After the closing and destruction of Resurrection Cathedral in 1961, the village church of Semënovka was the only Russian Orthodox house of worship in the immediate vicinity of Joshkar-Ola. When I asked an aged priest who had served in Semënovka since the mid-1970s why that church remained open, he replied laconically: “If they had closed it, there would have been no place to sing off the deceased.” The phrase “singing off” (otpevat') refers to Orthodox funeral services, and the priest’s assertion was that even Soviet officials would not have wanted, or dared, to deprive the population of the republic’s capital of a place to hold such rites. For a study of the interaction between religious and secular spheres, this matter-of-fact assertion raises a number of questions. While it is tempting to treat the Soviet era as a purely secular background to post-Soviet efforts of religious revival, funeral rites are just one area where religious practice not only persisted under socialism, but did so with a measure of public recognition. Soviet secularity could never quite exclude religion, and post-Soviet religiosity relies on the secular training and skills of former methodicians. We should thus think of the religious and the secular not so much as characteristics of long historical eras that succeed each other, but as sites of engagement that alternate and overlap in the lives of both societies and individuals.
As the public balance of power between secularist and religious institutions began to shift during perestroika, residents of the Mari republic adjusted their aspirations accordingly, but they did so with the help of more longstanding ideas about the place of this-worldly and other-worldly commitments in life’s trajectory. In the biographies of local methodicians, we find evidence of the kind of “dispersion” and “inversion” of religious elements that Hans-Joachim Höhn (2007: 36–38) considers to be markers of post-secular modernity. But it is often hard to tell if such phenomena are purely consequences of Soviet secularization or simply modifications of older patterns of living out a variety of human possibilities. In competition as well as complementarity, secularist and religious commitments laid uneven claims to people at different stages in their lives, sometimes speaking in almost indistinguishable languages, sometimes pulling in different directions.
When they interpreted icons as visual teaching aids, and liturgical beauty as a means to mesmerize an audience, atheist activists upheld the idea of functional equivalence between Soviet ideology and religion. One reason that they perceived such analogies between their own efforts and those of the “church people” may have been that, particularly in rural communities, secular events and religious observances competed for the limited amount of time available for nonproductive activities.
Emile Durkheim (1998 [1914]: 307) famously argued that religious experience among Australian Aborigines was a function of otherwise dispersed groups coming together for collective endeavors at certain times of the year, and that such patterns of gathering and dispersal divided the year into “sacred” and “profane” seasons. Although this model may work well for hunter-gatherers whose ordinary economic activities happen in dispersal, the sacred and the collective had a more tension-ridden relationship in large-scale Soviet agriculture. Religious affairs commissioner Nabatov and his colleagues displayed special concern about ritual activities during spring sowing and fall harvest because these were the times when economic managers most needed people to be focused on collective production. Increased didactic interventions by methodicians at these critical times exhorted people to focus on collective farm work, discouraging religious festivals as well as work for individual households in the private plots (Grossman 1977; Humphrey 1998: 302–306). Summer and early fall were major times of “Soviet presence” in the countryside (Fitzpatrick 1994: 174) because at the height of the agricultural season it was especially important to combat the dispersal and diversion associated with neighborly patterns of production and ritual practice. But agitational brigades also made their rounds during this time simply because the roads were in relatively good shape, and high school and university students were free to travel. While designed to enhance productivity, conducting and attending propaganda events took time away from agricultural labor, or from necessary rest periods during lunch breaks and after dark. Even under socialism, the relationship between spiritual development and good work ethics was not free from tension.
As times of heightened contestation between the demands of collective agriculture, individual family plots, and cultural enlightenment work, seasons of intensive agricultural work thus embodied the contradictions that could arise between different ways of measuring economic productivity and communal cohesion. Village religious observances, by contrast, seemed more successful in straddling divisions between the concerns of individual households and the village as a whole. Contrary to Soviet denunciations, Mari village festivals were timed to accompany important events in the agricultural cycle without directly competing with them; ceremonies were held before or after spring sowing, midsummer hay making, and fall harvesting. What is more, Chimarij and Russian Orthodox rituals recognized households as the main participant units, as both the providers and recipients of blessed foodstuffs and objects. But when it came to sustaining larger ecclesial institutions, the plans of Russian Orthodox and other Christian clergy stood in a similar tension with the demands of agricultural subsistence as those of Soviet ideological workers. For clergy in Joshkar-Ola and smaller towns, summer was a time of special opportunities and special problems, much as it was for Soviet propagandists. Summer weather facilitated pilgrimage and evangelization, but the garden work with which many residents of post-Soviet Marij El were occupied from the time the snow melted until the first frost also constituted a drain on everyone’s time and strength (cf. Ries 2009). “Don’t all go off to your gardens right away. If someone wants to work, you can help dig the church garden,” said the Russian Orthodox priest of a district center in his Easter homily in 2005, making a futile attempt to protect the holiness of the “bright week” that follows Easter. Throughout the summer, I heard his colleagues in the Lutheran church and the Charismatic Christian Center address the issue of gardens with comparable resigned disapproval, even as they tried to take advantage of the warm weather for evangelizing efforts.
