The 1960s is now understood to mark a watershed in the history of religion in Western Europe and North America.Footnote 1 People became more critical of institutional forms of religion and church attendance dropped. At the same time, however, there was a concomitant creative reimagining of what spirituality might be outside of traditional religious structures. One of the often-cited examples of this shift is the transformation in popular attitudes towards indigenous religious practices. Hippies, beatniks, academics and anyone with a counter-cultural bent became fascinated with shamanic and other forms of altered states of consciousness.Footnote 2
The 1960s also marks a transition in the history of religion in the Soviet Union, despite the official commitment to atheism by the communist state. As in the West, there was a striking transformation in public discourse about indigenous religions and shamanism in the Soviet Union in the mid-1960's. The present article examines Soviet rhetoric about shamanism in the atheist journals Atheist (Bezbozhnik) and Science and Religion (Nauka i religiia). How did Soviet atheist cadres write about shamanism, and what can we learn about the shifting meaning of religion within the Soviet modernist project by examining their depictions? Furthermore, by exploring the way in which the long 1960s served as a watershed moment for Soviet representations of religion, we can establish grounds for comparing how modernist projects developed on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.
First, I wish to be clear that I am not writing here about shamanism as an actual practice, but rather shamanism as it is represented by atheist cadres in Soviet journals. Although a demographically marginal practice, Siberian shamanism loomed rhetorically large in the Soviet imagination. Actual shamanism had been forcibly repressed since the Russian Revolution but quietly persisted across Siberia throughout the Soviet period.Footnote 3 Real shamanic practices documented by Soviet ethnographers and historians bore only a tenuous relationship to stereotyped images of shamanism as imagined by atheist cadres writing for Soviet Union-wide atheist journals such as Nauka i religiia. It is precisely this gap between stereotype and reality, however, that makes the representations of shamanism in these journals into indicators of a striking shift in the role that religion played in Soviet atheist imaginaries.
These representations are one instantiation of a long history of Western authors representing indigenous religious practices as reflections of Western concerns, a practice for which Edward Said coined the term ‘orientalism’.Footnote 4 Shamanism is a general term that has been used to describe a wide range of indigenous practices involving altered states of consciousness. Since these practices appear to be non-institutional, performative and diverge from the Christian practices that often serve as the default for imagining religion, shamanism has long represented the limit of the category of religion. How this limit is represented, reveals in turn how the category of religion is being defined.Footnote 5 Tracing the shift in public discourse about shamanism in Soviet atheist journals allows us to trace a shift in Soviet atheist definitions of religion, thereby providing a lens that reveals the particularly Soviet instantiation of a shared global, secular, modernist project.
The anti-religious press is an excellent source for understanding how particular religions were imagined by state and party atheist activists, as well as ethnographers, who occasionally contributed to Nauka i religiia and Bezbozhnik. Rhetoric in the two journals paralleled and expressed the Communist Party's anti-religious directives and changed accordingly. As Victoria Smolkin has argued, there is a crucial shift in how party officials and propagandists conceived of the atheist project in the mid 1960s.Footnote 6 Despite the existence of detailed pre-Soviet and Soviet era ethnographic data about real religious practices, including shamanism, anti-religious propaganda, from the 1920s and 30s, presented a flattened view of religion. Anti-religious articles in the early Soviet atheist press are written with the presumption that, once believers were confronted with the absurdity of religion, they would simply stop believing. Education and a better standard of living would ultimately eradicate religious belief altogether. Pre-war Stalinist state approaches to creating an atheist state were largely focused on crushing religions as rival social institutions. During the Second World War the ‘anti-religious front’ was abandoned in favour of co-existence, and this uneasy co-existence continued through post-war Stalinism.
The post-Stalinist period in the Soviet Union, which corresponds loosely to what one might consider the long 1960's, begins under Khrushchev (1953–64) and then shifts to the Brezhnev era (1964–82), which had long been described as a period of stagnation, but which recent scholarship has re-evaluated as pre-figuring many of the changes that were ushered in under Gorbachev. Under Khrushchev the role of religion in Soviet atheist propaganda shifted considerably from the pre-War period, and then shifted again in the mid-1960s under Brezhnev.
