Between August 15 and 18, 1960, 110 enterprises and medical, educational, and cultural institutions across the city of Joshkar-Ola held assemblies of their workforces. On the agenda everywhere was a lecture on the topic “The communist education of the toilers and the overcoming of religious prejudices at the present stage,” followed by discussion and a resolution on the closing of the last functioning Orthodox church of the city, the Church of the Resurrection. The result was not surprising, given the mounting pressure to close houses of worship all over the Soviet Union in 1960 and 1961 (Chumachenko 2002; Shkarovskii 1995): all of the assemblies, representing 17,000 workers and white-collar employees, passed resolutions demanding the church be closed, many of them unanimously.1 At the request of the republic’s Council of Ministers, the USSR Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs confirmed the closing of the church on November 19, forcing the congregation to merge with that of the village of Semënovka, approximately five miles outside of town.2 The church building was demolished a few months later.
Although the result was predictable, the process of this church closing is perhaps more remarkable than it seems at first. Perfunctory as these assemblies may have been, it was no small feat to bring together thousands of workers at over a hundred locations in the city within a space of four days to listen to lectures on an identical topic, delivered not by radio, film, or television, but by dozens of human individuals, and to secure voices from among the employees formulating support of the resolution in a dogmatically acceptable but not uniform way. For this task of mass mobilization to succeed, local lecturers had to be able to understand the message behind the prescribed lecture theme and generate variations of it. Because of the risks of human error and misunderstanding in the reproduction of doctrinary truths, the success of attempts to make theory take hold of the masses could never be taken for granted.
Taking the workers assemblies of 1960 as a starting point, one can see how didactic networks create their own internal dynamics. Through a peculiar combination of flexibility and central direction, they seem to embody the change they are promising. Although didacticism is most powerful when the promise of future change has some resonance with present experience, it also transforms people’s perspectives on present reality in ways that those designing the curricula can never fully control. Through the rhetoric of reports and methodical trainings, didactic networks salvaged some of the commitment to transformation from the Khrushchev era and brought it into the Brezhnev era and beyond, preserving it as a value for religious revivalists to appeal to.
In order to understand the mechanisms by which didactic interactions draw participants into ideological projects, it helps to take seriously their promise of making both teachers and students into something they currently are not—more proficient, more skillful, more informed, more responsible. The forward momentum of pedagogical mobilization calls into question common views of Soviet society and modern educational systems, both of which are associated more often with stasis than with transformative movement. But especially in peripheral locales, networks of ideological instruction were one way in which people experienced their society as being in an ongoing process of transformation.
Scholarship on Soviet propaganda and cultural work often emphasizes the repetitive and normative aspects of this work, arguing that its main concern was to generate required paperwork (Peris 1998) or perform the subject position of the normal Soviet person (Yurchak 2006). This approach hinges on the assumptions that the official discourse was generally known and accessible, and that cultural and political activists had a certain bored mastery over it. But how did people learn what was expected of them? Deep into the postwar decades, documents from provincial archives paint a picture of ill-prepared methodicians only partially proficient in the discourse they were transmitting to the masses, and of overburdened training networks beset with misunderstandings. Participants at events such as the workers assemblies were not simply reiterating normative speech and behavior, they were also learning what a normal Soviet person was and how she should act.
While early research in the ethnography of education drew attention to the way in which schools reproduce preexisting social inequalities (Bourdieu and Passeron 1970; Philips 1982; Willis 1981; Wortham 1994), Soviet history shows that the opposite effect deserves equally critical scrutiny. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s (1979) work on the link between education, purges, and social mobility under Stalin reminds us that the capacity of mass schooling to propel people into new social positions can have even deadlier consequences than the conservative tendencies that worry analysts in other contexts. During the mass mobilizations of the Khrushchev era, the issue was no longer to create a new generation of elites that would be loyal to the Soviet government, but rather to train enough transmitters to help align popular activity with the ambitious plans proclaimed by the party. This was a time when young people were roused to participate in the virgin land campaigns to claim steppe lands for agriculture (McCawley 1976) and comrades courts and people’s patrols involved citizens in promoting communist morality at workplaces and residences (Field 2007).
Such initiatives set the tone for an increased expectation of change that peaked at the time of the 1961 Party Congress, which declared the construction of communism as being within the reach of living generations. Both expectations of radically different futures and didactic strategies of popular mobilization would be scaled back under the more bureaucratic style of Leonid Brezhnev, who succeeded Khrushchev in 1964 (Breslauer 1982; Taubman 2003). By 1970, it would not have been as important to generate evidence of popular demand for the closing of a church as it was in 1960.
But even as a toned-down claim, the commitment to education as a force of change survived into the era of stagnation. The numbers of students in the party and Komsomol systems of education, which had expanded dramatically under Khrushchev, were at first reduced, but then started to grow again under more strictly regulated curricular guidelines (Benn 1989: 135–138). A renewed campaign for secular festivals that started in 1965 still heralded “new revolutionary traditions,” although many had first been introduced in the 1920s (Smolkin 2009). Methodicians still had to report on using “new methods” and “new forms” of propaganda, and to portray didactic approaches to atheist propaganda as innovations over prewar popoedstvo (anticlerical “parson eating”), although most of the softer alternatives had precedents in the experimentation of the first decade of Soviet power (Andrews 2003: 110; Solomonik 1977: 3).
The rhetorical homage to newness was tamed by what Yurchak terms a “citational temporality,” where “all types of information, new and old, were presented as knowledge previously asserted and commonly known” (2006: 61). To solve the apparent contradiction, one might think of citation and newness as two aspects of a teaching interaction. Social interactions in training networks have a necessary openness toward the future, because part of their “felicity conditions” (Austin 1965: 14–15; Goffman 1983) is the assumption that, though at present the instructor is relatively more proficient and the students owe him or her a degree of deference, this imbalance will change through the process of learning. For example, linguistic analyses have pointed out how teachers address students as in some way already the accomplished speakers or professionals they are training them to become (Jaffe 2003; Mertz 2007). At the same time, classroom interactions are “anchored” to wider social and political frameworks (Goffman 1986 [1974]: 247). In the Soviet case, the institutional anchoring gives teachers as well as learners pressing reasons to pay attention to the content and form of official discourse: within pyramidal networks of training and supervision, “getting things right” could become an important measure of progress toward becoming a new kind of person. Just how much change was considered possible or desirable at a personal or social level differed at different times in Soviet history.
The anti-religious campaigns of the Khrushchev era were part of a general climate of anticipation of imminent social transformation (Paert 2004; Stone 2008), and show how didactic elements helped stir this anticipation while keeping it within disciplined bounds. When a 1954 Central Committee resolution unleashed verbal and physical assaults by members of the Komsomol against religious congregations, they were quickly criticized in a second resolution. A second campaign, which began in 1958 and lasted until 1961, emphasized “communist legality” in official interactions with religious organizations. Local administrations were urged to apply Soviet laws on religious affairs more stringently than had been the case since the war, leading to the closing of many houses of worship for alleged violations (Chumachenko 2002: 131, 161). The workers assemblies that led to the closing of Joshkar-Ola’s last functioning church fall into the time frame of the second campaign, and show the enduring importance of a didactically staged popular will for legitimizing administrative decisions.