The competition between secularist cultural work and religious observances can thus be seen as one side of a triangular relationship, in which both stand in tension with the demands of rural (or deindustrialized suburban) subsistence. Within this triangle, religion is neither a harmful diversion from agricultural work, as atheist propagandists portrayed it, nor does it stand in easy harmony with the rhythms of village and partially urbanized life. Much like the Pentecostal Baptists on Papua New Guinea described by Joel Robbins (2004: 255), Christians in Marij El have found that the need to tend their gardens is at odds with their efforts to come together frequently as a Christian community. In the seasonal rhythm imposed by the Russian climate, any activity that involves regular communal gatherings—whether to listen to a lecture or to attend religious services—is easiest to sustain in the winter. But because weather conditions restrict long-distance outreach during that season, it remained up to village teachers and film projectionists to trudge through the snow and spread messages of the Soviet future to rural audiences. If the palpable signs of post-Soviet religious revival have remained mostly confined to cities, the Russian climate still plays a role: during the times when rural audiences would be most receptive to visitors with religious messages, they are also hardest to reach.
The competition with the rhythms of rural life seems to be most intense among ideological movements that expect their participants to be economically active at the same time as they develop spiritually, as do evangelical Protestantism and Soviet systems of lifelong learning. Rural religiosity in Russia, by contrast, is geared to a far more fragmented social reality. Confronting the tensions between being productive and pursuing a spiritual life, local religious traditions have tended to resolve them through complementarity, where different commitments are deemed appropriate for different life stages. In particular, the association between intensive religious practice and old age adds a new set of meanings to the phrase “postsecular religion.”
The priest from Semënovka claimed that the need to give the dead a liturgical “singing off” remained so pervasive throughout the Soviet era that even officials intent on closing churches had to take it into account. Indeed, Soviet statistics on religious rituals consistently showed that the percentage of deceased people who received religious funerary rites was noticeably higher than that of children who went through baptism or other religious rites of passage, and far higher than that of couples who were married in a religious ceremony.1 Elsewhere in socialist Eastern Europe, funerals also retained the strongest religious symbolism compared to other life-cycle rituals (Kligman 1988). In spite of these trends, evidence suggests that funerals received less attention in the struggle for secular rituals than other observances. For instance, they rarely figured in the literature on new secular holidays, although scenarios for secular funerals had existed since the 1920s (Lane 1981: 82–83).
As Christel Lane (1981: 83) suggests, part of the reason for this relative indifference lay in the philosophical difficulties of making entirely secular sense of a funerary rite. More precisely, dead people were beyond the reach of didactic intervention, making it harder to conceptualize how their treatment mattered to the society of living human beings. Socialist funerals addressed the surviving kin with messages about the meaning of life and the death-transcending power of labor, but that same theme was elaborated in many other contexts. For example, workplace festivities sometimes played on the theme of continuity between generations (Petrov 2003: 143), as did the public commemoration of dead heroes, such as Lenin or the fallen of the Second World War, whose role in Soviet life has been well documented (Merridale 2000; Tumarkin 1983, 1994; Weiner 2001).
Compared to other life-cycle events, increasing the number of secular funerals does not seem to have been a major concern for methodicians on the ground. As elsewhere in the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s, in the Mari ASSR there was abundant discussion of “new rituals” in newspapers and advice manuals. But the only call for more attention to funerals that I found struggled to define the proper addressee of the ritual’s didactic message. In his book The Family and Religion, Mikhail Nekhoroshkov quotes the letter of a miner published in the central newspaper, Pravda:
[A]s long as a person is alive, above him there is the party committee, the mining committee, and the rest of the leadership—we demand, we educate, we care for him in whatever way we can. Because this person is ours, and we’re not willing to give him up to anyone. But once he dies—then what, all of a sudden he stops being one of ours? Take him, priests [popy] and deacons, lay to rest the sinful soul—is that how it goes? To the dead, of course, it’s all the same, but the living are looking at us! Children, grandchildren are growing! And for us also, as long as we are alive, it’s not all the same what trace remains behind. We need to know that we have not walked the earth for nothing, that we have left something behind in people. (quoted in Nekhoroshkov 1967b: 51–52)
The letter argues that holding religious funerals for people who lived secular lives sends their surviving kin and friends a message about the fragility and powerlessness of the secular community just at a moment when its continuity and solidarity most need to be affirmed. “To the dead … it’s all the same” what kind of funeral they receive, but the living need to reaffirm the enduring strength of a community of human beings who are irrevocably “ours.”2 Such an exclusively humanist understanding of community might have been expressed in funeral rites that acknowledged the finitude of individual life and the commitment of colleagues and family to carry on the achievements of the deceased. But the fact that Nekhoroshkov quotes from a Moscow newspaper, omitting the usually obligatory local examples, suggests that there were few experiments with secular funerals to report on in the republic.
