Khrushchev era didacticism owed a great deal of its persuasive power to the palpable social changes that manifested in reconstructed cities, new apartment blocks, promises of more consumer-friendly production targets, and opportunities for participation in volunteer campaigns. While some hopes of impending change proved short-lived, the altered cityscapes brought about through the accelerated construction methods pioneered in the late 1950s remained, and imposed ongoing constraints on post-Soviet developments (Collier 2001). Religious life in Joshkar-Ola also had to adapt. By the end of the Soviet era, legal as well as illegal religious practices were increasingly confined to the outskirts of the city: the Orthodox met in the church of Semënovka, Muslims gathered for prayer in private apartments, and Baptists and Adventists established unregistered houses of prayer in the “private sectors” of single-family wooden houses outside the zones of reconstruction. The center, by contrast, was occupied not only by administrative headquarters, but also by the institutions of secular didacticism—theaters, cinemas, institutions of higher education, the Palace of Young Pioneers, and the planetarium of the Knowledge Society.
After the collapse of Soviet socialism, this spatial division changed, but slowly. In the city center, two Russian Orthodox churches reopened in the 1990s, and the diocese started to rebuild a third one. Other religious groups occupied the spaces of increasingly underfunded didactic institutions, meeting in houses of culture or former cinemas, largely in more peripheral areas. Great was my surprise, then, when I returned to Joshkar-Ola in September 2008 after an absence of two and a half years, to find both the city and the religious landscape altered by an ambitious construction project led by the republic’s presidential administration. Under the label of historical reconstruction, new brick buildings were replacing Soviet public buildings and filling areas that had deliberately been left as green spaces by socialist city planners. The Knowledge Society’s planetarium, located on valuable property directly across from the republic’s administrative offices, had been torn down. In its stead, a large open square was flanked on three sides by an office building/exhibition hall whose arched galleries were apparently intended to evoke Byzantium. The square’s centerpiece was a clock tower where, every hour, an icon of the Mother of God of Three Hands rode out on a donkey and entered a mosaic depicting a church which resembled the new Assumption Church in the garden behind the president’s offices. That church, whose single-dome, cross-shaped structure also gestured toward Byzantine styles, had been completed in 2006, despite public misgivings about this sign of preeminence for Orthodox Christianity in a multireligious republic.
In addition to this transformation of the formerly unassuming environs of the Khrushchev era government buildings, other changes could be found along Karl Marx Street, involving the construction of Russian Orthodox structures on formerly public ground. At the site where only a commemorative cross had stood in February 2006, the outer shell of a new version of Resurrection Church was almost finished, built in a different style and on a smaller scale than the destroyed cathedral. Farther south, on the site of a former public beach on the banks of the Little Kokshaga River, a belfry marked the construction site for a larger, completely new cathedral modeled on the Savior on the Blood in Saint Petersburg, a late nineteenth-century church constructed at the site where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, and hence a powerful symbol of Russian national unity. The republican archives, formerly located on Karl Marx Street in a wooden structure built on the site of a convent that had been destroyed in the 1920s, had been moved to a residential neighborhood on the other side of the river. There were plans to reconstruct the former convent church, but suspicious residents speculated that at least part of the site would be used for upscale apartments.
Like the Khrushchev era construction projects, these evictions, reconstructions, and rezonings gave palpable form to more elusive social and political shifts. Funding for building the new churches came from the Ministry of Culture, and the architects in charge of designing them confirmed that the churches' outward appearance had been decided by the republic’s president, Leonid Markelov. The plans for Resurrection Church, for instance, were based on photographs of a church in Saint Petersburg that Markelov had given to the architects, along with the order to adapt the design so that it could be built entirely from local brick. Once finished, a sketch of the facade had been taken to the archbishop for his blessing.
Though benefiting from the sudden wave of state expenditures, the diocese seemed to have little control over spending priorities—at the same time as a number of churches were built in the center within a few blocks of each other, the city had taken away a projected church construction site in one of the Soviet era residential areas where most of the population actually lived. Archbishop Ioann, who three years earlier had told me that the time for the physical construction of church buildings was over and the task now was to work for the enlightenment of the believers, now spoke in glowing tones about the benefits of such construction work: whenever a new church was opened, he claimed, it filled up with believers, and thus promoted the spiritual rebirth of Russia.
