Combining archival research on atheist propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s with ethnographic fieldwork in the autonomous republic of Marij El in Russia’s Volga region, Sonja Luehrmann examines how secularist culture-building reshaped religious practice and interreligious relations.
One of the most palpable legacies of atheist propaganda is a widespread didactic orientation among the population and a faith in standardized programs of personal transformation as solutions to wider social problems. This didactic trend has parallels in globalized forms of Protestantism and Islam but differs from older uses of religious knowledge in rural Russia. At a time when the secularist modernization projects of the twentieth century are widely perceived to have failed, Secularism Soviet Style emphasizes the affinities and shared histories of religious and atheist mobilizations.
Combining archival research on atheist propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s with ethnographic fieldwork in the autonomous republic of Marij El in Russia’s Volga region, Sonja Luehrmann examines how secularist culture-building reshaped religious practice and interreligious relations.
One of the most palpable legacies of atheist propaganda is a widespread didactic orientation among the population and a faith in standardized programs of personal transformation as solutions to wider social problems. This didactic trend has parallels in globalized forms of Protestantism and Islam but differs from older uses of religious knowledge in rural Russia. At a time when the secularist modernization projects of the twentieth century are widely perceived to have failed, Secularism Soviet Style emphasizes the affinities and shared histories of religious and atheist mobilizations.
Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic
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Overview
Combining archival research on atheist propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s with ethnographic fieldwork in the autonomous republic of Marij El in Russia’s Volga region, Sonja Luehrmann examines how secularist culture-building reshaped religious practice and interreligious relations.
One of the most palpable legacies of atheist propaganda is a widespread didactic orientation among the population and a faith in standardized programs of personal transformation as solutions to wider social problems. This didactic trend has parallels in globalized forms of Protestantism and Islam but differs from older uses of religious knowledge in rural Russia. At a time when the secularist modernization projects of the twentieth century are widely perceived to have failed, Secularism Soviet Style emphasizes the affinities and shared histories of religious and atheist mobilizations.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253005427 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | New Anthropologies of Europe |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 293 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Sonja Luehrmann is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University and author of Alutiiq Villages under Russian and U.S. Rule.
Read an Excerpt
Secularism Soviet Style
Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic
By Sonja Luehrmann
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2011 Sonja LuehrmannAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35698-7
CHAPTER 1
Neighbors and Comrades: Secularizing the Mari Country
If it seemed that atheist methodicians had no qualms about interfering in the private lives of citizens to eradicate religious attachments, they did so in the name of a particular vision of public social relations. Comparable to secularist critics elsewhere, the builders of Soviet socialism often blamed religion for upholding the distinctions of ethnicity, gender, age, and locality that threatened to hamper a vision of statewide solidarity. Like other modernizers, Soviet activists failed to fully grasp the complexity of the social relations they set out to transform. But their critique of religion as a force of strife and division also emerged out of encounters between ideological expectations and this on-the-ground complexity, creating a set of constraints that remain effective in post-Soviet religious policy.
Particularly in multireligious regions such as the Middle Volga, atheist activists confronted religious solidarity and religious fragmentation as part of the forces shaping a tangle of neighborly relations among households and between villages. These relations ranged from cooperation to distrust or indifference, but were always at odds with the universal solidarity that Soviet modernization called for. The assumption that penetrating and transforming this tangle necessarily involved anti-religious struggle owed much of its persistence to the unassailable status of the writings of Marx and Engels, including their critiques of religion's role in obscuring social relations and preserving patriarchal power. But Soviet atheist scholarship also elaborated its own changing answers to the question of where exactly the harm of religion lay, answers which over time came to home in on religion's potential to strengthen social boundaries and increase individual isolation. These ideas evolved in part out of encounters with historical patterns of neighborliness that ordered the coexistence between social groups at a local level—patterns that, like religion itself, seemed at once too fragmenting and too solid for the Soviet state to tolerate.