Anna Krylova argues that socio-economic changes, most notably the rise of an urban middle class, in the post-war Soviet period resulted in ‘rethinking core cultural parameters of the Soviet socialist imagination’.Footnote 7 Likewise, Sonja Luehrmann describes the Brezhnev era as ‘a time when a contradiction internal to Soviet ideological discourse – between homage to revolutionary change and commitment to stable state structures – led to an impasse’.Footnote 8 Among these core cultural parameters that reached an impasse was the role of religion in the atheist imaginary. As Nikita Khrushchev reversed many of the policies Stalin had implemented and sought to bring the Soviet Union back on the path towards an atheist, communist, utopian future, the Party initiated a new programme in atheist propaganda and education.Footnote 9 Soviet citizens who were educated and had a standard of living far better than that of previous generations, continued to engage in religious practices, and the leadership wanted to find out why. As Smolkin writes, ‘Soviet atheism . . . had to renounce its “militant” origins and become “scientific”’.Footnote 10 What this meant, as Smolkin's work demonstrates, was not always clear to Soviet atheist cadres themselves, and the pages of Nauka i religiia are fascinating precisely because they reveal how makeshift and sometimes contradictory this new approach was.Footnote 11
The new approach in the 1960s was, however, characterised by several features. First of all, atheist cadres began asking what it was that religion provided and arguing that socialism needed to provide a replacement for what it sought to eradicate. Sociologists and ethnographers began to conduct extensive research on existing religious practices in order to understand why religion persisted. Atheist activists examined folk rituals in search of inspiration for Soviet rituals.Footnote 12 Religion began to be discussed as cultural heritage, and believers were represented less as enemies, but as those whom the Soviet system had failed to convince. These shifts in rhetoric can also be seen in the pages of Nauka i religiia, where articles begin to appear about creating new atheist rituals, and heated debates were conducted about atheist morality and the soul.
Most of the articles in the pages of the anti-religious press wrote about ‘religion’, and yet religion was and remained, both to scholars and to Soviet atheists, an abstract and constructed category. Any discussion of actual religious practices were always descriptions of particular traditions – most often Russian Orthodox Christian practices – but also quite commonly Muslim or ‘sectarian’.Footnote 13 The gap between religion as an abstract category and actual practices and doctrines of specific religions is not a specifically Soviet phenomenon, but should be considered a characteristic of secular states in general.Footnote 14 In some cases the significant differences between denominations were simply ignored.Footnote 15 At other times close reading of the atheist press reveals that Soviet and Western liberal forms of secularism seemed to share fundamental conceptions of particular religious traditions and also basic assumptions about what could be considered religious practice in the first place.Footnote 16 In both Soviet and Western liberal forms of secularism, shamanic types of religious practice often marks the limit of what can count as religion.
Admittedly, shamanism appears relatively rarely in the pages of Nauka i religiia. Many articles focus on scientific achievements or the history of science and philosophy, and the term religion serves in these articles as a foil for science without denominational specificity. The vast number of articles that do discuss specific religious practices and beliefs in the 1960s address Russian Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism and sectarian forms of Christianity.Footnote 17 Islam, especially with regards to the treatment of women, a common trope in Soviet narrative of modernisation, also figured quite commonly.Footnote 18 Although both Buddhism and shamanism have long histories in Russia, they appear very rarely. Even when Siberia was discussed, it was more likely to be presented as the home of Old Believer sectarians than of indigenous peoples.Footnote 19
Why then devote attention to what was clearly a marginal interest for Soviet atheist cadres? Because if Russian Orthodox Christianity provided the default definition of religion to Soviet atheist activists, shamanism represented the most extreme outlier – the religion which, in practice, diverged most consistently from the state's idea of religion. Furthermore, the stakes of eradicating shamanism were high. During the imperial regime, religion and nationality were mutually defining categories. The Soviet Union inherited the discursive relationship between religion and nationality, in which religious practices were one indicator of the place of a particular ethnic group within a hierarchy of civilisations. Shamanism was a marker of the most ‘primitive’ peoples, and therefore the most in need of Soviet educational, medical and cultural intervention. As such, shamanism and other ‘backwards’ religious practices were important signifiers in the Soviet modernist project.Footnote 20
As the Soviet atheist project shifted in the 1960s so too did the way in which shamanism was represented in atheist journals. In the early 1960s articles and stories about shamanism in Nauka i religiia resembled in style and rhetoric similar articles on shamanism from the atheist journal Bezbozhnik in the 1930s. Shamanism was presented as superstition, always described as embedded in a primitive cultural context, and as such, the rhetorical effect of the articles was to validate the educational and civilising mission of the Soviet state. Around the mid-1960s, however, this pattern changed. While up to that point articles on shamanism fell into two genres, the ethnographic report and the fictionalised story, they were now joined by a third: investigative reports on paranormal phenomena. These reports were published in a series of articles titled ‘When the Spirits Show their Teeth’, in which shamanism was presented as an example of mysticism, hallucinogens and altered states of consciousness. Practices that were once represented as hopelessly backwards were increasingly presented as a form of direct spiritual experience that bypassed institutional authority. The perception of shamanism transformed from an ethnographically documented cultural practice peculiar to Siberian indigenous populations, into an – albeit primitive – form of a universal human capacity for altered states of consciousness. As such, the shifting representation of shamanism was part of an increasing popular and elite interest in the occult and the paranormal in Soviet Russia, what Birgit Menzel refers to as the ‘occult underground of Late Soviet Russia’.Footnote 21 This change also reveals how these shifts crossed the Iron curtain, resonating with – although not replicating – similar New Age discourses in the United States and Western Europe.Footnote 22 However, I will argue that due to a different relationship between religion and the state, the effect of these discourses is very different.