Religious centers and public buildings in Joshkar-Ola, early twenty-first century. Houses of worship are marked with numbers, public buildings with letters. The large street grids represent areas of city-managed apartment buildings; the smaller-gridded areas, where many of the Protestant churches are located, represent so-called private sectors with primarily wooden, single-family houses. [Map by Bill Nelson]
While priests wondered who was going to serve in all those new churches, and icon painters complained that none of the architects had any idea of the interior fittings needed in an Orthodox church, there was only speculation about the government’s motivation for funding the construction projects. Although republics continued to elect their presidents even after Vladimir Putin had started appointing the governors of Russia’s regions, Markelov had won two consecutive elections as the candidate most widely considered to have Moscow’s backing. His predilection for models from Saint Petersburg may have been a way to demonstrate Marij El’s loyalty to the federal government, in contrast to the Turkish models that inspired the new Qol Sharif mosque in Kazan', the capital of neighboring Tatarstan. During a modest economic upswing in Russia, caused by the high price of oil on international markets before the stock market crash of 2008, there was also an economic motivation behind making formerly public areas available for commercial development. In addition to churches, there were plans for shopping centers on the riverbank and a “children’s entertainment center” in the city park.
Whatever the precise constellation of economic and political interests may have been, the new reconstruction program threatened to marginalize the buildings of Soviet secular culture, which had once displaced religious structures from Joshkar-Ola. The archbishop’s newfound enthusiasm for construction projects—subordinates often struggled to locate him as he rushed from one site to another—perhaps showed his awareness that it was best for his diocese to decrease its dependence on the infrastructure of Soviet didacticism, a dependence that remained substantial for the other religious groups.
Religious resurgence in the late twentieth century, after the end of the Cold War called the existence of both Western and Eastern models of the welfare state into question, has sometimes been interpreted as the defensive response of those marginalized by neoliberal reforms (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). Fitting in with this interpretation, the years of capitalist “shock therapy” in the early 1990s did see a rise of religious commitments across Russia. As elsewhere in the world, a good part of this revival did not happen in traditional religious centers, but was made possible by religious entrepreneurs who were willing to occupy spaces made available by economic restructuring in the sphere of secular culture and leisure, such as empty storefronts and shuttered cinemas (Meyer 2006). In Joshkar-Ola and other postsocialist cities (Balzer 2005; Yang 2004), the link between religious revival and socioeconomic precariousness is evident in the spatial struggles among diverse religious groups (and between them and secular institutions) over the remaining structures of secular culture-building. But in Russia’s Volga region at least, there have also been interesting differences between denominations in terms of their reliance on such Soviet leftovers, indicating that it is not the state of the economy alone that determines the rhythms and strategies of religious resurgence.
By the second post-Soviet decade, the buildings and networks that had allowed Soviet citizens to experience their link with human contemporaries continued to be used by groups that sought to connect people to the divine, but only when they had no other choice of meeting place. In Joshkar-Ola, newly built Orthodox churches aggregated around the centers of political and economic power, while everyone else made do with the spaces left behind by Soviet projects of cultural and industrial construction: Chimarij activities were coordinated from a small office in the culture palace of the Road Construction Authority, Muslims had built their mosque in the green belt surrounding a factory, and Protestant congregations struggled to rent auditorium space in houses of culture or to secure plots in the private sector, where wooden houses remained underserved by municipal infrastructures of gas, heat, and water. Economic precariousness, including high unemployment, affected the great majority of citizens in this republic regardless of religious affiliation, while those denominations that clung most tenaciously to the structures of Soviet didacticism did so out of a more specifically religious sense of precariousness: while Russian Orthodoxy’s place in public culture was guaranteed by politicians eager to clothe themselves in its political legitimacy (Garrard and Garrard 2008; Mitrokhin 2004), other groups had to connect to the public sphere through the almost outdated, but widely recognized model of a didactic network.
Though not supported by a massive state bureaucracy, didactic approaches in post-Soviet religion resemble Khrushchev era mobilizations in the sense of being ways to work with limited resources during uncertain times: building organizations that are at once centralized and able to generate and exploit local enthusiasm. Looking at the Orthodox strategy of “Christianizing” Russian cityscapes (Kozelsky 2010) by occupying key sites without worrying much about winning hearts and minds through rhetorics of persuasion, it is clear that didactic networks are not the only approach to religious revival in the post–Cold War world. But as a familiar way of inhabiting the present on the way to its transformation, didacticism still appeals to those who see themselves as marginalized by ethno-confessional, political, and economic inequalities. Chimarij attempts to gain the status of a denomination through networks of teaching and learning show the enduring appeal of the model for building institutions from scratch.
