[M]aterial force must be overthrown by material force; but theory, too, becomes a material force when it takes hold of the masses.
—Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction”
The task of the methodician is to link theory with practice.
—A. V. Fomina, methodician at the Center for Folk Creativity, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Marij El, April 2005
And so go, teach all peoples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
—Matthew 28:19 (Russian Synodal Bible translation)
Political decision makers in Moscow were anxious to have life on the Middle Volga conform to a vision of union-wide social solidarity, but they were not always interested in the intricacies of local religious life as reported by Commissioner Nabatov. In the academic world, the empirical sociologists of the 1960s and ’70s were also often criticized for burrowing too deeply into accidental facts instead of finding ready-made answers in Marxist-Leninist philosophy.1 Both Nabatov and the sociologists found a more responsive audience among a particular group of applied intellectuals: instructors whose task was to assimilate knowledge about religion for the purpose of promoting an atheist society. In 1950, Nabatov was invited to join first the Mari division of the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge, then its newly founded atheist section. Although the Council for Religious Cult Affairs prohibited its commissioners from openly engaging in atheist propaganda, he prepared the texts of several lectures on Mari religious life for the society and for the lecturers deployed by the regional party committee, materials which were then used by other activists.2 The sociologist Viktor Solov'ev, born in 1934 in a Mari village in a northeastern district, started his public career as a teacher and lecturer for the regional party committee. After obtaining his academic degrees, he served for a long time as the liaison between the party lecturers and the Knowledge Society. Both men thus combined political ambitions with an interest in understanding the social implications of religious traditions, and both found receptive partners among propagandists of atheism.
Charged with closing the gap between the fragmented present of religious neighborliness and the union-wide comradehood that the Soviet Union proclaimed as its ideal, atheist propagandists needed information about religious life in order to convince others of its harmfulness. These specialists, who turned expert knowledge into teachable information with practical effects on people’s lives, represent a type that has reappeared in post-Soviet religious life. In both contexts, the tasks of ideological transmission promoted a concern with methodology as the crucial link between recognizable facts and changing ways of life, between knowledge and behavior, theory and practice. The organizations these methodicians served, whether secularist or religious, took didactic interactions as a structuring principle, assigning an intrinsic value to teaching as a transformative and mobilizing experience not only for those taught, but also for the teachers themselves. In Marx’s terms, they saw pedagogical method as the path to making theory “take hold of the masses,” and considered the grip to be firmest when teaching itself became a mass activity. The preoccupation with didactic methods is thus a key affinity between Soviet atheist and post-Soviet religious practice, and has had an effect on the “ecclesiology” of some secularist and religious groups: their doctrine about the nature of their community and the mechanisms that hold it together. In particular, the network of teacher-student relationships, held together by methodical instructions, was a Soviet way of organizing social relations that had a curious afterlife in religious practice.
Affinities between Soviet and post-Soviet methods of mobilization are not limited to religious life, but have also been noted in civic activism and political movements (Hemment 2009; Kurilla 2002; Phillips 2008). But because of the irony of seeing religious activists benefit from skills they gained in working to build a militantly secularist culture, the interplay between atheism and religion brings the many meanings of affinity into sharpest focus: a long shared history has brought distinct cultural forms to resemble one another, but has also equipped each side to oppose and deny the other more effectively.
In the Soviet Union, the task of turning theory into practice through pedagogical methods was so ubiquitous that a separate profession was devoted to this problem. The metodist was an expert in designing, organizing, and moderating didactic events, who might be employed by the Ministry of Culture, the party or Komsomol department for propaganda and agitation, a library, a museum, a culture club, or a public park. Although the equivalent in U.S. terminology would be a director of programming or an events manager, methodician best preserves the connotation of someone whose expertise is in applying, developing, and disseminating ways of engaging others in self-transformative behavior. These were the people who wrote and consumed books and brochures with titles such as “The forms and methods of scientific-atheist propaganda” and “Forms and methods of visuality in propaganda,” a genre of Soviet advice literature that proliferated in the postwar decades.
While I have found no explicit discussions of the history of the profession of methodician, historians have dated to the 1920s the emergence of the “festival expert,” in charge of organizing mass celebrations and smaller-scale events (Rolf 2006: 72). These experts drew on the influence of various strands of prerevolutionary reformist cultural practice, from Wagnerians (Clark 1995) to movements for workers’ education (Plaggenborg 1996), as well as on more recent developments in Soviet psychological and pedagogical research. Organizations of “science popularizers” (Andrews 2003), whose activities also had prerevolutionary precedents, likewise carved out an important niche in Soviet society for specialists in public pedagogy.
But the concern with method was not limited to people whose official job was methodician, nor to professional pedagogues in schools and universities. From the literacy campaigns of the 1920s to Komsomol groups and the party study circles of the Brezhnev era, Soviet society presented numerous occasions where people of all walks of life passed on acquired knowledge to others. This could happen among peers—for instance, when a member of a workplace study circle on political economy was asked to summarize the week’s topic in a presentation (doklad or referat; see Kelly 2001: 274) or when the workers of a factory were encouraged to design and contribute to a wall newspaper (Kelly 2002). Or the setting could be more stratified, when someone considered to be of higher political consciousness or higher expertise was sent to work with a less enlightened audience. Examples include a teacher or university instructor lecturing at an enterprise, university students or factory workers going to the countryside to talk about the importance of upcoming elections, city women modeling modern standards of dress and hygiene to female collective farm workers, and village teachers helping the local collective farm organize a festival.
Many authors have noted the ubiquity of didactic elements in as seemingly diverse areas of Soviet life as the theater, courtrooms, and public demonstrations, indicating the amount of institutional energy that was devoted to creating, expanding, and evaluating networks of instructors and peer facilitators (Benn 1989; Bloch 2004; Northrop 2004: 154–160; Wood 2005). Just as the commitment to secularism links the Soviet Union with a number of twentieth-century regimes that sought modernization by constructing exclusively human societies, this pervasive didacticism presents an instance of what Francis Cody, writing about India, calls the “pedagogical function of development” (2009: 354): an institutionalized effort to bring the actual abilities and self-understandings of citizens into alignment with the characteristics that will be required of them as inhabitants of the promised future. In the postwar Soviet Union, networks of instructors were treated as tools of development, but also as indications of its successes: one measure of the effectiveness of an instructor often cited in methodical literature was how many students became instructors themselves (Chernykh 1967: 24; Gorokhov 1974; Moiseevskaia 1961; Vershlovskii and Lesokhina 1968). The advice literature encouraged methodicians to think of themselves as both instruments for developing the population and ideal end points of such development.
Because of the association of religion with “backward” and “isolating” forms of sociality, atheist propaganda was an integral part of developmental pedagogy. But regardless of the disciplinary content of the methodicians’ teaching, seemingly technical questions of method—how to transmit knowledge in such a way that it would affect behavior—dominated the self-reflections and mutual interactions of amateur as well as professional methodicians. The Knowledge Society, with its broad mandate of disseminating politically useful knowledge, was also a major source of methodical awareness among the population.
After the Knowledge Society replaced the prewar League of the Militant Godless as the primary agent of atheist propaganda, disseminating atheism became a small part of the broader aim to popularize knowledge on topics as diverse as Communist Party history, foreign policy, scientific innovation, and literature.3 By denouncing the anticlerical tactics of the league as counterproductive, the new organization politicized methodological choices. But the quest for better methods also came from the society’s own membership. Though officially voluntary, participation in the Knowledge Society could open up career and travel opportunities for teachers, university instructors, and physicians who joined, and could also be imposed as an assignment on members of the intelligentsia who were Communist Party members.4 Since not all of them had experience presenting scientific discoveries and political developments to audiences whose educational level widely diverged from their own, many lecturers needed practical guidance.
