to the Muslims, Christians, and Jews of Ottoman Salonica/Thessaloniki described by Mark Mazower (2004), villagers in the Volga region, as elsewhere in the Russian Empire, lived in a world that was simultaneously segregated by religious and linguistic boundaries and characterized by intense connections across these “painfully proximate borders” (Grant 2009: xv). In this contested zone where Finno-Ugric populations had alternately paid tribute to the Tatar Khans of Kazan' and to the Muscovite princes and tsars, largely monoreligious and monoethnic villages often lay in close proximity to other such villages whose inhabitants spoke a different language, prayed to different gods according to different calendars, ate different food, and wore different clothes. Neighbors were aware of one another’s practices and recognized affinities with their own, as is attested by a wealth of linguistic, ritual, and technological parallelisms, as well as by shared uses of religious sites.3
More precisely than the notoriously broad term syncretism (Stewart and Shaw 1994), the idea of recognized affinities among neighbors captures a situation where, although fusion and mutual inspiration does occur, residents still consider different practices appropriate for different people. In the Volga region, a person whose family prayed in a sacred grove would not normally go to the mosque of the neighboring village, but would recognize activities in both places as “praying.” Because of their history of partial conversion before the revolution and the uneven availability of ritual specialists in the post-Soviet era, Mari families did often worship alternately in sacred groves and in Orthodox churches, but distinguished between the offerings appropriate to each site (Luehrmann 2010; Popov 1987). Rather than creating an unproblematic mixture of religious traditions, people maintained a form of separation-in-proximity that recalls other parts of the world with histories of incorporation into multireligious empires, such as the Balkans and North India (Bowman 2010; Hayden 2002; van der Veer 1992).
Against this background, the project of Soviet secularization involved the attempt to replace the ambivalent play of intimacy and distance involved in neighborly relations (Sorabji 2008; Žižek, Santner, and Reinhard 2005) with a more predictable, transparent, and universal allegiance to an imagined community centered on Moscow and propelled forward by the plans of the Communist Party (cf. Anderson 1983). To adopt a pair of terms from Kenneth Reinhard (2005), the Soviet struggle against religion was part of wider efforts to replace a “political theology of the neighbor” with a “political theology of the sovereign,” in which the rules and maxims of political life received their meaning in relation to a single master signifier—the interest of the Soviet toilers as articulated by the party. Never quite resolved, this struggle between alternative points of reference continues to shape the terms in which local residents and politicians discuss the place of religion in community life after the end of the socialist project.
In the summer of 2005, a fledgling Lutheran congregation proposed to build a church in the Mari village of Ljupersola in the Sovetskij district, a thirty-minute bus ride from Joshkar-Ola. Lutheranism had made its first converts in Marij El in 1993, brought by a Finnish-Estonian couple working through the Saint Petersburg–based Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria. Whereas the original congregation in Joshkar-Ola was largely Russian-speaking, a Mari writer and deacon set out to conduct Mari-language services in Ljupersola, a village of 450 people where he had contacts in the collective farm administration. After several years of weekly visits during which the living room of a Brezhnev era concrete duplex served as a makeshift place of worship, a group of approximately fifty members successfully registered as a religious organization with the district administration in the spring of 2005. Having acquired a plot of land on the village’s main street and secured promises from Finnish volunteers to help build a wooden church, the congregation applied for a building permit. In late August, the district administration convened a village assembly without publicly announcing the agenda. Two Orthodox priests had been invited; Lutheran clergy were only present because they had heard about the meeting from a sympathetic employee of the village administration. Addressing the assembly in Russian, the head of the district administration (a Mari) announced that the purpose of the meeting was to vote on the building application, and he immediately launched into a list of concerns:
In connection with this question of construction, it seems to me that today, probably, the fate of your village is being decided, and of your population, of our Mari population most of all. I briefly made myself familiar with the beginning of this movement, this Lutheran [movement], yes? The recruitment of people [Vovlechenie ljudej]. They started very small. They helped with clothing, yes, somewhere perhaps with food provisions, somewhere still other things. Here, it seems to me, our poverty was played on. Unfortunately, this is how it is today, there’s no denying it. And, after all, this isn’t done for nothing [ne prosto tak], I ask that all understand that. Behind all this hides some sort of objective, right? Let’s say, these Finns help today to do this, they’re not doing it for nothing. It seems to me, let them do this work in their own country, everything is permitted over there, they live in prosperity there, let them do their work there.4
The district head was making the connection between the religious choice of some villagers and the fate of “our Mari population” by identifying Lutheranism as a foreign movement, brought by Finns with suspicious motives. Having acknowledged the material attractions of foreign missions, he went on to make a plea for the region’s spiritual self-sufficiency:
We have here the Orthodox Church, that is, religion, and also our traditional religion, the Pagan religion, and I think that this is exactly the religion which, probably, we have and should have. This movement, it probably has a goal, it seems to me, a bad one. To destroy the foundation of Russia, as a whole. Concretely, it seems to me that in Marij El they are doing this. After all, going over to a different faith [vera], it seems to me that grown-up people who went over to a different faith, after all, probably if a person accepted a faith once, probably in betraying his faith, switching to another, in the interest of some goal, it seems to me that this is no longer the faith to which he is, let’s say, faithful [veren]. That is, he can switch again. When a better offer comes along, why not switch again.
These rhetorical links between faithfulness to one’s religion and faithfulness to one’s country will seem familiar to students of post-Soviet religious politics, as will the general suspicion of the motives of foreign missionaries. Like the 1997 law that distinguishes between religions with demonstrated historical roots in Russia and those that have none, this provincial official’s arguments refer to the broader ideal of a correspondence between religious adherence and ethnic identity. The challenge presented by the evangelical Protestant organizations that have become increasingly active in Russia since perestroika (many of them at least initially supported by Western funds and/or personnel) is in the way they missionize across ethnic lines, giving no credence to religious affiliations that are not based on conscious individual commitment (Pelkmans 2009; Wanner 2007).
“You don’t go to a strange monastery with your own rule,” said an official in charge of religious affairs in the presidential administration of Marij El, quoting a Russian proverb to argue that Protestant missionaries deserve respect for their faith, but should not propagate it among people to whom it is historically alien.5 This self-identified Chimarij woman also thought that Protestant converts must be either very greedy or very gullible, echoing suspicions elsewhere in the world where evangelical Protestantism is making inroads against religious groups with expectations of hereditary membership (D. Martin 1990, 2002).
Several authors have argued that assumptions about religion as a corollary of ethnicity solidified during the Soviet era, when ethnicity gained primacy as a public form of collective identification, codified by census lists of officially recognized nationalities and an obligatory entry in every citizen’s passport (Dragadze 1993; Khalid 2007; Pelkmans 2006; Urazmanova 2009). The idea that Finns are out to destroy the foundations of Russia also suggests the longevity of Cold War distinctions between friend and enemy. On the level of federal law and its regional applications, post-Soviet religious policy thus seems to follow the logic that cultural theorist Kenneth Reinhard calls “the political theology of the sovereign.” In his critical dialogue with Carl Schmitt’s ideas, the sovereign stands for Schmitt’s claim that all politics begins with a distinction between friend and enemy. The figure of the neighbor, by contrast, calls this distinction into question, because it “materializes the uncertain division between the friend/family/self and the enemy/stranger/other” (Reinhard 2005: 18; cf. Schmitt 2002 [1932]).
To return to a more Weberian terminology, the political challenge of neighborliness lies in working with the interplay of intimacy and alterity that constitutes elective affinity, thereby resisting the urge to disambiguate it into clear divisions between those who are part of a social covenant and those who stand outside. Soviet citizens, by contrast, were supposed to relate with unquestioned solidarity to those within the state, and with unmitigated hostility to the “enemies of the people” or Cold War adversaries. When atheists criticized religion for upholding the wrong social divisions, this was part of a larger discomfort with the shifting scales of neighborly political allegiances, which they sought to replace with a state-centered vision of “closed sovereignty” (Grant 2009; see also Yang 2004). But while some theorists of secularism have argued that the concern with religion as a divisive force was an outgrowth of the interdenominational warfare that shook early modern Western Europe (Asad 2003: 174; Asad 2006; Madan 1998), there seems to be more going on here than an uncritical transfer of Western historical narratives. In the way villagers and local politicians deal with ambiguous religious affiliations in post-Soviet Marij El, after decades of Soviet attempts to impose their own “political theology,” we see the enduring problems created by neighborly relations for Moscow-centric notions of the Russian nation. Having seen how the possibilities and limitations of neighborliness in the Volga region remain connected to religious diversity, it will be easier to understand the struggles of earlier generations of atheists.