This neglect was due in part to a view of community membership as involving susceptibility to teaching. Note that in the above quote, the living person develops ties to the secular community through the didactic efforts of party and trade union offices: “we demand, we educate, we care” (trebuem, vospityvaem, zabotimsja). From an atheist point of view, there was no way in which these efforts could continue after death.
Soviet atheist didactic interventions more typically targeted youth and middle age, and could thus coexist quite comfortably with traditions which associated intensified religious practice with old age (Rogers 2009). In the Volga region, as elsewhere in Russia, such a complementary view of secular and religious stages of development survived Soviet socialism fairly intact, though it depended on an idea of learning that was at odds with the promises of Soviet didacticism.
The happy convergence of Soviet atheist and local religious ideas of life stages can be seen in the statistics on life-cycle rituals. The lowest percentages of religious rituals were for marriages, i.e., rituals conducted for mature adults. Rituals connected to young children and to people at the end of their lives, by contrast, remained more strongly religiously marked. Atheist observers also associated old people, young children, and women with religious activity—the three groups assumed to be less fully integrated into socialist work collectives (Dragadze 1993; Paert 2004). A study by Viktor Solov'ev concluded that grandparents were the major force in deciding on the baptism of newborns even against the preferences of the parents (Solov'ev 1982). The commissioner for religious affairs, Savel'ev, claimed in several reports that most religious believers were women and pensioners. In 1974, he backed up such statements with statistics compiled from the reports of registered Russian Orthodox congregations, which showed that most registered (dvadtsatki) members of the eleven functioning Orthodox churches in the republic were female pensioners with no more than elementary educations.3 The composition of the “church aktiv,” as Savel'ev called it in analogy to mobilized party or trade union members, reflected associations of religion with social marginality and led him to call for the familiar didactic solution to the religious problem: specialized cultural programs for housewives and pensioners.
One might see the emphasis on the social marginality of religious practitioners as a self-serving move by atheists intent on minimizing the significance of the phenomena they were trying to eradicate. Indeed, historians have sometimes interpreted the tendency to ascribe greater religiosity to women as primarily an expression of the gender biases held by Soviet activists (Husband 2000: 102–105; Peris 1998: 79–83). Others have noted the opportunities for accommodation and disguise provided by official ideas about gender and religion. With respect to the “women’s riots” (bab'i bunty) against the 1929–1930 collectivization campaigns and church closings, Lynne Viola (1996) argues that women’s association with irrational, inconsequential behavior made it possible for them to express the dissent and dissatisfaction of the whole village, while shielding the community from state retaliation. A man might privately agree with his wife, but protect himself and the whole family by publicly denying any knowledge of her activities. During the anti-veiling campaign in Soviet Central Asia, the feminization of overtly religious behavior gave men a similar option of public disavowal (Northrop 2004: 176).
A similar argument about the benefits of marginality can be made for the association of religious practice with pensioners. If grandparents took the initiative to have children baptized, this served the interests of the parents, who had much more to lose in terms of educational or career opportunities. It also served the interests of the atheist activists, who could argue that high rates of baptism did not constitute evidence of the failure of atheist education among key social groups. Soviet regulations recognized the risk of such strategic disavowals of responsibility and tried to curtail them by forbidding churches to perform baptisms of minors unless both parents signed the baptismal register.4
But beyond such strategic considerations, particular characteristics of rural Russian religiosity facilitated the compartmentalization of religion by age and gender. Douglas Rogers (2009: 45) makes this argument for Old Believers in the Urals, pointing to their tradition of “deferring ritual participation,” where youth and middle age were times for attending to this-worldly affairs, while old age meant turning toward the spiritual formation of one’s soul in the interest of salvation. Rogers points out that this habit of uncoupling ritual practices from the affairs of the fallen world, documented since before the revolution, allowed Old Believer communities to adapt quite successfully to the demands of Soviet rule, while they reproduced religious life through the activities of the old and the very young.
The forms of old-age asceticism espoused by Rogers’s priestless Old Believers are extreme, involving withdrawal from commensality with younger family members and other acts of quasi-monastic abstention. Among Old Believers in the Mari republic, some female elders even prepared their coffins during their lifetime and reportedly lay in them for days at a time “in expectation of some kind of miracle.”5 But patterns of intensified religious practice during those life stages when an individual is less preoccupied with activities of production and reproduction have also been reported in mainstream Orthodox communities. For twentieth-century Greece, Renée Hirschon (1989: 220–232) and Charles Stewart (1991: 74, 109) have noted the association of religious activity with women and old age. For Russia, Tat'iana Bernshtam (2005: 241) argues that the trend in the late nineteenth century was that only women and the aged kept fasts, while younger men increasingly did not.