In some ways, the circulation of methodical directives helped Soviet mass organizations bridge the gap between local neighborly concerns and the centralizing claims of state sovereignty. Annelise Riles (2000: 90–91) remarks that commitment to a common aesthetics of rule-bound process and form enables United Nations NGO consultations to bridge several levels of geographic scale without foregrounding contradictions between “local” and “global” concerns. But the UN networks describe their main purpose as “sharing” information, whereas participants in Soviet didactic networks seemed more interested in how those higher up wanted them to use the knowledge they already had. At a 1956 seminar of the Knowledge Society, for which atheist propagandists from various parts of the Soviet Union had gathered in Moscow, a representative from the Tatar ASSR stated that methodical directions from Moscow were needed more than finished lecture texts, because members of the regional sections had sufficient expertise to furnish the content of lectures themselves.5 Eight years later, a lecturer from a state farm in the Moscow region made the same point at a seminar for rural propaganda workers. What rural lecturers needed was not information of the kind they could find in newspapers, but “such literature that would help people give up their belief in religions once and for all [okonchatel'no razuverit' v religii]…. I say [to believers]—god does not exist, and they say to me—prove it, and I don’t have any proof [mne nechem dokazat'].”6 By asking how to operationalize his knowledge, the lecturer shifted responsibility for the success of his efforts to faraway Moscow, while affirming his own theoretical expertise.
Methodical directives thus gave a sense of central direction to the task of transforming vastly different locales. Local propaganda workers did much of the day-to-day work of planning and putting on events on required topics. What they demanded from the center was, above all, prompts that would make their own efforts produce the desired effects—the argument that would shatter all belief in religion, the proof of God’s nonexistence that would end all counterquestions.
From the point of view of the center, method was a way to assert control by prescribing aims and giving general instructions for attaining them, without having to provide all the resources or overseeing all the steps. From the point of view of the lecturer, the concern with method arose in part out of the peculiar position of popularizers: they had to disseminate information without being able to change it. Printed lecture texts from Moscow were helpful, a natural scientist from Chita in the Russian Far East said at the 1956 seminar, but they did not answer such basic questions as how to explain to a person with an elementary school education or less “that protein, just through its chemical potentialities, could become the primary carrier of life.”7 He recounted the plight of a lecturer who attempts to deliver a lecture with a standard narrative of the progress of science, but runs into unanticipated queries:
These questions, after all, are in need of a particular methodical format [nuzhdajutsja v opredelennoj metodicheskoj razrabotke] and it is here that the lecturer runs into particular problems. From Aristotle to our days the lecturer tells his story and everything works out fine, works out splendidly, here it is quite possible to bring in a certain atheist element, but the moment they start to ask you questions—but what is protein, that is where the searching starts. Some consider it possible to say that protein consists of small particles formed by amino acids, but we have no serious methodical points of orientation.8
The dilemma of the lecturer consisted in having to answer for the contradictions of official doctrine without being in a position to reshape it. The question about proteins arose because of the official materialist definition of life as “the form of the existence of protein bodies,” which Soviet scientists borrowed from Friedrich Engels’s “Anti-Dühring” (Engels 1962a [1878]: 75; Graham 1972: 272–273). Note that the scientist did not challenge the definition of life with which atheist lecturers operated, but simply asked for guidance on how to make that definition meaningful to a lay audience. Some of the predicament grew from widespread uncertainty about political constraints during the post-Stalin Thaw, as indicated by the cautious formulation “Some consider it possible to say that …,” and an earlier speaker’s inquiry about whether or not to use the works of a particular biologist.9 In an organization whose charter treated political and scientific knowledge as part of a single mandate, asking for help in adapting scientific findings to different audiences and testing the limits of the politically permissible could be bundled into a single question about method.
The predicament of the popularizing lecturer is not restricted to societies with authoritarian regimes. More generally, the emphasis on method can be understood as part of what Theodor Adorno (1971: 75) calls “the immanent untruth of pedagogy”: the fact that its task is the circulation, not the production, of knowledge. There are a number of pedagogical systems that actively seek to restrict teachers’ capacity to question the underlying premises of what is being taught, including the “teacher-proof” curricula of test preparation in contemporary U.S. schools (Collins 2003: 32) and the uniform weekly Bible lessons studied in Seventh-day Adventist families and congregations worldwide (Keller 2005). As in the discussions of the Knowledge Society, method has a curious double role in these pedagogical approaches. On the one hand, it is never treated as an end in itself, but as a tool for helping didactic content reach diverse recipients. But with its promise of making content comprehensible and relevant to diverse audiences, method can so preoccupy the teachers that the underlying premises of what they are being asked to teach recede into the background.
In order to bridge the gap between the worlds of planners and researchers and the lives they seek to transform, methods themselves have to be able to circulate. Two features of the concept of method with which the Knowledge Society operated ensured this capacity for circulation: a method had to be specific to a particular audience, but should in principle be universally applicable. Universal applicability meant first of all that the method should produce the same results no matter who applied it, provided it was applied correctly. Disappointing results could only be caused by the insufficient preparation of peripheral practitioners. This was a common way of explaining the failure of universal schemes for improvement during the Khrushchev era, as exemplified in the analogy between a badly written lecture and badly grown corn made at the 1956 seminar. Alluding to one of Khrushchev’s pet projects—the promotion of maize as a food crop—one participant complained: “When we receive a lecture from the districts it is like a corn plant that is barely alive in the hands of an incompetent manager.”10
When correctly applied, a method should not only work independently of who was using it, it should also produce the same result in any audience of comparable social and educational background. The emergent empirical sociology of religion argued that different social backgrounds required specific methodical approaches (Pivovarov 1974). But the underlying idea was that human beings were so similar to one another that they would respond in the same way when given equal access to training and information—an idea that runs counter to some of Russia’s religious traditions.
A look at the actual methodical directives in printed lecture texts shows that the quest to adapt universal truths to the specifics of local life encouraged a fill-in-the-blanks approach to local realities. In 1962, the Mari division of the Knowledge Society reproduced 250 copies of a lecture by a historian from Joshkar-Ola, “The realization of the decisions of the March plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU—The concern of the whole party, the whole people.” Intended for the use of lecturers in the rural districts, the text is interspersed with pieces of “methodical advice for the lecturer,” all of which ask for specific local information. Where the lecture text talks about the contribution of the Mari ASSR to the task of provisioning the USSR with agricultural products, the lecturer is advised to “provide data on the condition of agricultural production, the plans for 1962 and the coming years in the district, collective farm, or state farm in which the lecture will be read.”11 In other places, directives recommend the insertion of the names of local progressive workers and enterprises, or ask for instances of assistance to agriculture rendered by the industrial enterprise or school where the lecture is delivered.12
In this understanding, the point of methodology is to help a speaker adapt content to make it comprehensible and relevant to the intended audience. The performative genre of the lecture as encounter between propagandist and audience remains constant. But the 1960s and ’70s also saw a renewed interest in a greater variety of genres, known as the “forms” of propaganda. Such experimentation had been a feature of Bolshevik political culture since the 1920s, when knowledge was made mobile with the help of mass spectacles, propaganda trains, mock trials, and innovative forms of classroom discussion (Clark 1995; David-Fox 1997; Kenez 1985; Petrone 2000; Plaggenborg 1996).
As a speaker at a 1959 meeting of atheist propagandists reminded the audience, forms were genres of performance common to all agitation work, while methods needed to be specific to the content they were intended to bring across.13 While there were indeed generic forms, such as film showings or evenings of questions and answers, some named forms were used exclusively to bring across atheist content, such as the Evening of Miracles without Miracles. In practice, instructions for performative genres (forms) circulated together with directives on how to adapt content to audiences (methods). If Knowledge Society planners were reluctant to acknowledge the link between content and performance, this speaks of their ambivalence toward emotional appeals in propaganda, and preference for the text-heavy lecture as the prototype of cultural enlightenment work.