Popular mobilization and legalistic discipline came together in the emphasis on “[moral] education” (vospitanie) as a purpose of all official initiatives (Field 2007). It is thus no coincidence that each workers assembly began with a lecture on “the communist education of the toilers [kommunisticheskoe vospitanie trudjashchikhsja].” Propagandists in the Mari ASSR were encouraged to lecture on this topic in response to the Central Committee resolution “On the tasks of party propaganda under present conditions” (January 9, 1960), which declared that the “moral education of the masses” was “the basic method for the regulation of the vital activity of Soviet society” during the transition from socialism to communism.3 Under Khrushchev’s ambitious program of governing through didactic measures, a morally trained populace was expected to be able to participate in political life vigorously and in politically desirable ways.
The minutes of the workers assemblies show the difficulty faced by such educational efforts, but also suggest that the emphasis on imminent change hit a nerve among the population. The lecturers anchored their calls to transformation to such elements from outside the assembly hall as city architecture and newspaper articles (Reid 2004). Speakers often referred to these materials when drawing contrasts between the church as a thing of the past and Soviet society as moving into a shining future. Mass-mediatized information and the new built environments were thus among the “teaching aids” that made didactic messages compelling for Khrushchev era citizens.
In Joshkar-Ola, the changing topography of the socialist city had placed the Resurrection Cathedral in an increasingly alienated and marginal position. The church was first closed between 1928 and 1944, when the eighteenth-century brick building housed first the cinema October and then one of the factories evacuated from Moscow to the Volga region at the outbreak of war in 1941.4 It was the only church in the city to be reopened after the war. Two other large churches had once stood on the same street on the banks of the Kokshaga River, but the Church of the Holy Trinity had been destroyed in 1939, and the Cathedral of the Ascension of Our Lord had been turned into a beer brewery (Starikov and Levenshtein 2001: 17, 24).
Demoted from a cathedral into a church and having lost its formerly imposing bell tower in 1928, the reopened Resurrection Church had an uneasy existence in the center of a Sovietizing Joshkar-Ola. The prerevolutionary market square which it once dominated was now a park with a statue of Lenin at its center, and the street on which it stood, formerly known as Ascension Street, had been renamed Karl Marx Street in 1919.5 When official documents referred to the church as located in “the building of the former cinema ‘October,’ ”6 this further underlined its status as a tolerated but alien institution, whose roots in the city were erased.
The campaign to close the church in 1960 occurred during a time of rapidly changing cityscapes. Earlier that year, following a Central Committee resolution, the Mari regional party committee had ordered construction firms in Joshkar-Ola to adopt the new technique of constructing multistoried apartment blocks out of prefabricated concrete panels, one of Khrushchev’s projects that continues to shape the face of cities across the former Soviet Union to this day.7 As construction began on the housing projects, a new central square named after Vladimir Il'ich Lenin was almost completed near the western end of Karl Marx Street, farthest from the church and the former market square. The new Lenin Square was framed by a neoclassical theater, a hotel, and the building of the Technical Institute. Soon to follow were government offices in the modernist style along nearby Lenin Avenue (Sanukov et al. 2004: 85–86).
The efforts to modernize Soviet cities in the late 1950s and early 1960s had many goals—from offsetting wartime destruction and accommodating growing urban populations to promoting a modernist aesthetic of functionality, rationality, and control (Buchli 1999; Ruble 1990). Statements recorded at the assemblies show that an additional—and probably not unintended—effect was to make such prerevolutionary buildings as the church appear anachronistic and out of place (see also Stronski 2010). Speakers frequently drew a contrast between the church and its surroundings and expressed indignation or embarrassment about its presence in the middle of the city. A member of the committee for radio and television was quoted as saying that he avoided walking along Karl Marx Street with his children, because he preferred that they did not even know the word “church.”8 In the minutes of the assembly at the repair factory, a similar concern about children came up: “In the center of town there is a church and when you pass it by with children one gets an uncomfortable feeling [stanovitsja ne po sebe], and children are curious and ask ‘What is that there?’ Against your will you have to lie to them and give them false explanations.”9
The proximity of the church to the small park, a place of modern, cultured rest in Soviet rhetoric, was often remarked upon as particularly inappropriate. One employee of the Mari publishing house was quoted as complaining that the church formed the backdrop to the Lenin monument when viewed from the park’s main entrance.10 This potential leakage between church space and public space was also treated as worrisome by the authorities: the charge that members of the congregation solicited money from people in the park was one of the arguments for closing the church in the official conclusion by the commissioner for church affairs.11 As a place to spend free time, the church should be replaced by the other offerings of a modern city: “People used to think it was a holiday to go to church. But now we have many places where you can relax and have fun,” a storage worker was quoted as saying.12
Such statements show that the attempt to frame the church as a scandal and an anachronism was intelligible enough to be reflected in documents from all over the city. Even the members of the congregation who wrote a letter of protest to Nikita Khrushchev acknowledged this sense of incompatibility by insisting that the church was not in the center of the city (“no longer” might have been a more accurate expression), implying that this made it less necessary to remove it.13
In addition to showing people’s interpretations of long-term trends in urban topography, the documents also bear witness to more immediate preparations for the closing of this particular church. A series of newspaper articles across the spring and summer of 1960 had initiated the gathering storm. Assembly minutes indicate that lecturers read from or referred to these articles in their speeches, and participants in the discussion drew on them for formulating their arguments. A separate assembly of pensioners was held in the Park of Culture and Rest on August 12, framed not as a lecture, but as a discussion of the article that most immediately preceded the meetings: “A brawl in the ‘divine’ temple,” published that day in Marijskaja Pravda, the republic’s main Russian-language daily.14
The article described a fight between parishioners that had erupted after the evening service on August 1, the eve of St. Elijah’s Day, a popular Orthodox holiday in Russia on which church attendance was likely higher than average. The fight, which allegedly started in the church and spilled into the street, was between supporters of the rector of the parish and those of a younger priest, whose impending removal to another parish had been announced at the end of the service. The author traced the falling-out between the two priests to competition over church funds, and accused the supporters of each priest of merely wanting to lay their hands on a larger share of the church’s income. Tellingly for the effects of such caricatures of greed-driven churchmen, speakers at some assemblies referred to “fights” between the two priests over the division of church funds, although the article only described parishioners physically fighting.15 Others cited the newspaper as evidence that the church was creating a “disturbance of the public order” or encouraging “hooliganism.”16 These phrases came directly from the article itself, which anticipated the conclusion which the assemblies were supposed to draw: “Therefore the workers in enterprises, having learned of the systematic debauchery in the church, of the disturbance of public order by the churchmen, are saying with indignation:—Isn’t it time to close down this breeding ground of hooliganism?”17