It is certainly possible to describe federal religious policy under the presidencies of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin as a politics of sovereign distinctions between those who belong and those who do not. The law of 1997, which reserved the status of registered religious organization to those who could demonstrate a fifteen-year presence in Russia, came during a decade of nods to the cultural significance of the Russian Orthodox Church, even as some of the church’s larger political ambitions remained unrealized. There was no blanket return of church property, and Orthodox religious instruction in schools remained limited to regional experiments, but Patriarch Aleksij II (Ridiger, 1990–2008) was treated as an authority on issues of public morality and Russia’s historical identity (Garrard and Garrard 2008; Papkova 2007).
This moral and cultural weight could also be felt in Marij El, where the “historical reconstruction” of the capital often seemed synonymous with the building of Orthodox churches, and Orthodox clergy were the only religious specialists to have regular access to army barracks and prisons. But nationwide trends were filtered through regional understandings of religious diversity as a historical reality, sometimes producing unexpected results. The local effects of the 1997 law are one example. While registration was granted to all Protestant groups who applied, Chimarij were unable to document an institutionalized existence that went back to the period before perestroika, since their outdoor rituals were counter to Soviet law. Bound to federal legislation, the republic’s administration denied registration, but sacrificial ceremonies continued without hindrance in many parts of the republic. Even though there is a Russia-wide discourse about the special legitimacy of “traditional” religions, different groups can be included under that umbrella in different places.6
In the same vein, national boundaries were not necessarily foremost on people’s minds when they drew lines of inclusion and exclusion. According to the Lutheran deacon, the statement that made the deepest impression on those listening to the district head’s speech at the Ljupersola meeting was the closing warning that Lutheran converts would not be buried in the village graveyard:
Even if let’s say the association [obshchestvo] exists here now, which, well, believes—we should not blame the person, let’s say he likes it, and he doesn’t understand maybe all of this, well, this person can’t even be buried in our graveyard, do you understand? Simply stated, this is already a different faith, and they must have a different graveyard and all the rest. For this reason I am simply asking all of you to make the right decision. We cannot command, insist on something; each one must approach this matter conscientiously.
As the deacon recalled, the district head previously had made a similar statement on local radio, and it had caused great fear among the members of the congregation, many of whom were elderly, so that death and burial were part of their not-so-distant future. Whether made in good faith or as a deliberate misrepresentation, the threat had no backing in Russian law, which treats public graveyards as secular spaces to which no religious organization can grant or limit access. But because it reveals much about the scale of communal life at which political rhetoric about religion acquires emotional force, the claim that a Lutheran convert would forfeit the right to be buried in the village graveyard is worth dwelling on for a moment.
Though contradicting the law, the threat had some degree of resonance with local custom, giving it a ring of possibility. Some villages in the republic did have separate graveyards exclusively for Chimarij or Muslims, although most graveyards seemed to incorporate a variety of religious and secular traditions. In all the regular village graveyards I visited, Christian crosses stood interspersed with the wooden slabs or poles which marked Chimarij graves and the metal cones with red stars on top which were popularized during the Soviet era as atheist burial markers. In settlements with mixed Mari-Russian-Tatar populations, there was often a corner reserved for Tatars, with headstones carved in Arabic script.
In the face of these alternatives, it was definitely an exaggeration that only a new graveyard could accommodate the new addition to the religious mix. And later that same month, I was present at the burial of a Lutheran woman in Ljupersola’s village graveyard. But the evocation of graveyards must have reminded listeners that the place where a family buries its dead forges a tangible connection to other families, shaping communal obligations of care and commemoration. For example, whole villages went out on certain days of the year for commemorative feasts at their relatives’ graves (Bouchard 2004). Being buried in the village graveyard meant being part of an ongoing ritual connection between living and deceased villagers. Tatar families in Mari villages might not participate in these feasts, but they were known to have their own cycles of commemorating the dead (Urazmanova 2009: 19).7 Lutheranism, as two villagers who spoke at the meeting pointed out, remained largely unknown, making it hard to gauge what the consequences of its arrival would be.
Whether or not villagers knew this, Protestants in Marij El did strongly oppose the local ways of commemorating the dead. In his sermon at the old woman’s funeral a few weeks later, the deacon made the common Protestant reference to the parable of the rich man and poor Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), where the rich man’s pleas for relief from his pains after death are countered by father Abraham’s answer that he was receiving his reward for the wealth he had selfishly enjoyed during his lifetime. The deacon interpreted this to mean that nothing could be done to change God’s judgment on the dead, so the living should focus on following the commandments and ensuring their own salvation rather than trying to ritually intervene on behalf of a deceased person.8
Given the importance of burial places for community life, and the fact that it is obvious from the district head’s speech that he was not used to making public statements on religious matters,9 it seems quite possible that his threat that there would have to be a separate Lutheran graveyard was not a deliberate lie. Rather, it may have been an attempt to impress on converts the distance they were putting between themselves and the village community, and to frighten them out of persisting in this choice.
The warning about graveyards shows that village life in the republic can accommodate a degree of religious diversity, but this accommodation depends on each religious group’s willingness to engage in mutually comprehensible practices. Residents often pointed with pride to their republic’s tradition of interreligious neighborliness—for instance, the highest official in charge of religious affairs pointed out that the construction of the Orthodox church in the district center of Medvedevo was made possible by the support of that district’s head of administration, who was a Tatar Muslim. Neighborliness involved an inclusive blurring of distinctions in some situations and the insistence on rigid boundaries in others, both of which were obvious in the way speakers at the meeting addressed the relationship between religious adherence and community affiliation. Many were quite vague in identifying legitimate religious faiths and scales of communal loyalty, while casting the arrival of a religious group from Finland as something unheard of. Most crucially, references to the ancestral faith of the village were usually undetermined as to what exactly that faith was, even as all speakers agreed that it needed to be preserved. Another speaker from the district administration addressed the assembly in Mari:
You have been living in this land for a long time, and before you, your fathers and grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers lived in this land. Every one of them had his own place in this world, and in the other world everyone will also find his own place.10 Everyone had his own faith, everyone believed in one God. I ask you, in the future too, to maintain the connection with your own faith, the faith of your fathers, mothers, and grandfathers. You should not wander around here and there.
He was saddened, he added, to hear that there were now “two faiths” among the villagers, and quarrels between them. The district head had already made a slide from mentioning two religions—Orthodox Christianity and Chimarij Paganism—to saying that there was one religion “we have and should have.” This speaker assumed only a single “faith of your fathers, mothers, and grandfathers,” speaking as if only the advent of Lutheranism had led to a multireligious situation in the village.
This ambiguity had something to do with the specific situation in this district, an area where the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church had been relatively strong since the nineteenth century and where Chimarij ritual activity was weaker than in more remote parts of the republic. In spite of this, there were no prerevolutionary movements here that embraced Christianity as part of a Mari identity, as was the case on the right bank of the Volga (Popov 1987; Werth 2002: 200–222). In the early twenty-first century, Ljupersola had a sacred grove that was remembered and avoided as a past site of Chimarij ceremonies, although members of the younger generation had no memory of ritual activity there. The village was also located a mere half hour by bus from the Russian Orthodox church of Semënovka, one of the few churches in the republic to remain open throughout the Soviet period (with a short interruption between 1940 and 1944). As one of the speakers at the assembly pointed out, many of those who were now converting to Lutheranism had originally been baptized there. The monastery of Ezhovo, which had been closed during the Soviet era, but whose healing spring had remained a pilgrimage site, was even closer. Some villagers visited these Orthodox holy sites occasionally, for rituals addressing specific life events (baptisms, weddings, funerals) or illnesses. Sporadic religious activity at circumscribed sacred sites thus united the forms of worship familiar to villagers. Adding to the Lutherans’ transnational proselytizing efforts and rejection of commemorative rituals, their insistence on holding weekly services right in the village was another feature that set Lutherans apart from the range of recognized religious practices.