The tension between central regulation and local improvisation inherent in the circulation of forms and methods offers a key to understanding what atheist work meant to those who conducted it. While some historians have described Soviet propaganda as ossified and boring, the constant pressure to produce quantifiable and reportable results did more than just create meaningless and ill-attended events designed to impress on paper more than in reality (Peris 1998). In order to produce the infamous paper trails, methodicians had to imaginatively engage with information about the work of institutions in other parts of the Soviet Union, because by reporting on copying and adapting new performance genres they could demonstrate that they were working to increase the effectiveness of their own events. Conferences, publications, and circulars were geared toward facilitating the exchange of experiences and the circulation of new forms. Officially encouraged copying helped preserve doctrinal orthodoxy, but it also encouraged a degree of innovation by asking cultural workers to adapt approaches from elsewhere to the needs of their communities. Akin to Malagasy Seventh-day Adventists following study guides designed in North America (Keller 2005), provincial Soviet activists could find pleasure in replicating correct procedures in spite of the lack of resources and the ambiguity of directions that separated them from the center.
The focus on procedural matters that comes with methodical training confirms Alexei Yurchak’s observation that late Soviet authoritative discourse was organized around an interest in performative rules rather than in the referential meaning of the underlying ideology. In his work on the political subjectivities of postwar Soviet generations, Yurchak claims that this “performative turn” happened shortly before Stalin’s death, and meant that there no longer was a metadiscourse in which ideological messages could be made explicit, questioned, or modified (Yurchak 2006: 74–76). The archival records of Khrushchev era atheist training sessions indeed lack any explicit debate or questioning of ideological matters. But what generated controversy during those sessions were precisely the matters of performance that, in Yurchak’s view, fostered a sense of unquestionable reality. At times, debates about the match between performance rules and desired outcomes came close to constituting a metadiscourse on ideologically inspired action, bringing to the surface divergent views about the ethics, rather than the truth value, of the socialist ideology people were being trained to promote.
An example of a form that aroused controversy is the Evening of Miracles without Miracles (Russian Vecher “Chudesa bez Chudes"), a demonstration of chemical experiments designed to pit the wonders of science against religious miracles. The first mention of this event in the files of the Knowledge Society is in the transcript of the 1956 seminar for atheist propagandists, where section chairman Khudjakov reports on a performance in Tashkent. The audience sat “holding their breath” for three and a half hours, watching an astronomer, a biologist, a physicist, and a chemist perform experiments. Among other things, they showed “concretely and convincingly how one form of energy turns into another.”14
The Tashkent demonstration seems to have been an attempt to show the mastery of science over the natural world without any direct reference to religious narratives. Khudjakov was impressed and recommended this form for use elsewhere. But the subtlety of propagating science without direct anti-religious polemics proved difficult to sustain. Three years later, a leading atheist from the Stavropol' region complained that audiences could fail to get the message that science and religion were incompatible and might understand the demonstration of humanly produced “miracles” as confirmation “that such miracles happened, and we, supposedly, merely demonstrate their mechanism, explaining how Jesus Christ turned wine into water [sic], and our Ivanov turns water into wine.”15
Different from Tashkent, the Stavropol' performance aimed at showing how religious narratives masked the involvement of human agents: it was no miracle that Jesus Christ turned one sort of liquid into another, because “our Ivanov”16 could do it too. This direct juxtaposition of science and religion was intended to expose the absurdity of the latter, but involved the risk that audiences would see the performance as a scientific confirmation of biblical narratives. Doubts in higher places notwithstanding, the Stavropol' variant seems to have been the one more widely used, probably because of the greater entertainment value of direct criticism and ridicule. In the Mari ASSR, Mikhail Nekhoroshkov, a biologist from the teachers college, traveled through the countryside with groups of students, giving atheist lectures followed by chemical demonstrations which showed how icons could be made to weep or bleed, why holy water did not become stale, where thunder and lightning come from, and how volcanoes erupt (Nekhoroshkov 1964).
These demonstrations were quite popular in the Mari ASSR and were carried out at least from 1961 to 1972, when recordings of a performance became the centerpiece of a radio feature.17 But there were also local critics, who deplored the mismatch between the intended results and the methods used. In an interview, the sociologist Viktor Solov'ev called the genre “vulgar anti-religiosity,” where anticlericalism and ridiculing of religious beliefs took the place of “elevating the level of the masses.” For the Moscow-trained social scientist, his older colleague’s approach smacked of the unrefined tactics of the League of the Militant Godless.
Defenders of the direct unmasking approach pointed to its greater emotional effect. In response to the critique of the Evening of Miracles at the 1959 seminar, a propagandist from Tambov argued that atheist methods had to be commensurable with the emotional pressures exerted by the church:
After all, the church people used these effects as a form for emotional impact, for impact on feelings. Who wouldn’t be able to see that when in the church the words “Christ is risen” appear, they affect ethnic [natsional'nye] feelings. That is why we carry out this chemical experiment with a talk where we show that the church people use some experiments for a particular goal, and others for more emotional impact. And this is how one has to approach this question.18
In this argument, the point of propaganda forms and methodical approaches was not simply to convey information, but also to affect audiences emotionally, and to make them aware of how emotions could be manipulated by less benign agents. There was no consensus among late Soviet atheist propagandists about the range of permissible emotional impacts, however. Recognizing that the orchestration of mass gatherings necessarily involves choices about some kind of “emotional regime” (Reddy 2001), scholarship on Soviet public events has long noted their relatively dry, intentionally rationalist character. Though encouraging a certain amount of joyful exuberance, Soviet propaganda theory avoided appeals to deep psychology (Benn 1989; Humphrey 1998: 399; Rolf 2006). Comparative work on Stalinist and National Socialist mass gatherings has interpreted the Soviet distrust of undirected emotions as an expression of the party’s didactic claim to transforming mass consciousness, rather than appealing to a popular unconscious in the fashion of the Nazis (Klimó and Rolf 2006).
In the postwar discussions of Knowledge Society members, one finds no explicit comparisons to Nazi practices and only occasional references to Stalinism as a negative foil helping to justify the society’s own approaches.19 However, in the ambivalent messages lecturers received about the proper balance of emotions and intellect in propaganda, one hears echoes of Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s successive denunciations of the policies of their predecessors as “personality cults,” and perhaps of an even more long-standing Soviet wavering between encouraging revolutionary “enthusiasm” and fearing its excesses (Breslauer 1982; Gorsuch 2000).
One training session on the art of oratory at a 1963 seminar summarized the authoritative view of what proper methods should accomplish by comparing the “world view” that was to be communicated to a light bulb. Only the lamp in a dark room allowed the owner to “correctly make use of [his] things, as a master of the house [po-khozjajski].”20 This vision of cultural enlightenment work as a lamp turned on in listeners’ heads, enabling them to gain instrumental mastery over their surroundings, seems to preclude any search for methods of psychological influence at other-than-rational levels. And yet, as shown by the lecturer who compared the tactics of “church people” and of the Evenings of Miracles, the assumed emotional appeal of religious liturgies remained a source of envy for Soviet methodicians. While never systematized into an explicit ethical discourse, debates about the appropriateness of particular methods did constitute a site of controversy and reflection, where participants articulated their ideas about the ends of cultural enlightenment work.
Another site where a metadiscourse of methodical didacticism emerged was in reflections on the purpose of training ever-growing numbers of people to be instructors. In retrospect, some former participants identified the performers, rather than the audience, as the real target of the desired emotional influence. One former member of Nekhoroshkov’s atheist student club, now a Lutheran pastor, remembered that the traveling atheists were well received by rural audiences, probably because people found the spectacular experiments interesting (he specifically remembered the volcano eruption) and because talented students were chosen to give musical and poetry recitals between the experiments. But in hindsight, he thought that the performances were less effective in converting the believers among the audience than in confirming student propagandists in their atheist convictions—“through emotion, feelings, logic.”