Two earlier articles that same year had a less explicit message, but were also used during the discussions. On January 16, Marijskaja Pravda had already reported on disagreements between the two priests in “Preachings and deeds of the spiritual fathers.”18 On May 11, both Marijskaja Pravda and its Mari-language equivalent, Marij Kommuna, reprinted versions of an article from a newspaper in the Tatar ASSR, which denounced the greed, debauchery, and warmongering of Iov, who was subsequently deposed as the archbishop of Kazan' (the diocese to which the Mari ASSR belonged) under accusations of tax evasion and a past as a Nazi collaborator.19 Although the case had no direct connection to Joshkar-Ola, this article was frequently mentioned in the discussions about closing Resurrection Church. Lecturers and audience members referred to Iov’s alleged ties to the Germans in occupied Ukraine, his illicit self-enrichment in Kazan', and the threat he posed to peace both within the Soviet Union and internationally.20 In addition to the charge of welcoming the Germans to Ukraine, the article accused him of making priests in the Kazan' diocese use “long-forgotten akathistoi [hymns in praise of a saint or an icon] calling for ethnic enmity between Russians and Tatars.”21
These are stereotypical charges that may have no factual foundation, although it is not entirely unlikely that a church dignitary in occupied Ukraine at least initially welcomed the German forces, who cast themselves as liberators from “godless” Bolshevism (Berkhoff 2004; Peris 2000). The objectionable akathistos could have been the hymn to the Kazan' icon of the Mother of God, which was revered throughout Russia but of special local significance in the Volga region. The icon’s discovery in the sixteenth century was during a time when the conquest of Kazan' by Muscovite forces was still challenged by Tatar resistance, and the akathistos (written in the nineteenth century by a professor of the Kazan' Theological Academy) addresses Mary as “exposure of unbelief,” “confirmation of the Christian faith,” and “deliverance from the invasion of foreign tribes” (Sretenskii monastyr' 2004). The icon repeatedly played a role in the defense of Moscow from European foes: Polish armies in the seventeenth century, Napoleon in the nineteenth, and Hitler’s armies in the twentieth (Shevzov 2007; Sretenskii monastyr' 2004: 30–32). So its veneration in Kazan' in the 1950s may have been intended as an expression of Soviet patriotism rather than a call to interethnic strife, but it still would have fit into the image of religion as a bulwark of ancient hatred.
Although the articles about the archbishop and those about the fights in the church made no explicit references to one another, speakers at the assemblies made connections between them, and contrasted their stories with positive themes that were prominent in press coverage. The front page of the same August 12 issue of Marijskaja Pravda that carried the article about the fight in the church featured a report on Khrushchev’s speech at the UN General Assembly, reprinted from Moscow’s central party organ, Pravda. A female worker connected both themes to demand drastic measures against Archbishop Iov and others, who she had concluded were making money from preaching “the inevitability of war”:
What horrors and suffering war brings! I would now travel around the whole world together with Khrushchev in order to preserve peace for eternity. In my opinion, the church in Joshkar-Ola must be liquidated, all the property confiscated, the buildings handed over to state services, and the clergy themselves should be sent to build roads in the North.22
The use of newspaper articles in lectures and discussions indicates the didactic function of information in Khrushchev’s populism (Wolfe 2005). Since Marijskaja Pravda was the organ of the Mari regional party committee and had to coordinate its content with the party bureau, the timing of articles about the church was certainly no coincidence. What is more, the files of the commissioner for religious affairs suggest that, although state organs may not have been wholly responsible for the discord between the two priests and the factionalism in the congregation, the commissioner and the KGB had monitored it through reports and complaints from parishioners over several months.23 So discussions about the church closing took place in a carefully controlled context. There is also evidence that the lists of speakers at the assemblies were culled to reflect a vision of what public opinion should be, rather than the diversity of views that actually existed. In a letter sent simultaneously to Khrushchev and to the offices of the Patriarchate in Moscow, elderly believers from Joshkar-Ola claimed that the pensioners assembly which sanctioned the closing of the church was attended not only by pensioners, but by “many young people,” and that only the preselected speakers were in favor of the closing, “and the others were all unanimously against the destruction of the temple, but they weren’t even allowed to say a single word.”24
The thick file of minutes thus speaks volumes about the didactic intentions of the city’s party leadership and networks of methodicians. Whether we can say that their efforts had public resonance hinges to some degree on the question of whose voices are recorded in these documents. In addition to culling the lists of speakers, it is possible that invented quotes were inserted into the minutes or that some of them were written without ever holding an actual meeting, a well-documented practice from Soviet cultural and political work (Humphrey 1998; Yurchak 2006: 100–102). Especially those minutes that record neither the names of the speakers nor summaries of what they said, but simply give the text of the resolution passed, cast into doubt whether anyone actually met to vote.25
While the minutes thus tell us little about the degree of atheist conviction among the working population of the city, they do show the inevitable engagement of large parts of the population with propaganda messages, anchored as they were in wider processes of change. In the 1960s as in the 1920s, documenting didactic efforts was always on the border of becoming an end in itself. But the resulting paper trail suggests something important about the dependence of ideological mobilization on people’s capacity to learn. Whether they record the voices of actual workers or the imagination of trade union activists entrusted with writing minutes, the documents connected to the church closing show the particular urgency that ideological discourse takes on when its users are not (or not yet) fully proficient in it.
Regardless of whether these minutes record the actual statements of participants or the fabrications of note takers, they present evidence of the kind of learning that needs to occur for ideological messages to spread, in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. First, even if some of the assemblies did not take place, writing fictive minutes would still require at least one person in each enterprise to be capable of making ideologically correct statements about the incompatibility of the church with current developments in the Soviet Union. The wide range of graphic styles (typed or handwritten, in various hands and colors of ink, with varying degrees of orthographic correctness) indicates that the minutes come from diverse sources and are unlikely to have all been composed in the office of the commissioner of religious affairs. The resolutions, too, are predictable in their general thrust, but differ in their wording and in the concrete recommendations for what to do with the church building.26 And although the content of the initial lecture is not always recorded, where the minutes do include a summary, these are quite different in each case (see table 1).
Far from just disseminating a pregiven text, organizing the assemblies involved training an adequate number of people to prepare and deliver lectures on the topic “The communist education of the toilers and the overcoming of religious prejudices at the present stage.” Earlier in the same year, the plans of Joshkar-Ola’s city committee for fulfilling a recent Central Committee resolution “On the tasks of party propaganda under present conditions” contained a list of training seminars for atheist propagandists to be held at the house of political enlightenment, the first of which had the same title as the lecture.27 This was one probable source of preparation for a number of lecturers.