By maintaining ambiguity about “the ancestral faith of the village,” speakers deemphasized differences between Orthodox and Chimarij sympathies while stressing the outsider status of Lutheranism. The district head seemed to give preference to Paganism by calling it “our traditional religion,” and another speaker from outside the village described the religion of their ancestors as toshto mari jumyn jüla, “the old Mari god customs,” using the Mari-language neologism for “religion” favored by High Priest Tanygin and other activists working for a republic-wide Chimarij revival. A villager, making the same case for religious unity, explicitly named Orthodox Christianity as the religion of the village. As with other speakers, treating the religious unity of the village as a given also made it easier for him to deemphasize differences between the situation of Ljupersola and that of Russia as a whole. Participants often left open whether the community threatened by the Lutheran presence was the village or the nation.
Switching back and forth between Russian and Mari (represented by italics in the quote), this villager started out on the national level: “V tomto i delo, chto my v Rossii ilena, a oni zhivut v Finljandii. Tyge prosto zhe iktezhe ushanen ona kert” (“The thing is, we live in Russia, and they live in Finland. So simply for this reason we cannot unite”). Before switching into pure Russian for an interpretation of world politics, the man used the combined resources of Mari and Russian grammar to underscore the threat of the “global plan” to destroy religious unity:
Tide global'nyj plan, chtoby Rossijym razrushit' pytarash. … Ved' u nikh tam nichego netu, eto u nas v Rossii tak; Sibir' eshche bogataja u nas, neft', gaz, vse, vse est', u nikh netu vot, i idet bor'ba za eto, eta problema mirovaja problema, ne nasha! Nas tuda prosto podtalkivajut. Vot tak, tovarishchi. Tak chto, u nas, my odna vera, da, nu eto pravoslavie, znachit, dolzhny byt' vsegda. Znachit, otdelis', i dolzhen verit' etoj veroj. U nas zdes' dve very ne dolzhno byt' i ne mozhet byt'.
This is a global plan to destroy Russia completely. … After all they don’t have anything over there, it is here in Russia; our Siberia is still wealthy, oil, gas, everything, everything is there, and they don’t have it, and there is a struggle going on over it, this problem is a worldwide problem, not ours! We are just being pushed into it. This is how it is, comrades. So that here, we are one faith, yes, well that is Orthodoxy, so this means that is what we should always be. This means, if you separate yourself off, you have to believe according to that faith. Here among us there must not be two faiths and cannot be.
The Russian-Mari compound “razrushit' pytarash,” which I translate as “to destroy completely,” gives the neighborly affinities on the Middle Volga a linguistic face. Russian, like many Slavic languages, has a system of verb aspects where most actions can be expressed by a perfective or imperfective form, emphasizing either the result of an action or its ongoing nature. Razrushit' (to destroy) is the perfective form, corresponding to the imperfective razrushat'. The Finno-Ugric languages of the Volga region lack such an aspect system and, more generally, the mechanisms for modifying verbs with prefixes and suffixes that constitute an important part of Russian morphology. Instead, they contain a number of verbs that can double as modal verbs. Combinations between modal and full verbs take on some of the functions of Russian aspects. The Mari verb pytarash, meaning “to finish, to end, to eliminate,” can be combined with the gerund of another verb to give the action the nuance of completeness and fulfillment, comparable to the perfective aspect in Russian. For example, tülash means “to pay,” tülen pytarash “to pay off completely, to settle a debt.” The form “razrushit' pytarash” combines Russian and Mari ways of constructing a perfective aspect (the Russian verb with a perfective ending and the Mari modal verb). In this man’s speech, “the mutual and internalized equivalence of value” (Jakobson and Pomorska 1983 [1980]: 86) between a regional and a national language corresponded to equivalences between different scales of communal identification. His repeated use of u nas (Russian for “here among us”) sometimes clearly stood for Russia as a whole, sometimes ambiguously either for the village or for Russia. The opposing u nikh (“among those people there”) was more clearly located outside of Russian national borders, in Finland or in a generalized abroad. In the political rhetoric of neighborliness, internalized equivalences found their limit in internalized incommensurabilities.11
The Russian address “comrades” (tovarishchi) also helped the speaker align his village audience with a Russia-wide public. In post-Soviet Marij El, tovarishchi was a common form of address in all manner of official speeches, without connoting particular communist sympathies or nostalgia for the Soviet Union. For addressing an audience of Mari speakers, however, tovarishchi and its translation, joltash-vlak (lit. “friends”), competed with the pair rodo-tukym, poshkudo-vlak (Mari: “relatives, neighbors”), a greeting from village rituals that seemed the preferred choice for political figures who wanted to appeal explicitly to an ethnic Mari community. Compared to the more locally and personally specific “relatives and neighbors,” addressing a Mari audience in Russian and as “comrades” created an opening to larger scales of community, be they the worldwide proletariat or the Russian nation.
There was certainly room for friction between all these levels, and the meeting itself was an example of the kinds of manipulation of democratic procedure which many of my interlocutors in Marij El routinely expected of politicians. But political differences aside, all speakers colluded in maintaining ambiguities in some areas while making clear distinctions in others. The boundaries between Orthodoxy and Paganism were left unclear, while both stood in opposition to Lutheranism. Likewise, there was a sliding scale of loyalties between the village and the nation, and between Mari and Russian speech communities, whereas international aid was cast as definitely coming from hostile, greedy outsiders.
When I say that participants in the meeting colluded, I do not mean that they were intentionally covering up preexisting religious and political differences. Rather, the term collusion is intended to draw attention to the rhetorically produced and potentially fragile nature of such unity. As linguistic anthropologists have understood it, collusion means the collaboration of interlocutors in a given social interaction, which they are “holding together for each other” through a “marriage of indefiniteness and precision in utterance interpretation” (McDermott and Tylbor 1995: 219–220). At this meeting, district administrators and residents colluded in constructing indisputable connections between an unspecified ancestral faith and local, district-level, and national solidarity. But the situation might have been different if the villagers had been asked to contribute to the financing of a Russian Orthodox Church in the district center. It is this fragility of collusive links that made rural neighborliness seem suspicious to successive Soviet and post-Soviet administrators interested in stable political loyalties.
Even during the assembly, the fragile nature of collusion emerged. What was at play there was not a common front of Russian nationalism against the religious diversity coming from abroad. Subtle differences between speakers pointed to the fissures between religious and communal loyalties. The contributions of the two Orthodox priests at the meeting, for instance, showed the strategic importance that the ambiguity of the “one faith” has for the church, but also its reluctance to participate in the collusion. One priest, rector of the church in the nearby village of Orsha, spoke on the familiar nationalist theme of Orthodoxy as a guarantor of Russian national unity going back to the conversion of the Kievan Rus', whereas “divide and conquer” had always been the strategy of enemy outsiders, from the Golden Horde to the German fascists. The other priest, from the church in Semënovka, showed his greater sense of diplomacy and higher theological education by offering a more careful substantiation of Orthodoxy’s claim to special status. Acknowledging that the state as well as the church was interested in a unified society, he presented Orthodoxy’s claim to providing such unity as based not so much in its support of national sovereignty, but in historical manifestations of divine will:
Orthodoxy is one of the traditional faiths in the Mari country. At the time when Lutheranism first appeared in Russia, in the sixteenth century, … Ivan the Terrible conquered Kazan', and Orthodoxy already spread here on Mari land. Among the special signs that the will of God was for the spread of Orthodoxy, we see them in the history of the miracle-working icon of the myrrh-bearing women in whose honor the monastery was built [at Ezhovo], and in the life of the great man St. Gurij of Kazan', who did much to enlighten the Maris with the light of the faith in Christ and to teach them learning; he did much for this, as the first bishop of Kazan'. And many more sacred objects [svjatynii] which can be found on Mari land bear witness to the will of God, because God visited this land and helped people gain salvation in it.
Even as he explicitly directed his comments against Lutheranism by emphasizing the centuries of Orthodox presence in the region, this priest indirectly challenged the district head, who had referred to Paganism as “our traditional religion.” In closing, the priest insisted that there were “categorical differences” between Lutheranism and Orthodoxy, and stressed that each villager had to make a “spiritual choice” (dukhovnyj vybor) on how to live from now on. From his standpoint, to allow or not allow Lutheranism to take root in the village was a choice between paths of development that had consequences beyond questions of community integration. By treating religious observance as more than a sign of trustworthiness and belonging, the priest subtly departed from the opinions voiced by the political leaders, without openly breaking the framework of consensus.