When Chimarij activists attempt to harness the remains of Soviet didactic mobilizations to establish a foothold in the post-Soviet public sphere, there is a double irony: Soviet didacticism was not only part of an effort to build an explicitly secular culture, but it was also centered in cities and treated the rural sites of Chimarij rituals as recipients, rather than sources, of knowledge, aid, and instruction. Soviet agit-brigades sent out to the countryside to promote a speedy harvest often reported back the wishes and grievances of rural dwellers, who were assumed to be in need of both enlightenment and material help.1 Even in the narratives of methodicians who worked with rural audiences across relatively small social distances, because they had themselves grown up in a village or even still lived in one, the movement from centers to peripheries played a role. A rural schoolteacher in her thirties remembered how her father, an elementary school principal and member of the Knowledge Society, set out on foot rain, shine, or snow for early morning lectures at outlying complexes of the collective farm in whose central settlement the family lived. Soviet didactic activities thus had a spatial direction in which towns were giving centers and the countryside was the receiving periphery.
As post-Soviet Joshkar-Ola was transformed by the modest wealth of the Putin years, the disparities between city and countryside increased: in many villages, a majority of houses still had no indoor plumbing, and their residents relied on woodstoves for heat. Meanwhile, legal reforms had lifted the prohibitions that formerly kept urban-based religious organizations from practicing rural outreach comparable to that of the Knowledge Society. The Lutheran satellite congregation in Ljupersola was an attempt of a Protestant church to establish its own network, creating pathways of knowledge and assistance between town and country. Laypeople from the village traveled to Joshkar-Ola to receive training as youth workers, Sunday school teachers, or humanitarian aid workers, while the deacon, the cantor, and a changing contingent of youth from the city boarded the church’s minibus every Sunday evening to conduct the service in Ljupersola, sometimes bringing loads of donated clothing from Finland, and sometimes taking back sacks of potatoes. But only one other Protestant congregation—a Pentecostal group led by an ethnic Mari couple—was investing a comparable amount of effort in the countryside. The others concentrated their human and financial resources on evangelizing in the city.
The Orthodox Church also organized training sessions for rural teachers at the diocesan center, which, in Marij El as in many other republics and regions of the Russian Federation, was identical with the seat of regional government. But for Orthodox Christians, town-country relationships have been somewhat more complicated: while rural residents are considered to be in need of material and moral support from urban church institutions, the countryside is also the realm of holy sites and monasteries that attract urban dwellers as pilgrims seeking to receive healing and inspiration, rather than as missionaries seeking to direct and transform (Kormina 2006).
Rural places are even more central to Chimarij Paganism. Its high priest is the only major religious leader in the republic who lives in a village, not in the capital, and even urban adherents travel to villages in order to participate in rituals, which take place on garden plots or at sacred sites associated with particular villages. But for purposes of post-Soviet revival and recognition as a denomination, activists seem to find it necessary to balance an obligatory respect for rural ritual centers with structures of dissemination from city to country that resemble Soviet didacticism and the outreach work of other religious groups.
A case in point was a seminar in July 2005, which began in a culture palace in Joshkar-Ola and ended in a Mari village in the Morki district. Ambitiously entitled “The preservation of ethnic immaterial culture as a means toward state integrity and spiritual security,” the seminar was organized by the Joshkar-Ola-based Mari Cultural Center, with funds from the federal Ministry of Culture. The participants included employees of culture clubs and museums in addition to practicing Mari priests (known by the Mari term onaeng or the Tatar kart). Invitations had gone out through the pyramid of cultural institutions, asking each district in the republic to send one or two cultural workers. In addition, cultural centers serving the Mari diaspora in the Perm region, Bashkortostan, Udmurtia, and Saint Petersburg had been invited to send representatives. Joshkar-Ola thus figured in the seminar as a center of knowledge and infrastructural support for matters concerning Mari ethnic culture, much as it did during the Soviet era.
