When political activists engage in anti-religious struggle, what are they fighting against? At a time when the return of religion to the public sphere makes more headlines than its long-expected withdrawal, this may seem a naïve way of posing the question. When considering contemporary religious revivals and the challenges they pose to the predictions of modernization theory, observers more commonly ask why these predictions once seemed so plausible and how to formulate more adequate understandings of modernity. But nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of modernization bred not only expectations of the gradual disappearance of religion from public life, but also movements that actively sought to help this process along, through education, restrictive legislation, or the physical elimination of believers and sacred objects. For people caught up in secularist movements as strategists or participants, religion was a powerful adversary, not merely a remnant of a disappearing past. Rather than investigating the implications of religious revival for secular concepts of modernity, this book starts from the late Soviet atheist campaigns to reverse the question: what can the apprehensions and intuitions of secularist modernizers contribute to our understanding of religion?
Any possible answers need to take into account that Soviet citizens rarely engaged in atheist activism out of their own initiative, but because their professional or party position required them to do so. One of the first legislative acts of the Bolshevik government was a decree in January 1918 on the separation of the church from the state and the school from the church, and the so-called Stalin constitution of 1936 guaranteed freedom of religious confession, but gave only atheists the right to propagate their views (Corley 1996). Several waves of violent anti-religious campaigns in the 1920s and ’30s destroyed the institutional power of the Russian Orthodox Church and other religious confessions by murdering clergy and lay believers (Husband 2000; Mitrofanov 2002). During the decades following the end of the Second World War and Stalin’s death in 1953, which form the focus of this book, atheist propaganda remained a duty that members of the Communist Party, teachers, doctors, scientists, and others in positions of authority might be called upon to perform. The strategies they were trained in were based on the double premise that religion had become institutionally obsolete, but remained a force in the lives of many citizens. When such not-quite-voluntary activists groped for the right language to denounce religious attachments, it became apparent that some of them were not immune to this force themselves. The following quote from a speech by a female factory worker at the height of a new anti-religious campaign under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, illustrates the resulting ambiguities:
From eight years of age I was alone, my parents died in 1933. Hungry and cold, I had to wander alone among people in search of food and shelter. Hunger forced me to steal vegetables from gardens so as not to die of hunger, and “god,” he also forgot about me for some reason. He gave me neither food nor shelter, where was he at that time? He was silent, watched, but did nothing. No, he did not exist [Net, ne bylo ego]. Only our people and our Motherland helped me. They found me a place in an orphanage, put me through school, brought me out into society [vyveli v ljudi], this is what I always believed in and will believe, this is to whom I owe all my conscience and my life.1
This woman is speaking in 1960 in favor of the closing of the last Russian Orthodox church in Joshkar-Ola, the capital of the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in Russia’s Volga region. When she remembers her hungry childhood, the God who did not help her seems real enough to still merit her anger. Even the phrase ne bylo ego, translated here as “he did not exist,” is ambiguous—it might also mean “he was absent.” While she seems uncertain if God is an illusion or simply unreliable, it is obvious which alternative object of trust the speaker seeks to promote: the community of human beings and human institutions that make up “our people” and “our Motherland.” She credits this community not only with helping her survive, but also with making her a social being, educated and with a place in society. When she had no one but God to look to, the child was forced into antisocial behavior (stealing, wandering without a fixed residence), but being rescued by a state orphanage connected her to a saving web of human care. Even if her own atheism remains incomplete, this worker has correctly grasped the central contrast of Soviet atheist propaganda: asocial, treacherous religion was set against human collective accomplishments, which were the only deserving objects of faith.
Even in this short narrative, some pitfalls of this faith in people become apparent: if the speaker’s parents died in 1933 because of the famine that ravaged the Volga region along with Ukraine and southern Russia that year, they were arguably victims of the hurried collectivization campaigns of the same Soviet state that their daughter lauds as her lifesaver (Davies and Wheatcroft 2004). More generally, to conflate “our people” with state institutions, such as an orphanage, means to credit an abstraction with the warmth and help received from other human beings, in a move of transference not unlike the one that critics since Ludwig Feuerbach (1841) have analyzed as the root of all religion. The state here seems to take the place of God, equally sacralized and lifted out of the realm of human questioning. Such structural similarities between religious and secular efforts to provide people with a transcendent purpose were painfully apparent to atheist strategists. But the latter also insisted on a critique of religion as something fundamentally opposed to socialist visions of society. This critique deserves to be interrogated more closely for what it says about late Soviet society and about the problems of religious community-building in the post-Soviet era.
During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, headscarf debates in France, disputes over stem-cell research in the United States, and the continued strength of religiously inspired international charity networks cast doubt on earlier expectations that religion would gradually lose its relevance to public life.2 In turn, growing numbers of social scientists and philosophers have begun to direct their attention to secularism—the body of political doctrines and moral sensibilities that make it seem necessary for religion to be detached from modern public life—making it into an object of analysis in its own right instead of a normative background assumption. Perhaps because the bulk of this scholarship focuses on Western Europe, North America, and the Middle East, its authors tend to treat secularism as a corollary of political liberalism, linking it to liberal doctrines that see society as a collection of autonomous individuals, and politics as a negotiation of personal interests.3
Although some of these academic discussions were stimulated by clashes between secularist and religious politics in India (Bhargava 1998) and Turkey (Navaro-Yashin 2002; Özyürek 2006), those political movements of the twentieth century that made secularism part of a deliberate program of accelerated, collective modernization are seldom included in the wider debate on what it means to be secular. Also conspicuously absent is the state-sponsored atheism of socialist Eastern Europe and northern Asia, despite a growing body of historical and ethnographic work addressing changes in religious life under the influence of militant atheism (Berglund and Porter-Sz
cs 2010; H. Coleman 2005; Ghodsee 2009; Khalid 2007; Pelkmans 2006, 2009; Rogers 2009; Wanner 2007; Yang 2008). Ironically, attempts to “provincialize” a European secular perspective on history (Chakrabarty 2000) seem to have made it harder to appreciate the global reach of secularism and to analyze the constellations of local interests and pressures to keep up with an ideal image of the West that led a variety of political movements to adopt it.
