‘Heterodox’ Religiosity in Russia after the Fall of Communism: Does it Challenge ‘Traditional’ Religion?

Belyaev, Demyan

doi:10.1080/09637491003726620

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 30 publications

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“…The frequency of participation in religious services and public religious rituals is still comparatively low in the Russian Federation today, even if it has increased since Soviet times (see e.g. Kääriäinen 1999, Filatov & Lunkin 2006, Belyaev 2010. For the same reasons it is easier to establish that it was religious institutions and organisations that were successfully suppressed in the Soviet Union (Sundström 2007: 77-109).…”

Section: The Cultural-national Renaissancementioning

confidence: 99%

Is the shaman indeed risen in post-Soviet Siberia?

Sundström

2012

Scripta

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In his exhaustive study of ‘shamanism’ among the Altaic peoples in Southern Siberia, the renowned Soviet ethnographer Leonid P. Potapov contends that ‘under the present conditions there are no remnants or survivals of Shamanism as such left in Altai’. What remains are legends and reminiscences, but these can no longer be told by people with personal experiences of Altaic ‘shamans’ and their rituals. According to Potapov, modern socialist culture has changed the minds of the Altaic peoples to the degree that they are now a materialistically thinking people, and ‘shamanism’ has completely disappeared. In addition, he contends that there are no prospects of its return after the deathblow dealt by Soviet anti-religious repression in the 1930s ‘shamanic’ rituals were forbidden and ritual paraphernalia such as drums and costumes were expropriated by the authorities. Considering that Potapov in his study follows Altaic ‘shamanism’ through 1500 years, depicting it as a ‘religion’ and ‘theology’ which stayed more or less intact over the centuries, his statement seems more like a pious hope based on the Soviet vision of a society liberated from superstition, religion, and spiritual exploitation. Potapov himself delineates Altaic ‘shamanism’s’ development from a ‘state religion’to a ‘folk religion’. From this perspective it might seem remarkable that ‘shamanism’ should not have survived 70 years of atheist repression, missionary work and the Soviet transformation of society. Already by the time Potapov’s book was published, during the very last months of the existence of the Soviet Union, there had, in fact, appeared a number of persons claiming to be ‘shamans’, with an ancestry dating from the time of ‘shamans’ of the first half of the twentieth century. These individuals were also part of organisations and movements promoting the revival of ‘shamanism’ in the autonomous Altai Republic. In other parts of the former Soviet Union similar processes took place. Today, in post-Soviet Altai, as well as in many other parts of Siberia, shamanism exists in the same sense that there is Buddhism, Christianity and Islam in the region.

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Section: The Cultural-national Renaissancementioning

confidence: 99%

Is the shaman indeed risen in post-Soviet Siberia?

Sundström

2012

Scripta

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“Heterodox Religiousness” in Today’s Russia: Results of an Empirical Study

Belyaev

2011

Social Compass

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The author presents a selection of important results from a new representative population survey on the attitudes and experiences with various forms of heterodox (also sometimes called non-institutionalised, "eclectic" or "esoteric") religiousness, conducted in the Russian Federation in 2006 -the first survey in this country to have focused specifically on this kind of religiousness. The author shows that heterodox religiousness appears to have become the dominant form of religiousness in contemporary Russia and involves a larger proportion of the population than traditional Christian religiousness.L'auteur présente une sélection de résultats importants provenant d'une enquête réalisée sur une population représentative à propos des attitudes et expériences de formes variées de religiosité hétérodoxe (appelée parfois non institutionnalisée, "éclectique" ou "ésotérique"). Cette enquête a été menée dans la Fédéra-tion de Russie en 2006. Elle constituait la première enquête de ce pays centrée spécifiquement sur ce type de religiosité. L'auteur montre que la religiosité hétérodoxe est apparemment devenue la forme dominante de religiosité dans la Russie contemporaine et qu'elle rassemble une part plus importante de la population que la religiosité chrétienne traditionnelle.

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‘Heterodox’ Religiosity in Russia after the Fall of Communism: Does it Challenge ‘Traditional’ Religion?

Cited by 2 publications

References 30 publications

Is the shaman indeed risen in post-Soviet Siberia?

Is the shaman indeed risen in post-Soviet Siberia?

“Heterodox Religiousness” in Today’s Russia: Results of an Empirical Study

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