Responsible for the training seminars was G. N. Chistjakov, a staff member of the city committee’s department of propaganda and agitation who also participated in the work of the Knowledge Society.28 He himself delivered the lecture at a number of enterprises. At other places, this task was performed by lecturers from the party or the Knowledge Society or, occasionally, a leading member of the enterprise or educational institution. Working with materials from the seminar and from newspaper coverage, each speaker had to come up with an ideologically acceptable version, part of the art of putting together new products from pregiven elements that was a crucial aspect of the methodician’s work.
Heard: A presentation of the head of the telephone exchange [name], who noted in his presentation that besides suffering and deceit religious prejudices do not bring any good to the working masses. Religious ideology makes people into slaves to all kinds of imaginations of divinity, causes laziness, stinginess, and deceit. In some cases it takes away the last hard-earned penny from the toilers, and even promotes anti-Soviet preaching, provoking Soviet people—those people who overthrew the power of capitalism, built socialism, opened the era of Soviet satellites, the era of rockets, and are moving successfully toward the bright future of communism. For their part, the religious obscurantists are slowing down the building of communist society to some degree, and for this reason the only correct decision for us can be to uproot this religious evil in the city of Joshkar-Ola, to ask the superior organs to end the existence of the church of Joshkar-Ola, that is to say the Resurrection Cathedral. Not to allow in the future the breeding ground of deceit, stinginess, and hooligan “fights” for the benefit of the clergy.
[Source: GARME, f. R-836, op. 1, d. 11a, l. 5.]
Presentation of the candidate of historical sciences, Comrade [last name]:
In our country religious prejudices and survivals have largely been liquidated, but they still occur among elderly people and especially among old Maris. The youth of our country is being brought up in a communist spirit and knows neither church nor gods. Among the backward milieus there are still believers in christ and other gods, there are various sects, which pull weak-willed people into their milieu even from among young people and the adult population. Religious confession is not prohibited by law in our country, from the earliest days of Soviet power the church is separated from the state and the fulfillment of religious rites is not prohibited, but nonetheless we know that religion leads to no good, it spiritually poisons our Soviet people.
[Source: GARME, f. R-836, op. 1, d. 11a, ll. 116–117.]
Table 1. Two Sample Lecture Summaries on “The Communist Education of the Toilers and the Overcoming of Religious Prejudices at the Present Stage”
Mistakes in the minutes are perhaps the clearest indication that they document the efforts of people relatively unfamiliar with official discourse. In a produce store, either the lecturer had misunderstood information from higher sources, or the person who was taking the minutes did not fully understand what the lecturer said. In the words of the handwritten minutes: “Professor Bogoslov wrote the latest publishing house of the bible, but he renunced [sic] religion.”29 Either the lecturer or the minutes taker must have heard the Russian word bogoslov (theologian) as a family name, failing to understand professor-bogoslov as a professional designation, a “professor of theology.” Likewise, somewhere along the chain of transmission izdanie (edition) turned into izdatel'stvo (publishing house); the more likely fact that this theologian published an edition of the Bible was understood to mean that he wrote it; and the irregular past tense otrëksja (he renounced) was heard and then spelled as otrësja.
Such semantic and grammatical mistakes show that the organizers of atheist campaigns could never take the availability of capable lecturers and comprehending audiences for granted, especially in regions such as the Mari ASSR, where Russian, the language of all official meetings, was not the first language of many participants (cf. Humphrey 1989). More evidence of the efforts required to reproduce ideological discourse comes from statements that seem unintentionally ideologically incorrect. In Stephen Kotkin’s terms (1995: 222), one might say that someone tried to “speak Bolshevik,” but failed. For instance, the same man who reportedly objected to the church forming a backdrop to the Lenin monument also demanded that the prison, located on the other side of park, be removed from the city center, equating the prison (a state institution, albeit one that was expected to become obsolete with the impending arrival of communism) with the church (which was considered alien to the Soviet state).30 Elsewhere, a woman with a Tatar surname complained that Russians have a church to pray in while Tatars have no mosque in Joshkar-Ola.31 While this statement could be useful as evidence that the presence of religious institutions incited interethnic envy, it plainly did not speak of a developed atheist consciousness. One questioner from the floor inquired if the city government could force the church to lower its fees for religious rites, suggesting an interest in enlisting the state’s help in making religious practices more affordable rather than eliminating them.32 All statements were framed as support of the general criticism of the church, and none of them elicited corrections from the lecturers or other participants. At a time when so many elements of social life appeared to be in flux, even local organizers of atheist events struggled to correctly apply the message of radical incompatibility between religious and Soviet institutions.
Some minutes also recorded comments that opposed the church closing or cautioned against its possible consequences, but those were often followed by immediate rebukes from the lecturer or other participants. For instance, a woman was quoted as saying that since the church was mainly visited by elderly people, these pensioners, rather than the working-age population, should decide whether to close it or not. Her remark was followed by a colleague’s reminder about social responsibility: “At the present time people’s consciousness is rising, people are taking the creation of public order into their own hands, and we cannot just walk past such a disgrace.”33
In some minutes, such dissenting voices translated into small numbers of votes against the resolution to close the church.34 But as we have seen, explicit opposition was just one of a number of ways to fail at the performative role of the conscientious and responsible builder of communism. Some ideologically incorrect positions were challenged by other participants; some were not. If, as Yurchak argues, voting for a resolution at an official meeting was a performative act by which participants reproduced themselves “as a ‘normal’ Soviet person … with all the constraints and possibilities that position entailed” (2006: 25), these instances of misalignment raise the question of how people knew what was expected of them. In a situation where neither activists nor their audiences were fully competent performers, spreading authoritative discourse was a learning challenge: widening circles of participants had to pick up the requisite vocabulary and performance styles. This dependence on constant processes of teaching and learning was at once a weak point of ideology and a key to its mobilizing power.
Records of Khrushchev era atheist campaigns invite us to think of ideological discourse as something that is not reproduced by rote repetition but through the generative efforts of more or less competent transmitters. To help keep the transmitters themselves on track, higher authorities distributed training materials and coordinated media publications. The result was a combination of local flexibility and disciplinary rigidity that was not unique to the late Soviet Union, but is also an organizational strategy employed by transnational religious groups active in the twenty-first century, including evangelical Protestants. In both contexts, didactic relationships link centers and peripheries while allowing for expansion outward. Creative possibilities become harnessed to centrally defined goals in ways that are not always obvious, but that comparison makes easier to see.
Strikingly, while scholarship on Soviet didactic efforts often assumes a general cynicism among practitioners that makes it impossible to take records of past statements at face value, ethnographers of evangelical organizations accept the self-descriptions of church members more easily. When scholars characterize evangelical churches as “nondenominational,” emphasizing “Jesus rather than creeds or doctrines” (Erzen 2006: 61, 71) and having a “no-frills, ordinary-folks approach” to worship (Luhrmann 2004: 519), they lift their terminology directly out of these organizations’ self-representations as locally independent bodies whose practices grow from the personal predilections of their members more than out of any centrally defined authority. To make both types of organizations comparable as didactic networks, one has to give the words of Soviet methodicians a little more credence than is customary, and treat their evangelical counterparts with more suspicion. With this twist of perspective, some specific affinities between postsecular church-planting and Soviet strategies of building a secular public become apparent. In the mobilization of atheist lecturers to deliver nearly simultaneous performances of 110 lectures with identical themes but different texts, we can see a similarly “potent combination of external influence and radical local adaptation,” as David Martin (1990: 282) has noted for global Pentecostal missions.