This book seeks to contribute to a more transnational view of attempts to banish gods and spirits from social life by bringing approaches to liberal and postcolonial secularisms into dialogue with the history of Soviet atheism, as it played itself out in the Middle Volga region. In this part of Russia, religion had long served as a marker of differentiation between imperial subjects. A border zone between the Muslim Khanate of Kazan' and Orthodox Christian Muscovy, inhabited by peasants who spoke Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and worshiped agricultural deities in sacred groves, this region came under Russian rule in the sixteenth century. Until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, religious confession (in shifting combination with other criteria, such as noble or commoner status, native language, and place of residence) remained a decisive factor in determining a person’s legal rights and obligations (Kappeler 1982, 1992; Werth 2002). For the communists governing this region, doing away with religion thus also meant doing away with the religious boundaries and norms that, they felt, inappropriately separated people by ethnic group, gender, or age. By making the shift from trusting in God to trusting the state, Soviet citizens declared allegiance to a new, overarching social body in which older particularities lost their force.
Others have traced the tortuous and often contradictory processes by which social planners in the early decades of Soviet rule sought to replace religious identifications with secular ethnic cultures that would relate to one another in a harmonious “friendship of the peoples” (Hirsch 2005; T. Martin 2001; Werth 2000). My aim is to ask why religion seemed to stand in the way of such commensurability, and how anti-religious efforts reshaped religious life. The answer to the first question has to do with assumptions about religion which Soviet communists inherited from classical Marxist thought; but these assumptions were also reworked under the pressures of shaping a new society under conditions of rapid technological and political change.
In the stretch of woodland, meadow, and bog on both sides of the Volga that was organized into the Mari Autonomous Region in 1921 (upgraded to an autonomous republic in 1936), the rhythms of life changed drastically. Marginal agriculture, hunting, and seasonal wage labor in logging or shipping were replaced by work in large-scale, mechanized farms and in the industrial enterprises of the urbanizing capital. The royalist name of that town, Tsarevo-Kokshajsk, was first revolutionized into Krasnokokshajsk (Russian for Red City on the Kokshaga), and finally indigenized into Joshkar-Ola (Mari for Red City). New settlements along the railroad branch that connected Joshkar-Ola to the Moscow-Kazan' line from 1928 onward were ethnically mixed, different from the older confessionally and linguistically segregated villages. New educational institutions made literacy rates rise from 18 percent among Maris (only 7 percent among Mari women) and 37.8 percent among Russians in 1920 to near-universal levels in postwar generations, while also detaching the acquisition of knowledge from church authority. A teachers college founded in 1919 was the first-ever institution of higher learning in the republic, and rural primary schools replaced four-year instruction funded through Orthodox parishes (Iantemir 2006 [1928]: 89; Sanukov et al. 2004). During the Second World War, the evacuation of weapons factories from areas threatened by German occupation further accelerated the process of industrialization and urbanization. Adults who participated in atheist propaganda and church closures in the 1960s and ’70s had not only lived lives increasingly remote from institutionalized religion, they had also been immersed in promises of constant change and unheard-of possibilities since childhood.
Shedding religious attachments—and the hierarchies and divisions connected to them—was a condition of entering this ongoing process of change. In this sense, one might see Soviet atheism as part of an exit strategy from imperial forms of governance in which different communities of subjects had been endowed with different rights. New comparative studies of empires suggest that secularists in Kemalist Turkey and post-independence India faced comparable legacies.4 In all three contexts, rapidly modernizing, “mobilizational” states (Khalid 2006) sought to establish control over internally diverse populations, and feared that allegiance to nonhuman agents could present a threat to the new collective of equal citizens. While this comparison awaits more careful exploration, keeping in mind that the secularisms of the twentieth century were about building new communities as much as new selves provides an important corrective to the idea that secularism and liberal individualism are somehow inherently linked.5 In fact, the extended and refocused forms of sociality that secularism promises may be part of its most enduring appeal.
If we are to understand the “thick texture of affinities, prejudices, and attachments” that continues to give secularist commitments “visceral force” within and outside of academia (Mahmood 2008: 451), surely the narrative of transformation of a hungry thief abandoned by all into a useful and grateful member of society deserves our attention. But if the collective she joins presents itself as an absolute savior, can it be called secular? Thinking about the sense in which a secular society existed in the Soviet Union requires some sorting through the intellectual baggage that Soviet Marxist thinkers brought to the topic, and through some common definitions of secularity and religion.
When Soviet atheists thought about the relationship of their activities to religious practice, two outwardly contradictory models seemed able to coexist. One was an idea of functional replacement, where secular forms superseded their earlier, religious equivalents. The other was that of constructing a qualitatively new society that relied on and celebrated human action. Cultural planners of the 1920s and ’30s acted out the logic of replacement by turning houses of worship into cinemas, and graveyards into parks (Dragadze 1993), and by introducing socialist holidays to coincide with commonly observed religious ones (Petrone 2000; Rolf 2006). As Leon Trotsky, who was one of the driving figures of Soviet cultural policy before his falling-out with Stalin, put it concisely in a 1923 essay: “The cinema competes not only with the tavern, but also with the church. And this rivalry may become fatal for the church if we make up for the separation of the church from the socialist state by the fusion of the socialist state and the cinema” (Trotsky 1973 [1923]: 39).