By the term neighborliness, I am referring to the ambivalent set of relations between households and villages that evolved in this region, whose inhabitants had lived with religious and linguistic diversity for centuries and where religious affiliation had served as a marker for legal and political distinctions up until the Bolshevik Revolution. Comparable to the Muslims, Christians, and Jews of Ottoman Salonica/Thessaloniki described by Mark Mazower (2004), villagers in the Volga region, as elsewhere in the Russian Empire, lived in a world that was simultaneously segregated by religious and linguistic boundaries and characterized by intense connections across these "painfully proximate borders" (Grant 2009: xv). In this contested zone where Finno-Ugric populations had alternately paid tribute to the Tatar Khans of Kazan' and to the Muscovite princes and tsars, largely monoreligious and monoethnic villages often lay in close proximity to other such villages whose inhabitants spoke a different language, prayed to different gods according to different calendars, ate different food, and wore different clothes. Neighbors were aware of one another's practices and recognized affinities with their own, as is attested by a wealth of linguistic, ritual, and technological parallelisms, as well as by shared uses of religious sites.
More precisely than the notoriously broad term syncretism (Stewart and Shaw 1994), the idea of recognized affinities among neighbors captures a situation where, although fusion and mutual inspiration does occur, residents still consider different practices appropriate for different people. In the Volga region, a person whose family prayed in a sacred grove would not normally go to the mosque of the neighboring village, but would recognize activities in both places as "praying." Because of their history of partial conversion before the revolution and the uneven availability of ritual specialists in the post-Soviet era, Mari families did often worship alternately in sacred groves and in Orthodox churches, but distinguished between the offerings appropriate to each site (Luehrmann 2010; Popov 1987). Rather than creating an unproblematic mixture of religious traditions, people maintained a form of separation-in-proximity that recalls other parts of the world with histories of incorporation into multireligious empires, such as the Balkans and North India (Bowman 2010; Hayden 2002; van der Veer 1992).
Against this background, the project of Soviet secularization involved the attempt to replace the ambivalent play of intimacy and distance involved in neighborly relations (Sorabji 2008; Zizek, Santner, and Reinhard 2005) with a more predictable, transparent, and universal allegiance to an imagined community centered on Moscow and propelled forward by the plans of the Communist Party (cf. Anderson 1983). To adopt a pair of terms from Kenneth Reinhard (2005), the Soviet struggle against religion was part of wider efforts to replace a "political theology of the neighbor" with a "political theology of the sovereign," in which the rules and maxims of political life received their meaning in relation to a single master signifier—the interest of the Soviet toilers as articulated by the party. Never quite resolved, this struggle between alternative points of reference continues to shape the terms in which local residents and politicians discuss the place of religion in community life after the end of the socialist project.
Religion and Neighborliness in Post-Soviet Marij El
In the summer of 2005, a fledgling Lutheran congregation proposed to build a church in the Mari village of Ljupersola in the Sovetskij district, a thirty-minute bus ride from Joshkar-Ola. Lutheranism had made its first converts in Marij El in 1993, brought by a Finnish-Estonian couple working through the Saint Petersburg--based Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria. Whereas the original congregation in Joshkar-Ola was largely Russian-speaking, a Mari writer and deacon set out to conduct Mari-language services in Ljupersola, a village of 450 people where he had contacts in the collective farm administration. After several years of weekly visits during which the living room of a Brezhnev era concrete duplex served as a makeshift place of worship, a group of approximately fifty members successfully registered as a religious organization with the district administration in the spring of 2005. Having acquired a plot of land on the village's main street and secured promises from Finnish volunteers to help build a wooden church, the congregation applied for a building permit. In late August, the district administration convened a village assembly without publicly announcing the agenda. Two Orthodox priests had been invited; Lutheran clergy were only present because they had heard about the meeting from a sympathetic employee of the village administration. Addressing the assembly in Russian, the head of the district administration (a Mari) announced that the purpose of the meeting was to vote on the building application, and he immediately launched into a list of concerns:
In connection with this question of construction, it seems to me that today, probably, the fate of your village is being decided, and of your population, of our Mari population most of all. I briefly made myself familiar with the beginning of this movement, this Lutheran [movement], yes? The recruitment of people [Vovlechenie ljudej]. They started very small. They helped with clothing, yes, somewhere perhaps with food provisions, somewhere still other things. Here, it seems to me, our poverty was played on. Unfortunately, this is how it is today, there's no denying it. And, after all, this isn't done for nothing [ne prosto tak], I ask that all understand that. Behind all this hides some sort of objective, right? Let's say, these Finns help today to do this, they're not doing it for nothing. It seems to me, let them do this work in their own country, everything is permitted over there, they live in prosperity there, let them do their work there.