Shamanism in the Anti-Religious Press During the First Five Year Plan
If I am to argue that the 1960s represent a change in representation, it is important to understand what the 1960s are changing from. To this end I will present anti-religious propaganda from the 1920s, which exemplifies the way shamanism was represented in the early Soviet period, so as to provide the ground against which to examine the shift in the 1960s. The anti-religious newspaper Bezbozhnik was published from 1922 to 1941, but for the purposes of this article, I will focus on the First Five Year Plan (1929–32).Footnote 23 The First Five Year Plan was a period of intense social transformation which established what Sheila Fitzpatrick calls the ‘distinctive Stalinist habitat’, which she argues set the basic parameters for the Soviet system under Stalinism.Footnote 24 Anti-religious policy and propaganda was central to the Soviet modernist state building project, and the stakes of this project were highest in relationship to its most ‘backwards’ citizens – the indigenous populations of Central Asia and the Siberian north, who the Soviet state aimed to emancipate from the pernicious influence of shamans, lamas and Orthodox priests, who supposedly kept them steeped in superstitions to exploit their ignorance.Footnote 25
While in the eyes of the Soviet state shamanism was the most primitive of religions, it was definitely still included in the category of religion, and both state policy and propaganda reflect this. The ‘Instruction on the elections to the Soviets, confirmed by the Presidium of the Central Committee’, published on 4 November 1926, included lamas and shamans in the list of ‘servers of cults of all religions and beliefs’ who were denied voting privileges.Footnote 26 Legally, therefore, shamans were put into one category with other religious professionals, and this parallel is reflected in articles in Bezbozhnik, in which shamanism was explicitly paralleled to both Buddhism and Orthodox Christianity and their practitioners were decried as exploiters of the masses’ credulousness. The work they performed (i.e. religious ceremonies) were deemed fakery and illusion, and, thus, by Marxist standards, unproductive. Shamans exploited the superstitions of the native population by claiming to speak for the spirits, demanding sacrifices of the most expensive furs or the best animals in the herd. As they were profiting from the labour of others, they were considered class enemies (kulaks), and therefore members of the symbolic bourgeoisie.
The short story Shishka is an excellent illustration of the Soviet anti-religious rhetoric of the Stalinist era.Footnote 27 The story describes the reaction of nomadic Tungus hunters to the coming of the revolution, including a bear sacrifice, and Orthodox priests are explicitly compared to shamans.Footnote 28 In the beginning of the story, Shishka, the main character, is baptised by an Orthodox priest. The baptism is explained literally, describing the actions the priest took (bathed him, sang over him and swung a bowl on a chain that spewed smoke around him) without their interpretation, rendering them ridiculous and claiming that baptism meant nothing to the baptised natives.Footnote 29 For this supposedly empty performance the priest ‘took two sables and left’. In the story both the shaman and the priest exploit Shishka: ‘father Safron comes twice a year and yells “Give for my God” and the shaman says, “Give for my God”. The shaman's God is easier. Shove a piece of meat in the shaman's throat, feed him fish, give him a reindeer hide, and he's satisfied.’ The Orthodox priest, in comparison, wants furs, which are more valuable. When word of the Russian Revolution arrives, the Bolsheviks free the Tungus from these demands: ‘they say that even Father Safron doesn't have the right to take furs’.Footnote 30
Prior to receiving news of the revolution, the description of Tungus life is timeless. The story begins and ends with descriptions of the taiga, which Shishka knows because he has ‘learned from his father. And his father learned from his father, and so on.’ All the reader is told of Shishka's age is that he was born when the ice was melting and baptised at nineteen. Even the appearances of the Orthodox priest are seasonal. He comes ‘two times a year’. History enters only with the news of the Bolshevik Revolution. The author of the article thus projects an ahistorical existence onto his subjects and presents the Soviet Union as the driver of historical progress.
The Bolsheviks are unable to free the Tungus from the shaman's influence, however, and the bear sacrifice takes place after the news of the revolution arrives. The ceremony is described as a ‘performance’ during which the shaman goes into trance to ask favors of God. God promises to grant good hunting and fishing and a mild winter if ‘the Tungus give the shaman five reindeer hides, one living reindeer and a glass of vodka’, thereby highlighting the exploitative nature of the shaman: he demands payment for things which, in a materialist world view, he cannot possibly be responsible for delivering. The ceremony ends with the slaughter and consumption of a bear (of which the chief and the shaman receive the best parts) and a drinking binge which erupts into violence. The reader is left with the disturbing image of the drunken Shishka, after remarking on how good the bear (his god) tastes, contemplating how good it would be if one could eat all gods, and even god's representative on earth, the plump Father Safron.Footnote 31 The overall image is one of primitive savagery, illustrating the work that the Soviet civilising mission had in front of it.
Thus, shamans were depicted as undermining the economic development of their communities in several ways. First, they demanded sacrifices of the best furs and best herd animals for the spirits.Footnote 32 Several articles described sacrifices in great detail, emphasising this point: ‘in past years, this celebration presented a genuine ruin for the working masses, who were obligated to fulfill large allotments of produce or cattle sacrifices’.Footnote 33 Furthermore, shamans also fostered unproductive hunting superstitionsFootnote 34 and medically suspect, unhygenic healing practices.Footnote 35 One of the explicit goals of the League of the Militant Godless and the journal Bezbozhnik was to spread this type of information, breaking the hold that religion had on believers and replacing it with science.