Studies of Protestant and Catholic Europe have interpreted a similar compartmentalization of religious and secular involvement by gender and age as an effect of secularizing processes (Brown 2001; Christian 1972). The Greek and Russian examples are certainly open to the same interpretation. But compartmentalization has older precedents, such as the Muscovite tradition of people entering monasteries at an advanced age, after having lived lay lives (Smolitsch 1953: 262–263). Comparable to Hindu expectations about renunciation in old age (Hawley 1987), a general ethics of social complementarity became a resource for engaging the demands of secular society.
In the Mari republic, this notion of complementarity was not restricted to Orthodox Christians, but was part of the shared neighborly assumptions about how religious practice worked. A group of mainly elderly women cleaned the floor of the Russian Orthodox cathedral after services on Sundays, and one participant said that she would do this for her children’s sake as long as she could, after which they would have to do it for her. A Tatar schoolteacher to whom I mentioned the problems of Muslim students at German universities, where the fasting month of Ramadan sometimes coincides with major exam periods, expressed bafflement as to why young people would observe the fast. She explained that she was nearing retirement and would perhaps take up fasting then, though it would be hard. For her, fasting and increased piety were necessary for people who were withdrawing from productive life and preparing their souls for death.
An elderly couple in a Mari village recalled how notions of gender complementarity had helped them conduct household-level sacrificial ceremonies during the Soviet period. With her husband’s knowledge, the wife conducted the rites at home while he was at work, so as not to endanger his job at the post office. The couple explained their division of religious labor as a strategic accommodation, but this accommodation was made possible by a prior understanding of ritual as intercession: what counted was that the ceremony be performed by someone in the household, not that the whole household be present. As they prepared to participate in a communal sacrificial ceremony in the fall of 2005, it was still the old matriarch, rather than her husband, grown son, or daughter-in-law, who said the prayers before the icon corner before everyone left the house. She also stood in line to hand the onaeng the family’s sacrificial offering, a duck, and receive his prayers, while her husband joined other men in tending the fires under the kettles in which meat from all the sacrificial animals was cooked together. Even after the lifting of Soviet restrictions, the task of ritually representing the household still fell to the oldest married woman.
Although none of these instances excludes the possibility that the feminization and deferral of religious practice might have increased during the Soviet period, they make it unlikely that these phenomena either were invented by Soviet observers or simply reflected strategic reactions of religious believers to Soviet policy. In terms of the logic of local understandings, restrictions on who could participate did not significantly impact the efficacy of religious observances, just as devotion to constructing the socialist society during youth and middle age did not preclude turning to intensive religious practice after retirement. The relationship between the religious and secular spheres was thus shaped in part by the religious traditions of rural Russia. But the alternation of religious and secular commitments also depended on movement between different approaches to learning that not everyone found easy.
The link between secular attachments and particular learning contexts became clear in a conversation with a retired journalist and former anchor of an atheist radio show. When I interviewed her in 2005, she was wearing a Russian Orthodox baptismal cross around her neck and was clearly embarrassed when I asked about the show she had worked on in the 1970s. But she still spoke with indignation about a specific episode, when in the course of visiting a “sect” whose exact denomination she had forgotten, she learned that this group used children who had learned to play the piano “in Soviet music school” to play religious music during services: “this baffled me.” The idea that the skills that children acquired in the Soviet educational system could be used for religious ends went against her sense of the purpose of knowledge. Legal prohibitions against the involvement of minors in congregational life—the reason for splits in the 1960s within Baptist, Adventist, and Pentecostal groups, parts of which refused to comply with these laws (Lane 1978: 146–148; Sawatsky 1981)—show a similar concern with ensuring that schoolchildren would be exposed to exclusively secular influences. In what may have been the same case remembered by the journalist, Commissioner Savel'ev asked the city executive committee to take action against an Adventist congregation in Joshkar-Ola in 1977. The leadership, he stated, had “enlisted [vovlekli] for participation in the divine service—playing the piano as accompaniment to the choir of believers—Sasha Trusjuk, son of the presbyter, student of the seventh grade of middle school No. 24 in Joshkar-Ola.”6
As the example of France shows (Bowen 2008; Ozouf and Ozouf 1992), such a visceral association between schooling and secularity does not have to lead to militant atheism, but can simply enforce a secularist version of compartmentalization: students in state schools are expected to leave whatever religious attachments they have outside the classroom. In the Soviet Union, the hope was that the secularizing influence of the school would extend into the family and into a graduate’s productive life, but the mechanisms of control weakened outside the school fence. Though they did not always succeed in turning people into lifelong atheists, the constant claims that Soviet educational offerings made on the time, energy, and aspirations of children, adolescents, and working-age adults had an impact on their ability to look beyond secular knowledge. While they were proud of their professional accomplishments, many post-Soviet religious activists spoke of the ignorance and lack of skill with which they had approached religious practice late in life, and many expressed regret for time spent pursuing other kinds of learning.