The district head was making the connection between the religious choice of some villagers and the fate of "our Mari population" by identifying Lutheranism as a foreign movement, brought by Finns with suspicious motives. Having acknowledged the material attractions of foreign missions, he went on to make a plea for the region's spiritual self-sufficiency:
We have here the Orthodox Church, that is, religion, and also our traditional religion, the Pagan religion, and I think that this is exactly the religion which, probably, we have and should have. This movement, it probably has a goal, it seems to me, a bad one. To destroy the foundation of Russia, as a whole. Concretely, it seems to me that in Marij El they are doing this. After all, going over to a different faith [vera], it seems to me that grown-up people who went over to a different faith, after all, probably if a person accepted a faith once, probably in betraying his faith, switching to another, in the interest of some goal, it seems to me that this is no longer the faith to which he is, let's say, faithful [veren]. That is, he can switch again. When a better offer comes along, why not switch again.
These rhetorical links between faithfulness to one's religion and faithfulness to one's country will seem familiar to students of post-Soviet religious politics, as will the general suspicion of the motives of foreign missionaries. Like the 1997 law that distinguishes between religions with demonstrated historical roots in Russia and those that have none, this provincial official's arguments refer to the broader ideal of a correspondence between religious adherence and ethnic identity. The challenge presented by the evangelical Protestant organizations that have become increasingly active in Russia since perestroika (many of them at least initially supported by Western funds and/or personnel) is in the way they missionize across ethnic lines, giving no credence to religious affiliations that are not based on conscious individual commitment (Pelkmans 2009; Wanner 2007).
"You don't go to a strange monastery with your own rule," said an official in charge of religious affairs in the presidential administration of Marij El, quoting a Russian proverb to argue that Protestant missionaries deserve respect for their faith, but should not propagate it among people to whom it is historically alien. This self-identified Chimarij woman also thought that Protestant converts must be either very greedy or very gullible, echoing suspicions elsewhere in the world where evangelical Protestantism is making inroads against religious groups with expectations of hereditary membership (D. Martin 1990, 2002).
Several authors have argued that assumptions about religion as a corollary of ethnicity solidified during the Soviet era, when ethnicity gained primacy as a public form of collective identification, codified by census lists of officially recognized nationalities and an obligatory entry in every citizen's passport (Dragadze 1993; Khalid 2007; Pelkmans 2006; Urazmanova 2009). The idea that Finns are out to destroy the foundations of Russia also suggests the longevity of Cold War distinctions between friend and enemy. On the level of federal law and its regional applications, post-Soviet religious policy thus seems to follow the logic that cultural theorist Kenneth Reinhard calls "the political theology of the sovereign." In his critical dialogue with Carl Schmitt's ideas, the sovereign stands for Schmitt's claim that all politics begins with a distinction between friend and enemy. The figure of the neighbor, by contrast, calls this distinction into question, because it "materializes the uncertain division between the friend/family/self and the enemy/stranger/other" (Reinhard 2005: 18; cf. Schmitt 2002 [1932]).
To return to a more Weberian terminology, the political challenge of neighborliness lies in working with the interplay of intimacy and alterity that constitutes elective affinity, thereby resisting the urge to disambiguate it into clear divisions between those who are part of a social covenant and those who stand outside. Soviet citizens, by contrast, were supposed to relate with unquestioned solidarity to those within the state, and with unmitigated hostility to the "enemies of the people" or Cold War adversaries. When atheists criticized religion for upholding the wrong social divisions, this was part of a larger discomfort with the shifting scales of neighborly political allegiances, which they sought to replace with a state-centered vision of "closed sovereignty" (Grant 2009; see also Yang 2004). But while some theorists of secularism have argued that the concern with religion as a divisive force was an outgrowth of the interdenominational warfare that shook early modern Western Europe (Asad 2003: 174; Asad 2006; Madan 1998), there seems to be more going on here than an uncritical transfer of Western historical narratives. In the way villagers and local politicians deal with ambiguous religious affiliations in post-Soviet Marij El, after decades of Soviet attempts to impose their own "political theology," we see the enduring problems created by neighborly relations for Moscow-centric notions of the Russian nation. Having seen how the possibilities and limitations of neighborliness in the Volga region remain connected to religious diversity, it will be easier to understand the struggles of earlier generations of atheists.