Throughout these articles shamans were presented as an outgrowth of the ‘backwards’ condition of the small nationalities of the North, a ‘product of the ignorance and the darkness of the minds of the native masses’.Footnote 36 Shamans were portrayed as exploitative and hypocritical enemies of the state. While hardly an institution like other religions, shamans were nonetheless rivals for the hearts and minds of indigenous Soviet citizens in Siberia. Occassionally, they were also presented as victims of their own backwardness, who could be educated and ‘saved’. Shamanism's continued existence among Siberian indigeous peoples was a call to arms for the Soviet modernist project, which would liberate the natives from the pernicious influence of the past. The examples of ‘reformed shamans’, along with stories of young indigenous Siberians rejecting the influences of shamans, illustrated that the Soviet state's modernising project could succeed.
Shamanism in Nauka i Religiia in the Early 1960s
Bezbozhnik continued to be published until 1941, until anti-religious propaganda was suspended during the Second World War and was not continued until after Khrushchev became Party Secretary. In 1954 Khrushchev broke with the Stalinist status quo between religion and the state and initiated a new anti-religious campaign, in an attempt to what he considered a return to the core principles of communism. During the early Bolshevik period and pre-War Stalinism religious institutions were considered rivals that threatened the power of the state. By the 1960s, however, this perception no longer existed. Religion was now an ideological problem, and it needed to be addressed as such. Smolkin argues that ‘individual believers were not internal enemies, but Soviet citizens whose rights and feelings had to be respected. The battle was with the belief, not with the believer. Religion, then, was no longer a political enemy to be repressed, but an alien ideology to be eradicated through enlightenment’.Footnote 37 The journal Nauka i Religiia was established in 1959 with the expressed purpose of serving as one of the main weapons in this new chapter of the battle between communism and religion in its many incarnations.Footnote 38
On the surface, the articles in the early 1960s reflect a similar understanding of shamanism to that illustrated in earlier articles published in Bezbozhnik, but, significantly, the tone of the articles changed in crucial ways. Shamanism was still being presented as exploitative and economically irrational. The figure of the shaman remained that of a greedy thief, exploiting and deceiving believers. However, the way the story was being told shifted significantly. In Shishka crude stereotypes depicted the ignorance and savagery from which the native had to be saved. The non-Soviet conditions of the 1920s justified future Soviet state interventions. By the 1960s, however, Soviet power had supposedly completed the class war and restructured the conditions of everyday life such that nothing remained outside of it. Religion could thus no longer be presented as an external enemy but rather was depicted as persisting within the structures of Soviet society. The goal of anti-religious rhetoric was no longer targeting a clear enemy but rather identifying the wrong kind of belief. However, in order to identify the wrong kind of belief, Soviet atheist writers had to define the ‘right’ kind of belief, which was much more challenging.
A 1961 letter to the editor illustrates the shift and the complications it brought with it. The letter, published in the March 1961 issue, described shamanic practices at Arshan, a healing spring in the Saian Mountains. The spring, originally a shamanic sacred site, in the later Soviet period became a health resort, where doctors used the mineral water to treat patients. The author of the letter both ridicules the idea that offerings to the spirit master of the mountain can produce cures and also argues that the ‘Master of White Mountain was invented by shamans’ who ‘without conscience deceive believers’.Footnote 39 This language was very similar to rhetoric from earlier articles in Bezbozhnik, emphasising the deceptive and exploitative nature of the shamans.
Beyond that similarity, however, there are significant differences. For one, the line between folk medicine and Soviet medicine in the letter was very thin. Both shamans and Soviet doctors used the spring as a medicinal source, and the distinction that the author makes between the shaman's ‘impossible’ claim that the water could heal eye and heart ailments, and the doctor's use of water for gastrointestinal cures seems to be a very fine distinction indeed. The author offers no criteria or proof as to why Soviet medical approaches are different from those of shamans, thereby undermining the conceptual distinction they are trying to make.