Often, changes in their family status pushed people to seek religious expertise and venture beyond the society of human contemporaries. The teacher of Quranic reading at the mosque recalled how the thought of her own and her mother’s future death spurred her desire to acquire knowledge about Islam. Her mother had been illiterate in Arabic, but knew the prayers she had heard “from the grandmothers.” The daughter grew up with a sense that God existed, but in school all she heard was that “God does not exist.” As she grew older, the question of religious knowledge became more pressing for her:
I thought: I am going on forty; I thought: sooner or later I’ll have to die. My hair is cut off, what sort of a Tatar-Muslim am I? I thought of myself as a Muslim, not understanding that being a Tatar doesn’t mean that you’re a Muslim yet…. So at forty I already started to think that, for example, my mother was old, and that I can’t do anything, don’t know anything, how to pray, which prayers to read, I didn’t know anything. When I turned fifty, I started to go to the mosque. At that time the first abc’s [pervye azy] started here, the mosque wasn’t finished yet, we went to this temporary shed heated by a stove. I started to go there, received my first abc’s there. And then when I wanted to know more, and couldn’t get it here, I went to the medrese [in Kazan']; my mother had already died at the time, I didn’t have to take care of her.
This former factory worker was born in 1942, so her forties coincided with the end of stagnation and the onset of perestroika. She took up religious practice as she was nearing retirement age (fifty-five for women), during a decade of growing religious activism in all denominations in the republic. The spirit of the times must have made it easier for her to take on the responsibility of an elderly woman: to say prayers for the generations that preceded her and those that followed. Her approach to religion came from the framework of lifelong learning, familiar from her time as a trade union organizer. She enrolled in distance education at the medrese in Kazan' while taking care of her infant granddaughter and allowing her daughter to go back to work. Although she successfully completed her diploma thesis under these difficult conditions, she later told me that she and other women active in the mosque regretted that they had “wasted” so many years without saying prayers and observing fasts; if they had started earlier, embodied forms of ritual knowledge would now come more easily.
A Mari schoolteacher of the same generation (b. 1945), who had started attending sacrificial ceremonies after retirement, also mentioned her mother’s death as a key moment when she realized the inadequacy of her own knowledge. Thanks to an aunt’s explanations, the bereaved daughter, who had spent her working life away from her native Shorun'zha, found out how much she had to learn about commemorating the dead. While her mother had been alive, she had allowed her daughter to visit the village cemetery whenever it suited her schedule, but now it turned out that graves should only be visited on special days, such as the spring festival of semyk.
Before, I didn’t know either how to behave in the cemetery. I arrived from the city, and my mother and I [said], let’s go to the cemetery. It turns out there too you have to know the right procedure. Even here in our neighbor’s family, the grandmother has already died now, her neighbor died and, she said, appeared to her daughter in a dream: “My daughter, visit me in the cemetery when everyone else goes, too, and come through the main gate.” All of us stand there and watch when all the people are coming.
For this retired teacher, learning how to properly commemorate her mother (and, later, her husband) became part of a quest for spiritual knowledge that led her to consult with Mari ritual specialists and to take classes with a psychic healer. Both women actively sought knowledge about religion in old age, seeking to compensate for their lack of preparation with the kind of on-demand, methodical learning that was part of the promise of Soviet didacticism. But both also felt that participation in Soviet life had disrupted their relationships with their elders, and that their own mothers had practiced only a compromised version of older religious traditions.
These women belonged to a generation whose parents were born after or shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution, and both reported having had limited exposure to religious exemplars in their own families. In 1952, Commissioner Nabatov noted with his characteristic astuteness that, although Tatars claimed that only old people fasted during Ramadan, observation of the daily schedules of two working-class families had shown that all members adjusted their meal times to fall after dark, so that effectively the whole family adhered to Islamic restrictions.7 For members of later generations, such religious ordering of family life was no longer available as a source of learning. She had been able to learn little about Islam from her mother, said the teacher of Quranic reading, since even her mother had just been a little child when the mosque in their village was destroyed. The Mari teacher had heard about prayer ceremonies in her childhood “from the tales of the elders,” but had not been taught prayers herself.