Although they had clearly been invited to represent the legitimacy of the “faith of the grandfathers and grandmothers,” the priests at this meeting were in a difficult position vis-à-vis the villagers as well as the officials. Nationally, the Russian Orthodox Church has been one of the principal proponents of the discourse on the primacy of “traditional religions.”12 But this rhetoric presents risks in regions where Orthodox expansion is only a few centuries old and the church faces criticism from populations trained with Soviet history books that portrayed prerevolutionary missions as instruments of tsarist colonialism (e.g., Korobov 1957). The Lutherans have repeated similar criticisms in their own publications, in order to portray their own branch of Christianity as more benign and compatible with Finno-Ugric traditions (Uvarov 2000). So while the Orthodox diocese in Marij El generally goes along with the collusive production of unity between traditional faiths,13 the priests’ attempt to anchor the special status of Orthodoxy in divine will shows their awareness that human tradition alone may be too ambiguous a basis for legitimation.
The frictions between discourses of traditional unity and theological claims to primacy show why religious commitments can present a dilemma to a secular state-building project: while the state may try to appropriate the moral authority of religion, borrowing from divine forces can ultimately undermine the claim of government agents to act on behalf of all citizens and uphold universal standards of moral right (see also Sullivan 2009).
In contrast to their Soviet predecessors, politicians in post-Soviet Marij El do not attempt to eliminate all religion from public life. But they still treat it as a potentially divisive force which they seek to neutralize by giving preference to those religious groups that can be identified with the cultural traditions of one of the ethnic groups of the region. These traditions are understood to be diverse but ultimately infused by the common moral sensibilities of long-term neighbors. In the case of Ljupersola, the neighborly construction of unity-in-diversity turned out to be expansive enough to include the Lutherans after some struggles. Although the village assembly rejected the application for a building permit, this decision was successfully challenged by the Lutheran deacon, who wrote a letter to the district head listing the violations of Russian law that had occurred at the meeting and threatening to take the matter to court.14 Without waiting for the congregation to act on its threat, the district head gave permission to construct a parsonage, not a church, on the plot of land.
The Lutherans had been prepared for this outcome; indeed, the pastor had suggested it at the village council meeting. With help from the Finnish volunteers, they proceeded to build a wooden structure according to the original plan, simply omitting the steeple. By the time the building was consecrated three years later, in September 2008, the congregation had received permission to call it a “prayer house” (molitvennyj dom), and the head of the village administration was present for the service of consecration. According to the catechist in charge of the congregation, this village official had accepted the invitation, saying, “There is one God, but many organizations” (Bog odin, organizatsii raznye). He thus extended the collusive discourse about the “oneness” of all religions to this new group that had come to the village and stayed.
From this discussion of the post-Soviet religious landscape, two things are worth retaining for understanding the stakes faced by Soviet atheists (and secularists elsewhere) in disentangling religion from community. First, “our faith” was named as important by speakers with a vague or fluid sense of its dogmatic or institutional content. As we will see, Soviet atheists already had encountered this fluidity, which presented a challenge to their understanding of religion as a system of dogmatically determined truth claims. As a result of confronting religion as an aspect of communal adherence rather than as dogmatic conviction, atheist workers in the Volga region added new facets to their critique. While retaining the focus on religion as false epistemology, which they inherited from Marx, Engels, and other nineteenth-century authors, they more and more came to emphasize its socially divisive character. Since this second angle of anti-religious critique was only fully elaborated during the last decades of the Soviet Union, it shows how atheist thought evolved in response to the local politics of neighborliness.
A second noteworthy aspect of post-Soviet religion is that the ambiguously defined religious solidarity is thought to exist with reference to various scales of communal belonging. Some of these scales were among those which Soviet activists tried hard to eradicate for several decades, foremost among them the village as a ritual community of “relatives and neighbors” in which outsiders could never fully participate. The idea of a nation whose resources were coveted by Western enemies, by contrast, was something that became real for rural residents during the Soviet period, as did the potentially dangerous, but also desirable, world of international ties (Grant 1995; Yurchak 2006: 190–195). In Soviet and post-Soviet times, state-centered “political theologies of the sovereign” were always destabilized by sliding scales of alternative communal identifications.
In that sense, the blurred boundaries of neighborliness have remained a political reality. But the example of micro-politics in Marij El also shows that there is no reason to idealize neighborly politics: while its mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion may be flexible and open to expansion, a hardening and contracting of communal boundaries is equally possible. The threat of not burying Lutheran converts in the village graveyard was realistic enough to have rhetorical force, even though in this case it remained unrealized. Far from being community members simply by virtue of living somewhere, as Kenneth Reinhard claims is characteristic of neighbors (2005: 66–67), neighbors in Marij El are measured against standards of social conformity and authority that may ultimately be less flexible than the number of groups that can be included. Faced with the ambivalent character of neighborly politics, Soviet atheists saw religion as a force that at once divided communities and made them more resistant to change induced from outside. Far from merely wanting to endow the state with a sacred authority stolen from religion, they distrusted the fracturing potential of the religious sacred and saw its elimination as a necessary condition for a society of citizens to transcend neighborhoods and regions.
Readers familiar with the latent or acute violence that can accompany religious divisions in other parts of the former Soviet Union and elsewhere in the world may be struck by the harmlessness of bureaucratic haggling about building permits and burial places.15 It is true that even the sharpest critic of religion would hardly claim that the Volga region has historically been plagued by religious strife. To understand why Soviet atheists nonetheless came to identify religion with intercommunal divisions, recall that this is a part of the world where religion has long served as a marker of communal identification.
When Maris were paying tribute to the Khanate of Kazan', religious distinctions already served as dividing lines between different kinds of tax and labor obligations, a practice which continued after Kazan' fell to Ivan IV in 1552.16 Despite efforts to convert Tatar and Mari elites and, later, commoners to Russian Orthodoxy, the area retained significant Muslim populations into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while many baptized Maris continued to sacrifice ducks, sheep, and sometimes horses in prayer ceremonies led by hereditary onaeng, in addition to attending church services (Popov 1987; Werth 2002).
In the century preceding the Bolshevik Revolution, religious and ethnolinguistic categories were the primary contenders for social identities on the regional scale. A series of reconversion movements among Christianized Tatars and Maris, culminating in 1866, challenged imperial laws against apostasy from Orthodoxy with the argument that God had given different ways of worshiping to different peoples. As part of the state’s reaction to these movements, training courses for non-Russian clergy and teachers began in the 1860s and ’70s under the auspices of Nikolaj Il'minskij, a professor at the Kazan' Theological Academy. These courses contributed to the formation of indigenous Christian elites who went on to promote literacy in their native languages while maintaining links with each other and an orientation toward Kazan' as a regional center (Geraci 2001; Werth 2000, 2001, 2002).
While these regional identities evolved, the village retained its importance as a unit of communal affiliation. Villages in the Volga region were often inhabited by people of a single linguistic and religious affiliation, although in some places Mari, Tatar, and Russian villages were close neighbors. Each village was an important ritual unit, both among unbaptized Maris, where the households of a village or a cluster of villages carried out sacrifices in a common sacred grove (Popov 2005), and among Christian converts. Nineteenth-century Christian Maris exerted pressure on their fellow villagers to give up Chimarij practices, which they saw as a threat to the purity of their own Christian life, while some Kräshens (Christian Tatars) who petitioned to re-register as Muslims argued that they could not be Christian in a Muslim village (Werth 2000: 500; Werth 2002: 212). This sense of mutual dependence was underscored by the tax laws of imperial Russia, where the village community (mir) held collective responsibility for paying taxes and providing the required number of army recruits.
Tensions could emerge between neighboring villages of different faiths and languages, as shown by the accusations of ritual murder which Russian peasants leveled against a community of Pagan Udmurts in 1892, resulting in a lengthy court case (Geraci 2001: 195–207).17 While this incident shows that neighborly relations could be characterized by “antagonistic tolerance” (Hayden 2002) rather than harmonious respect, there were no significant outbreaks of intercommunal or interreligious violence in the Volga region in the nineteenth century. Rather than being divided by deep-seated enmities, the region which Soviet officials came to govern was fractured by a diversity of religious and emerging ethno-linguistic identities, reinforced by the enduring importance of the village as a unit of ritual, economic, and political life.