This view, in which secular spectacle replaces religious tools for community-building, was taken up by many outside analysts of the Soviet Union, who speak of Soviet state “rituals” (Lane 1981) or a “cult” of Soviet leaders (Tumarkin 1983). Though not always culminating in the charge that communism was in fact a substitute religion,6 these analyses are similarly grounded in a Durkheimian view of the sacred, which is not defined by assumptions about the existence of divine or spiritual beings, but by virtue of being set apart from the profane (Durkheim 1998 [1914]; see also Moore and Myerhoff 1977). A state that appropriates some of this set-apart character for its own symbols and rituals is then no longer quite secular, but can be said to be placing itself at the center of its own “civil religion” (Bellah 1967).
If a secular society is one in which nothing is held sacred, the official Soviet culture of the 1960s and ’70s might be better described as religious, dominated as it was by the invention and promotion of secular festivals and ritualizations of life-cycle events (Smolkin 2009). But it is perhaps no accident that Soviet theorists of religion never adopted the Durkheimian definition of religion as based on the contrast between the sacred and the profane, but always defined it as faith in God or spiritual beings.7 Restricting our view to the intentional and unintentional equivalences between church and cinema, divine and bureaucratic helpers, would be to overlook the importance of this choice of definition. Striving to eradicate attachment to superhuman powers, Soviet atheists saw the creation of an exclusively human community as the ultimate goal of secularization.
To generate enthusiasm for this new community, festival planners might strategically exploit popular reverence for state symbols and try to approximate the appeal of religious rituals. But those in charge of atheist education also recognized that such parallels could compromise the message that religion and communism were incompatible. Postwar training materials on atheist propaganda thus called for approaches that focused not on replacing religious narratives but on spreading what was known as a “scientific world view” among the population (Powell 1975). Some of these materials explicitly addressed the need for atheism to be substantially different from the religious sensibilities it sought to replace. In this sense, theorists of Soviet scientific atheism might have agreed with Talal Asad (2003: 25) that the secular is not simply religion in another garb, but has a more elusive relationship to previous cultural forms. Rather than merely substituting earthly absolutes for heavenly ones, being secular in the late Soviet Union meant living in a society governed by different affective regimes and different communicative possibilities than those imagined to hold sway in religious societies.
New socialist holidays, though deliberately timed to coincide with and replace religious (mainly Russian Orthodox Christian) holidays or periods of fasting, were nonetheless said to have a different emotional tone. Where, in the words of a 1963 lecture about new Soviet traditions, religious holidays were characterized by a pessimistic mood of submission “to an imaginary god, fear of the afterlife, disbelief in the power of science and the strength of the human being” (Anonymous 1963: 25), Soviet holidays were joyful and optimistic, inspiring creativity and confidence in the future. The emotional switch from fear to joy, passivity to activity, becomes possible through events that materialize the collaboration of human contemporaries as a driving force of history.
Soviet secularization was thus not only about replacing the church with the cinema and appropriating the cinema’s cultural power to the state. It was also about accustoming people to social relations in which there were no significant nonhuman agents. Rather than a notion of individualism or privatized religion, it is this “exclusive humanism,” whose emergence in modern Western European thought has been described by Charles Taylor (2004, 2007), that provides a link between the secularist traditions of Western Europe and state-enforced atheism.
The demands of exclusive humanism placed limits on strategies for the functional replacement of religious forms. From Marx and his contemporaries, who criticized religious faith as an expression of mystified social realities, Soviet communists inherited an ethical commitment to demonstrating that only living human agents made history. But if religion was “the sigh of the oppressed” (Marx 1957 [1844]: 378), it became harder to understand why religious attachments did not fade away as socialist society developed. To explain “the vitality of religion under socialism,” as the titles of books and conferences in the 1960s framed the problem,8 atheist theorists made a link between religiosity and enduring forces of social division. Sociological studies showed statistical correlations between proclaimed religious belief and either a status of pensioner and housewife or a lack of access to cultural facilities, such as libraries and cinemas. Researchers in the Volga region also argued that being part of an ethnic minority attempting to maintain a separate identity strengthened religious attachments (Solov'ev 1977, 1987). In a striking reversal of Emile Durkheim’s analysis of society as the true referent of religious ritual, Soviet sociologists and propagandists went to great lengths to cast religion as antisocial, associated with isolation and fragmentation.
This emergent critique helps to explain some of the contradictions of the Soviet secularization process. On the one hand, atheist planners recognized and sometimes sought to imitate religious methods of achieving social cohesion. On the other, they suspected that the alternative relationships with divinities, saints, and spirits implied in religious ritual threatened human solidarity. The society they were engaged in building derived its claim to secularity from the exclusion of such alternative relationships, making human contemporaries the only possible partners in action. But since nonhuman interlocutors remained real to significant parts of the population, the exclusively human society often presented itself as a didactic goal.
After the Second World War, there was no organization in the Soviet Union solely devoted to atheist propaganda. The League of the Militant Godless, founded in 1925 and formally dissolved in 1947, was replaced that same year by the newly founded Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge. Renamed the Knowledge Society (Obshchestvo Znanie) in 1963, this association of scholars and intellectuals engaged in atheist propaganda as part of a broader mandate, since it was also heir to prewar organizations involved in popularizing science and technology (Andrews 2003; Peris 1998: 222). In the wake of wartime relaxations of anti-religious policy, the League of the Godless was condemned for crude anticlericalism and counterproductive attacks on the feelings of believers. The premise of atheist work within the Knowledge Society, by contrast, was that confrontation with the discoveries of modern science was the most effective tool for weaning people from reliance on supernatural agents (Powell 1975: 48–51).