A glimpse at another family suggests that it was only toward the very end of the Soviet era that engagement with secular learning replaced more tacit forms of religious transmission in the family. The principal of a rural primary school, born in 1963 in an Orthodox Christian Mari family, converted to Islam when she married a Tatar. Though considering herself an observant Muslim, she contrasted the religiously influenced dispositions modeled by her parents to her own generation’s inability to provide their children with the same kind of example. Her father, a party member whom she called “a true communist” (istinnyj kommunist), died in an accident after throwing her mother’s icons out of a new house. But although she thought that her father’s atheist convictions were firm enough to eventually cost him his life, the school principal maintained that he prayed for the health of the family every morning while cutting the bread for breakfast. When I asked what words he used in the prayer, she said that as a “true communist” he would never have prayed aloud, but she was sure that “in his soul” (v dushe) he was praying. He always insisted that no one start eating until he had handed each child their portion, and allowed no one to exchange their food with anyone else’s. Her husband, by contrast, only cut a slice of bread for himself and let everyone else serve themselves, abdicating the responsibility of the head of household to intercede for the family. For her, this illustrated the failure of her generation to exemplify religious sensibilities for their children in the way even atheist parents had done in the past.
The complementarity of religious and secular spheres thus helped keep socialist society permeable to nonhuman forces, but exemplars from whom one might have learned how to engage these forces became increasingly hard to find. People of postwar Soviet generations felt that they lacked the long-term exposure that would have helped them build up the disposition necessary for taking up religious practice later. When they complained about “wasted time,” they acknowledged the difficulty of using methodical study to make up for missed opportunities to form the necessary habits. Once as I was waiting among petitioners to be received in the Orthodox archbishop’s office, two visibly nervous elderly women whispered to each other that they did not know any of the “church rules” of behavior. A middle-aged man suggested that they use the present time of Lent to learn. “It’s too late for us to learn,” replied one woman with obvious regret.
Like many of the religious methodicians in this book, these nervous petitioners were of a generation that had spent their working lives under Soviet socialism, and whose parents had done likewise. Having reached retirement age around the time that restrictions on public religiosity were lifted, they struggled to remake themselves into the kind of religious adepts they imagined their grandparents and great-grandparents to have been. The difficulties many of them encountered show the limits of Soviet didacticism, with its promise of speedy and lifelong transformation. For some members of this and younger generations, the response was to embrace the learning practices of evangelical Protestants, whose expectations seemed easier to meet through short-term, concerted effort. Another solution for recuperating secular learning into religious practice can be to theologize the discoveries as well as the methods of Soviet science, as has happened in post-Soviet encounters with occultism.
My discussion in this book has focused largely on activists who sought to conform to specific religious or ideological traditions. However, not everyone in the Mari republic cared about doctrinal conformity. As Galina Lindquist (2008: 154) notes for Tuva, another multireligious region within the Russian Federation, many of the ways in which people engage with powerful nonhuman forces occur “on the margins” of established religious systems. These margins often incorporate not only various religious traditions, but also Soviet science, inverting its purpose from demystifying the world to controlling the mysterious. Some people carried out such interstitial practices occasionally, for instance by visiting a church in the hope of soaking up cosmic energy. Others were highly engaged religious virtuosi, such as the yoga master and psychic healer with whom some of my Chimarij interlocutors had studied.
The attraction of a new-age synthesis of scientific paradigms and religious traditions has been noted in Russia (Akhmetova 2005; Lindquist 2006) and in other parts of the world undergoing rapid social and technological change (Gombrich and Obeyesekere 1988: 452; Stewart 1991: 131). In post-Soviet Russia, the quest for empowerment through occult knowledge resonates in peculiar ways with atheist understandings of religion and science. In an influential formulation from his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx called religion the “inverted world consciousness” that reflects the “inverted world” of social inequalities which denies people access to the truth about social and natural relations (Marx 1957 [1844]: 378). Soviet atheist propaganda simplified the idea of inverted consciousness to present religion as a system of explanations that came into play when experiential knowledge failed to provide convincing answers. In the words of Knowledge Society lecturer Nikolaj Sofronov: “only in those instances when the rural toiler encounters unknown, incomprehensible forces of nature and society beyond his control, does he take them to be something foreign and even hostile to him. Only then does he turn to god for ‘help’” (1973: 9). But it is doubtful if this understanding of religion as an explanation of the unexplainable captured what was most important to local religious practitioners. In the 1985 sociological survey of beliefs and traditions in the Mari ASSR, declared religious believers were asked what they saw as the positive functions of religion. Although the statement that religion “explains many questions of life” was the first option given to respondents, only 6.4 percent chose this answer. Far more believers maintained that religion helped them get through difficult moments in life (30.6 percent), prevented people from committing reprehensible actions (15.3), kept them safe from misfortune and illness (14.8), or promoted the preservation of ethnic traditions and culture (7.5 percent; Solov'ev 1987: 132–133). Still, the idea that religion equaled faulty knowledge about the world shaped didactic responses like the Evenings of Miracles without Miracles, which were designed to promote popular knowledge of science in order to counter religiosity.
