A sociologist who first heard of this book may have expected a Weberian exploration of the relation between “the spirit of socialism” and economic development. Instead, this book is about late Soviet “spiritual phenomena,” from astrology to the Hare Krishnas, and the still more esoteric sects and intellectual currents described in the last two chapters. The research is based on classical anthropological methods, from field study and interviews (80 in total!) to archival research, the press, and scientific journals. Throughout runs the Geertzian motif of understanding the actors’ motivations “from the native’s point of view.”
The starting assumption is plausible: by the late 1980s, the crisis of the communist worldview propelled many individuals to search for deeper truths that could help make sense of “a world that appeared to them in disarray” (4). What united “the seekers” across various social divides was passion for the pursuit itself rather than any advance commitment to new dogmas. Sociologically, most seekers originated in the non-dissident, predominantly urban scientific-technical intelligentsia, many of them researchers, engineers, or “socialist planners” in both the civilian and military-industrial economy. These strata grew during the Soviet space age, when Sputnik, Iurii Gagarin, and rockets silently displaced Vladimir Lenin, providing “socialist” values (economic growth, international peace, and scientific progress) with a new “kind of transcendence” (7). By the same token, the mathematician, physicist, and engineer became the social embodiments of the ideal(ized) elite (the so-called fiziki) without, however, displacing the writers and poets (liriki) as “voices of conscience.” However, as Joseph Kellner shows, the two worlds met in the minds of those fiziki who, for example, tried to convey mathematical truths in artistic form (Ch. 4). By the 1970s, disenchantment with “real existing socialism” led the seekers to begin looking for answers in uncharted spiritual waters, often via familiar kitchen circles (kruzhki) where a collectivism unhindered by communist dogma also flourished. However, most seekers could “come out” only in the final stages of the Soviet collapse.
The four empirical chapters explore varieties of the seeking phenomenon: the astrologers (Ch. 1); the Hare Krishnas (Ch. 2); the Vissarion sect (Ch. 3); and the mathematician Anatolii Fomenko who used calculations to challenge accepted historical chronologies, disputing that the Mongols ever invaded Russia (Ch. 4). The pursuit of astrology as a response to disorientation “during a crisis might be self-evident” (23–24), but Kellner argues that its attraction was rooted in the tradition of both late imperial Russian and Soviet “speculative science” that envisaged “the merger of technological progress with spiritual liberation” (24). As a “form of divination” that connected the celestial to the earthly (40), astrology proved attractive to scientists and engineers who provided 80 percent of instructors (!) in the astrology academy founded by Mikhail Levin (1991), a mathematician-astronomer and disillusioned offspring of the Sputnik age (30–32; 34–38; 50). Superficially, the popularity of Hare Krishnas seems far removed from astrology, but Kellner finds a connection in their shared cyclical view of history, nostalgia for a lost Soviet spirituality, and the belief that “degradation” could be overcome through ritualistic reversal (76–78; 85–86). By contrast, the Vissarion sect (Ch. 3) seems to fit the Russian tradition of sectarian prophecy, with a self-proclaimed “Christ” creating a cult in Siberia’s remoteness. But even here the connection between UFO believers and Vissarion’s initial following was not accidental, even if the leader’s charisma proved more persuasive than his eclectic belief system (106). Vissarion’s followers, however, were more traditionally “Russian:” they embraced the medieval figure of Sergei of Radonezh, and mystically worshiped the Russian landscape, wooden architecture, and Nikolai Roerich’s paintings that evoked ancient Rusʹ. Interestingly, despite its “Russian” messianism, the sect acquired a large international following and shunned narrow patriotism (120).
What does all this have to do with “the spirit of socialism?” Kellner’s answer is that the fusion of utopia and scientific-technological development created a specific Soviet-Russian ethos of speculative science that aspired to infuse progress with “cosmic meaning” (think of Andrei Tarkovskii’s films and the Strugatskii brothers’ science fiction). Using Émile Durkheim’s language, we could say that the discrepancy between these high “cosmic” expectations unleashed during the Khrushchev period and Brezhnevite stagnation caused chronic anomie, resulting in a search for other-worldly meaning on the wreckage of unfulfilled earthly promises. As Kellner’s well-researched and worthwhile book shows, these movements attracted millions of acolytes and cannot be dismissed as “marginal.” In the end, however, the reader still wonders whether the answer could be both more prosaic and more universal, namely that communist ideology simply could not satisfy the all-too-human craving for individual salvation.