For members of the Knowledge Society and lecturers of regional party organizations, conducting atheist propaganda always involved movement. Since religiosity was assumed to reside in more peripheral places, and enlightened knowledge in more central ones, lecturers from regional capitals traveled to Moscow for training, then were sent out to collective farms and enterprises in their regions. On the lowest rung of the pyramid, teachers from rural schools visited outlying hamlets to conduct lectures for milkmaids and combine drivers. Teachers and academics might also recruit their students to join them in lecture circuits. One prominent atheist activist of the Mari republic, the biologist Mikhail Nekhoroshkov, organized students from the teachers college into an atheist club and traveled with them to village houses of culture (Nekhoroshkov 1964). Their performances included skits and songs, but also demonstrations of chemical and physical experiments designed to convince audiences of the power of the natural sciences to explain unusual occurrences. These Evenings of Miracles without Miracles were not an original invention of the Mari club, but a form that was popularized through the network of trainings and publications of the Knowledge Society. The intricate movement of people and scripts geared toward making atheist arguments more persuasive says something about the kind of society atheist propaganda was intended to construct, which I call a didactic public.
Rejecting the liberal idea of the privatization of religion in modern society, Soviet policymakers never thought of anyone’s convictions as a private matter. To be sure, the constitution guaranteed freedom of conscience, and legal restrictions barring religious associations from educational and social work left the family as the only legitimate place for the transmission of religious values (Pospielovsky 1987a, b). But the same constitution also guaranteed freedom of anti-religious propaganda, meaning that the domestic arrangements of citizens could become targets of didactic intervention. For this reason, the anthropologist Tamara Dragadze (1993) speaks of the “domestication” of religion in the Soviet Union, rather than its privatization. Religious practice was increasingly restricted to in-group contexts, and religious expertise became a more heavily feminized domain. The publicly visible lives of household members, by contrast, were immersed in interactions that pointedly excluded any reference to more-than-human agents.
A lecture in the fields, Ronga district, ca. 1972. [From the album “Relay of Good Deeds,” courtesy of Sovetskij District Museum, Republic of Marij El]
In a society in which few things were private in the sense of being protected from state intervention, the “sovereign subject” or “bounded self” of the liberal political imagination (Mahmood 2005: 32; Taylor 2007: 37) was replaced by a malleable self, open to the influence of outside forces (Kharkhordin 1999; Oushakine 2004). Training people to be atheists was part of this larger transformative effort. But the language of the “new man” notwithstanding, the primary object of intervention was often society as a whole, rather than individual selves. Efforts to become a new person were inseparably tied to learning how to change others. What is more, integration into networks of teaching and learning often motivated people to engage with official ideology as well as with their fellow citizens. Even during the decades known as the era of “stagnation,” Soviet secular culture retained a measure of dynamism by offering people ways to change their own places in the world through participation in didactic initiatives (Benn 1989).
Where might one locate the social effects of such training efforts? The Knowledge Society and party-sponsored propaganda operated through networks that were designed to be centrally directed but use a minimal amount of central resources. This meant, for instance, that atheist concerts or lectures were centrally mandated, but rarely fully scripted, relying on a great deal of local improvisation. Soviet propagandists received direction through lists of recommended lecture titles and schematic descriptions of performative genres, rather than memorizing texts composed in the center. This system presupposed local activists skilled in reading the intentions behind titles and able to assemble the necessary materials and human talents to animate the preapproved forms. In its material organization, Soviet propaganda relied on a population not necessarily of convinced or enthusiastic followers, but of people who applied their own creativity to generate dogmatically correct statements and politically desirable events.
Such reliance on the generative competence of local performers was probably due in part to the need to save on printed materials in a socialist “economy of shortage” (Kornai 1992). But post-Soviet evidence shows that such material constraints may have helped to give Soviet propaganda more lasting effects. When interviewing people now active in religious organizations, I encountered many memories of their being drawn into propaganda activities based on particular skills. A Lutheran pastor remembered being asked to participate in the Evenings of Miracles during his student years because of his skill in reciting poetry; an artist and woodcarver now working on the restoration of churches remembered being put in charge of painting posters and wall newspapers during his time as a factory worker; and one of the Knowledge Society’s few remaining lecturers talked about the gift of tactfully approaching diverse audiences that had made her a good lecturer. These people differed in their retrospective evaluations of the contents of their work, but shared a sense of pride in their skills.
Lecturers, painters, and student agitators were part of the Soviet didactic public, different from the egalitarian and open-ended communicative sphere imagined by liberal theorists. The didactic public was unapologetically directed by party-controlled organs that insisted on setting standards of truth. But like the liberal public, it allowed for a new scope of connectedness with strangers in a network constituted not through connections of kinship or residence, but “through mere attention” (Warner 2002: 87; see also Habermas 1988). Participants in this network faced the intellectual and practical challenge of making known truths and proclaimed goals comprehensible and meaningful to audiences. A radio report described the Evening of Miracles without Miracles as “interesting and joyful, and without a doubt… useful for those present.”9 Memories of the difficulties of making events “interesting” (interesno), “joyful” (veselo), and “useful” (polezno), and of the satisfaction of finding the right props and striking the right tone, contain important clues to the reasons that certain people find ideological activism attractive.
Keeping in mind that skills and methods can become preoccupations in their own right, we can understand some of the astonishing ideological versatility of members of the final Soviet generations. Though their relation to official ideology is often described as cynical or “pure pro forma,” people who came of age under Khrushchev or Brezhnev nonetheless appear to have been profoundly shaped by their involvement in the official culture of their day, often taking models of behavior with them into post-Soviet careers (Yurchak 2006; see also Derluguian 2005). Since, for some of these people, post-Soviet careers include religious activism, this is testimony that engagement in the didactic public did not presuppose deep atheist convictions. But for teachers and learners in the Soviet Union as well as for secularists elsewhere (Ozouf and Ozouf 1992), there was also a more substantive connection between didactic engagement and secular values. As long as expanding systems of public education gave access to real chances of social mobility, they provided one of the most palpable proofs that people could transcend their circumstances with the help of other humans. For the hungry girl abandoned by God, human teachers and school administrators were not only temporary survival aids, but also forces of lasting transformation.