The seminar coincided with important dates in the rural festival calendar, but without the spirit of competition which such timing would have brought during the era of Commissioner Nabatov and his successors. Instead of drawing people away from traditional festivals, the seminar was scheduled to allow attendees to participate in the celebration of sürem, a midsummer Mari ceremony, in the Morki district, where it has been held on St. Peter and Paul’s Day (July 12) since the nineteenth century (Kalinina 2003: 19; J. Wichmann 1913: 105). Starting in Joshkar-Ola on July 11 with lectures by two Mari ethnographers in the culture palace of the republican Road Construction Authority (Avtodor), the event then turned into an excursion to the countryside. Participants were loaded onto two buses and taken on the three-hour drive to Morki town, the district center, where the day ended with a concert, dinner, and informal disco in the dormitory of the local technical college. On the next day, additional lectures by the same ethnographers informed the cultural workers of norms of dress and behavior at Mari ceremonies; the priests had already driven the remaining thirty miles to Shorun'zha village to prepare the ceremony under the instruction of the high priest of the republic and the local onaeng. The buses with the cultural workers reached Shorun'zha toward noon, after two stops in Morki: at the market to buy the headscarves that many female participants had not known to bring, and at the church to buy candles. In the village they joined a delegation of photojournalists from Finno-Ugric republics and a flock of journalists and visitors from across Marij El.
After the ceremony, the seminar participants visited the sights of Shorun'zha: the beehives, the library, and a workshop for traditional embroidery set up by the local collective farm. But at the urging of the two guests of honor from the federal Ministry of Culture in Moscow, the delegation did not stay for the evening concert that had been prepared for them. Instead, most of the participants returned to Morki, while a car took the Moscow guests back to Joshkar-Ola to catch the night train. I spent the night in Shorun'zha at the home of the methodician of the village clubhouse, whose efforts to prepare children for the concert had thus come to nothing.
We met the remaining members of the delegation again on the next day for the more informal part of the festival, which involved various forms of “play,” such as horse racing, the blowing of ceremonial horns made from elm bark to drive out evil spirits before the impending harvest, and a long procession along a village street led by women from the local folk choir. The procession stopped frequently to partake of the food that the households along the street had put out on long tables in front of their gates.
On this day, the visible master of ceremonies was the chairman of the collective farm,2 a former Communist Party secretary and a current member of the republic’s parliament whose birthday was on Peter and Paul’s Day. He was widely credited with making this kind of ceremonial life possible in Shorun'zha, but had kept in the background during the ceremony proper, not appearing in the sacred grove. The chairman led the procession down the street and finally presided over a banquet in the collective farm’s dining hall. There, he acted as the tamada (a pan-Soviet term of Georgian derivation for the master of the table) and called on guests to pronounce toasts, all of which included well-wishes for the future plans of the collective farm: building a hotel suitable to host comparable seminars in the future, and attracting ecotourists and students from ethnographic field schools in Finland. After posing for a group photograph on the steps of the dining hall, the delegation of cultural workers left, while the journalists stayed for another day, visiting a sacred spring and mountain in the vicinity. I also stayed behind to visit with the methodician’s family and participate in the ongoing hay gathering in neighboring Shin'sha.
Like the workers assemblies of 1960, this seminar required more intricate preparations than immediately met the eye. And the Chimarij organizers could not rely on the well-established structures of party, trade union, or Knowledge Society that supported Soviet methodicians, but had to piece together comparable networks themselves, relying on the remnants of Soviet cultural institutions. The main organizers were the methodician of the Mari Cultural Center (sponsored by the republic’s Ministry of Culture) and her husband, a retired army officer. In addition to organizing weekly evenings of Mari music and other forms of entertainment in Joshkar-Ola, the couple collaborated with the high priest to coordinate “events connected with the traditional Mari religion.” The latter phrase was the title of a large hand-drawn planning chart hanging on their office wall, containing the annual scheduled dates of the big prayer ceremonies of republic- or district-wide significance.
Occupying rooms on the second floor of the Avtodor culture palace, made available by virtue of old acquaintance, the Mari Cultural Center had a rather tenuous hold in Joshkar-Ola. But its rival in the quest to provide Chimarij adherents with an institutional base in the capital, the cultural-political association Mari Ushem, had a more troubled relationship with the republic’s government and was itself constantly in danger of losing its offices in the former House of Political Enlightenment. In the context of the unstable relations between Mari activists and a republican government dominated by ethnic Russians (Sokolovskii 2006), the title of the sürem seminar, with its allusion to Russia-wide anxieties about perceived threats to the “security" and “integrity” of the state posed by ethnic and religious separatisms, was probably designed to reassure federal sponsors of the loyalty of its organizers. During the event itself, the organizers spent most of their time entertaining the two guests from Moscow, even riding with them in a separate car. But efforts to standardize and didacticize religion should not be confused with political conformity: Mari Ushem, too, sponsored lectures on Mari Paganism in Joshkar-Ola and distributed videotapes and literature on the topic. The two organizations collaborated at some ceremonies, and some cultural workers who received materials from the Mari Cultural Center were also members of Mari Ushem.