Analyses that pinpoint the instructors-in-training as the real objects of transformation are not restricted to post-Soviet hindsight. According to one report from Joshkar-Ola’s teachers college, written in 1960, training in agitation and propaganda was supposed to encourage students in the “development of creative initiative, self-activity [samodejatel'nost'], [and] the search for new, engaging [uvlekatel'nye] forms of agitational work.” Students would develop “a serious attitude toward their work” as they “systematically hold talks, readings, use works of fiction, illustrations, slide shows, magazines and other things.”21 This report mentions in one breath the ethos of responsibility for one’s work and the technical mastery of a battery of propaganda forms. If religion worked through deception and manipulation, the Soviet educational system produced people whose scientific knowledge, combined with such personal qualities as creativity and self-responsibility, would keep them secure from errors and help them take responsibility for their contemporaries.
Soviet assumptions about didactic skill treat it as an embodiment of the secular ideal of exclusively human communicative action. But methodical training turns out to be detachable from its atheist content, even as the assumptions about teaching as a tool of mobilization and transformation remain. The stories of post-Soviet religious methodicians show the surprising resilience of Soviet didacticism, which is now used for quite different transformative goals.
In post-Soviet Marij El, I encountered many people who would have been able to identify with the atheist propagandists’ concern with method. Almost all religious communities had clergy or active lay members who exemplified the didactic ethos described in the report on the student agitators: taking responsibility for a social ideal through striving to shape the views and behavior of others. These religious activists also shared the worries and questions of the participants in the atheist seminars: how to find a language for doctrinal truths that people would understand and put into practice. Some of them, such as the Lutheran pastor, had conducted atheist propaganda themselves at an earlier point in their lives. Even more had trained in Soviet cultural professions, including teachers, journalists, methodicians in cultural institutions, artists, and musicians. With only a few exceptions, they had not grown up in religious households and had typically taken up religious practice in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Some Soviet-trained methodicians readily acknowledged that the skills they had acquired in their secular training served them well in religious work. Those they instructed also recognized them as long-time teachers, and had particular expectations of them. The example of religious methodicians shows the success of Soviet efforts to inculcate teacherly qualities into large parts of the population, but also the collapse of the hope for purely human-driven transformations that had animated Soviet cultural enlightenment work. Using the resources offered by the religious traditions they had joined, converts conceptualized the relationship between the different periods of their lives in various ways.
Among those who found that their Soviet pedagogical or methodological training had served them well in religious work was another Lutheran, a woman born in 1968 who graduated from the foreign-language department of the teachers college and now served as a Sunday school teacher and translator. She claimed that “the methodology for foreign-language teaching and Sunday school are the same” and that her training for work with children helped in her new duties. Likewise, a retired instructor from the teachers college who coordinated courses for the Sisters of Mercy in the Orthodox diocese, found that it was quite easy to find physicians willing and able to teach basic medical skills to these devout laywomen. During the Soviet period all physicians had been required to “carry knowledge to the people” and give public education lectures, she explained.22 A retired child-care worker now leading a Baptist Bible study had been the propagandist in charge of political education sessions in her work collective. She stated that this experience had helped her learn the skill of gathering information on a specific topic and adapting it to the understanding of her audience.
As I have argued elsewhere, religious work in post-Soviet Russia is one of a limited number of areas where people can recycle the didactic skills they acquired in Soviet cultural work to make a modest living, while preserving values of economic disinterestedness and service to others (Luehrmann 2005). The various religious traditions offered different ways to resolve the moral quandary created by this change of ideological allegiance. Among the centrally determined topics the Baptist Bible study leader had covered as part of her former duties as a propagandist were atheist ones; she specifically remembered making a wall newspaper entitled “Sticky spider’s web,” devoted to the evils of religion and sectarianism. Whenever she mentioned this aspect of her past, she asked God’s forgiveness in an aside—“Forgive me, Lord, for this disgrace [bezobrazie].” But as a believer in predestined salvation, she also maintained that her previous work had been part of a divine plan to prepare her for her current church service.
The Lutheran deacon who founded the rural congregation of Ljupersola, a trained journalist and a well-known writer of Mari-language fiction, was more outspoken about the functional and moral equivalence of his work throughout his life. It was difficult, he admitted, to travel to schools now and speak about Lutheranism when people knew that he “used to speak about other things” (first as a Komsomol official, then as the editor of the youth newspaper of the republic, also under Komsomol control). But really, he added, he was still speaking about the same thing, about goodness, except that earlier he had been “without God.” But he felt “as if he, the Lord, had prepared me all my life—that may be putting it too grandly—for this work. Because now I feel at ease before an audience, I have all the skills, I know how to communicate, and people see me, understand me, accept me, listen to me.” For example, as the graduate of a boarding school for artistically gifted children, he was a good singer and skilled at designing hand-painted posters. “What God gave, that’s what I’m using now, only now, so late, but God knows when it is time. Back then, maybe, I didn’t have the life experience to talk to people. God knows better after all.” When I later told this man about my archival research with the records of the Knowledge Society, he said that, although it was certainly bad that the society conducted atheist propaganda, in principle its lecturers did good work by “carrying knowledge to the people,” and that it was a pity that no one was visiting the villages with lectures any more.
The Tatar woman teaching courses in Quranic reading to women in Joshkar-Ola’s mosque had a somewhat different biography from these retired professionals, but like them, she had once done cultural work within a Soviet bureaucracy. Born in 1942, she was the daughter of a war widow who could not afford to keep her in school beyond sixth grade, which forced her to give up her dream of becoming a teacher and work in a factory instead. Though refusing to join the Communist Party, she became active in the trade union and was put in charge of organizing samodejatel'nost'—literally, self-activity, meaning amateur concerts and recitals put together by collectives of workers to entertain colleagues or to enter into competitions with other enterprises. This places her among the amateur methodicians into whose training and supervision late Soviet organizations invested such efforts and resources.
Quite in line with the ideal of elevation through self-activity, this factory worker had acquired an authoritative demeanor which people in the mosque community recognized as the habitus of a teacher. One of her students and the woman who ran the mosque store both told me that she had been a teacher all her life. She also shared with a Soviet era teacher a high esteem for knowledge, but did not place it in contrast to blind religious faith, as a lecturer of the Knowledge Society might have done. For this Quran teacher, the transition between her secular and religious careers was marked by the acquisition of knowledge about Islam—she had had “faith” all her life, she said, but no “knowledge”—and it was only the time spent at a medrese in Kazan' after retirement that enabled her to acquire whatever authority she now had to teach others.
Not everyone saw a moral break between cultural and religious work. The director of the culture club in the village of Shin'sha, who was also the chairwoman of the local chapter of Mari Ushem, a Mari cultural association with a mildly nationalist agenda, had taken the initiative to revive Mari sacrificial ceremonies in her village. These had not been publicly conducted since the sacred grove was appropriated for use in the secular festival peledysh pajrem. Tellingly, the club director used the language of Soviet cultural administration when talking about the revival of religious ceremonies in the grove: “I asked the administration not to hold these mass events there, but, so to speak, to renew the work which was carried out before [kotoraja provodilas' ran'she], to clean the prayer grove.” By using the verb provodit' (to carry out), whose subject is typically a bureaucratic agency, the director assimilated ceremonies to such other forms of cultural work as mass festivals, classes offered in the club, or youth discos. Using another expression from the Soviet centralized networks of continuing education, she recalled identifying potential priests and sending them to the capital to study with the high priest of the republic “through the line of Mari Ushem” (po linii Mari Ushem).