Through the networks of the Communist Party, the Knowledge Society, the Komsomol youth organization, and Young Pioneer palaces, institutions throughout the Soviet Union put a great deal of effort into training professionals and volunteers to reproduce ideological discourse. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the didactic skills of adapting content to particular audiences, creating visual aids, and collecting facts and illustrations were widespread among the population. In this book, I call people with such didactic expertise methodicians, a neologism inspired by the Russian term metodist, a professional designation for a person in charge of programming and events planning at a culture club, library, house of political enlightenment, or other such institution.
Also from Soviet terminology, I borrow a distinction between methodology, as a general theory of how to approach the task of convincing and transforming others, and method, as a more practical representation of steps to take toward that goal. In Russian, these two nouns correspond to two adjectives, metodologicheskij and metodicheskij. In an effort to keep the distinction visible in English, I speak of “methodical” skills or “methodical” guidance when referring to the practical sense of how to get things done, and only use “methodological” in reference to more abstract debates. As analysts of Soviet propaganda have noted, a preoccupation with the practicalities of method soon replaced both psychological inquiries into the effects of propaganda campaigns on target audiences and questions about underlying goals and principles (Benn 1989; Kenez 1985; Peris 1998). By the time of the postwar “developed socialism,” participants at training sessions for atheist propagandists might ask how to interest rural audiences in the achievements of Soviet space flights, but they were never encouraged to question if someone who learned about the age and extent of the universe would necessarily abandon religious faith. Since I wish to draw attention to situations where methodical practicalities offer an alternative arena for debate when ideological regulation makes it impossible to question methodological premises, the distinction between the two adjectives is worth importing into English.
As I became immersed in religious life in Marij El, as the former Mari ASSR has been known since 1991, I encountered former professional or amateur methodicians in leadership positions among all denominations. Retired teachers, journalists, college instructors, actors, and trade union activists were now serving as clergy, organizing Mari sacrificial ceremonies, leading Bible studies, and teaching Quranic reading. The irony was that many of them had belonged to professional groups that were required to profess and promote atheism. After the end of the bloody persecutions of the prewar decades, a collective farm worker who was not a member of the Communist Party usually faced little censure for having a child baptized or circumcised or for keeping religious paraphernalia at home. A teacher who did the same, however, risked losing her job. What is more, many of the converts I encountered had never even faced such problems, because they recalled having been convinced communists. One Tatar woman who used to be a trade union activist and now taught Arabic to women at Joshkar-Ola’s mosque had even been too conscientious to join the party, although that would have helped her advance to administrative jobs: “I would rather be a true communist outside the party than a careerist within it,” she said.
Ethnographers of religious life in other parts of the former Soviet Union describe activists with comparable backgrounds (Rogers 2009; Wanner 2007). These religious methodicians bring a particular didactic orientation to their new work; they view words, images, and events in terms of their potential to catch the attention of others and influence them toward desired changes in opinion and behavior. I have argued above that drawing ever-new participants into didactic networks was one of the major ways in which Soviet society secularized itself. In a strange twist of history, the orientation toward change through persuasion that such networks promoted has now become a point of convergence with global forms of religiosity that some observers label “postsecular.”
The term postsecular emerged from dialogues between social sciences and theology, and refers to situations where the ongoing public importance of religious commitments is increasingly recognized, while the society remains secular in the sense that holding such commitments is not a condition for membership. Citizens who engage in religious practices are aware that not everyone around them does the same (Höhn 2007; Schweidler 2007). As analysts of religious life in secularizing societies have noted, the possibility of observing no religion at all has an impact even on those who consider themselves religious. Religious organizations compete for people’s commitment with one another as well as with more secular offerings, leading them to adjust their styles of self-presentation and epistemological claims (Casanova 1994; Habermas 2005). This can result in more event-centered, emotionally charged, and “seeker-friendly” forms of congregational life (Buckser 1996; Cox 1984; Hervieu-Léger 1997). When the prestige of religious expertise declines, such expertise sometimes becomes the domain of those marginalized in public life, such as housewives and pensioners (Brown 2001; Dragadze 1993).
But the relationship between religious life and a secularizing society is not a one-way street where religion is always on the defensive. When secular concepts become “theologized” (Assmann 2002) and endowed with sacred meaning, this can result in unforeseen transformations of religious as well as social possibilities. As individual paths of “believing without belonging” (Davie 1994) defy older doctrinal boundaries, techniques for attracting and cultivating the attention of potential converts acquire new ethical and theological significance. As shown by ethnographies of the use of new media in so-called fundamentalist movements, the quest for attention makes religious leaders adapt their messages and personas to the demands of film and voice recording, but also draws on older ways in which seeing and listening were valued theologically (S. Coleman 2000; Harding 2000; Meyer 2006).
Charles Hirschkind’s study of the circulation of tape-recorded sermons among Egyptian Muslims, for example, points to a subtle shift where paying attention, once thought of as a virtue incumbent on the listener, now becomes a measure of the skill of a preacher in attracting an audience (2006: 40). At the same time, this shift is far from complete, because listeners continue to work on themselves to be able to better absorb and respond to a preacher’s message. Among religious responses to the Soviet obsession with finding the right method to engage and persuade, there is a similar mix of mutual appropriation and friction, part of a much longer relationship between religious and secular settings of learning in Europe that is best described by the Weberian term elective affinity.