The Soviet government came in with a commitment to foster the ethnic distinctiveness of those groups which it understood to have suffered under tsarist colonialism, but also with the determination to keep the empire it inherited from breaking apart (T. Martin 2001). During the decades before the Second World War, the struggle to disentangle ethnic identities from religious affiliations focused on determining which groups deserved recognition as legitimate Soviet nationalities. Groups such as the Kräshens, who were religiously distinct while sharing the language of Muslim Tatars, were dropped from census lists in the late 1930s, at the same time that clergy and religious leaders suffered intense persecution and the Kugu Sorta reform movement among Mari Pagans was completely wiped out (Hirsch 2005; Sanukov 2000; Werth 2000; Y. Wichmann 1932). Starting a process of ethnic consolidation whose incomplete results can be seen in post-Soviet Marij El, recognized ethnic groups were given cultural and economic resources, while religion was deprived of any independent institutional base (Slezkine 1994). The assault on religious institutions did not remain the sole focus of Soviet atheist policy, however. In the postwar era, a new emphasis on the bureaucratic supervision of the surviving religious groups emerged, along with new efforts to turn the population away from them through education. This also required new rationales for why religion remained harmful.
While the link between religion and social identity had been a principle of governance in the Russian Empire, it became a problem for Soviet activists. Representing a revolutionary state claiming to liberate its inhabitants from the fetters of the old regime, they identified religious authority as one of the ways in which magistrates and gentry had secured the obedience of peasants and workers. The more discerning among them also recognized how deeply ritual practices permeated rural labor and community relations, in ways that simple critiques of exploitative and wasteful religion failed to capture. One set of dilemmas that many scholars have noted arose from Soviet attempts to separate potentially progressive ethnic “culture” from harmful and backward “religion” (Hirsch 2005; Humphrey 1998; Sadomskaya 1990). But atheist activists struggled not only with connections between religion and ethnic custom, but with the relationship between religion and social boundaries more generally. As they attempted to transform life in the Volga region, officials contrasted the boundedness and chaos of religiously infused neighborliness with the barrier-free, ordered secular public opened up by atheism. Starting as a frustrated response to the lack of identifiable religious communities with clearly delimited functions, this critique took on sharper contours in the 1960s and ’70s as a result of a wave of empirical research on religion.
The attempt to contrast religious boundedness with the desired new secular community goes back to the 1920s, when activists created ethnic festivals in order to develop progressive models of ethnic diversity while combating religious influences. As part of a wave of measures for the “demonstrative recognition” (T. Martin 2001: 183) of the folklore of peoples of the USSR, joshkar peledysh pajrem (Festival of Red Flowers) was instituted among the Mari. First organized in 1920 in the district center of Sernur by students and instructors from the teachers college, it was timed to coincide with the end of spring sowing and with semyk, a ritual commemoration of the dead during the seventh week after Easter.18 Comparing the fate of this festival to its Tatar equivalent, sabantuj, shows that choices about new Soviet celebrations were determined not only by a concern with demonstrative ethnic equality, but also by a particular vision of secular society.
Throughout the 1920s, pledges were collected from village councils and collective farms to forgo semyk, Easter, or Pentecost, and instead to celebrate joshkar peledysh pajrem after spring sowing, with performances of song and dance and recognition of exemplary workers (Solov'ev 1966: 9–13). Among the Tatars, sabantuj, previously a ritual held at the time of first plowing, was also transformed into a post facto celebration of the sowing campaign, and thus purged of its connotation of invoking divine blessing on agricultural work. In some Mari villages, peledysh pajrem was held in the sacred grove, a gesture of substitution typical of prewar anti-religious strategies.
Like other new festivals elsewhere in the Soviet Union, these were also occasions to denounce traditional forms of inequality between men and women. Organizers in the Volga region showcased modernized versions of embroidered women’s costumes, omitting the regionally and ethnically distinctive forms of headdress for married women, which were becoming targets of campaigns comparable to those against veiling among Muslim women in Central Asia (Molotova 1992: 87; cf. Massell 1974; Northrop 2004). Although they did not cover a woman’s face, the Mari shymaksh and soroka were attacked for being unhygienic and “diminishing a woman’s dignity.”19 Since the embroidery on these headdresses was intended to protect against the evil eye and dangerous spirits (J. Wichmann 1913), asking women to give them up when entering a sacred grove also sent potent messages about the self-reliant courage required of a Soviet person.
Official promotion of peledysh pajrem and sabantuj stopped in 1931, at the beginning of the Stalinist crackdown on “bourgeois nationalists” (Sanukov 2000: 36), and it is hard to ascertain from published sources how widely they were observed before that. As long as they lasted, the festivals offered a demonstrative occasion to experience the kind of communal life promised by Soviet secularity: an opening up of spaces that were formerly marked off by ritual precautions, and an elimination of social distinctions of gender, age, or marital status. The framework of equivalence in which cultural distinctiveness was celebrated was not unfamiliar to residents of the Mari countryside: Maris had their festival, Tatars theirs; Maris, Russians, and Tatars all had their own music and forms of national dress. What the Soviet version of this framework ignored were the sub-ethnic divisions between villages; even a fellow Mari would have little reason to visit another village’s sacred grove for a celebration dedicated to village concerns. In the vision of the festival planners, groves were to be turned into symbols of a generalized attachment to the beautiful Mari countryside, places for people to enjoy each other’s company unperturbed by fear of nonhuman forces and by human distinctions. But postwar discussions about reviving ethnic festivals among the Maris and Tatars show that such reconfigurations were neither easily achieved nor easily verified.
As has been pointed out by many historians of Soviet religious policy, the Second World War brought fundamental changes to the relationship between the state and religious organizations (Chumachenko 2002; Shkarovskii 1995). After spending decades destroying the power of religious institutions, the government realized that it needed their moral support in the war effort. Toward the end of the war, a specialized bureaucracy dealing with religious affairs was put in place, reflecting a change in orientation from efforts to quickly eradicate religion to the realization that it would be part of Soviet life for the foreseeable future. The Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs (Sovet po delam Russkoj pravoslavnoj tserkvi) was created by decree on October 7, 1943. In May 1944 it was complemented by the Council for Religious Cult Affairs (Sovet po delam religioznykh kul'tov), in charge of relations with all other officially recognized religious groups in the Soviet Union. Each council began to establish a network of commissioners (upolnomochennye) in regions and republics, who would report to the council on local religious life, receive and verify petitions for registration, and handle the registration documents for clergy, cult buildings, and religious organizations (Chumachenko 2002: 17–27). In 1965, the two organizations merged into the Council for Religious Affairs (Sovet po delam religii).
The first commissioner for religious cult affairs in the Mari ASSR was Aleksandr Kharitonovich Nabatov, who served from 1945 until 1952. He took special interest in those forms of local popular religion which did not seem to fit the institutionalized model foreseen by the registration requirements, among them village festivals. He also noted important differences in the official treatment of Mari and Tatar festivals, revealing some of the conditions for the successful secularization of folk customs.
Reporting to Moscow from a region struggling under the high work obligations of postwar agriculture, Nabatov noted the importance of agricultural celebrations to villagers and collective farm authorities. According to him, the Tatar festival sabantuj had achieved widespread recognition as a secular village festival by the early 1950s. Local administrative bodies often organized it as a reward for those collective farms that completed spring plowing and sowing on time. In 1951, the executive committee and party committee of the Paran'ga district, one of the areas of the Mari ASSR with significant concentrations of Tatars, staged a celebration of sabantuj in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of Mari autonomy.20 Nabatov’s superiors marked this part of his report with a question mark, and Nabatov himself noted a year later that although sabantuj had become “an ordinary civic festival,” it still involved city residents giving gifts to mullahs in their home villages.21
In spite of the misgivings of administrators higher up in the hierarchy, local officials were apparently convinced enough of sabantuj’s success in motivating rural laborers that they were searching for a Mari equivalent. Peledysh pajrem appears to have been forgotten by that time, so the candidate became agavajrem, a meatless food offering and prayer for successful sowing conducted in special groves at the edges of the village fields (Kalinina 2003: 43–77). Its secular adaptation had first been suggested in a regional party committee decision of 1936, to mitigate the perceived negative effects of abolishing peledysh pajrem. This decision was apparently never put into practice, probably owing to the political atmosphere of suspicion about anything that might be perceived as nationalism (Sanukov 2000: 37). After the war, Nabatov repeatedly reported that agavajrem was indeed taking on secular forms as it became integrated into collective farm life, and that it would be helpful to further develop such tendencies. While previously, he wrote in one report, “the leading and decisive role was played by the Mari kart—a religious minister, … now the leading role in the organization of the festival is taken by the collective farm administration.” In 1949 this “communal feasting without killing of animals and sacrifices” was “obligatory for collective farm workers and had the character of communal merrymaking [obshchestvennogo uveselenija].”22 Only in some places, he had noted the year before, were there such “religious formalities” as special gifts and food offerings to the kart in exchange for prayers and petitions to the gods.23
Nabatov observed that many collective farms in the late 1940s and early 1950s organized celebrations of agavajrem. But promotion of the holiday was never made official policy, although Maris remarked on the injustice of the Tatars being allowed their festival, while Maris lacked theirs.24 Much later, the search for a secular Mari festival led to the official revival of peledysh pajrem during a union-wide wave of renewed atheist campaigns in 1965.25 By that time, sabantuj was well established as a Soviet festival honoring exemplary collective farm workers and celebrating Tatar culture with athletic competitions, music, and dance (Aleksandrova 1978: 93–98).