Although she attempted to defer to the expertise of the “grandmothers” whose memories of past ceremonies she collected, the club director found that the villagers accepted the ceremony as one more kind of event which it was her job to organize. After having organized a ceremony on St. Peter’s Day23 (July 12) for the first time in 2001, she had expected that next year the grandmothers would take the initiative. But as July approached, people started asking why there weren’t any posters with announcements similar to those she had put up the previous year—“So there’ll be no St. Peter’s Day this year?” Again in the style of Soviet festival planners, the director stated that the ceremony on St. Peter’s Day was still in the process of “entering into tradition” (vkhodit v traditsiju).
If culture and religion seemed to merge easily for the club director, this may not have been the case for all residents. One of the old women of the village (to whom I was introduced by younger relatives who considered her an expert on Mari traditional religion) told me that if I wanted to know about the sacrificial ceremonies, I should ask the club director. If old women accepted the much younger club director’s role as organizer of the ceremony, this may indicate either that cultural work and religion were not opposed for them, or that the association with cultural institutions had so changed the event that they did not recognize it as the same ceremony that was conducted in their youth. Other Shin'sha residents told me that some old people refused to attend the ceremonies because they thought that the grove had been irredeemably desecrated by the Soviet secular holidays.
While such reservations may also have existed in other places, I encountered the staff of culture clubs and schools at work on village ceremonies in various parts of the republic: as assistants of the priest or as organizers who talked the collective farm chairmen into donating sacrificial animals and mobilized villagers into cleaning up the sacred grove before the ceremony in a subbotnik, the Soviet era term for a voluntary-compulsory community workday. If villagers expected the involvement of cultural workers in ceremonies, this indicates that they had come to accept a crucial part of the Soviet social imaginary: that of a village community in which neighborly relations were not sufficient, but that needed the mobilizing efforts of state institutions to fully constitute itself. As religious ceremonies were understood by analogy with forms of “society work” (Rogers 2009), they found a place in administrative pyramids in which all lines led to the capital, much as they did for the secular festivals.
All these methodicians drew on theological resources to conceptualize the relationship between their former and current work. For the Protestants, the idea of instantaneous salvation through newfound faith made their past morally neutral, available as a source of skills that posed no threat to a convert’s current standing in the church. The Quran teacher expressed more regret at not having fulfilled her obligations as a Muslim through much of her life, but cited her previous lack of knowledge and young age as attenuating factors. For those villagers who accepted the sacrificial ceremonies as a method for creating social cohesion, there was no moral problem in the transitions between sacred grove, festival ground, and back. But at least some villagers apparently thought that reviving the correct actions did not salvage the spoiled sacred place. Russian Orthodox theology presents even greater obstacles to assumptions about the primacy of methodical action over the inner qualities of people or places.
The Russian Orthodox Church does recognize teachers and cultural workers as keys to making religion matter in social life, but keeps them at a certain institutional distance. Since 1998, the diocese of Marij El has organized a yearly joint conference with the Ministry of Education on topics of religion and morality. The 2005 conference was held under the title “Secular education and the spiritual-moral traditions of Russia.” The archbishop required all priests to attend, and each of them brought a group of teachers from their parish to Joshkar-Ola. Seeing the small buses parked around the Socio-Political Center (formerly owned by the Communist Party and known as the House of Political Enlightenment) was a reminder of the cultural power wielded by the church through such modest but significant resources. Some parishes owned their own bus, others had access to buses owned by the district or village administration, and being able to offer teachers an excursion to the capital at a time of low salaries and rising transit fees was likely to make an impression.
As during Mari ceremonies in the villages, religion at these conferences coexisted quite comfortably with cultural work and education. Unlike Chimarij Paganism, the Orthodox Church had an institutional structure of its own and was able to partially set the agenda in its relationship with state institutions. Although the church hierarchy sought to collaborate with the state on issues of moral education, conversations with Orthodox clergy showed that their ideas about learning, personhood, and community were quite far removed from the Soviet understanding of method. It was from these clergymen that I heard the most pronounced skepticism against the transfer of methodical approaches to religious practice, helping me understand some of the assumptions built into the enthusiasm about methods I encountered elsewhere.
This skepticism existed even among clergy whose backgrounds also made them religious methodicians. The parish priest of one of the district centers had formerly been an instructor at the College for Cultural Enlightenment (Kul'tprosvetuchilishche, renamed the College of Culture—Kolledzh Kul'tury—in the 1990s). Several of his parishioners made a positive link between the fact that he was “a former cultural worker” and his qualities as a priest: he was well educated and “articulate” (gramotnyj), and he had a good voice and clear diction, making his services impressive and easy to follow. The priest also used a very didactic—and Soviet—simile in his Easter sermon, saying, “We should come to church as to a school, but instead we treat it as a House of Everyday Life.” The House of Everyday Life (Dom byta) in a Soviet city was a center for services such as hairdressing, watchmaking, repairs of household appliances, and other everyday needs of the population, and it often mutated into a department store in post-Soviet times. Although the exhortation not to treat the house of worship as a place of commerce has New Testament roots, the positive counterpoint in the biblical passage is not a school but a “house of prayer.”24 In his sermon, this priest thus accorded a moral dignity to the school that was reminiscent of Soviet didactic discourse. But when I interviewed him, he decisively denied that his training in the cultural education sector was useful for what counted most about church service:
Q: Some of your parishioners told me, our batjushka25 is a former cultural worker, that is why his diction is good, everything is easy to understand. Do you think that your worldly education has given you anything for church work, or are those totally different things?
A: I think it hinders me. Because spiritual education26 is different. The foundation, take the one I received—I after all received a Marxist-Leninist foundation. Philosophy, economics, political economy, scientific communism, and atheism, scientific atheism. But it is a surprising thing, it strengthens me still more in my faith in God. Knowing all that, knowing these things, knowing psychology, social psychology, that strengthens me still more in my faith. In this sense, yes, it helps. But for the service, it only hinders me.
Q: And for the service in the church in your view, what is the most necessary quality in a person?
A: To be without sin yourself. If I were totally without sin, if I never sinned, if I were pure of heart, that is, everything would be a hundred times better. A hundred times better. The most important thing is not the word, the most important thing is personal example, personal life, everything, everything. People feel this from far away. A saint can be felt from far away. And my goal, as of all Orthodox people, is to draw close to saintliness, draw close to God, that is the goal.
Another Orthodox parish priest, this one a former instructor of agricultural engineering, gave an equally anti-methodical answer when I asked how he would explain to a person who worshiped in both Mari prayer groves and Christian churches that these are not the same thing. There is no way to explain it, he said. If someone does not see in the heart what stands behind the outwardly similar practices, that person cannot be made to see it.
In both cases, the priests evaded my attempt to speak about the methodical skills of diction and persuasive argumentation by directing the conversation to the inner qualities of teachers and learners. Instead of assuming universal applicability, they insisted that the most ingenious methods would fail if the person applying them or the person on whom they were used lacked the requisite traits and dispositions. In reverse, if these were present, the specific methods applied were secondary. The qualities in question were not necessarily innate, but could be acquired through patient exercise, similar to the virtues of humility and submission to God which Muslim women in the Egyptian piety movement studied by Saba Mahmood (2005) sought to cultivate through prayer and dress. The cultural-worker-turned-priest speaks of life as a process of “drawing close to saintliness”; the other priest alludes to the notion of freedom of will in Orthodox theology, according to which one can become receptive to spiritual truth through deliberate work on oneself (Zigon 2011). Transformation here does not come from quickly following the steps outlined in a set of methodical instructions. Rather, it requires a process of self-fashioning through discipline and liturgical observance that potentially takes a lifetime, and the goal is to become a new kind of person rather than a bearer of skills. This is why the cultural-worker-turned-priest laments the wrong “foundation” he received in his personal development, and the time he lost pursuing other goals, and why he says that his secular education “hinders” him in his church service.