One affinity lies in the way that particular strategies of transmission become linked to the ideal of a particular kind of community, a nexus that Michael Warner has identified as characteristic of the modern notion of a “public.” As institutions constantly reaching beyond their own membership to mobilize new partipants, Soviet networks of cultural enlightenment and evangelical missions both strive to form a public in Warner’s sense of a social entity made up of strangers, who are brought together “by virtue of being addressed” (2002: 62). Constituted through the circulation of lectures, sermons, and methodical advice, these incipient publics participate in what Greg Urban calls a “metaculture of newness,” a system of judgments about culture propelled by the speedy travel of things, people, and ideas, and characterized by the value placed on new creation rather than the invariable reproduction of old forms (2001: 67). Within Soviet and evangelical networks, “new approaches” and “new inspirations” are treated as preconditions for success, but both manage to restrict the range of the permissible through recourse to the “citational temporality” (Yurchak 2006) that imposes limits on the apparent infinitude of possible new creations.
In Urban’s analysis, which focuses on the cultural effects of technologies of mass production, the metaculture of newness becomes possible through technical innovations in the transmission of knowledge. The mechanically reproduced mass media are freed from the constraints of cultural objects whose “dissemination” as externalized, perceptible things depends on individual reception and recreation. For a myth or a basket design to circulate, its telling or demonstration must be followed by “replication,” when people internalize the skill and can recreate a performance or object that counts as similar by local standards. With the advent of mass media, dissemination is largely disconnected from replication: a film can be viewed in many places by people who will never learn how to make one themselves (Urban 2001: 42–48). Though valued more highly, “original” creations are also outcomes of dissemination because they usually recombine elements from existing models, without which “the new entity would have little prospect of future motion or future circulation. It would simply become incomprehensible” (5). So the metaculture of newness is made possible through a combination of techniques of mechanical reproduction and efficient dissemination with the availability of people skilled in reworking circulating models into products that will be recognized as new.
In their own attempts to simultaneously value and control newness, Soviet and evangelical contexts quickly encounter the limits of mechanical reproduction, and end up relying more strongly on replication by human agents through internalized skills than Urban’s model would lead one to expect (Luehrmann 2011). Not unlike some instances of capitalist consumer culture, such as person-to-person marketing and interactive social media, ideological networks resort to pyramids of personal interactions as a cost-efficient way to create an expansive and motivated membership. The citational practices in which the bonds between teachers and learners are expressed make Soviet and evangelical publics more limited in their range of possible innovation than classical analyses of the liberal public sphere would allow for. But in both cases, these limits—set by state and party in the Soviet case, by denominational authorities among evangelicals—are enforced quite efficiently without recourse to rote repetition. Each public is able to extend its reach through creative combinations of mechanically disseminated didactic materials and personal interactions between teachers and learners.
Titles of lectures and sermons are a common way to express citational bonds in both Soviet and evangelical networks. For organizations such as the Knowledge Society and party departments of propaganda and agitation, disseminating lists of recommended lecture titles was a tool for reaching a maximum number of lecturers with minimum expenditure.35 While full lecture texts were also printed and circulated,36 lists of titles were printed more systematically and in larger editions. In 1955, the All-Union Knowledge Society printed 600 copies of a three-page list of recommended topics of lectures on scientific-atheist propaganda.37 In 1959, 25,000 copies of an expanded four-page list were printed. Number six among the seventy-one titles is “The communist education of the toilers and the overcoming of religious prejudices at the present stage,”38 the title of the lecture delivered at the assemblies in Joshkar-Ola. Mimeographed lists circulated by the Mari division of the society were shorter, and presumably reflected those lectures that could be delivered locally.
Like the RSFSR and the all-union societies, the Mari division also mimeographed full lecture texts in editions of several hundred copies, but the very fact that this effort was duplicated on the regional level shows that texts from the center were not available for all lectures, or had to be adapted to local conditions.39 To an important degree, then, Soviet propaganda networks entrusted the reproduction of dogmatic orthodoxy to the generative ability of local methodicians rather than relying on radio and television alone or asking lecturers to animate written texts. A former leader of Komsomol study circles whom I met during my research remembered choosing topics each term from a list of recommendations. What she did with the topic was largely up to her, and she recalled that it was welcomed when propagandists supplemented the materials provided in Komsomol brochures with additional information from journals and books.
One reason for the reliance on personal replication may have been economic shortages: lists of titles require less paper, ink, and space on postal trains than full lecture texts delivered at comparable print runs. But as we have seen, the task of reflecting on and adapting content was also thought to have a transformative influence on the transmitters. Methodical guides praised the “living word” of the lecturer as better able to forge a connection to the audience as “the speaker [vystupajushchij] and the listeners [slushateli] enrich each other with their knowledge and impressions” (Tiapkin 1970: 3). In addition to being potentially more persuasive than mass-mediated texts and performances, personal interaction with a lecturer or seminar leader was also expected to “activate the listeners” (Gorokhov 1974: 50), to encourage them to participate in the process of knowledge transmission through presentations, discussions, and research.
Lists of lecture titles promoted the ideal of an active, engaged public while allowing for control through the messages encoded in the titles themselves and through systems of evaluation of lower-level lecturers by their superiors. Although explicitly value-laden titles came under critique among postwar Soviet atheists, readers trained in the intertextual web of seminars and atheist literature could still derive important information from the lists. Activists within the Knowledge Society warned against titles such as “Religion—An enemy of science and progress,” “The origin of Christianity and its reactionary role,”40 or “Church weddings and their incompatibility with Soviet ideology”41 as likely to deter believers from attending the lectures. It thus remained up to lecturers to decode the intentions behind the binary oppositions and rhetorical questions in approved titles. For instance, they had to understand that titles such as “Scientific predictions and religious prophecies” and “Science and religion on unusual celestial phenomena”42 called for an argument that demonstrated the superiority of the scientific over the religious approach, rather than presenting them as complementary.