Compared to sabantuj, agavajrem had two features that seem to have disqualified it from secular adaptation. First, official promotion of sabantuj relied on a narrative of folk custom versus clerical religion. According to an atheist propaganda lecture on Soviet festivals, Islamic mullahs had long tried to eliminate the festival “because the folk customs were incompatible with the dogmas of Muslim religion.” Unable to abolish sabantuj, the mullahs had deprived it of its original joyous character by forbidding music and excluding women from participation. Only the Bolshevik Revolution returned the festival to its true form (Anonymous 1963: 22–23). Similar strategies of playing off a purported Pagan past against presently professed world religions are evident in Soviet adaptations of the seasonal celebrations of other Muslim and Christian populations.26 But in the case of Mari food offerings, there was no Christian layer under which to excavate the folk traditions, and Paganism was too much alive to be regarded as the harmless vestige of a more democratic past. For Nabatov and the readers of his reports, it seemed too difficult to determine whether or not the need to propitiate divinities was still lurking behind the sense that this kind of feasting was “obligatory” for the communal life of a collective farm.
Besides being seen as an active occasion of worship rather than a cultural vestige, agavajrem had another disadvantage. The Mari festival mainly involved the offering, sharing, and consumption of food, followed by rather homely games, such as egg-throwing competitions. It thus lacked the spectacular elements of athletic competition that Soviet organizers most emphasized about sabantuj. Competitive wrestling and horse racing, whose functions as rituals linked to the fertility of the fields were ignored in official descriptions, attracted the mass audiences that best embodied the new secular public. Small clusters of villagers rolling eggs or pushing swings did not provide the same experience of strangers united by a common object of attention.
Caroline Humphrey, a British anthropologist who visited Burjat collective farms in southern Siberia in 1967 and 1975, reports that atheist activists there made a comparable distinction between suur-kharbaan, a summer festival with athletic competitions that had been adapted into a secular, officially organized holiday in the 1920s, and tsagalgaan, the lunar new year. Despite suggestions from ethnographers, the latter was not turned into a celebration of livestock breeders, but was celebrated only at the family level and met with official disapproval (Humphrey 1998: 380). The spectacular athletic components of sabantuj and suur-kharbaan, performed before the whole village and open to spectators from elsewhere, resonated with Soviet notions of the openness and visibility appropriate to public life.27
By contrast, the sanctification and sharing of food during agavajrem and tsagalgaan were associated not only with invoking the blessing of spirits, but also with social fragmentation. Tsagalgaan is an occasion to visit and share food with members of one’s kin group (Humphrey 1998: 379–380), and the food blessed at agavajrem and other Mari sacrifices is brought back to be shared with members of one’s own household. “You bring it from your home, and take it back to your home, otherwise you are giving away your family’s good fortune,” as a participant in one ceremony in 2005 explained the rule that food left over from the sacrificial meals should not be given away to non-kin.
If sabantuj and suur-kharbaan were judged to be less irredeemably religious, this shows that secularizing, to Soviet activists, involved breaking down what they saw as the debilitating divisions of rural life: between households, between kin groups, between villages. Secular festivals helped integrate villages into a union-wide public of strangers by directing attention to Soviet administrative centers. Peledysh pajrem, sabantuj, suur-kharbaan, and their equivalents among other ethnic groups were celebrated first in individual collective farms, then in the district center, and finally in the regional capital, with the more centralized celebrations featuring selected workers, athletes, or folk ensembles from the lower levels.28
Soviet laws that confined religious practice to liturgical worship by registered congregations in their own buildings actively prevented the development of translocal religious publics to rival the secular one. Evidence of religion’s capacity to mobilize across boundaries occasionally disturbed atheist observers throughout the postwar decades, but their critique of religion as associated with isolation and division became more elaborate over this period. This reflected Marxist narratives of progress that associated religion with an outdated rural past. But atheist analyses also evolved as alternatives to other ideas about the harm done by religious attachments.
The reports Nabatov wrote as the commissioner for religious cult affairs in the Mari ASSR speak of his efforts to apply received models of anti-religious critique, even though he recognized all too well when they did not fit. Apparently a native or long-time resident of the republic, he furnished detailed descriptions that often frustrated his Moscow superiors.29 His correspondence reveals much about the creativity required of provincial officials if they wanted to apply staple Marxist tenets to the intricacies of rural life (cf. Humphrey 1998: ch. 2).
The first problem to which Nabatov alerted his superiors was that the most widespread religious practice outside of Russian Orthodoxy was not included on the list of religious institutions with which he should concern himself. In his first preserved report in 1946, Nabatov called this religion the “Mari cult” (marijskij kul't), rites carried out by Maris “in prayer groves” under the leadership of priests known as karty or muzhany, who “officiate at prayer ceremonies, slaughter the sacrificial animals, give names to newborns, conclude marriages and funerals.”30 The prayer ceremonies “sometimes constitute a mass gathering” (byvajut massovymi). For instance, at a ceremony in the Kozhsola rural council of Sernur district, offerings amounting to 12,000 rubles, three wagonloads of linen, and significant amounts of leather and wool were collected and given over to the national defense fund.31
Pointing to the significant numbers of worshipers at these gatherings, Nabatov raised the question of their legalization, asking if communities of adherents of the “Mari cult” could be registered as religious organizations. He gave noticeably shorter treatment to the Old Believers, Muslims, Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jews who also were part of his responsibility, noting simply that he was beginning to receive petitions for the registration of religious organizations from some of these groups.
The council apparently gave some consideration to Nabatov’s argument that the “Mari cult” deserved its attention. Council member Fil'chenkov was sent to inspect the Mari ASSR in February 1946. He reported that, although the Maris were for the most part considered “baptized in the orthodox faith,” a substantial part of the population was “under the influence of the Mari cult,” as shown by the thousands of people who had attended the region-wide “world prayer ceremonies” (mirovye molenija) up to 1924 and again in 1945, when ten such ceremonies, involving the sacrifice of sheep, geese, and ducks, were held.32 Local officials and party members not only did little to stop these ceremonies, but sometimes actively supported them. The current chairman of the presidium of the supreme soviet of the Mari ASSR, when he was secretary of the party committee of a rural district, had permitted a Mari priest to hold a harvest ceremony at night, as long as the collective farm workers reported for work in the morning. Petitions by villagers to conduct ceremonies were sometimes accompanied by declarations from collective farm or rural council chairmen that they had no objections.33
Noting the history of tsarist persecutions of Mari ceremonies, Fil'chenkov reported that members of the Mari intelligentsia and state and party officials often participated in ceremonies, “commenting on them with enthusiasm, without seeing anything compromising in them.” Christian rituals, by contrast, were carried out by Maris “extremely pro forma,” and before the closing of the churches in the late 1930s many Maris preferred to lock the doors of their houses rather than receive an Orthodox priest.34
The “Mari cult” and other local religious practices posed several challenges to Soviet understandings of religion and the harm it did. First, adherents did not form stable communities with set times and places of worship, thus defying registration. The phrase “spontaneous appearance” (javochnyj porjadok, the same term one might use about an unscheduled public demonstration) occurs again and again in Nabatov’s reports, referring to Mari sacrifices, but also to prayer gatherings near Tatar graveyards for Muslim holidays and to pilgrimages to sacred springs in which Russian Old Believers, baptized and unbaptized Maris, and Muslim Tatars participated. In addition to the worrisome support of such activities by the local intelligentsia, the scale of some of these gatherings and their capacity to draw people from long distances made them hard to ignore, since they rivaled Soviet attempts to determine the rhythms and foci of public life.