The swift conviction with which these priests repudiated my attempts to engage in the conversations on method that worked well with members of other denominations brought into focus some of the ideas underlying Soviet and post-Soviet didactic discourse. The notion of the learning process as a stimulus to which everyone responds in a similar way relies on assumptions about the essentially similar makeup of each human being, assumptions Louis Dumont has identified as a feature of modern individualism. The contrasting idea that people are qualitatively different from each other, whether by birth or by long, disciplined development (and for that reason complement each other in different tasks), is among the features of Dumont’s (1966) depiction of hierarchical society that make it so alien to modern social imaginaries. The priestly ideal that several Orthodox clergymen and laypeople described—a saintly hermit in a remote rural location endowed with powers of prophecy and second sight, by whose prayers any miracle was possible—had as little in common with the equalizing impulse of the Knowledge Society’s quest to make as many people as possible into teachers as it had with the Protestant notion of the priesthood of all believers.27
Involved here are different visions of personhood, but also different visions of the foundation and dynamics of a community, each bringing certain values of temporality and scale. Soviet methods, like the ones used by churches oriented toward growth through evangelizing, were designed to be transmissible in short training sessions in order to produce the many lecturers, study circle leaders, and methodicians needed to quickly integrate a population to follow a centrally defined vision. Even where the actual audience for the events organized by these specialists was small, their spatial, visual, and auditory layout treated spectators as an open-ended mass of strangers. Such audiences exist through being mobilized, a feature that unites modern publics and voluntaristic denominations (Warner 2002) and distinguishes them from the hierarchical imaginary, where the community precedes any of its parts. In light of this distinction, it is understandable why the club director in Shin'sha contrasted the Soviet era “mass festivals” (massovye prazdniki) with “religious festivals” (religioznye prazdniki). Religious rituals in a village might draw as many people as a Soviet mass festival, but they do not constitute their public through the number of individuals they attract—one member of a family might attend, for instance, and fulfill duties for relatives.
The same principle of hierarchical complementarity applies to Orthodox Christianity, as it was understood by lay believers in Marij El and explained in church doctrine. Different from the interchangeability of individuals gathered in a mass public, Orthodox ecclesiology contains a strong emphasis on the church as a hierarchy, where people are endowed with different capacities for attaining divine truths and have distinctive roles to play in order to obtain common salvation (Headley 2010). In the words of Hermann Goltz, interpreting the Corpus Areopagiticum, the anonymous but influential body of work of a sixth-century theologian, hierarchy is an “interlocking celestial and terrestrial order” representing “the ideal (final) condition that divine philanthropy has instituted for the salvation of fallen human physis.” In this social order, the capacity to see divine truths is “deflected” through the descending ranks, which are “adapted to the respective intelligences in their greater or lesser perfection” (Goltz 1974: 148). The church as an institution offers participation in this divine order, but without the expectation that every member will be able to be a teacher and transmitter of divine truths.
In the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church, this view of the primacy of the institution over its individual members helps make sense of the tribulations of clergy and believers under socialism. One history of Russian Orthodoxy in early Soviet Russia argues that the compromises made by the Moscow Patriarchate with the Bolsheviks starting in 1923 were a sacrifice on the part of the bishops of that time for the sake of preserving the institutionalized ritual life of the church, at the cost of compromising their own integrity. In the view of the author, a professional historian and ordained priest, what mattered was to preserve the church as a transhistorical entity “for the children, for the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren of those who had now abandoned the church hierarchy” (Mitrofanov 2002: 295). The value of the institution lies in the tradition of worship and spiritual experience it embodies (Florovsky 2003 [1963]), not in its ability to mobilize and train members at any given point in time.
But however eternal the church is imagined to be, it must still be animated by its living members. In Marij El, people became active as Orthodox Christians by performing and receiving what Goltz calls “hierarchical actions”: blessings (which are given by someone of higher status to someone lower down, for instance by a priest to a layperson or a mother to her children), mutual intercessory prayer, and virtuous acts that people performed for someone else’s benefit. When, after mass one Sunday, I joined a group of predominantly elderly women who helped clean the floor of Joshkar-Ola’s Russian Orthodox cathedral (a pious act said to procure the forgiveness of sins), one of the women said that she would be doing this for her grandchildren as long as she could, and then at some point they would have to do it for her. These acts constitute community not by asking people to go beyond their intimate relationships and address a public of strangers and potential recruits, but by transforming the meaning of these intimate connections. Mobilization through pyramids of teacher-student relationships attempts to reorganize neighborliness into universal comradeship. Instead, Orthodox hierarchical actions leave the apparent chaos of neighborly and kin relations intact, but superimpose the biblical understanding of the “neighbor” as one who gives and receives care.
Of course, it is hard for contemporary Orthodox clergy to completely ignore the promises of didactic method for revitalizing community life, and pedagogical conferences are only one way in which the diocese cultivates allies among cultural and educational workers. As far as the priests are concerned, we might consider their reticence about the very idea of methods as an outsiders’ version of the insiders’ tribulations about appropriate methods that we saw among the Soviet propagandists. By comparison, some of the didactic models that come to post-Soviet religiosity from abroad ask few questions about permissible means in transformative efforts, treating increases in membership as ends in themselves.
One of the Protestant churches that sprang up in Joshkar-Ola in the first half of the 1990s is the Christian Center, founded as a mission project of a Charismatic church in Beaumont, Texas. A missionary from Texas conducted services and Bible studies in a rented auditorium space from 1993 onward, and donations from his home congregation eventually helped buy the building of the disused cinema Mir (Peace) in the eastern part of the city. Although its membership was small (less than fifty people attended Sunday services on average during the time of my fieldwork), the Christian Center epitomized everything that seemed wrong with Protestantism to city officials and Orthodox clergy. Its evangelizing strategies were aggressive and loud, without respect for preexisting Christian traditions or established religious-ethnic boundaries. Its worship style included speaking in tongues and dancing to rock music, which seemed to mark it as just as foreign as its initial funding sources. But the popular appellation “the American Center” notwithstanding, by the end of the 1990s the church maintained only loose connections to its American founders. The last American pastor had paid only infrequent visits due to visa problems, and had finally found a permanent replacement in 2004 in a young Russian man from Joshkar-Ola who had joined the church as a teenager. Now in his late twenties, the young pastor had spent a few years in Moscow, where he received no formal theological training but had served and studied at a church named Triumphant Zion, a mission of the Embassy of God in Kiev, a Charismatic megachurch founded by the Nigerian Sunday Adelaja (Wanner 2007). After returning to Joshkar-Ola, the pastor maintained spiritual and educational bonds with Pastor Aleksandr Dzjuba of Triumphant Zion, and through him with Adelaja, and sought to reorganize his church according to their model.
Much of this model was concerned with making relationships of spiritual learning and teaching into structural principles of church growth. In the tradition of Pentecostal Protestantism,28 the members of the Christian Center believed that publicly asking Jesus to forgive one’s sins was sufficient for salvation, but that a Christian would reap even greater earthly and heavenly rewards for a life of service to God’s kingdom. In order to become fit for service, two things were necessary: receiving the baptism of the Holy Spirit (which manifested itself in the gift of praying in tongues) and improving oneself through study and spiritual discipline. As a precondition for successful evangelization, the Embassy of God and its affiliate churches emphasized the need to obtain God’s blessing through human intermediaries endowed with spiritual and social authority. According to one of its junior pastors, the mission of Triumphant Zion in Moscow was to offer the “apostolic protection” of Pastor Sunday to the many churches in Russia that, like the Christian Center, had been founded by Western missionaries and then left to their own devices. “It is good when a church has one apostolic protection, and this protection constantly watches over [bljudet] the growth of the church, the development of the church. That makes for healthy growth of the church.” Western missionaries had not inculcated the same respect for spiritual authority: “They deserve thanks for planting churches, but they didn’t give them moral training [ne vospitali].”