One purpose of creating a teachable Mari religion was, then, to present Chimarij adherents as worthy of standing on a par with members of other religious groups. The institutions that participated in the emerging network—the culture palace of an enterprise in the capital, district cultural administrations, and a district technical college and rural collective farm headed by a former party secretary—had developed in the Soviet period to spread knowledge and cultured behavior from the cities to the countryside. But, different from a Soviet era institution, the Mari Cultural Center could rely on administrative command through the Ministry of Culture to obtain the support of only some of these institutions. The director of the culture palace and the chairman of the collective farm, for example, had to be persuaded to support the project by virtue of personal connections or common interests.
Like the institutional supporters, the two groups of students gathered together as recipients and future transmitters of the imparted knowledge were quite different: onaeng seeking to improve their knowledge of the ceremonies, and methodicians interested in Mari culture. From what I was able to learn from the organizers, the hope was that the latter might organize similar ceremonies in their towns and villages, or at least give positive treatment to Mari religious traditions during educational events. Through gathering and instructing onaeng, the high priest was asserting the authority of his own interpretation of Mari rituals and also acting to remedy the lack of experienced priests after the Soviet period. Too many onaeng had been killed under Stalin (Sanukov 2000: 129) to continue the previous system of hereditary priesthood with informal training in the family.
This disruption confronted the high priest and his supporters with the need to quickly train specialists, creating pressures of change comparable to those that had prompted the Soviet reliance on standardized methods. In the quest for standardization, the high priest had worked with the ethnographer Nikandr Popov to put together a book, Jumyn jüla (lit. “God’s customs,” a neologism meant to be equivalent to “divine law,” the Russian Orthodox term for a catechism; Popov and Tanygin 2003), that described Chimarij prayers and ceremonies. He also hoped to establish a training center for onaeng in the hotel complex in Shorun'zha once it opened. The reasons he gave for planning to do so in a village rather than in the capital showed both his awareness of the relative weakness of his group within the confessional politics of the republic—“it’s better there than in the city, so that Ioann [the Orthodox archbishop] won’t see, so that it doesn’t bother him”—and the primacy of the countryside for the ritual and social life of Chimarij adherents: “it’s better for the priests [karty] there.”
The degree to which the high priest’s authority was recognized in the republic seemed to vary from village to village. I attended one agavajrem ceremony in a small village where the presiding onaeng claimed never to have heard of the high priest. But there was a group of eight to ten priests from different districts who regularly co-officiated with the high priest during ceremonies at different locations. These priests sought to establish a network that mirrored the administrative structure of districts and republics, in the quest to achieve registration first in more and more districts, and finally at the republic level. In order to achieve this, the schedule of ceremonies they worked out annually ordered events in a hierarchy of local, district, and republic-wide significance. Replacing earlier distinctions between ceremonies held by a village, those organized by an association of neighboring villages, and rarer ones designated “all-Mari" or “world" prayer ceremonies (mer kumaltysh; Popov 1996), this model also involved a “hierarchy among karty,” as the head priest of one northeastern district, a former police officer, explained: some could only officiate in their village, some in their district, some at any place in the republic. He seemed to consider this an important achievement, and told me to note it in my study.
By trying to create centralized teaching institutions in order to secure recognition and reconstitution as a religious group, Chimarij activists mirror the adherents of other indigenous religions in post-Soviet Russia. Sakha and Tuvinian shamans in Siberia (Balzer 2005; Walters 2002) as well as Pagans in the fellow Finno-Ugric republic of Mordovia (Shchipkov 1998) have tried to establish educational centers. They thereby not only accept Soviet era ideas of religion as a bounded system of knowledge (Broz 2009), but also place their hopes in Soviet models of a centrally directed public sphere, modifying the ritual geographies of neighborliness. For activists and their supporters among village leaders, precarious religious networks are among the few remaining alternatives to the secularist culture-building that once promised an end to rural isolation.