It is certainly possible to describe federal religious policy under the presidencies of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin as a politics of sovereign distinctions between those who belong and those who do not. The law of 1997, which reserved the status of registered religious organization to those who could demonstrate a fifteen-year presence in Russia, came during a decade of nods to the cultural significance of the Russian Orthodox Church, even as some of the church's larger political ambitions remained unrealized. There was no blanket return of church property, and Orthodox religious instruction in schools remained limited to regional experiments, but Patriarch Aleksij II (Ridiger, 1990–2008) was treated as an authority on issues of public morality and Russia's historical identity (Garrard and Garrard 2008; Papkova 2007).
This moral and cultural weight could also be felt in Marij El, where the "historical reconstruction" of the capital often seemed synonymous with the building of Orthodox churches, and Orthodox clergy were the only religious specialists to have regular access to army barracks and prisons. But nationwide trends were filtered through regional understandings of religious diversity as a historical reality, sometimes producing unexpected results. The local effects of the 1997 law are one example. While registration was granted to all Protestant groups who applied, Chimarij were unable to document an institutionalized existence that went back to the period before perestroika, since their outdoor rituals were counter to Soviet law. Bound to federal legislation, the republic's administration denied registration, but sacrificial ceremonies continued without hindrance in many parts of the republic. Even though there is a Russia-wide discourse about the special legitimacy of "traditional" religions, different groups can be included under that umbrella in different places.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Names
Introduction: Atheism, Secularity, and Postsecular Religion
I. Affinities
1. Neighbors and Comrades: Secularizing the Mari Country
2. "Go teach:" Methods of Change
II. Promises
3. Church Closings and Sermon Circuits
4. Marginal Lessons
III. Fissures
5. Visual Aid
6. The Soul and the Spirit
IV. Rhythms
7. Lifelong Learning
Conclusion: Affinity and Discernment
Glossary
Notes
References
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Anthropologist Luehrmann (Simon Fraser Univ., Canada) has written an erudite, interesting book on the interaction between religion and secularism in the Soviet Union. Basing her study upon archival documents and atheist propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s as well as ethnographic fieldwork in the autonomous Republic of Marij El in the Volga region, she shows that Communist policies damaged and changed religion and interreligious relationships in lasting ways; that religious persistence impacted atheist efforts to remove religion from society; that the antireligious orientation of the secular state sometimes produced values that favored pedantic and self-actualization attitudes; and, paradoxically, that religious and atheist leaders had many affinities, including a shared hope of improving society. This is a fascinating probe into the complex world of a country attempting to remove religion and god from society in order to modernize, but finding that atheism is not synonymous with modernization, and that religion has deep roots and an extraordinary ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Useful bibliography and index. Summing Up: Recommended. Faculty/specialists. —Choice"
Anthropologist Luehrmann (Simon Fraser Univ., Canada) has written an erudite, interesting book on the interaction between religion and secularism in the Soviet Union. Basing her study upon archival documents and atheist propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s as well as ethnographic fieldwork in the autonomous Republic of Marij El in the Volga region, she shows that Communist policies damaged and changed religion and interreligious relationships in lasting ways; that religious persistence impacted atheist efforts to remove religion from society; that the antireligious orientation of the secular state sometimes produced values that favored pedantic and self-actualization attitudes; and, paradoxically, that religious and atheist leaders had many affinities, including a shared hope of improving society. This is a fascinating probe into the complex world of a country attempting to remove religion and god from society in order to modernize, but finding that atheism is not synonymous with modernization, and that religion has deep roots and an extraordinary ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Useful bibliography and index. Summing Up: Recommended. Faculty/specialists. —Choice
Well conceived from start to finish and likely to become a benchmark in its field. . . . This deeply thoughtful book should appeal to a wide range of readers.
Anthropologist Luehrmann (Simon Fraser Univ., Canada) has written an erudite, interesting book on the interaction between religion and secularism in the Soviet Union. Basing her study upon archival documents and atheist propaganda of the 1960s and 1970s as well as ethnographic fieldwork in the autonomous Republic of Marij El in the Volga region, she shows that Communist policies damaged and changed religion and interreligious relationships in lasting ways; that religious persistence impacted atheist efforts to remove religion from society; that the antireligious orientation of the secular state sometimes produced values that favored pedantic and self-actualization attitudes; and, paradoxically, that religious and atheist leaders had many affinities, including a shared hope of improving society. This is a fascinating probe into the complex world of a country attempting to remove religion and god from society in order to modernize, but finding that atheism is not synonymous with modernization, and that religion has deep roots and an extraordinary ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Useful bibliography and index. Summing Up: Recommended. Faculty/specialists. —Choice