In order to institutionalize spiritual protection at all levels, Triumphant Zion promoted a model for church growth that all involved considered to be a Western import, although again the claim was that its American popularizers did not grasp its full spiritual significance. Under the G-12, or “cell church,” principle, twelve church leaders (known in Russian by the Anglicism lidery) receive teachings directly from the pastor and pass them on to members of small prayer groups with which each leader meets once a week. Each member of such a “cell group” (jachejka) or “house group” (domashnjaja gruppa) is in turn encouraged to find his or her own “disciples” (ucheniki) either among less experienced church members or among the unconverted, drawing them into the church. Ideally, groups should split once they reach more than twelve members—the number of Jesus’s disciples and, as the young pastor at the Christian Center explained, the maximum number of students to which any teacher could realistically transmit his or her knowledge. As the links between the Christian Center and Triumphant Zion strengthened, the church in Joshkar-Ola struggled to move to the G-12 principle from a less strictly ordered set of house groups that met on Tuesday nights in various parts of the city.
Cell groups at the Christian Center were in many ways reminiscent of Soviet study circles, but the complex network of international circulation through which the form had come to Joshkar-Ola shows how deceptive such resemblances can be. During my year-long stay in 2005, I was invited to attend the house group that met in the church building itself, which was attended by approximately eight long-standing members who lived close by. Based on experiences with small groups in other Protestant churches, I had expected the group to be engaged primarily in Bible study. But at the first meeting the group members, after an opening prayer and some chatting over tea and cookies, all took out the notes they had taken on the previous Sunday’s sermon on the topic “The foundation of your victory,” and proceeded to discuss what the pastor had tried to tell them. They studied the Bible verses mentioned in the sermon, which ranged from the story of King David’s adultery with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11) to a verse from the epistles saying that God judges without reference to the person, but by the deeds of each (1 Peter 1:17). The focus was on understanding the pastor’s intention in grouping the passages together, and on making decisions about applying the sermon’s message to one’s life. When the discussion veered too far, the group leader (a woman in her forties who taught English at the technical university) injected quotes from the sermon to draw attention to the pastor’s core points about vigilance against sin: “he [the pastor] pronounced the following phrase several times: When Jesus died, God did not take off the robe of the judge,” and “[the pastor] said several times: flies don’t land on a hot skillet.”
The group referred to this activity as razbirat' propoved' (taking apart the sermon), using terminology familiar from Soviet and post-Soviet education. There, razbirat' temu (taking apart or going over the topic) meant a presentation and discussion of the day’s lesson as prescribed in the curriculum. The participatory structure of such a lesson—based on student presentations and joint discussion rather than lecture and rote learning—was akin to the study circles (kruzhki) and seminars that Russian socialists had developed in exile in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and brought with them into the Soviet educational institutions founded in the 1920s (David-Fox 1997: 122, 170). Workplace-based study circles expanded during the Khrushchev era, guided by a centrally determined curriculum and textbooks (Benn 1989). The following excerpt from an evaluation, conducted in 1960, of the study circle on political economy attended by staff and faculty of what was then the Polytechnical Institute gives a taste of the method:
Left over from the last class meeting was the question: “the role of banks in socialist society.” They took apart that question [Razobrali etot vopros], but without bringing in new material. They started a new topic: “Socialist reproduction and national income.” They took apart the questions: 1) The essence of socialist reproduction. 2) The gross social product. The participants were prepared for the lesson within the bounds of the textbook on polit-economy…. The passivity of the leader manifested itself in the fact that he underestimates the significance of introductory words, [simply] asking the participants “what question is left from the last class?” and “please present” [pozhalujsta vystupajte].29
Though set in the apparently open-ended form of a discussion, the aim of “taking apart” a textbook topic or a sermon is less to question, alter, or expand its content than to fully understand it and apply it to contexts of everyday life, a process whose appeal Eva Keller (2005: 129) aptly compares to that of completing a jigsaw puzzle and seeing the pieces come together in a predetermined design. In line with the role of methodicians as popularizers of received knowledge, the leader in the above quote is criticized for “passivity” because he does not provide proper guidance to the students, neglecting to steer the discussion and summarize key points. A similar concern with stimulating grassroots engagement while maintaining central control was seen in the sermon study groups at the Christian Center. This is how the young pastor explained the practice:
It’s about the thoughts that, for example, I think that God wishes that they would start working in the church. For example, I see that God moves the pastor to lead in a certain direction. And in order to lead, a word is necessary [neobkhodimo slovo], that is, we need to know where we are going, are we going in the right direction or not. For that reason, we take a particular topic, each month is distinguished by a particular topic. Every sermon has its topic within the framework of this big given topic. And to make sure that the people can also move in that direction, for that reason they take apart the sermon. But there is nothing so strict about this that all would have to subscribe to the thoughts that I say…. The foundation in any case for all discussions is the Bible; it is the priority, the authority. The pastor can err, that’s for sure. So sometimes even people can give advice, say that something is wrong. That is normal. That is what the Protestant movement consists of, that everyone has an opinion. But some kind of order needs to exist, and some kind of basic direction has to be given by the pastor, and discipleship needs to be maintained, I think, on all levels. But again, there should be freedom, only there shouldn’t be any extremes in either direction.
With its similarity to Soviet study circles, the authoritarian didacticism of this church might appear to be a compromise between the Protestant principle that “everyone has an opinion” and a post-Soviet, or even Russian, reluctance to give up order and common direction. Going further into the history of Soviet study circles, political scientist Oleg Kharkhordin traces their way of deploying collective authority back to Russian Orthodox traditions. He argues that the Soviet collective, as theorized by Stalin era pedagogue Anton Makarenko, with its “relations of responsible dependency” and practices of mutual evaluation (Kharkhordin 1999: 91), represents a distinctive Russian-Soviet path to self-fashioning, different from the introspective practices of Western Europe. Drawing on Foucault’s work on the importance of the private confession common in Catholic Europe for the formation of the Western European subject, Kharkhordin argues that Orthodox monastic practices of public penance and collective “unmasking” (oblichenie) created Russian and Soviet selves less concerned with psychological depth than with defining themselves in relation to others (228). In his argument, party cells are secularized versions of Orthodox monastic communities. Thus, Russian Protestant church cells might appear as newly theologized outcomes of a local tradition of collective control.
One problem with this idea is that many Bolshevik methodologies of collective study were pioneered before 1917 among exiled Russian social democrats in Western Europe. The traditions of the European Left and reform pedagogy constitute more obvious influences than Russian Orthodoxy (David-Fox 1997: 26–37; Scherrer 1978). Post-Soviet cell churches also find their inspiration outside of Russia: all the features of collective responsibility and mutual surveillance that might seem reminiscent of communist and perhaps even Orthodox collectivism are already part of the model that has reached Russia from Western Christendom and its extensions in the global south. The young pastor himself named two inspirations for cell groups in his church, the church of Yonggi Cho in South Korea and Brazilian churches organized along the G-12 principle. Some of the literature on church organization sold in the Christian Center and in related Moscow churches was written by U.S.-based authors such as Larry Stockstill, whose The Cell Church (2001 [1998]) was translated and published by Word of Life, a Charismatic church in Moscow.
Stockstill, the pastor of a megachurch in Colorado, describes cell groups as an ideal structure for a large, growth-oriented church because they serve several crucial functions simultaneously. As small groups meeting according to a centrally coordinated timetable and with leaders who report back to the pastor, they make possible a personal “ministry to each member of the body of Christ,” as the subtitle of Stockstill’s book proclaims, while realizing the principle of “flexibility and accountability” (Stockstill 2001 [1998]: 136; see also Hornsby 2000; Hurston 2001). As places where members can invite their unconverted friends and to which newly converted church members are referred, they serve as tools for evangelizing and retaining new members, and thus as instruments for church growth. Because of the expectation that members of a group will eventually become leaders of their own cell when the existing group grows and splits, the cells also serve the “formation of leaders” (110). Reminiscent of Kharkhordin’s analysis of individuation through collective evaluation, it is the cell’s responsibility to “analyze the spiritual gifts of its members, to help them take their place in the church” (34). For the content of the weekly meetings, Stockstill recommends the same mix of socializing, prayer for individual needs, discussion of the week’s sermon, and development of service projects that was practiced in Joshkar-Ola, justifying the focus on the pastor’s ideas by the need to keep cell group leaders from trying to elaborate their own teachings (154).