Chimarij attempts to build a didactic network involved processes of standardization and canon-building that have been described as “rationalization” (Weber 1972 [1921]), “internal conversion” (Geertz 1973), and “Protestantization” (Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988) by scholars in other parts of the world. As changes instituted in a bid for recognition as a legitimate religion, they have precedents in the prerevolutionary Kugu Sorta (Big Candle) reform movement, which abolished animal sacrifice and presented its tenets in textual form as a way to claim parity with other religions of the Russian Empire (Werth 2001; Y. Wichmann 1932). What distinguishes post-Soviet didacticization from other types of religious reform is the way in which activists approach the need for easier and speedier teachability as not only a textual problem, but an organizational one. By making their rituals teachable, Chimarij not only claim equality with other religions and the right to registration, but also strive to give religious life a society-building power familiar from Soviet cultural work.
At the seminar, the didactic task fell largely to the two ethnographers, Nikandr Popov and Ol'ga Kalinina, both researchers at the republic’s Institute for History, Language and Literature. Popov lectured on “The social concept of the Mari traditional religion as a factor in the strengthening of the spiritual security of the country" and “The foundations of spiritual morality of the Mari people.” Kalinina’s topics were more directly oriented toward the practical application of the experiences gained at the seminar. In her lecture “Calendrical folk festivals of the Mari in ethnographic materials,” she provided a guide to the existing ethnographic literature on Mari festivals, inviting participants to draw on such literature when organizing events. And on the morning of the ceremony, she gave a short briefing on how to dress and behave in the sacred grove.
The lectures of both scholars included efforts to package features of the Mari religion into lists, a promising teaching tool for anyone interested in easy dissemination. Kalinina had prepared a handout listing eighteen numbered rules for behavior before, during, and after the ceremony, referred to by the organizers by the Russian term metodichka. Popov acknowledged the lack of just such lists of rules as a problem within the Mari religion. Lecturing on the social concept of the Mari religion, he admitted that the Maris had no such thing as the Ten Commandments, but, as God had revealed himself to different peoples in different ways, the Maris also possessed moral directives in the form of “god’s sayings” (jumyn oj-vlak). Different sayings had been preserved in different places, but, if put together “like a mosaic,” they had “great meaning.” In both lectures he elaborated the plan of gathering together Mari moral precepts from folktales (jomak) and proverbs (kalykmut), in which Maris articulated ideas about good and evil, and precepts on “how to relate to God, how to relate to other peoples, how to build up respect for the family, how to enrich our own culture.”
Popov’s efforts recall those of nineteenth-century folklorists who assembled European folk epics from individual verses and themes (Honko 1987; Knight 1998), or, more generally, the attempts to formulate coherent, decontextualized systems out of disparate and situated sources for which anthropologists have long criticized one another.3 These lectures can certainly be situated in a particular tradition of European folklore studies. But they also show the power of a didactic model of religion. Listable precepts are not only convenient for structural analysis, they are also easy to disseminate, recite, and memorize, and hence teachable even in a short seminar or in the classes on Mari religion whose introduction into the school curriculum Popov advocated. Chimarij activists obviously considered lists of moral precepts and other forms of didactic entextualization as crucial to mobilizing the networks of teachers and cultural workers that they needed to revitalize Mari ritual life.
For ritual specialists, the appeal of methodical aids seemed to lie not so much in their usefulness for learning how to conduct a ceremony, but in the way they signaled conformity to a religious hierarchy. One onaeng in Shorun'zha displayed the book Jumyn jüla and a collection of Mari prayers compiled by Popov on a kitchen shelf, but when I asked whether he used them, he said no, he knew the prayers and actions without looking at a book. When someone came to him and said they did not know what to say in the sacred grove, he recommended reading some of the prayers; after that, people could pray by themselves. Like the lecture and sermon titles of other didactic networks, printed texts authorized the personal imagination by keeping it within approved bounds, promising a common direction to personal efforts to relearn Mari traditions.
Chimarij activists were not alone in feeling the pressure to codify their practices into easily teachable tenets. Popov’s attempt to derive a “social concept" from proverbs and sayings echoes the “social concept" passed by the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church at its millennium council of 2000. This text, in turn, is a response to analogous statements in the Catholic Church, whose more centralized and explicit doctrines gave it an initial advantage in the post-Soviet quest to gain a voice in matters of contemporary social dynamics (Agadjanian 2003). Although the need to engage in social outreach has long been deeply disputed within Orthodoxy (Kenworthy 2008; Mitrokhin 2004), a variety of Orthodox dioceses have negotiated contracts with regional governments in the effort to fill the niche of charity work that the socialist state once reserved for itself (Caldwell 2008). In Marij El and elsewhere, permission to do volunteer work in schools, orphanages, prisons, and army garrisons was an object of competition between Western Christian churches, the Russian Orthodox Church, and other Russia-based religious groups. In this context, guiding statements and social conceptions were also instruments through which a religious organization could become socially effective by offering a sense of meaning and direction, which secular attempts at culture building no longer provided. Within this scramble to replace secular institutions, Chimarij efforts focused on the countryside, seeking to recreate the dynamics of Soviet networks while correcting the way they had marginalized villagers.