Before receiving permission to speak on a given topic, Knowledge Society lecturers had to present to a board of older colleagues from the regional presidium, which could require changes of content as well as delivery. Ad hoc evaluations of lectures by inspectors from regional centers suggest that it was not always easy for lecturers to interpret and follow the expectations encoded in a title. In addition to aspects of performance and delivery, as when lecturers read from a prepared text without taking their eyes off the page43 or failed to answer audience questions,44 criticism often focused on wrong or insufficient political contextualization: no connection was made between a topic and the decisions of the latest Party Congress;45 historical or scientific facts were simply listed without critical analysis and atheist conclusions;46 or the criticism focused on long-abandoned religious customs rather than present practices.47
Through evaluations and intertextual clues, lecture topics helped anchor the “living word” to centrally defined goals. Post-Soviet evangelical churches in Joshkar-Ola used citations in similar ways: to reconcile the local flexibility of independent congregations with the rigid demands of “discipleship.” Though lines of authority were more discrete and sometimes more short-lived than in the Soviet party bureaucracy, they relied on a similar combination of mechanical reproduction with personal internalization and learning. Even in denominations that did not use the snowball structure of cell groups, there was an expectation that members would bring in converts by inviting relatives and neighbors to read and discuss printed literature or view videos with them. In addition to such personal acts of “incarnation” of mass-disseminated materials (S. Coleman 2000: 133), congregations also maintained relationships with popular preachers by selling and consuming their mass-produced books and recordings as well as by sending members to attend seminars taught by them in person. Similar to lectures in the Knowledge Society, sermons in evangelical churches are often identified by a title and become an entity for circulation and replication by preachers who consider themselves disciples of the pastor who originally delivered it.
As Susan Harding notes, preachers “may borrow aggressively from one another, appropriating exegeses, illustrations, stories, quotations, logics, style, tone, gestures, and even entire sermons without citation,” since among them “piracy is not a vice, it is a virtue” (2000: 24). But such piracy is not random, since “whom they [preachers] choose to imitate and impersonate” matters a great deal, not only for “their audience and their reach,” as Harding says, but also for the relations of discipline and authority in which preachers place themselves (Bartholomew 2006; S. Coleman 2006). The personalization of such relationships to well-known preachers through borrowings from their sermon titles and themes allows even self-declared nondenominational churches to maintain conformity even as they emphasize the joys of the personal discovery of spiritual truths through study and prayer.
The story of how the young pastor of the Joshkar-Ola Christian Center aligned his church with the Kievan Embassy of God via Moscow’s Triumphant Zion illustrates how the circulation of texts mediates relations of spiritual authority in evangelical networks. Baptized by the American missionaries who founded the Christian Center, the young pastor had encountered the teachings of Sunday Adelaja and Aleksandr Dzjuba during his stay in Moscow. In addition to selling books and tapes by these pastors at the Christian Center’s book stall, the young pastor passed on their teachings in the form of named sermons. For instance, a sermon delivered by Pastor Aleksandr Dzjuba from Triumphant Zion during his visit to Joshkar-Ola in September 2005 was entitled “How to graft yourself onto the grace of the church.” Announcing the topic, he asked everyone to take out pen and paper and take notes, and he invited the pastors among the audience (in addition to the pastor of the Christian Center, they had come from other churches in the Volga region) to “take this sermon for yourself” if they wanted to. At the Christian Center, such an act of appropriation had occurred a little more than two months earlier, when the young pastor preached on a similar topic (“Grafting yourself onto his grace”) in his Wednesday sermon, addressed mainly to people who considered themselves leaders within the church. Through taking Dzjuba’s sermons for himself, the young pastor served as an animator of Dzjuba’s message, and drew authority from his association with the metropolitan pastor.
Both sermon performances offered advice on how to behave toward spiritual authority, especially when encountering differences between congregations and between clergy. Within this common theme, there were interesting differences in emphasis, indexing the unequal relationship between the two speakers and their churches. Both versions of the title were taken from Romans 11:17–18a: “But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches.” Both sermons applied Paul’s reflections on the proper attitude of the newly converted gentiles (the “wild olive shoot”) toward the Jews as the original people of God (“the olive tree”) to the situation of Charismatic churches within the landscape of more established denominations, as well as to that of newcomers to a particular congregation in relation to its long-standing members and leaders.
The related titles indicate the circulation of common themes, and the young pastor in Joshkar-Ola made it no secret that he was keeping up with the ideas of “his pastor,” Dzjuba, through sermon tapes and visits to the “leadership schools” Dzjuba taught at Triumphant Zion. On several occasions, he referred to his work as passing on the “bread” which he received in Moscow and Kiev to the congregation in Joshkar-Ola, or as passing on the torch in a relay race. The commonality between these sermon performances extended to other Bible verses: both developed themes from Mark 2:22a (“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins”) to discuss the need to lay aside old experiences in order to appreciate the message of a new pastor or a recently joined church. There was a common plotline, in which slightly humorous stories about proper behavior in unfamiliar worship settings illustrated the point about respect for the rules of a particular congregation as a precondition for sharing in its “grace” (see table 2). Finally, both pastors adopted similar performance techniques, enacting the message about the proper attitude of discipleship in the church with a small role play. Quoting James 4:6 (“God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble”), Dzjuba had the bandleader who had accompanied him from Moscow come up and act out a skit in which the musician was introduced as a proud person and Dzjuba pushed him back, showing how God opposes such people. Two months earlier, the young pastor had enacted the same skit with one of his ushers. Both pastors thus chose a subordinate from their own congregation to demonstrate a point about deference to divine will.
Differences between the two performances lay in those aspects that indexed the relationship of each speaker to the sources of the sermon’s authority and to the congregation addressed (which in both cases was the Christian Center in Joshkar-Ola). The young pastor introduced his sermon as being addressed primarily to people “who have come from a different church”; Dzjuba introduced his as deserving the special attention of people “from this church,” placing himself as an outsider offering sympathetic criticism of the many changes in leadership the Christian Center had undergone. Dzjuba’s call for people who like to sleep in church to “just go to the Baptists” may also be understood as a comment on his audience. Dzjuba and the husband-and-wife team of musicians he brought with him had spent much of the weekend criticizing local church members for being too passive in their responses to praise music, thus missing out on part of the grace offered by their church. While Dzjuba took the position of someone who was evaluating the congregation as a whole, the young pastor spoke to the problems of those members who failed to understand why God had brought them to this particular church.
Each church has been provided by God with its own grace [nadelena svoej blagodat’ju]. And this grace is linked to the mission of the church. Each church has its own. When I repented, my mum was a Baptist. My first desire—well, to lead her out of that slavery, that is, to lead her out of the Baptist church. Mama, how can you go there? I went there to the Baptist church, they started to praise God, I came in right away like a Charismatic, hallelujah! [Laughter in the congregation] One of their deacons came up to me and stepped on my foot just like that, and I went on lalalalala [Raising his arms], thinking I’d show those Baptists. [Laughter] He came up to me and stepped on my foot, I didn’t understand. He said put down your arms, here we don’t do it that way. And I closed my eyes, but suddenly no one else is singing praise and all are looking at me. [Laughter] And I had come thinking to promote my church. But then I understood that I couldn’t do anything there. And then, after a few years, God explained to me that I shouldn’t change them, that it’s a stupid task. There are people for whom—Mama, for instance, she comes into the church, sits down, and after fifteen minutes her eyes are closed. At most if someone is alert, well perhaps it takes half an hour until they are all asleep. The pastor comes out, and half an hour is enough to put everyone to sleep. I understand that there are people who, well, this makes them happy, they want to get some sleep somewhere. [Laughter] Why force them to clap their hands? Let them just go to the Baptists. [Laughter] Why force them? I don’t fight over people, because I have understood that the grace of God is on that church too. And this grace carries with it a particular mission.