Though it may not have resonated much with committed religious practitioners, the idea that religion was a mode of knowledge structurally similar to science proved convincing to people who had assimilated the methods and truth standards of scientific inquiry. Toward the end of its existence, even the Knowledge Society showed an increasing fascination with the occult knowledge which it suspected in religion. In the year of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the brochure series Znak voprosa (Question Mark), inaugurated during perestroika to popularize debate on controversial themes, covered such topics as “Fortune telling: Superstition or …?” and “Will there be an end of the world?”
The answers were no longer the clear-cut denunciations of superstition which such lectures as “Should one believe the cards?” or “Religious prophecy and scientific prediction” had provided for decades. Instead, readers learned that since people had strong connections to their environment, certain bodily characteristics such as the lines of the hand or the shape of the cranium could very well predict something about their future impact on the world (Rostsius 1991). Another volume argued that the biblical book of Revelation not only contained facts about a past ecological catastrophe, but also useful warnings about what would happen in the future if the kind of technological development that had brought about the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl continued (Barashkov 1991). In these “post-atheist” publications, science appears to have triumphed as the ultimate authority, but takes on some of the resigned fatalism of which Knowledge Society lecturers had long accused religion.
For religious methodicians in Marij El, the unquestioned authority of popularized science provided a lens through which to understand the effects of ritual objects and actions. A Mari cultural entrepreneur involved in the Chimarij revival explained that only pure beeswax candles should be used for prayer, never the cheap paraffin ones sold in church, because beeswax shared the same cell structure as the universe and the human body. A burning beeswax candle spread the energy of this cell structure, endowing the prayer with its force. The cell-structure model of the universe was popularized through lectures in the Knowledge Society’s planetarium, an important venue for atheist propaganda that remained in operation until 2006. Seeking to explain the many stories about communal employees and party activists who had fatal accidents after felling trees or disrupting ceremonies in sacred groves, the retired Mari teacher from Shorun'zha drew on information from a television program about Siberia that claimed that ritual sites had special magnetic properties whose energies affected those who disturbed them.8 Both the teacher and the entrepreneur mentioned a local adept of raja yoga as a source of their interest in the sacred energies behind natural phenomena.
When I found this yogi in his office in the culture palace of the armed forces, it turned out that he considered himself to be a scientist unaffiliated with any religion. His career path was closely connected with Soviet networks of lifelong learning and their transformations through perestroika and beyond. As a medical student in Astrakhan' in the 1970s, the young man had started practicing autogenic training, a concentration technique with inspirations from Indian yoga that was publicized in 1932 by the German psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schulz (1884–1970). The yogi left medical school when his father, an army officer, was transferred to Joshkar-Ola (a city with no medical training facilities), and received a degree in biology instead. With the onset of perestroika in the 1980s, books on yoga by Soviet authors started to appear, and he read the work of the Leningrad biologist Vladimir Vasil'evich Antonov, The Art of Being Happy (Iskusstvo byt' schastlivym).9 During visits to Antonov, he learned additional techniques, while also developing an interest in psychology. In 1985, on the initiative of the factory’s Komsomol cell, he was invited to organize an “office of psychological relaxation” (kabinet psikhologicheskoj razgruzki) at Joshkar-Ola’s electronics factory. The possibility of forming private “medical cooperatives” emerged soon after, and he found a partner with whom he developed similar offices of relaxation on a fee-for-service basis. Adapting the techniques of autogenic training, these offices employed music, slides of natural scenes, and texts that suggested specific “thought-images” that would arise before the mind and relax the brain.
As factories and social services fell apart, the yogi shifted his practice to energy field therapy and began teaching raja yoga out of an office in the army’s culture palace, obtained through personal connections. Although the Russian word for psychic healer, ekstra-sens, indicates a spiritual quest to move beyond sense perception, every detail in the office spoke of the yogi’s methodical expertise in using color, sound, and gestures to achieve particular psychological effects. Discussing Mari ritual clothing, he remarked that “the color white is a source of light, it embodies the fact that humans are drawn to light,” an insight he had obviously taken to heart for his own professional presentation: the off-white color of his coat matched that of the soft carpeting. The photographic wallpaper behind his desk depicted a life-size birch grove, and every one of his sentences ended with an upward cadence of the voice, punctuated with a short smile.
This yogi based his attention to ambient detail on the theory that informational energy emanates from every object, organ, and person (Lemon 2008; Lindquist 2006: 54–55). He had traveled to India several times and claimed that Indian civilization had first refined many of these ideas, which were now being confirmed by science. However, one should not “cross over” into Indian civilization, because it was “a civilization of the past. It has already been replaced.” Instead, “one must take the most important things from it, one must understand and interpret it in a contemporary fashion, on the level of contemporary science.” By seeking to influence psychological states through a mix of what he understood to be ancient Indian knowledge and contemporary science, this yogi took theories of multisensory education back to some sources that Brezhnev era methodicians would never have acknowledged: the quests of reform pedagogues in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose reflections on the role of sensory impressions for developing human potentials also drew inspiration from European occultism and its encounters with Hindu practices (Maydell 1997; Zander 2008).