Former cultural workers who use their Soviet methodical training to promote religious causes extend principles of Soviet mobilizations into religious life, but they are also part of a long shared history of religious practice and human learning. All religions face the problem of knowledge transmission, and those with bodies of sacred writings in particular have developed elaborate systems of formalized schooling (Ong 1982; Whitehouse 2000). Arguably, many modern pedagogical methodologies have a religious history, notably in colonial missions and parish schools (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Ozouf and Ozouf 1992). But where state schools expand, they also introduce new methods and principles of learning that have an impact on religious life, as Dale Eickelman (1992) and Brinkley Messick (1993) have noted for countries dominated by Islam. Histories of schooling and literacy in imperial Russia suggest a comparable cross-fertilization between religious and secular institutions (Brooks 1985; Eklof 1993).
After 1917, the contributions of religious institutions to Russian popular education were intentionally stopped. Instead, methodological reflections on how to open education to groups that had previously been excluded from it—workers, peasants, women, young children—drew on pedagogical reform movements of the nineteenth century with their search for experiential approaches to learning (L. Froese 1963; Kirschenbaum 2001). But the service ethic of descendants of Russian Orthodox clergy and the interest in all-around human development of various esoteric movements have also been identified as influential in early Soviet pedagogy, showing the continued entanglement of religious and secular quests for personal and social transformation (Manchester 2008; Maydell 1997). Although the reform pedagogues stood in a fraught relationship to Bolshevism and many were persecuted as “bourgeois specialists” under Stalin (Fitzpatrick 1970; Plaggenborg 1996), we will find echoes of their approaches and concerns in the work of postwar methodicians (Kerr 2005).
In post-Soviet Russia, the complex heritage of Soviet didacticism encounters a global trend toward theologizing approaches to personal change. Books I encountered on the shelves of Soviet-born evangelicals included translations from secular self-help literature as well as avowedly Christian titles instructing their readers on how to lead a “purpose-driven life” (Warren 2002) or find happiness in marriage. Many religious activists also readily admitted how useful experiences with Soviet cultural work had been.
The entanglement of these three sources of inspiration for didactic approaches—Soviet atheist, secular Western, and transnational religious—will occupy us for most of this book. But the secular-religious affinity is not unique to Russia. Ethnographies from other parts of the world have noted a lively back-and-forth between religious and secular approaches to solving social problems by means of personal transformation. Courses in Islamic spirituality for the employees of a privatizing Indonesian enterprise (Rudnyckyj 2009), an evangelical Christian rehabilitation program for prison inmates in Iowa (Sullivan 2009), and a residential program of the conservative Protestant “ex-gay” movement in California (Erzen 2006) all position themselves as alternatives to nonsectarian, publicly funded ways of addressing issues of workplace morale, criminal recidivism, and sexuality in marriage. They are postsecular in the sense that they take the methods and values of secular institutions and apply them to quests for spiritual salvation, while claiming that the secular institutions themselves have failed to deliver on their promises or are too costly to maintain. What is happening in post-Soviet Russia is thus part of a more general shift of transformational hopes toward religious institutions after the end of the Cold War, as socialism is perceived to have failed and secularist welfare states are on the retreat in many parts of the world.
If religious life proves to be one of the areas where Soviet methodical training finds a ready application, the reason is thus neither that Soviet culture was just religion in disguise, nor that secular modernity has destroyed a previously existing authentic religiosity. As the reflections of Soviet atheists on their work teach us, religious and secular forms do not simply replace and supersede one another, nor do they exist in incommensurable universes. Max Weber’s term elective affinity most effectively highlights the constant back-and-forth between the dynamics of secularization and theologization.
Although it is often used to mean little more than a vague resemblance whose causes are unknown, elective affinity has a more strictly defined meaning in the source from which Weber borrowed it, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of the same title. Goethe chose his title with reference to eighteenth-century chemistry, where an elective affinity meant an inherent attraction between chemical elements that forces them to leave their existing association and reamalgamate with another element. The new amalgamation then seems completely natural and indivisible, brought together “as if by higher providence” (Goethe 1956 [1809]: 37; see also Adler 1987).
When Weber uses the term to describe the relationship between religious practice and economic development in The Protestant Ethic, he introduces it as an alternative to Marxist or idealist causal explanations in which one side precedes and lays the foundation for the other. He also emphasizes that it is a provisional label that awaits the detailed historical analysis that follows (Weber 1922: 85). In an investigation of Weber’s use of the concept, the sociologist Michael Löwy concludes that at its strongest, elective affinity means an ongoing relationship of “attraction and mutual influence” between two cultural forms “on the basis of certain significant analogies, inherent or meaningful affinities” (Löwy 2004: 100).
As a description of how things come to resemble each other over time without ever being essentially the same, elective affinity offers an attractive third option to the alternatives of either equating the sacred and the secular or seeing them as fundamentally opposed to each other. If didactic elements of religious and secular traditions stand in a relationship of elective affinity, this means that resemblances between them unfold in the course of a sometimes shared, sometimes separate history. Mutual influences may be so manifold that the causal question of what came first or which side is a reflection of the other is less important than insights into the shifting balance of power between secular and religious institutions and the contribution of each side to helping people live through wider historical changes. If the same people once found empowerment through participation in the didactic networks of Soviet culture, but now claim that only God can grant this sense of expanding horizons, a quite radical shift of sociopolitical context is accompanied by a reorientation of hope.
With its roots in alchemistic musings about the mysterious transformative possibilities of inorganic matter, elective affinity presents a riddle more than an answer. Part of this riddle is a question that concerns atheist and postsecular methodicians alike: the scope of human freedom and loyalty in times of transformation. The characters in Goethe’s novel—two couples whose romantic attractions switch in the course of the narrative—grapple with this question when they debate whether the laws of irresistible affinity apply only to inanimate matter, or to human relationships as well. For the methodicians in charge of catching the attention of others in order to make them affirm or switch allegiances, the boundaries between persuasion and manipulation were also points of reflection and mutual critique. In religious and secular contexts, the ethics of promoting social change were intricately bound up with competing views of human autonomy and dependence.