Many people ask: There has been some experience in life, there has already been some experience. Even when someone first comes to God. I think that it is a rare person who hears about God for the first time. Probably there is already some knowledge, that here I know this is the way to pray, this is the way to praise God, or this is the way to read the Bible. That is, we already know somehow this is the way to act. And always any church, we have already said, carries its own particular grace. Any church. Remember, we said that in the Orthodox church, they have their grace, everything is calm, everything is quiet, there is such quiet there. And, for example, there are Baptist churches, also a Christian church, they also have their own grace, they dig in deeper in the word, know the Bible better. So they have more in this respect. You have to wear a headscarf there by all means. Among the Orthodox, a cross. They have their traditions. That is their own grace, their traditions, their teachings. Each church has its own characteristics, each church has its own particular measure of grace.
And each minister has his1 own particular measure of grace. For instance, I meet with many other ministers, and I understand. For instance this week I met with a young Orthodox guy, we talked, and he serves in the Orthodox church. And when we talked, I felt that God is present in him. [Laughs] God is in him. He wants to prove to me that I don’t believe correctly, but I can see that God is in him, simply there are some things that he has not understood….
There. And, for example, different churches, for instance I see Baptist ministers, I see that God is there too. God is there too. There. Now if you take the Pentecostal church, God is there too. The Lutheran church, there is a Lutheran congregation here in town, God is there too. God is there too. There are many churches where God is present, and God, where he is, gives to the church, gives to the ministers, a certain measure of grace. All have grace, but the Bible says the measure, the measure is different for all. The measure of this grace is different. Grace is diverse [mnogorazlichnaja]. …
You must simply say: Praise God, if you have brought me here, then my task is what? To graft myself onto this grace, that is to become a part of this grace. Graft yourself onto this grace. If God brought you into a Baptist church, then you have to prepare, I don’t know, a big Bible which is full of notes, well among us too, but there everything revolves around that. For praise you have to supply yourself with a hymn book, among the Orthodox perhaps you have to bring a cushion so as not to fall asleep there. [Laughter] That is, all of them have their own grace, that is their own measure of grace, you understood that, yes?
Note: 1. He used the Russian word svoja, which is a reflexive possessive pronoun indicating the gender of the possessed rather than the possessor. I translate it as “his” because the clergy in all the Christian churches in Joshkar-Ola were male, although female ministers were allowed in Triumphant Zion and the Embassy of God, the churches in Moscow and Kiev with which the Christian Center was affiliated.
Table 2. Two Sermons Developing the Theme of Manifestations of Divine Grace in Different Denominations
Dzjuba also evaluated the young pastor, calling him a bearer of new grace for whom the congregation had to provide new wineskins, i.e., leave behind the things they thought they already knew. While thus throwing his support behind the young pastor, Dzjuba called him a porjadochnyj chelovek (lit. “orderly person”), a rather unenthusiastic term of praise denoting trustworthiness and honesty but no outstanding qualities.
Finally, the pastors demonstrated their different relationships to their common “apostle,” Sunday Adelaja in Kiev, in an anecdote they told to illustrate how not to behave toward authority. Both used the example of an unsuccessful Ukrainian pastor who came to Kiev to consult with Sunday Adelaja but, instead of listening to the more experienced and more successful minister, started to offer him advice. Dzjuba framed this story as his personal experience with a friend whom he introduced to Adelaja, while the young pastor told it as a story he heard from the protagonist (the unsuccessful pastor) at a seminar in Moscow. This indicates that there are several reasons for the similarities between the performances. The young pastor was probably familiar with a prior version of Dzjuba’s sermon, which he heard in Moscow or on tape. But he had also had other opportunities to hear some of the same stories on which Dzjuba drew, through being part of the same network of seminars, tapes, literature, and joint worship. The differences between the two renderings anchored each performance in a chain of transmission in which one speaker was closer than the other to the original sources of wisdom.
Within the Knowledge Society as well as in evangelical churches, chains of transmission were also chains of authority, constituted through teaching and emulation. In both settings, it was in part the prospect of evaluation by superiors that motivated lecturers and preachers to put together ideologically correct collages from the loose associations of titles, illustrative examples, and methodical advice made available to them through a combination of mass media and face-to-face interactions. The association with these superiors was itself a source of pride, as shown by Dzjuba’s and the young pastor’s attempts to highlight their relationship with Sunday Adelaja. In the memories of two former lecturers of the Knowledge Society, there was a similar mix of dread and pride when they spoke about the academics who directed the society. One woman, a retired schoolteacher and lecturer of forty years, still conveyed the excitement of facing the “scholars” who evaluated her lecture before she could deliver it in public: “Fifteen people sitting there. You read your lecture. The first time they did not pass me, this and that and that you have to do, after all they are scholars. And the second time they said that it’s okay to deliver this lecture.” Her colleague, also a schoolteacher by training and later a full-time staff member at the Knowledge Society’s planetarium in Joshkar-Ola, clarified the link between the scientific authority of printed sources and her responsibility to adapt them for diverse audiences when she discussed her use of razrabotki, or printed, “worked-out” versions of lectures:
These razrabotki, methodical aids for the lecturer they were called, yes? For example, when I worked in a school myself, this is how these razrabotki helped me. So I already know, this was written by people with a doctorate, scholars, specialists. I already know approximately what I need to talk about. It’s only the base, and then you take everything yourself, either from life, or from fiction, from scientific literature. So I had such [a topic of] unusual celestial phenomena, eclipses, all of this you explain and bring examples from the local, you ask people. That’s why I love to talk to people [obshchat'sja s ljud'mi ljublju], because you can learn a lot from them.
Lecturers and preachers shouldered a double burden: they needed to please their superiors, who had definite standards of truth in mind, and to work with mass-mediatized materials in such a way that they created an actively engaged public, not the notoriously similar masses of passive, isolated spectators. But in the way they approached this problem, there was an important difference between late Soviet propagandists and post-Soviet preachers. Among the former, authority was derived from scientific standards that were ultimately buttressed by political institutions. Among the latter, the authority of the living word was much more personalized, since it resided in the divine inspiration that enabled a preacher to correctly interpret scripture and discern God’s intention in the world. This belief in divinely inspired teachings led to a tendency to ascribe to didactic materials a spiritual status that went far beyond what Soviet lecturers would have felt comfortable with. But ultimately the preachers confronted the same all-too-human limits of ideological transmission that Soviet planners had to contend with.
The tendency to both personalize media transmissions and sanctify teaching materials was exemplified by a course of the Institute in Basic Life Principles, sponsored by two Baptist congregations in Joshkar-Ola. The U.S.-based institute offers courses on Christian ethics to churches around the world. The curriculum consists of videotapes of seminars led by founder Bill Gothard (b. 1934) in the 1980s, combined with review questions and discussions led in person by an instructor from the regional office.