However, shamanism was a much weaker rival. The practice is described as on the wane, and just as in earlier descriptions, believers are presented as elderly and gullible. The author writes:
But belief in sorcery (koldovstvo) is falling catastrophically. In order to hold onto their tottering authority the shamans take self-created ‘prophylactic’ measures. So, in the village of Tarb . . . several people became sick. The local shaman held rituals around their houses. The doctor cured people, but some of the believing elders came to the conclusion that the shaman cured people of their ailment.Footnote 40
The image of deceiving shamans and gullible elders echoes rhetoric from the 1930s, but in this account the enemy is weak, desperate and on the defensive. The author of the letter describes the co-existence of Soviet medicine with alternative shamanic practices to the editor and concludes with the argument that the continued presence of shamanic belief is the fault of the local atheist organisation, which has not conducted sufficient education in the area. This rhetoric is also familiar from the 1930s, showing the same link between ‘primitive superstition’ and political intervention, but the tone of the descriptions is much less vitriolic, echoing party directives to be respectful of believers.Footnote 41
The story ‘In Pursuit of the Golden Idols’ (1963) also illustrates the shift in how believers and belief are portrayed within Soviet society.Footnote 42 Here belief is portrayed no longer as an external threat but an internal inconsistency, internal to Soviet society, located within the consciousness of individual Soviet citizens. In this story, Dimitrii Moldanov, the young secretary of the party organisation of a reindeer herding collective reads about golden shamanic idols hidden in the taiga. He wants to find these shamanic idols and turn them over to build a museum. After a rousing speech to the village, Moldanov convinces the villagers to turn over their personal idols and search the taiga for the shaman's shrine, where the most valuable idols were kept. The old hunter, Kuz'ma Semenovich, the only one who knows where these idols are located, goes along on the search to find them. However, he doesn't reveal what he knows because he is conflicted about their mission. In the end he takes Moldanov to the shaman's shrine, and comes to see the religious idols for the empty and meaningless items they are, thereby validating the better life offered by the Soviet state and the camaraderie of Soviet life, which he experiences through his cooperation with Moldanov.
However, Kuz'ma Semenovich, the believer in the story, is a far more complicated protagonist than Shishka, the ignorant native in the story discussed above. Unlike in the article about Shishka, belief in this story is neither simple nor the product of ignorance. Moldanov, the young, atheist party secretary is represented as not capable of fully understanding what it is to be a believer, and Kuz'ma Semenovich, the old hunter, is presented as a thoughtful person:
Sacred shrines, shamanic chants – kamlanie, ancient pagan ritual, as a Pioneer, Dimitrii read venomous poems against shamans at school evenings. Later, as a komsomol member he acted in anti-religious plays. Even later, as a communist and party organiser he discussed various prejudices with elderly people. But he had only seen a shaman's drum on stage, and he had never come across a sacred hut.
Kuz'ma Semenovich lay with closed eyes. Sleep would not come to him. Childhood. An old chum in the depths of the Kazym taiga. A sick father. Nearby his mother, older brother, neighbours. Among all of them the shaman Grigorii. Beating a drum, chanting strange words. And the face of the shaman – white, frightening. For his whole life he would remember the shaman's face.Footnote 43
Kuzma's faith is rooted in powerful experiences from his childhood, including his father's illness and his own offering of the first fur he ever caught. Faith is presented as originating in family obligation and received wisdom, and Kuz'ma is not presented as a fool for believing. Later in the story Kuz'ma Semenovich is depicted as emotionally torn between the shaman's injunction to ‘protect the faith of your fathers’ and the disillusioning realisation, as he sees the pile of wooden idols, that ‘they had bowed down to this pile of firewood, their fathers and grandfathers had awaited help from this!’Footnote 44 In the end, Kuz'ma Semenovich helps young Moldanov open the shaman's box, revealing not golden idols, but a stash of gold and silver coins that the shaman had been hoarding. The atheist museum is set up, and people come from the surrounding taiga to see it. Although Kuz'ma never explicitly agrees, in a final handshake between Moldanov and Kuz'ma, Moldanov ‘understood everything without words: in the friendly, if guilty smile, in the slyly satisfied crinkling of the elder's eye’.Footnote 45 In the final paragraph, Moldanov embodies a perfect description of how the good atheist activist is supposed to act, convincing the believer of the merits of atheism without resorting to insults or offending their sensibilities.
The moral of the story is the same as the stories from the 1930s: religion is exploitative and Soviet life is better than life under the illusion of religion. Instead of handing their furs over to a shaman, the villagers now have a school, a museum and a village Soviet that makes decisions collectively. The tone of the story however, the way in which belief is presented and the understated actions of the Soviet hero mark a shift in the relationship between believer and activist, and thereby also between religion and the state. In Shishka religion was represented by a priest and a shaman, representatives of exploitative institutions that contested Soviet state power. By the early 1960s these religious institutions were no longer part of the story. Religion was now located in the consciousness of the individual citizen, untethered from any institution. This form of religion is internalised, but one would not call it ‘privatised’ – unlike in Western liberal forms of secularism, religious belief is still very much in the public realm. Kuz'ma Semenovich's internal belief is still a problem for society and must be eradicated. However, Kuz'ma's religiosity is a question of individual consciousness untethered from public institutions that might rival the state. One might be tempted to call it ‘spirituality’, but as Luehrmann points out, the Russian translation of spirituality, dukhovnost’, has its own particular history in the late Soviet era. Spirituality, in the late Soviet context, referred to intellectual and moral development and was generally contrasted to religion.Footnote 46Dukhovnost’ is what the Soviet state sought to cultivate instead of religion, but this shift from institutions to internalised beliefs had unintended consequences.