This book is based on a total of almost two years of residence in Marij El, first as an instructor of German at Mari State University in 2000–2001, then as a researcher returning for month-long visits in 2003 and 2008 and a year-long stay in 2005–2006. Though quite centrally located by Russian standards—just one night’s train ride away from Moscow—Marij El is a small republic in terms of both size and population. In an area approximately a hundred miles across from west to east and north to south, the 2002 census of the Russian Federation counted 730,000 people, more than one-third of them living in the capital city, Joshkar-Ola. Forty-two percent of the total population declared themselves to be Mari, a nationality recognized as indigenous to the area and historically speaking a Finno-Ugric language, although many urban families switched to using Russian over the decades of Soviet rule. Six percent were Tatars, the Turkic-speaking titular nationality of neighboring Tatarstan, while the remaining half consisted mainly of Russians, Ukrainians, and other eastern Slavs (Lalukka 1997; Rossiiskaia Federatsiia 2004: 73).
Lacking oil and other natural resources, Marij El is one of the poorest areas of the Russian Federation, with high unemployment since the arms factories that formed the backbone of the Soviet era economy ceased production in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, there are several barriers to migration that keep people in the republic. Brezhnev era policies had encouraged provincial youth to study in their ethnic republics and return to their home towns and villages afterward. In the post-Soviet period, the lack of effective housing and labor markets still made it difficult to move between cities in Russia for anything but seasonal, low-skill employment (White 2000). With the exception of some army personnel and evangelical missionaries, many of the members of the provincial intelligentsia who made up the main pool of atheist and religious activists had spent most of their lives in the republic.
In this environment, the former allegiances of many contemporary religious activists were common knowledge. Sociological surveys show that the number of declared religious believers in the republic rose from 13.5 percent in 1985 to 43 percent in 1994 and 68.2 percent in 2004, while declared atheists decreased from 32.2 percent in 1985 (to which can be added the 37.8 percent of respondents who declared themselves to be indifferent toward religion) to 18.4 percent in 1994 and 16.6 percent in 2004 (Shabykov et al. 2005: 10, 346; Solov'ev 1987: 118).10 While the figures for both the Soviet and post-Soviet eras say little about actual convictions or observances, they do indicate that a good number of people who formerly sought to project an atheist persona now present themselves as religious. The few remaining avowed atheists were quick to interpret such turns as opportunism, making fun of people who used to predict the imminent demise of religion and now helped to organize theological conferences.
For those people who did make the switch to religious observance, choosing a particular denomination presented another point of division. For example, two middle-aged men had attended the same elite school for Mari students and later pursued careers in Soviet education and youth work. Now, one was a Lutheran deacon, the other trained catechists for the Orthodox diocese, and each suspected the other of wanting nothing but money and power.
Indeed, in postsecular Russia the choice of religious affiliation is often more politically sensitive than the decision whether or not to be a believer. In surveys, people can easily deny any religious belief and still claim to be Orthodox, Muslim, or Buddhist, depending on the religion commonly associated with their ethnicity (Filatov and Lunkin 2006). But trends that challenge the equation between ethnicity and religion meet with suspicion. The preamble to Russia’s 1997 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations infamously singles out Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, “and other religions” as “an integral part of the historical patrimony of the peoples of Russia.” Apparently to safeguard this patrimony, the body of the text distinguishes between religious groups and religious organizations. Only the latter have the right to be a legal person, own property, maintain educational institutions, and issue invitations to foreign nationals for teaching or missionary work. In order to register as a religious organization, a religious group of at least ten citizens has to demonstrate that it either has existed locally for at least fifteen years, or is part of a centralized, Russia-wide denomination. Since its adoption by the Russian parliament, this law has drawn much criticism from international Protestant organizations that see it as an attempt to shelter the Orthodox Church and other historically established confessions from competition (Elliott and Corrado 1999; Gunn 1999; Shterin and Richardson 1998).
In Marij El, similar ideals of a correspondence between religion and ethnicity coexist uneasily with historical reality. The government of the republic recognizes three “traditional religions”—Russian Orthodoxy, Mari Paganism, and Sunni Islam—which correspond to the main ethnic groups of the republic. At public events and special sessions of parliament, the archbishop, the mufti, and the Chimarij11 high priest (a position created in the 1990s specifically for this purpose) sit together to represent a tradition of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. These three denominations are also the only ones to sit on the republic’s advisory council on religious affairs. The argument that every ethnic group should pray in its own way predates the Soviet period; it can be found in the petitions of nineteenth-century Mari and Udmurt villagers asking for permission to leave the Orthodox Church and return to the sacrificial rituals of their ancestors (Werth 2001). But the present practice of recognizing selected religions as attributes of ethnic groups also recalls Soviet strategies of simultaneously celebrating and neutralizing ethnic diversity (Khalid 2007; Luehrmann 2005; Pelkmans 2006). Forms of religiosity that fit into this ideal order of ethnic coexistence are no longer denounced as antisocial, but officials and citizens still express concern over the disruptive potential of religious revival. Post-Soviet religious policy thus to some degree echoes the ambivalence of Soviet understandings of religion: on the one hand, it recognizes and seeks to exploit the potential of religious ritual to strengthen human solidarity; on the other hand, it remains wary of religious groups that seem to promote alternative social orders.
Challenges to the equation of religion and ethnicity are manifold: for example, many Mari families have included baptized Christians for generations, and most Russian villages of the republic were first established by Christian dissenters known as Old Believers (Iarygin 2004: 39–40; Werth 2002: 110–111). In the wake of the relocations of the Second World War, Protestant communities, including Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, Pentecostals, and, since the 1990s, Lutherans and neo-Charismatics, further added to the mix. All of these groups were able to register under the 1997 law, while the Pagan organization Oshmarij-Chimarij was denied registration because there had been no registered Soviet era Chimarij organization with which it might claim continuity. But the boost from American and Finnish missions that the Protestant congregations received in the early 1990s had left them with the image of being “foreign” churches, although many of them met in the most familiar spaces—houses of culture—and were making efforts to indigenize their leadership. In a context where the public role of religious diversity was still uncertain, a research project that took me back and forth between people of various religious and nonreligious persuasions struck at the heart of my interlocutors’ own worries.