During the course I observed, the function of the Moscow-based instructor was largely to test audience comprehension; the course ended with an exam that qualified those who passed it to become instructors for the institute. He also seemed to play a gatekeeping role, making sure no one saw the videos out of sequence or outside the institutional setting where the local church was paying course fees to the institute. When I asked for permission to sit in on the second half of a two-part course sequence, the instructor, an expatriate American, said that normally he did not allow people to see the second part without having seen the first, because they might not properly understand it. He also explained that making tape recordings was forbidden, and the participants had to promise not to circulate copies of the supplementary materials they received.
Gothard’s standardized and copyrighted curricula are an example of religious entrepreneurship not unusual in the era of mass media (Hunt 2004; Rudnyckyj 2009). But the participants interpreted these prohibitions as based in more than commercial considerations. The leader of a Bible study group in one of the Baptist congregations had participated in the course, and then refused to let a study group member copy the lesson on anger management. She first defended the prohibition by citing the institute’s need to protect its copyright, but the irate member challenged her: “So where was the copyright of the apostle Paul?” The leader countered that, if these materials circulated freely, Orthodox Christians might use them for their own missionary ends. Besides, one should not study them out of sequence, because God always gave knowledge in the order in which it was needed most. Here, considerations of copyright and interconfessional rivalry were mixed with the idea that the instructional materials themselves had a sacred quality.
During the course itself, each lesson started with a prayer by one of the participants, suggesting that it was impossible to correctly process the information presented outside of a worshipful mood. On the videos, Gothard also prayed at the beginning and end of each taped lesson. The bandleader of the Christian Center had a similarly reverential attitude toward teaching aids. When I asked for copies of her lesson plans on the principles of praise-and-worship music, she warned that these materials had been written “in the Spirit” (i.e., by people who had invoked the presence of the Holy Spirit through prayer and praise singing) and that I should read them as I would the Bible, preparing myself through prayer and asking God to show me the meaning of the text.
Such reverential reading practices depend on people having been socialized into them through study groups, sermons, and other types of instruction (Crapanzano 2000; Luhrmann 2004), again tying the dissemination of media to personal internalization. Simon Coleman (2000: 171–172) calls attention to the exhortations to respond through prayer and pledges included in many evangelical instructional materials, and argues that the aim is to encourage a bodily appropriation of the teacher’s words by the student. Turning his argument around, one could say that, through suggesting particular responses, the creators of instructional materials appropriate the future-oriented thrust of the learning process by attempting to retain control of the student’s actions even after the lesson is completed. In a comparable way, the emphasis on the “activation” of the learner in Soviet pedagogical literature implied that this activity would be put to the service of centrally defined goals. Both Soviet era programs of study and religious curricula thus aim to harness the transformative energy of learning for larger projects of personal and collective change. But by privileging personal relationships with inspired teachers, evangelical networks exemplify some of the dangers of the personification of inspiration that Soviet networks after Stalin sought to diminish by bureaucratizing, rather than personalizing, the learning process.
Evangelical preachers would argue, of course, that secular attempts to harness the energy of the teaching process were bound to fail because they were based merely in human knowledge and sought human ends, lacking the divine wisdom that alone could bridge the gap between transformative promises and morally desirable outcomes. The further circulation of materials from the course on Christian ethics in Joshkar-Ola showed, however, that postsecular attempts to outdo secular predecessors faced similar challenges in the unpredictability of human learning.
Like the methodicians of the Knowledge Society, Bill Gothard made copious use of lists in his teaching. Lessons included lists of the twelve kinds of heart of which “God speaks” in the Bible, the three ways of enlarging our heart, and the thirteen steps on the path toward immorality. Other observers have noted a general tendency toward quantified lists among evangelical Protestants as an aspect of their penchant for standardization (Crapanzano 2000: 77, 157; Erzen 2006; Sullivan 2009). With its impression of completeness and easy replicability, the list promises to convey insights in a universally comprehensible way, providing teachers with an effective methodical tool to direct their students to action. In practice, lists turn out to be easier to disseminate than to replicate in a new performance. When a group of young Baptist women attempted to recreate one of Gothard’s lists in their study group, they struggled to translate the sense of definitive direction conveyed by its form into classroom activity. The youngest member of the group, a student around sixteen years old, tried to model the discussion on a lesson dealing with the “principle of creation” (printsip tvorenija). The materials she had copied from the course workbook consisted of two lists, one of the “unchangeable characteristics” of a person and one of “signs of self-rejection.” She simply read aloud the first list without discussion or modifications, although earlier she had announced that she thought there were more “unchangeable characteristics” than the ten points included by Gothard.
Before reading the second list, the student tried to have the other members of the group generate it themselves by asking what they thought the “signs of self-rejection” were. Obviously discouraged when the first volunteered answer, “people scold themselves” (rugajut sebja), was not an item from the list, she started to read the eleven signs together with the explanations and supporting Bible verses, occasionally stopping to ask the group what they thought a term meant, but quickly reverting to the text when what followed was silence or an unforeseen answer. For instance, under point 5, “self-criticism,” she asked: “What is that? I mean, why?” Without waiting long for an answer, she continued: “No, let me explain. It is when a person always thinks, ‘I could have done better.’”
Sociolinguistic analyses of classroom exchanges often interpret such a lack of uptake of student utterances by teachers as an expression of the teacher’s authority (Collins 1996; Mertz 2007: 54–58). In this case, the presenter had very little authority over the other members of the group, being the only secondary school student among college-age “sisters.” Rather, her lack of uptake may show how she was constrained by the authority of the curricular materials, which she sought to reproduce at the price of curtailing divergent answers. In their emphasis on exact replicability, such detailed curricula only underscore the limits of method’s capacity to produce predictable effects, pointing to the paradox of claiming divine guidance and methodical exactness at the same time.
Didactic networks seem to work best when they rely on methodical prompts that are not quite as detailed and prescriptive as Gothard’s courses. Most Soviet and evangelical methodicians worked in contexts which encouraged individual initiative and creativity in teaching, but held the instructor accountable for the effects of the message transmitted and for its faithfulness to preexisting models. They measured effectiveness by the degree to which teachings produced changes in students that were then reflected in observable indicators, such as the increased productivity of a work collective or the growth of a church. Both models thus sought to capture and direct something that is notoriously difficult to apprehend (Miyazaki 2004): the movement toward a different future that is present in a learning interaction. Given the risks involved, only those who urgently need rapid change seem likely to adopt didactic methods of mobilization. Khrushchev’s didactic populism helped generate hope and engagement during the uncertain transition from Stalinism (Fitzpatrick 2006), but his successors found it too unstable to uphold. And as post-Soviet denominations are settling into a new religious order after the initial years of revival and proselytizing, those who work hardest to harness didactic dynamics are also among those who have the least to lose.