Experiencing the Paranormal in the Late 1960s
Beginning in the mid-1960s a second shift took place in the contents of Nauka i Religiia, which once again paralleled a shift in policy. As Smolkin documents, beginning in 1964, the editors began focusing on questions of philosophy, morality, the meaning of life and the development of Soviet rituals to replace that which atheism sought to remove.Footnote 47 If in the late 1950s religion had already begun to be taken seriously and believers had been treated with more respect, now, a decade later, atheism started to be defined as a positive project. Beginning in January 1965 the covers and images of Nauka i Religiia were glossier and had more colour, most likely to reflect the journal's more popular orientation.
In addition to a shift in focus – targeting a broader audience and trying to define atheism in positive terms – there was also increasing content devoted to paranormal and mystical phenomenon. The shift in Nauka i Religiia is part of a broader openness to the paranormal and practices that could be defined as ‘occult’. Birgit Menzel documents this resurgence of interest in the occult, arguing that Soviet government practices were deeply contradictory – sometimes denouncing the occult and at other times funding research into it.Footnote 48 The representations of shamanism, which like the occult, occupy the limit of the category of religion, help parse the logic behind this seemingly contradictory fascination with practices that might be religious.
In the 1930s journals, atheist authors insisted militantly that the material world is all that exists and focused on religions as rival institutions. Belief was a problem, but it was an institutional problem – the question was whether Soviet citizens would believe what religious institutions told them, or what state institutions expected. By the late 1960s, when religions represented less of an institutional problem, the atheist nature of the journal and its authors seemed to rest on a scientific attitude, in which any phenomenon could be evaluated through the scientific method. To a certain degree this continued the rhetorical approach of earlier anti-religious propaganda, the rhetoric of ‘debunking superstitions’ through scientific fact. In earlier rhetoric, however, the superstitions being debunked were usually shown to be a ploy of whatever social institution (the church, the Tsarist state, the Capitalist West) sought to keep people in ignorance. However, as debunking superstition moved to debunk phenomena that are not institutional, writers began to move into much more ambiguous rhetorical territory.
For example, most of the March 1966 issue was devoted to a debate over ‘Telepathy: For or Against’, in which various scientists debated whether or not telepathy was scientifically feasible.Footnote 49 Other articles were devoted to evaluating the scientific arguments for and against the possible existence of Atlantis, the Abominable Snowman and various forms of mysticism.Footnote 50 Sometimes authors were even self-conscious of this shift in rhetoric, as in an article in the 1968 February issue, entitled ‘Expedition to the Bonesetter’.Footnote 51 Presented under the series heading ‘What People are Capable of’ the article chronicled a doctor's visit to a bonesetter in Archangelsk. The article began with the negative association between healers and religion or mysticism. Having heard rumours of a particular bonesetter's success, the doctor asks: ‘What is this? Ignorance, flowering in the far-away backwoods taiga, or original (samobytnaia) folk wisdom continuing into our days from the depths of centuries? Thence came the desire to go to Pinera and see with my own eyes’.Footnote 52
The author self-consciously presents the two interpretive options open within Soviet anti-religious discourse, revealing that the ideological work of scientific atheism was not always clear to cadres themselves. The criteria for his investigation was rational and scientific, manifested in his desire to go, experience and evaluate the phenomena for himself. Furthermore, the possibility that ancient wisdom might be valuable would probably have been unpublishable and unimaginable within the pages of Bezbozhnik in the 1930s. By the late 1960s, however, social scientists and atheist cadres were explicitly looking to folk traditions for sources of non-religious rituals.Footnote 53 In this instance, the doctor's conclusion was positive. The healer was ‘far from religion or any sort of mysticism, he thinks soberly and rightly’ and his healing is deemed to be the ‘rare, original, folk art of healing, which must be attentively studied and carefully preserved’.Footnote 54 His evaluation seems to have found favour with readers; a follow-up article on the ‘Many Centuries of Folk Experience’ in the November issue of the same year was introduced as being in response to reader interest in the first article. The second article looks at Russian folk medicine more broadly, arguing in the end that it was largely effective, although not as effective as contemporary Soviet medicine, and that it deserved further study.Footnote 55 On the one hand, the articles validate the scientific method and Soviet medical research, while on the other, they open the door to including folk medicine and village healers, who would have been classified as ‘superstitions’ during the early Soviet period, into this category.
The topic of mysticism became so popular that, starting in 1968, it became its own series under the title ‘When Spirits Show Their Claws’ (Kogda dukhi pokazyvaiut kogti), which described a history of mystic practices beginning with Siberian shamans and Delphic oracles.Footnote 56 In 1969 a new topic within the same series was introduced, called ‘Gateway to the Truth’. The introduction to this series explained that ‘tales of Boehme, Swedenborg, Masons, modern mystics interested our readers. In their letters they asked how one can explain the visions of mystics, their mystical view of the world, ecstasy and so on.’Footnote 57 The editors turned to a physiologist, M. A. Rozhnov, and a psychiatrist, V. E. Rozhnova, to offer a scientific explanation of these phenomena. Shamanism is included among these forms of mysticism or ‘ecstasy’.