Like any atheist scientist, the yogi had little good to say about organized religion, particularly Christianity, which he considered to stand in particularly stark contradiction to science. But he also used the language of “spirituality” to refer to those human potentials that escaped ordinary science, which needed to be developed through disciplines of self-improvement (samosovershenstvovanie). Priests, he said, presented themselves as the only source of spiritual development, but much of organized religion really just reflected the vision of the “mentally disturbed.” Yoga, by contrast, united spirit, mind, and body, enabling adepts to gain control over aspects of life that the ignorant accepted as given. The yogi claimed, for instance, that he and his students were able to take illnesses upon themselves and to materialize objects out of cosmic energy. Because “a person who possesses knowledge of raja yoga has colossal spiritual possibilities,” even the Soviet government was afraid of its consequences and prohibited pursuit of this discipline, he added.
By no means unique to Russia (e.g., Langford 1999), the yogi’s inversion of science into an occult discipline might be seen as the outcome of a gradual decline of the emancipatory aims of Soviet science education. Whereas in 1972, Nekhoroshkov proclaimed on Mari radio that science made the Soviet people “creators of their own fortune, their own fate,”10 by 1991 the Knowledge Society published brochures treating both scientific and religious knowledge as keys to long-determined destinies. Yoga and other esoteric disciplines, in turn, promised post-Soviet citizens that they could regain control over their fate through spiritual powers that trumped natural laws.
The fascination with seeing and unlocking hidden destinies can thus be read as a reaction to the failed promises of secularist development (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; West and Sanders 2003). However, following Theodor Adorno’s observations on astrology in the postwar U.S., we might also say that this psychic healer picked up on key features of the didactic networks that had popularized socialist science. Adorno argues that the “naturalist supernaturalism” of astrological columns—which emphasize the “merciless” immutability of prediction—is indicative of the fact that, for most people, science constitutes an “abstract authority” that has to be accepted rather than understood (1994 [1974]: 46, 51, 57). In the Soviet context, this authority was perhaps not so much abstract as located in very concrete institutions. The yogi, for instance, claimed that the Soviet and Bulgarian governments had conducted mass experiments with hypnosis through television. In a context where scientific findings regularly served as tools for persuading citizens to adopt a materialist outlook on life and to work for a socialist future, the idea that science provided the power to know and control the destiny of others even without their consent was only a step away. The instrumental understanding of insight as a key to power was already there, as was the idea that those higher up in the chain of authority reserved crucial bits of information for themselves.
If many people in post-Soviet Marij El equate scientific and religious epistemologies when they engage with nonhuman forces, this reveals more than a failure of Soviet scientific optimism. It is also a phase in the ongoing relationship between atheist and religious didacticism. Lived religions have come to more closely resemble the image in which atheist propagandists saw them: systems of explanation and attempts to govern forces and circumstances commonly thought to be out of human control. But while atheist science remade religion in its own image, post-Soviet religious practice has reinvigorated the dynamics of spirit that late Soviet methodicians tried so hard to keep under control.
The three clusters of examples in this chapter focus on what may seem to be very different issues: the common problems of cultural and religious activists to make room for their work in the calendar of productive activities; the place of religious practice in the life course and the succession of generations; and the intertwining of science and religion in popular approaches to nonhuman forces. But all are united by the theme of the dispersal of religion across other areas of human life. Contrary to what some people have argued about “dispersed” or “invisible” religion (Höhn 2007; Luckmann 1991), the intermittent, contingent, and socially marginal nature of religious practice in rural Russia does not appear to be entirely a consequence of secularization. Rather, the established traditions of compartmentalizing religious practice in accordance with season, age, and gender facilitated its survival through successive waves of social change. At the same time, perceived affinities between religious epistemologies and other ways of approaching the extraordinary encouraged people to develop personal syntheses under the heading of “spirituality,” rather than abandoning religion for the newly propagated “scientific world view.”
The changes that the Soviet period did bring to the relationship between religious and secular commitments revolved around novel approaches to learning. State-prescribed didactic methods aimed at a constant, rapid, and verifiable acquisition of new knowledge and skills, replacing the slower, more socially and temporally circumscribed transformations involved in a father’s silent prayer over bread or an aging woman’s immersion in scriptural recitation in preparation for death. Secular didacticism was far less modest than rural religiosity in its demands for commitment and attention, but its promise of limitless transformations eventually undermined its own goal of creating good citizens for an increasingly static society. By applying Soviet promises of methodical self-improvement to the development of extrasensory capacities, post-Soviet religious seekers are recovering the dynamism of the concept of spirit that was almost lost in late Soviet moral education. Pushing the quest for knowledge beyond the boundaries of the humanly possible, they show how difficult it is for secularism to remain settled in its self-imposed limitations.