Eventually, the council took the position that “like other pagan cults, the Mari one does not constitute an object of the Council for Religious Cult Affairs”35 and that it was “inexpedient to pose the question in terms of any kind of legalization of the actually occurring rituals, prayer meetings and the like.”36 Justifying its decision to the Central Committee, the council stated that Mari ceremonies caused “considerable harm to agriculture” and were “usually carried out during the height of agricultural work”37—probably a generalization from Fil'chenkov’s story about the nighttime ceremony at harvest time. Nabatov’s own reports show how difficult it was to sustain this narrative of economic harm, motivating his search for alternative ways to understand the meaning of rural religiosity.
In general, Nabatov’s observations do not confirm that Mari ceremonies always occurred “during the height of agricultural work.” In a draft circular to the district executive committees of the republic, Nabatov notes the following times for ceremonies: “in the spring before the beginning of the spring sowing campaign—agapajrem (aga—plowing, pajrem—holiday), in the interim after spring sowing—semik, and in the fall after bringing in the harvest and sowing winter grains.”38 As might be expected of the ritual cycle of a peasant population, these festivals seemed to fall into times of relative quiet preceding or following the major work tasks of the year.
Although the sacrifice of much-needed farm animals could itself be construed as economic harm, Fil'chenkov reported that since collectivization, there had been no instances of the sacrifice of animals owned by collective farms (which would have been a criminal act); all sacrificed animals had been privately purchased. Nor were the priests enriching themselves through the ceremonies: the meat was consumed on the spot, and other offerings were handed over to the union-wide defense fund.39
Even when his stated purpose was to prove that religion was harmful, Nabatov’s observations often pointed him toward its usefulness to rural economic managers struggling to meet the strenuous demands placed on Soviet agricultural producers in the postwar years (Nove 1982 [1969]: 298–304). Evidently answering a list of questions in a 1947 report, Nabatov used the heading “harm to the population” to enumerate the animals sacrificed and notes that “hundreds of horses” were used by thousands of participants from all over the republic to travel to the site of a “world prayer ceremony” in the fall of 1946, implying that this caused disruption of agricultural work.40 But he also stated that collective farm administrations themselves were sending petitions for permission to conduct prayer ceremonies and that these came from successful farms which fulfilled their requirements for grain requisitions.41 A year later, having attended a ceremony, Nabatov noted that a number of collective farm chairmen told him that “these sacrifices bring people closer together; … afterwards the population works more willingly.”42 In cautious and circumspect wording, Nabatov concluded that there was, “I would say, a dependence of the collective farms on the observance of religious cults,” a dependence “almost being promoted by local councils.”43
There was a material side to this dependence that had little to do with belief in ritual efficacy. At the 1948 ceremony, offerings were sold and the proceeds were divided between savings toward the cost of next year’s ceremony and the collective farm’s budget. A few years later, offerings made by pilgrims at the Shabashi healing spring on the feast day of the Kazan' icon of the Mother of God became the object of a dispute between the collective farm and the rural council.44 Nabatov’s readers understood these cases as instances of “accommodationalism,”45 where people in leadership positions made concessions to the ideological immaturity of their workers when it fit the short-term interests of the collective. These reports revealed the troubling attraction of religious rituals, but at least they could be explained away as strategic, if misguided, steps by local leaders.
More disturbing was the case of the collective farm Samolët, where the managers showed their own commitment to religious thinking. In the summer of 1948, the farm leadership presided over the sacrifice in a sacred grove of an old horse and its subsequent ritual consumption in the stables. They explained that their hope was to remedy their “insufficient number of horses” by killing one of them and then feasting on it “in the horses’ stalls, at the immediate spot where the collective farm experiences, by their explanation, misfortune, a lack of horses.”46 Although this was a successful farm and the horse was no longer able to work, the district executive committee fined the workers collectively for the damage. Punishment was necessary because the actions challenged the logic of mutual benefit that underlay the planned economy. By seeking to increase its own productivity by means that ran counter to union-wide visions of scientific progress, this collective farm exemplified the parochial selfishness associated with religion.
Discussions about the effects of opening houses of worship also show that ritual practice was perceived to give too much of a boost to local self-sufficiency and self-interest. When Nabatov considered recommending the reopening of a mosque in the Paran'ga district, an area with a large Tatar population lacking any legal opportunity to worship, the district executive committee spoke out against it. Far from serving the whole district, the opening of a mosque in one village would cause a flood of petitions from others. “By established custom, Tatar muslims don’t go, don’t visit the mosque of their neighboring village,” the district chairman explained, showing his awareness of the fragmenting potential of neighborly religion.47
The case of the republic’s only legally registered mosque, which was in the Tatar village of Kul'bash (Morki district), aroused similar misgivings about the mutual entanglement of religion and local pride. After the opening of the mosque, the local collective farm, Kzyl bajrak, “began to excel in its work” and was repeatedly held up as an example by the district radio station. “As if as a service in exchange for the opening of the mosque,” the collective farm had built a bridge and a fire shed and was currently building a communal bathhouse. It had also constructed a minaret for the mosque.48 A few months later, Nabatov reported that the mosque was also serving as a place for public announcements, such as appeals to buy government bonds.49 This provoked severe reproaches from his superiors for having allowed the mosque to be transformed into a “communal-political organization.”50
Though more in line with local realities than was the attempt to link religion to economic harm, the critique of religion as parochial also distorted the image of its adversary. In 1950, collective farms in the republic were consolidated, and Nabatov found that Mari ritual communities adapted, now gathering for sacrifices at the scale of the enlarged farms.51 But Soviet laws sought to hamper such initiatives to integrate religion with the new economic and political realities, by prohibiting publicly visible processions and pilgrimages as well as religious charity work (Kolymagin 2004: 51). It has even been argued that Soviet restrictions were a major factor in forcing religion into the parochial, domestic frames denounced by atheist propaganda (Dragadze 1993; Kormina 2006: 141–142). Indeed, the lack of evidence for further interregional Mari sacrifices after the immediate postwar years may confirm that atheist policies, whose vigor picked up again from the mid-1950s onward, caused ritual activities to become more locally constricted.
At the same time, polemics against the fragmenting force of rural religiosity were not just a product of the atheist imagination, but a response to the elusiveness of neighborly politics. Each of the interregional gatherings at sacred springs or groves had a host village on whose territory the site was located. Local authorities felt entitled to the offerings made at “their” sacred spring, suggesting a sense of ownership where nonresidents could be guests, but remained to some degree outsiders. Villages and collective farms petitioned for and defended “their” houses of worship. As Nabatov put it in one of his characteristic musings, what troubled officials like him was that religious customs, though normatively “alien to our Soviet person,” often seemed to “enter into communion with communal life [vstupajut v obshchenie s obshchestvennoj zhizn' ju],”52 at once strengthening communities and steering them away from their task of becoming interchangeable parts of a secular nation. What remains an inchoate sense of discomfort in Nabatov’s writing would become a theory of the link between religious belief and social fragmentation in the sociological work of later decades.
Nabatov was relieved of his post as commissioner for religious cult affairs at the end of 1952, apparently as a cost-saving measure. Even before the official merger of both councils in 1965, successive commissioners for Russian Orthodox Church affairs seem to have carried out the functions of the commissioner for religious cults.53 While time constraints forced these officials to limit themselves to monitoring the officially recognized religious groups and their compliance with Soviet law, a budding empirical sociology applied itself to the study of religious life more generally.
Over the course of the 1960s and ’70s, sociologists in the Volga region and other multiethnic areas of the Soviet Union refined statistical criteria to depict the harmful effects of religion and the benefits of atheism. The answers they came up with involved ideas about religion and rural segmentation that recall the concerns of Nabatov’s generation. But the sociologists were more explicit in their rejection of alternative explanations, arguing that religious believers were neither deliberate wreckers of the Soviet economy nor ignorant people deceived by malicious priests. In published studies, attempts to demonstrate the link between social isolation and religious practice often turned into calls for more resources to be devoted to social and cultural services for underserved segments of the population, such as rural residents, housewives, and pensioners. In the words of one scholar involved in the atheist section of the Mari division of the Knowledge Society, a religious person was someone “whose links to society for some reason or other are insufficient in some places (low level of education, underdeveloped spiritual needs) or are even completely lacking (self-isolation from the social-political life of the collective, separation from the work collective)” (Sofronov 1973: 8).
Part of this critique focused on the impact of religiosity on interethnic relations, but this was only one among several factors. Viktor Stepanovich Solov'ev, a sociologist trained at the Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow (an institution directly subordinate to the Central Committee of the Communist Party), carried out surveys of popular beliefs and traditions in his native Mari ASSR in 1972 and 1985. Modeling his surveys on a study first conducted by his Moscow teacher, Viktor Pivovarov, in the Chechen-Ingush ASSR (Pivovarov 1971; Smolkin 2009), Solov'ev combined questions about religious belief with wide-ranging inquiries about gender, ethnicity, language skills, attitude toward ethnic traditions, participation in Soviet cultural practices, access to commodities and services, and degrees of social engagement.