The shift here is significant. Earlier representations of shamans as deceitful charlatans presumed, although it was not explicitly stated, that shamanic trances were mere performances. The frame of analysis was thus socio-cultural. In this series of articles, however, the trance state itself became the focus, and by framing this state as subject to analysis by physiologists and psychiatrists, the frame of analysis was bio-chemical. These practices were therefore no longer represented as harmful cultural practices that had to be eradicated, but a biologically grounded human capacity that was subject to neurological investigation and could be scientifically explained.
A 1969 article in the series was devoted to explaining altered states of consciousness and offers an illustration of the shift in how shamanism was portrayed. In this article shamanism was presented, not as ethnographic data, but rather as a stage of development of mysticism:
Mystics consider the instruments of this kind of perception to be, what they call them, mystical experience, that is experience acquired by people in various non-ordinary states of consciousness. Each of many varied kinds of mysticism has its own state: ecstasy, trance, divine communion, illumination, intuition and so forth. Belief in the possibility and power of this means of perception are inherent in each stage, from the most primitive and vulgar forms of mysticism (Shamanism, magic, sorcery, spiritism, mesmerism) and the more complicated of its manifestations, where there is the pretension of some sort of theoretical generalisation (masonry, theosophy, anthroposophy) to the most complicated, refined and elaborated mystical, philosophical teachings (intuitivism, existentialism, Thomism).Footnote 58
The following article in the series contrasted personal accounts of drug use by Aldous Huxley and accounts of Timothy Leary's experiments at Harvard,with Bogoraz-Tan's descriptions of Chukchi shamans and the Delphi oracle. This series, which extended over many issues, was always prefaced with a statement stating it had been written in response to reader interest. The writing was ambivalent – on the one hand, the authors claimed to seek to debunk claims though scientific investigation, and yet the wealth of details they supply indicate a deeper fascination. Images of a meditating hippie and a drug addict warn of the dangers of hallucinogenic drug use in the pursuit of mystic experience, as do dire reports about babies born with drug-related problems in New York.Footnote 59 However, at the same time, there were extensive details about mystical claims and visions, presented as mysterious and inexplicable. Shamans were now understood to be part of an on-going continuum of human experiences, connecting them to Delphic oracles, medieval saints and Swedenborg. The universality of these experiences across time and space elevated them to something more than just religion, a universal human phenomenon that was worthy of investigation.
It is notable that this shift in rhetoric taking place in a state-sponsored Soviet anti-religious journal paralleled the growing fascination with shamanism in Europe and the United States at the same time, and the authors were aware of this parallel. The image of the hippie mentioned above had a fascinating caption:
Hippie (from the slang word ‘khel’ – ‘knowing’ or ‘penetrating to the bottom’) is the latest form of unrest among American youth. War and dollars, swallowed from their fathers, have become repugnant to them, they crave a different truth. But they search for it on a false path – stupefying themselves with narcotics, the roar of microphones and the strumming of guitars. Is that the path to the ‘omniscient spirits’ found by primitive tribal shamans? Their instruments are also narcotics and drums. In the photo a ‘hippie’ indulges in ‘Buddhist musings’ on the streets of San Francisco.Footnote 60
It is unclear whether the hippies and shamans are equally deluded (their instruments are the same) or if the hippie is merely a pale imitator of the more authentic (primitive) shaman. The article goes on to argue that trance states in both hippies and shamans are the effects of chemicals in the brain. There is an echo of the social critique from earlier decades in this description – the hippie is as deluded as the Siberian shaman's patients, both victims of an unjust social order. However, by 1969 ignorant superstition lives on the streets of San Francisco instead of in Siberia, where omniscient spirits live instead. Although the shaman remains ‘primitive’, he is no longer a representative of a primitive culture, but rather a primitive manifestation of a universal form of brain function, subject to neurological and bio-chemical, rather than ethnographic, analysis. The shaman and the hippie are thus both seeking altered states of consciousness, a particular form of human experience. In both cases, the shaman and the hippie are deluded, finding transcendence in what is merely a bio-chemical reaction in the brain. On the one hand, this approach continues older anti-religious rhetoric in that it validates the (presumably atheist) scientific method, and the ability of Soviet science to explain everything. However, on the other hand, the status of the shaman has profoundly shifted – from a primitive exploiter to the object of scientific fascination and study. The practices of shamans are no longer deceitful fakes to be denounced but rather a fascinating biological human ability to be studied.
This shift in how shamanism was presented in the Soviet atheist press mirrors the mid-1960s policy shift in anti-religious policy, and the concomitant shifts in the Soviet atheist project. As Soviet atheist cadres tried to address questions of morality and the meaning of life in a society in which formal religious institutions no longer held much power, the individual and experiential nature of shamanism shifted valence, and became potentially appealing. Instead of a sign of primitive culture shamanism becomes a precursor of individual spiritual experience. As such, it formed part of a broader rise in interest in folk religion and the paranormal in the last decades of the Soviet Union. The articles are ambiguous. The frame within which shamanism is presented shifted from socio-cultural to bio-chemical, but unlike earlier articles, there was no clear moral to be drawn. As in earlier representations, there was the implication that atheist science would debunk religious claims. These altered states only appear to be religious – they are in fact biological. However, if altered states of consciousness are due to universal human biology, the articles offered no clear indication of what the relationship between altered states of consciousness and the Soviet state should be.