One of the features that united different denominations was that the spatial dynamics of religious life bore palpable traces of Soviet didactic networks. Basing myself in Joshkar-Ola, I was close to the archives as well as to most formalized endeavors of religious teaching. With the exception of the Lutherans and one Pentecostal group that conducted Mari-language rural missions, most Protestant congregations were limited to the capital city, where each had between 50 and 250 members. In the evenings and on weekends, when the archives were closed, I attended services and leadership trainings and interviewed clergy and lay leaders at as many congregations as I could keep regular contact with, in particular the largest of the three Baptist groups; the Lutheran, Mari-language Pentecostal, and Charismatic churches; and the Orthodox cathedral. The Orthodox diocese of Joshkar-Ola and Marij El (created as an offshoot of the Kazan' diocese in 1993) operated a cultural and training center offering child care, courses for medically trained “Sisters of Mercy,” and Bible study led by the archbishop. Chimarij activists had a more tenuous foothold in the capital through the Mari Cultural Center, housed at the culture palace of the Road Construction Authority. Most of their worship activities happened in groves of oak, birch, and fir near villages throughout the republic, where priests (known as onaeng in Mari or by the Tatar loanword kart, “old man”) led prayers and sacrificial feasts at important points in the agricultural year. Orthodox churches were also spread throughout the republic, as were sacred springs visited by people of all religions, leading to a lively traffic in city people traveling in search of divine help or the advice of respected clerics.
The Republic of Marij El within the Russian Federation, with the Volga River to the south. The named towns are district centers; the squares indicate villages where the author visited Chimarij ceremonies. [Map by Bill Nelson]
Following invitations from students, schoolteachers, or religious activists whom I met in Joshkar-Ola, I established connections with several villages in the eastern and southeastern districts of the republic, paying repeated visits for Chimarij ceremonies or Orthodox holidays. While not allowing for the deeper insights that longer stays in one village would have provided, this approach helped me see the role of rural sites in the wider networks of didacticized religion, as organizers traveled from Joshkar-Ola to rural Marij El, but also exchanged visits and materials with more remote centers in Moscow, Ukraine, Finland, or the United States.
When I announced my interest in atheism and religion, the first question was usually: “And what is your faith?” My response, that I was a Lutheran from Germany, made sense to people in terms of the dominant equation between ethnicity and religion, and gave me a place of more or less peripheral participation in the religious observances I witnessed. Nonetheless, my project also raised concerns. Christians of all denominations were often shocked that I attended Mari ceremonies and ate sacrificial meat; Orthodox clergy and laypeople wondered if I were an American spy; the mufti seemed worried that I might be on the lookout for terrorists in his mosque; and old Mari women asked when I would start behaving as a proper ethnographer and record a specific genre of tales or songs.
Exhausting as it sometimes was to anticipate and conform to expectations of dress, behavior, and speech in the different religious and secular contexts, I never regretted the decision to focus on the Mari republic as a region, rather than on a particular religious community. While helping to see secularism as a strategy for managing religious diversity, an interconfessional view of the Volga region also offers a corrective to studies of Soviet and post-Soviet religious policies that treat “religious pluralism” and “religious freedom” as new challenges that have arisen primarily in relation to Protestant groups (Bourdeaux 1995; P. Froese 2008; Uzzell 1997). Reminding me that Soviet atheists faced not generic religiosity, but long-established patterns of religious coexistence, research across denominational boundaries uncovered a dual meaning of affinity: between religions as well as across secular-religious divides, people and approaches tended to resemble one another more than most activists liked to admit. Rather than setting up contrasts between “religious” and “secular” ways of learning or being, the challenge of studying secularism in a multireligious setting is to do justice to the ways in which spheres of life that seem separate and mutually exclusive are also so intertwined that one would not exist without the other.
Starting from this double meaning of affinity as a mode of regional coexistence between neighbors and a historical relationship between secular and religious spheres, this book seeks to uncover the aims of Soviet secularism and its afterlife in the post-Soviet religious landscape. The two chapters of the first part, “Affinities,” set the stage by introducing the dual challenge of secularist interventions in this multireligious periphery: reordering patterns of neighborly coexistence and mobilizing participants into didactic networks. Part 2, “Promises,” focuses on the methods of standardized change that unite such networks across secular and religious spheres. Part 3, “Fissures,” explores the tensions between didactic hopes, the realities of late Soviet society, and the techniques of human transformation offered by religious traditions. In part 4, “Rhythms,” the single chapter brings the interweaving of secular and religious spheres back to the level of individual lives, discussing the movement between human and more-than-human aspirations in the biographies of methodicians.
In looking at Soviet atheism and post-Soviet religion through the lens of didactic methods, I may seem to impose a secular paradigm on religious life. Certainly the search for affinities across Soviet secular and post-Soviet religious spheres has led me to concentrate on practices that were central to the Knowledge Society and reform-oriented religious groups, while they remained more marginal to rural religiosity, for example. But pressures to theologize attention and persuasion affect all groups as they navigate Soviet era ideas about culture and religion, and the post-Soviet hopes and needs of their constituencies. My aim is to suggest a secularist history for these pressures, in order to show that atheist critiques of religion do not always miss their marks, but also risk shaping their adversary in their own image. Events designed to catch public attention by virtue of being interesting, entertaining, and useful are commonplace in the experience of North American readers, including those who practice a religion. The crisscrossing atheist-religious debates described in this book extol the virtues, but also count the costs, of staking future hopes on the promises of didactic methods.