The study concluded that compared to atheists, Tatar and Mari believers were less likely to speak Russian at home, cutting themselves off from this “important medium of active communion with social practice, with the achievements of science, technology, and Soviet and world culture” (Solov'ev 1987: 144). Believers of all nationalities were more critical of interethnic marriage (10.5 percent of believers objected to them compared to 3.2 percent of atheists; ibid.: 145). And commenting on the separation of Tatar and Mari graveyards, Solov'ev argued that this was proof that “customary orders set up by religion, even after losing their religious content and religious basis to a considerable degree, have become national traditions of far from positive character” (147–148).
Solov'ev’s ideal of an atheist society was one in which people would transcend ethnic or local selfishness and recognize “the indivisible unity of national [i.e., ethnic] interests with the interests of the Soviet people as a whole” (Solov'ev 1987: 145). Success was measured not only in views about interethnic relations, but also in participation in modern Soviet culture. In 1972, the percentage of religious believers participating in voluntary social and trade union work was less than a fifth of that of atheists (Solov'ev 1977: 100). In 1985, when figures were adjusted for differences in age, education, and rural or urban residence, atheists were still found to be more engaged with Soviet cultural life. People who had never held religious beliefs reportedly read an average of 2.3 books per month, people who had abandoned religion 2, and religious believers and people wavering between belief and nonbelief less than 1. For attendance at public film showings, lifelong atheists averaged 1.5 per month, believers and waverers 0.4 (Solov'ev 1987: 116).
In his interpretation, Solov'ev never clarifies if he thinks of religion as the cause of this withdrawal from modern social life, or as the consolation sought by those who are already isolated. What appears to interest him is not so much the causal role of religion, but the causal role of atheism in overcoming divisions within local communities and connecting residents to larger Soviet and world contexts. The 1972 study was programmatically entitled “How’s it going, comrade?” (Russian: Kak zhivesh', tovarishch?), addressing respondents in the casual tone common among familiars, but also as members of the larger Soviet public. The published results portrayed atheism as the solution to the tangle of religious, economic, and communal structures in rural neighborliness that so frustrated Nabatov. Like attempts to divert animals from the national productive cycle for the benefit of local collective farms, separate graveyards and disinterest in secular literature were symptoms of a vicious circle between religion and the limited horizons of rural life that atheism would break apart.
In practice, the struggle to completely dissolve rural communities into a union-wide sovereign domain was never taken up in earnest in the postwar Mari ASSR. Often of local origin and always trained in the rhetoric about the value of ethnic cultures, Soviet officials tended to treat rural religion as relatively harmless. Residents of several Mari villages recalled that prayer ceremonies continued throughout the Soviet era, especially in the more remote districts, often with the tacit knowledge of local party and collective farm officials. Even atheists eventually began to find redeeming features in religion’s capacity to sustain the traditional communities whose demise was increasingly lamented during the final decades of Soviet socialism (Solov'ev 1987). With the onset of perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Solov'ev reinvented himself as a scholar of nationalities questions. In a 1991 brochure entitled “Ethnic diversity is our wealth,” he presented religion as a tool for preserving “national” culture, praising Paganism in particular as “the deepest and most natural merging of the religious and national elements of spiritual culture” (Solov'ev 1991: 116).
This softening of atheist positions paralleled intellectual trends toward a greater valuing of prerevolutionary and folk heritage, which began during the Brezhnev era (Arutiunian et al. 1992: 324–331; Garrard and Garrard 2008: 93–97). But even as religion found a more and more comfortable niche as an integral component of ethnic traditions, the steadfast atheist Solov'ev retained his sense that strengthening communal bonds was not its only effect. When I interviewed him (then vice dean of the faculty of law of Mari State University) in 2005, he first acknowledged that atheists had underestimated the link between religion and ethnic solidarity. But then he added another thought, which pointed in the direction of religion as radically asocial, suggesting a different reason that it proved difficult to eradicate. Citing Marx, Solov'ev said that he had always understood that some people still needed the “opium” of religion, even if he himself did not. For instance, a war widow could find in religion “what society cannot give her”—the joy of a relationship with God to compensate for her loneliness (never mind that it is an imaginary relationship, he was quick to add).
Solov'ev refers to what scholars of religion have described as the “double movement” of religion, horizontally connecting people and (for lack of a more multidimensional spatial imagination) vertically connecting them to something other-than-human (Lincoln 1994: 2–3). More keenly perhaps than many disengaged theorists of religion, atheist activists felt the tension between these two movements, because their attempts to replace and reorient the horizontal bonds between humans were threatened by the claims of the extrasocial dimension. In the dilemmas of officials and empirical scholars, we see the struggle between the sociocentric humanism of secularizing projects and religion’s capacity to infuse life with considerations beyond human sociality. This tension is in play when secularizers in different places worry about the divisive effects of religion, making their apprehensions more than just figments of the enlightenment imagination.
Coming full circle to the official correlation between recognized ethnicities and “traditional” religions in post-Soviet Marij El, the once-secular festivals of sabantuj and peledysh pajrem have comfortably included religion since the early 1990s. When the festivals are celebrated in Joshkar-Ola on Russian Independence Day (June 12), each in a separate park, Chimarij and Muslim dignitaries bless their respective festival grounds. Only the Russian celebration, berëzka,54 lacks the presence of an Orthodox priest. The Orthodox diocese is wary of equating itself with Russian folklore and, unlike other groups, has the institutional resources to maintain a public presence almost on its own terms. Religious events not subsumed under the label of ethnic culture are carefully excluded by the city administration: in 2001, an application by the Charismatic Protestant Joshkar-Ola Christian Center to put on an evangelizing concert for the June holiday was denied.
From the perspective of the Volga region, the Soviet secularization process involved the construction of a public sphere in which there was no place for religion either as an instrument of social cohesion or as a means to open human society to nonhuman forces. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, politicians have been seeking the benefits of religion-as-cohesion while remaining suspicious of the destabilizing potential of extrasocial commitments. The sense that religious commitments can foster and reinforce social divisions has thus outlived the official promotion of atheism.
Soviet approaches to atheism drew on Marxist ideological dicta, but also evolved as the transformative promises of this ideology came up against the tenacity of religion in social life. As Christopher Brittain has argued in a thoughtful critique of Talal Asad’s genealogical approach to the secular, it is just such “contextual tensions” within religious and cultural politics that get overlooked when scholars understand the secular “as primarily an ideological myth, rather than a concept with deep material and social roots” (2005: 158, 162–163; see also Das 2006). Taking the analysis beyond an identification of broad intellectual continuities with enlightenment discourse, a detailed view of the Soviet secularizing project helps us see the complex adjustments made by political actors as their understandings of ideological aims encountered their interpretations of social reality. In particular, the tribulations of secularist thought in the face of a religiously diverse region such as the Middle Volga suggest that it is no accident that secularist solutions emerged in the twentieth century in several successor states of multiethnic empires, notably Turkey, India, and the Soviet Union. The ideologies espoused by political reformers in these diverse parts of the world may well contain echoes of the trauma of the European wars of religion. But it also seems worth considering how each movement diagnosed local religious differences and affinities, the tensions among neighboring populations, and the degree to which these threatened national integration.55
The processes of expulsion and violence by which modernist secularizers established themselves are warning enough against any idealization of secular imaginaries (Aktar 2003; Husband 2000; Mueggler 2001; Pandey 2003). Even in the comparatively benign times that are the focus of this book, attempts to pressure the Soviet population into adopting a “scientific world view” remained above all a way to buttress the Communist Party’s sovereign right to define the qualities required of comrades within the Soviet polity. This recalls a basic question that underlies much of the recent interest in Carl Schmitt’s notion of political theology (de Vries 2006), and that also provides the critical impetus for Asad’s genealogies of the secular: is it possible to construct a political vision that does not have “theology” lurking within it as some form of mystified authority that eludes collective human agency and reason?
Atheist activists were occasionally troubled by this question in their efforts to construct an exclusively human society. Although remaining within the confines of official Soviet discourse, their debates about legitimate and illegitimate methods can illuminate dilemmas of transformative authority in other settings as well.