The seminar revealed some of the challenges of reinstating the promises of Soviet networks to the countryside. As a didactic event, it addressed three constituent groups assumed to be in need of methodically packaged knowledge about the Mari religion: the superiors in the federal government and the subordinate ritual specialists and cultural workers, many of whom came to Joshkar-Ola from more rural places. While this could have been the participant structure of a regional seminar in the Soviet era, the event departed from Soviet models in two ways. The first was the use of the Mari language almost throughout, except during some of the official welcoming addresses and in the printed program—something that, as several participants remarked, would never have happened during the Soviet period, when Russian would have been used to accommodate the non-Mari speakers. Second, the seminar transposed urban and small-town participants into a rural setting, whose residents and ritual sites had an authority of their own to support or obstruct the seminar’s message.
Departing from the usual urban-rural vectors of Soviet didacticism, the seminar cast the urban visitors not as counselors and experts, but as prospective ritual participants who were themselves in need of instruction. Since Chimarij rituals were not practiced evenly in all parts of the republic, many participants had never attended a Mari ceremony before, or not since childhood. Many of them knew so little about ritual etiquette that they had not brought the proper attire: headscarves and skirts for women and caps for men. At the same time, they did not come with an expectation to be pure observers, but also as participants. For instance, some methodicians expressed embarrassment when they were told just before the ceremony that participants were not supposed to drink alcohol for a day in advance, whereas vodka had flown quite liberally at the dinner the previous evening. Two women from the district surrounding Joshkar-Ola, baptized Orthodox Christians, expressed anxiety over whether it was right for them to participate in a Chimarij ceremony. Doubting the ethnographer’s explanation that Tünjambal Serlagysh, the Savior above the World, and Mer Jumo, the God of the World, corresponded to Jesus Christ and the Christian God, they decided that it might be better not to offer candles, coins, or other gifts, but just to stand back and watch. Conflicting religious commitments only reinforced the idea that a ceremony is an occasion for participation, never purely a didactic spectacle to be observed.
The rural setting of the seminar was thus neither the object of instruction nor simply a teaching tool. Rather, participants encountered the rural sacred space as a potential source of power with its own rules of engagement. The rural hosts also treated the ceremony as a combined occasion for self-display and for accomplishing aims that departed from those of the outsiders. Parallel to the seminar, the organizers of the ceremony in Shorun'zha had accomplished their own organizational feats. Having previously visited a much smaller ceremony on St. Nicholas’s Day in May, I could tell that the sacred grove had been carefully prepared for this more important occasion: a wooden gate now marked the entrance to the sacred ground, and water containers hung nearby for handwashing before entering the grove proper. New wooden benches for worshipers stood near some of the five trees at which sacrifices were made. These preparations had been undertaken through the joint efforts of the collective farm and the village administration, as I later heard from the collective farm’s chairman.
Village leaders also carefully managed Shorun'zha’s reputation as a stronghold of Mari traditions. An announcement posted at the village bus stop alerted residents to the upcoming festivities, and asked everyone to appear in Mari costume. My hostess’s sister, who lived on the street which the procession followed on the second day of the festival, reported that the collective farm leadership had asked all the neighbors to prepare tables with Mari dishes. Unsure what would qualify as a Mari dish, she tried to remember how to prepare something the organizers explicitly asked for, a kind of custard made from creamy, heated milk.
None of these displays of rural neighborliness would have been possible without the organizational skills of Shorun'zha’s leadership, and observers from elsewhere in the republic were quick to acknowledge that. In Joshkar-Ola and Shin'sha, people often pointed to Shorun'zha as a model village, where people zhivut druzhno, live in unity, as friends. Many considered the way in which the collective farm and rural administration could mobilize residents to participate in community events to be exceptional, and saw it as the reason for the village’s ability to conserve both religious customs and a functioning agricultural collective. As elsewhere in rural Russia (Rogers 2009: 227, 256), it only seemed possible to create a communal ritual life in those places where institutions of the Soviet collectivized economy survived.