During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union defined themselves as ideological opponents, and came to see each other as polar opposites, especially in regard to religion. The United States increasingly defined itself as the bastion of religious freedom, while the Soviet Union sought to define itself as a bastion of atheist humanism. It is only when we look through the margins, in this instance examining how shamanism is represented in popular media, that we can see refractive echoes between Soviet and US secular modernist projects. In both the United States and the Soviet Union, social scientists and policy makers presumed the secularisation thesis, namely, that modernisation meant a reduction in religiosity, and that scientific attitudes and religion were incompatible. In the United States and other Western liberal democracies the incompatibility of science and religion were resolved through the privatisation of religion, the ‘only legitimate space allowed to Christianity by post-Enlightenment society, the right to individual belief’.Footnote 61 Religion and secular modernity were compatible in the West so long as religious behaviour confined itself to this privatised sphere of individual belief and conscience. While scholars and policy makers in the Soviet Union also accepted the secularisation thesis and presumed that scientific attitudes and religious convictions were incompatible, privatisation of religious belief was not an acceptable solution to Communist Party members committed to an atheist state.
In both the Euro-American West and the Soviet East, the limits of what was considered religion was defined by shamanism. In the first half of the twentieth century the performative, improvisational and experiential aspects of shamanic practices made shamanism incompatible with modernist projects on both sides of the globe. Shamanism was a marker of primitive behaviour in populations that needed to be civilised in North America as much as in Siberia. By the mid-1960s, however, this interpretation had shifted globally. Shamanism was now a primitive form of a universal human mode of consciousness, a type of individual experience that was potentially dangerous but also appealing to late modern subjects. The experiential nature of shamanism, the way in which altered states of consciousness could be measured, induced and experienced, appeared to disrupt the incompatibility between scientific attitudes and religious beliefs. Shamanism appeared to offer an experiential proof of the sacred in a way that could be observed, and which therefore transcended the privatised space of individual belief and infused the material world with the sacred.Footnote 62 It is important to note that in both contexts, the idea that shamanism is individualistic and non-institutional was a profound mis-recognition of indigenous practices, a blind spot in modernist projects that failed to recognise indigenous institutions and required indigeneity as the orientalist ‘primitive’ foil to an imagined modernity. Rhetorically, shamanism filled the same role in both Western and Soviet imaginaries of the modern, namely offering a way to disrupt the perceived incompatibility of religion and science.
As Soviet journal articles show, Soviet writers were aware of developments across the Iron Curtain. At the same time, however, the fascination with shamanism occured under profoundly different institutional structures. In the West, shamanism, as an apparently individual, experiential and non-institutional practice, appealed to individuals with a counter-cultural orientation, but because it largely took the form of individual consumption, it did not actually challenge the status quo on a structural level. New Age fascination with shamanism as individualised and experiential remained within the private sphere allotted to religion in the Western secular state, thereby leaving structures of secularism intact.
Soviet atheist writers were aware of the counter-cultural critique of Western New Agers, and as we have seen, cited the examples of counter-cultural hippie shamans on Haight-Ashbury as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the West. In the Soviet Union, however, a state aspiring to atheist utopia could not allow space for privatised, individual belief. An atheist Soviet state ought to have had a position on these kinds of New Age, shamanic and occult practices, but atheist propaganda in the long 1960s reveals that state actors no longer knew what that position should be. The way in which shamanism and other forms of altered states of consciousness could be measured and investigated scientifically appears to be a large part of their appeal to the writers at Nauka i Religiia. By explaining altered states of consciousness as the result of brain chemicals, these articles appear to argue that Soviet science and the Soviet system were better positioned to understand these phenomena than Western scientists. This type of scientific explanation appears to support the atheist claim that religion is an illusion. However, by arguing that these altered states of consciousness are in fact, real, and that shamans actually experience something that can be researched and documented, the articles appear to have inadvertently legitimised them, carving out a space, however limited, for these practices within what ought to have been an atheist public sphere.
In both Soviet and US discourses about shamanism, shamanism represented the limit of the category of religion. Its perceived individualised and experiential qualities rendered it appealing to individuals with counter-cultural leanings looking for religion outside of institutional forms of religion. The rising fascination and shift in rhetoric about shamanism in the long 1960s point to underlying similarities in Soviet and Western modernist discourses. The effects of this shift, however, played out differently on either side of the Iron Curtain, due to the different spaces allowed for religion by the state. In the West, the experiential and individualistic nature of shamanism appeared to offer a counter-cultural perspective but ultimately posed no challenge to the secular privatisation of religion. In the Soviet Union, state-sponsored atheist writers saw the experiential nature of shamanism as an ideal example for proving that science can explain religion, but inadvertently legitimised these practices as part of a universal human experience, thereby undermining an atheist public sphere. Rhetorical representations of shamanism in the Soviet atheist press offer a prism which refracts global, modernist projects through the lenses of Western liberal and Soviet forms of secularism.