Stockstill’s book and descriptions of discussion groups in Latin America and South Korea (D. Martin 1990: 143–144; D. Martin 2002: 13; O’Neill 2010: 26) show that there is nothing particularly “post-Soviet” about the cell group’s aim to steer the circulation of knowledge while developing personal responsibility through collective accountability. In a variety of secular and religious contexts, such didactic structures are a way to put the benefits of face-to-face community to the service of a fast-growing organization. In the eyes of the members of Triumphant Zion and the Christian Center, what distinguished their cell groups from Soviet predecessors was the spiritual potency of a deferential teacher-student relationship that tied students not to a tradition of human knowledge, but to the leader’s divine inspiration. Although they credited American mentors with teaching these organizational principles, Russian Charismatics felt that the Americans missed part of their significance—another sign perhaps of the divine origin of ideas that could circulate even without human understanding.
The critique of lax American interpretations of teacher-student relationships was a major theme of Aleksandr Dzjuba’s visit to the Christian Center in September 2005, on the occasion of the church’s twelfth anniversary. The American legacies he singled out for criticism included first-name address and use of the familiar ty (you). The young pastor should be addressed with the formal vy, and church leaders and administrators by first name and patronymic in the usual Russian way of expressing respect. Leaders visiting from Moscow to hold workshops had to be thanked properly, so that they would come back. “I know that the Americans did not teach that, but we are in Russia now, it is time to return to natural life.”
One of Dzjuba’s aides went so far as to compare the young pastor to a prophet, whose teachings church members had to accept in the interests of their spiritual and material future. In search of a deeper understanding of deference and discipline, the Embassy of God and its affiliate churches often looked to guest preachers from an array of developing and Asian Tiger countries, such as the Jamaican Myles Munroe, the Korean Yonggi Cho, and the Singaporean Kong Hee. On one of his sermon tapes, Sunday Adelaja recommends such preachers as representing the future directions of God’s work in the world, while dismissing the books of well-known American Charismatics such as Kenneth Hagin, which deal with how to receive health and prosperity through faith, as good for the first steps of the newly converted, but too simple for mature leaders.30 The secrets of effective church growth, he argues, should be learned from places where churches are attracting new members against great odds, among people who live in economic or political hardship.
The Embassy of God and its affiliated churches could afford to be eclectic in their inspiration because the origin of an organizational principle mattered less to them than the fact that it had proven successful elsewhere. The young pastor described the search for appropriate methods as a process of abstracting basic principles from foreign models and biblical texts, looking for secrets of divine inspiration:
There are principles, certain biblical principles. I think there are biblical principles that stand behind leadership, for example the principles of Jesus’ success. In any case, behind any success there is a secret, there has to be a secret of some kind. Just by itself it doesn’t happen. So when we discover these secrets, they begin to work in our lives. But the main source of success is God. Success comes when a person listens to God and follows Him.
The implication of this characteristic mix of scientific positivism and biblical universalism (see also Sullivan 2009) was that it did not matter who designed a method and for what purpose, because the fact that it worked meant that it had God’s approval. Somewhat ironically then, the idea of divine inspiration precluded ethical reflection on methods in this group.
While lines of actual historical influence are complex, with multiple crossings from West to East and back, one of the reasons that cell groups work in Russia is doubtlessly that there are many people who honed their discussion-leading skills in Soviet study circles. Unlike Marshall Sahlins’s “structure of the conjuncture” (1985), where actors interact with elements of a foreign cultural system as if they were functional equivalents of something familiar, the affinity between study circles and cell groups presents a case where misrecognizing the equivalences allows people to continue acting in familiar ways.
A significant difference between postwar Soviet study circles and cell churches is that the former never theologized the teacher into a “prophet,” something that would have been easily criticized as a Stalin-type “cult of personality” after the Twentieth Party Congress. Where Charismatic gatherings eagerly used elements of music, coordinated movement, and the mind-altering effects of fasting and sleepless nights to make the audience receptive to their messages, attempts to stir up mass exuberance met with suspicion among Soviet methodicians. If there is a point in identifying the elective affinities between Soviet and post-Soviet uses of method, it is not to establish a causal connection in which one element is the original and the other its copy or descendant. Rather, it is to see different axes along which method-talk can be compared: faith in standardized approaches to social transformation with rapid, predictable results animates Soviet atheist and Protestant mobilizations, but runs counter to Orthodox conceptions of hierarchical tradition. However, Soviet thought resembles Russian Orthodox and other regional religious traditions in another respect: they all offer resources for the ethical distinction between appropriate and inappropriate methods, while those branches of Protestantism that attempt to discern God’s will from the success or failure of human endeavors can ultimately encourage an instrumental ethics that equates what works with what is good (Weber 1922).
Beyond these axes of difference, what unites methodicians of all stripes is that their work forces them to pay close attention to the reality that they set out to change. To borrow terms from Stefan Plaggenborg, methodicians have to concern themselves with the “transformation and transformability of mental and physical constitutions,” rather than assuming the “interchangeability” of dispensable people and circumstances (Plaggenborg 1996: 40). Working at a nodal point between centralized institutions and neighborly politics requires artful compromises, a constraint that may help reconcile Adorno’s perception of the subservient powerlessness of pedagogues with the widespread suspicions about their manipulative power.
“Godless chastushki for all occasions,” 1962. Part of a series published by the Artists Union of the USSR, this poster uses the genre of popular teasing verses to portray deception and ignorance as causes of religious beliefs. “Miraculous” renewals of icons are actually caused by chemical solutions; a seemingly devout woman uses icons to hide her moonshine distillery; and a flight through the heavens is sufficient to convince even an old woman that God does not exist. [Courtesy of State Museum of the History of Religion, Saint Petersburg, SM 441/1]
A Mari family in the Morki district, 1945. The older woman in the back is wearing the pointed shymaksh headdress that Soviet campaigns in the 1920s had targeted for elimination. [Private collection]
Peledysh pajrem in the former sacred grove, Shin'sha village, early 1970s. The heads-carves worn by the women may be part of festive attire, but they may also indicate the women’s awareness of entering into a sacred space. [Private collection]
“At the crossroads.” In this cartoon from the campaign against religious holidays, an accordion player—an indispensable fixture at rural celebrations—tries to decide whether to go to a village with a church or to one with a sacred grove. The text above the drawing reads “In the summertime many religious holidays are celebrated, work days wasted.” The text below literally translates as “Where should I wander?” But the verb, podat'sja, also evokes poddat'sja, to get drunk. [Drawing by I. Baklanov, Marijskaja Pravda, June 25, 1960]
The grain-grower’s pledge, a secular coming-of-age celebration for collective farm youth, Sernur district, 1967. The sign in the back reads “Glory to those whose minds and hands forge the greatness of the motherland.” [Courtesy of State Museum of the History of Religion, Saint Petersburg, SM 2349/1]
The jury at the harvest festival of a collective farm in the Sernur district, 1967. Judging competitions was an intricate part of Soviet festivals. [Courtesy of State Museum of the History of Religion, Saint Petersburg, SM 2350/1]
“The way to space is open!” Instructions for setting up a poster wall with a rotating inset to showcase Soviet space exploration. Soviet cultural workers were skilled at creating this kind of self-made display. [From Bazykin and Komarov 1961]