While actively participating in constructing Shorun'zha’s image, the chairman displayed a studied aloofness from outside attention, as if to avoid giving the impression that he was gaining personal fame from his village’s reputation. He did not attend the ceremony on St. Peter and Paul’s Day because July 12 was also his birthday, and he did not want that to take up all the attention, he explained during his speech at the concluding banquet. He also minimized any role that either his own planning or orders from town might have played in shaping the festivities: “No one prepared, no one summoned us from town. We sing ourselves, we dance ourselves, we distill [moonshine] ourselves and drink ourselves.” When I asked in a subsequent interview if he thought that religious events like the sürem ceremony helped agriculture, he said no, they did not help agriculture, they helped the people. From this short answer, he launched into a reflection on the changes in the forms of leisure and sociality available in post-Soviet society, and asked me if I liked to go to the cinema. Even in Joshkar-Ola, no one could afford it any longer, he claimed: “No one goes to the cinemas now, what for, [to] watch some horror movie for 300 rubles?4 We support each other, when someone is sick, when there is grief, you have to help, and we help from the workplace. Now we live like that, it’s the primitive-communal order [pervobytno-obshchinnyj stroj].”
With this reference to historical-materialist theories of social evolution, where primitive communism represented the oldest form of social organization, the chairman pointed to the uncertain place of marginal rural communities in the attempts to rebuild former didactic networks along religious lines. According to him, the organization of religious ceremonies was not a result of thriving town-country networks, but one of the few compensatory measures available when past networks had fallen apart. During the 1980s, when he was first a club director and then party secretary, networks of cultural institutions and social services provided country dwellers with opportunities to spend free time watching movies or engaging in other pursuits. The present, by contrast, was characterized by isolation and abandonment. In his pessimistic assessment, religion was something for the village to fall back on when left to the devices of neighborly help, but it was a poor replacement for the Soviet promise to raise rural standards of living to urban levels.
The chairman’s resigned skepticism brings us back to the link between networking strategies and social precariousness. Knowing full well that the new network could not provide the same kinds of subsidized resources that Soviet didactic organizations had made available to rural peripheries, he nonetheless embraced it as a better alternative to disintegration and isolation. From this perspective, the regeneration of Chimarij practices is not an end in itself, but a way to keep the village within the widened horizons of sociality that Soviet secularism had once opened up, even though not everyone believes in new chances or dynamic futures.
Work on Turkish secularism has emphasized nostalgia for the hopes inspired by a strong developmental state as a motivation for abiding secularist attachments (Navaro-Yashin 2002; Özyürek 2006). Religious actors in post-Soviet Russia can be susceptible to the same nostalgia as they seek to recreate familiar structures of Soviet mobilizations. But people who came of age during the last decades of the Soviet Union have already lived through a number of disappointments as transformative energies died down and mobilizations failed to deliver on their promises of change. Rural people, in the experience of Shorun'zha’s collective farm chairman, had always been low on the list of priorities of Soviet administrations, no matter what goals were proclaimed for a modernized countryside. And even in the city, successive waves of reconstruction had never brought about the promised communist future, in which all shortages of housing and goods would be solved.
For religious groups seeking to take over where secularist mobilizations left off, there are two options. One is to emulate the dynamics of secular didacticism, injecting them with the promise of divine agency. This is the model that has made global Pentecostalism attractive to the marginalized (Dombrowski 2001; D. Martin 1990), whose sense of precariousness and desire for change can come from poverty, but also from a sense of moral alienation. Larry Stockstill, the wealthy pastor of a megachurch, received God’s call to reenergize his church through cell groups the night after Bill Clinton was elected president, apparently in anticipation of moral and political uncertainties (Stockstill 2001 [1998]: 13). Arising out of yet another kind of marginality, Chimarij trainings are a more sober expression of the hope that a didactic framework can create the momentum for directed change in a neglected countryside.
The other option for postsecular religion is to propose a different view of what transformation means. If the Russian Orthodox Church takes care to distinguish itself from didactic institutions, this is only partly because it recognizes their fading importance. Another reason is that Orthodox responses to modernization have foregrounded those theological resources for thinking about change that stand in tension with the search for standardized curricula. Though all sides share the idea that larger social change is brought about through deliberate personal transformation, they differ on the means by which such transformation can occur, and the ends which it should achieve.