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New Religious Cultures in Late and Post-Soviet Russia: Social Networks, Ideologies, Discourses

Subject Area Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Term from 2018 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389197348
 
Final Report Year 2025

Final Report Abstract

This research project is the first to analyze the genealogical, historical and social parameters of New Age culture in the USSR between 1960 and 1990 and in post-Soviet Russia. The aim was to develop and evaluate primary material and to initiate a theoretical discussion on how the Russian New Age can be conceptualized from the perspective of various disciplines. In addition to analyzing New Age milieus, networks, and discourses, parascientific doctrines and the role of New Age ideas and practices in the emergence of nationalist ideologies and occult conspiracy theories in late and post-Soviet Russia were also examined. The forms of new religious culture summarized under the term New Age in late and post-Soviet Russia are part of a global development in the late 20th and early 21st century. The concept first emerged in the 1990s, initially with positive connotations, but then re-evaluated negatively, which continues to this day and has not become established as a self-designation in Russia. One of the characteristic features of New Age culture is the “holistic principle”, which implies the integrity of the universe, the interdependence of all processes taking place in it and the indissoluble connection between man and the universe, microcosm and macrocosm, which is described in “scientific” terms, in particular as the effect of 'energies” and “fields”. One of the key aspects of New Age epistemology is a kind of scientism, the use of rational knowledge and (para-) scientific discourses to legitimize religious metaphors, narrative models and practices. In late Soviet society, these objectives gave rise to various paradoxical co-operations with (para-)scientific actors and institutions. Ideologically, they were linked by the common recourse to the early Soviet utopia of the creation of a new human being. Although there has been a parallel development and mutual influence in the USA, the USSR and Europe since the 1970s, particularly through the interactions initiated by the Californian Esalen Institute in so-called New Age 'citizen diplomacy', the Russian New Age is not a 'cultural import' from the West, but an independent phenomenon with roots in the late Soviet intellectual underground. Ideologically, as in the West, it aimed at a substantial moral rebirth of human individuality through self-improvement and the achievement of fundamentally new “harmonious” qualities of social relationships. However, while the Western New Age usually refers to liberal ideals, sees itself as universal and points to a fundamentally feminine age, in Russia it tends to express conservative values and tends towards social escapism. It drew on its own mystical and esoteric traditions (Agni Yoga, Daniil Andreev’s Rose of the World, Nalimov’s Mystical Anarchism, later local Theosophy and George, Gurdjieff groups, astrological schools and esoteric institutes)), including those of official religions. In the West, the New Age of the 1960s and 70s was a form of social and cultural protest and at the same time a kind of eschatological movement. In the countries of the Soviet bloc, it was more of a technocratic utopia, but also a kind of protest ideology against functionalism.

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