This “scholarly-popular” volume is a compendium of twenty-one selected articles previously published by Roman Shizhensky (Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Kaliningrad) in Russian between 2008 and 2020 and now made available to an Anglophone audience by Prav Publishing (founded in 2019). According to publisher Jafe Arnold, it is intended to overcome the underrepresentation of Slavic paganism in global neo-paganism studies and to present a different picture from the “pseudo-pagan speculations which adequate and competent representatives of Rodnoverie (Native Faith) here in Russia have been struggling against for many years” (10–11). Arnold accentuates “the hyper-fixations of Western Studies on [Native Faith's] nationalism and constructionism ” (10). Shizhensky explains constructionism as referring to scholars’ tendency to stress Rodnoverie's necessity to create, rather than reconstruct, pagan rites and symbols because of a paucity of primary sources regarding the pre-Christian Slavic past. Many Rodnoverie adherents eschew the category of “neo-paganism” because of its Christian and therefore foreign origin and resent its pejorative connotation in Russia as being tied to right-wing movements.
Shizhensky's research and writings are thus intended to counter negative stereotypes of Rodnoverie by moving beyond its founders’ extremist writings and uncovering the demographic profiles and beliefs of individuals attracted by Rodnoverie events, such as annual midsummer Kupala festivals. Shizhensky and his team accordingly conducted limited field research and sociological surveys between 2013 and 2020. Recognizing the utopian nature of reconstructing a “Golden Age” of paganism, Shizhensky stresses the movement's evolution over forty years, its diversity, “a kaleidoscope of personalities, trends and ideologies” (21); its urban character; the relative youth of its adherents (with an average age around thirty-one years) who have mainly secondary and post-secondary education; its dominance by males; its engagement with internet resources; and its flexible syncretism. Although he concedes that participants in Native Faith rituals are compensating for their “sense of loss of a dignified place in socio-political realities (25),” he argues that “even ethnic belonging recedes into the background” in their reconstruction of the past (13).
At the same time, Rodnoverie members, according to Shizhensky, form “imagined communities” in the same way that Benedict Anderson has described national groups. This comparison results in Shizhensky's multiple discussions of Rodnoverie's intellectual foundations, particularly the ideas of Alexei Dobrovolskii (aka Dobroslav, his unbaptized name, a euphemism for racial purification) and Nikolai Speranskii (Velimir). Shizhensky recognizes racial and national belonging as essential to Dobrovolskii's Aryanism and eco-anarchism, as well as those of other neo-pagans in and outside Russia. He notes the influence of “ethnological theories popular in Hitler's Germany” (145) upon Dobrovolskii. However, Shizhensky does not identify their theorists as Nazis, fascists, or anti-Semites. For example, he describes Herman Felix Wirth as a “Dutch thinker, employing the comparative linguistic method, and engaging in the comparative analysis of Indo-European symbols” (146) and “head of the Ahnenerbe” association without mentioning that the latter was an SS organization. Shizensky likewise does not fully identify the virulent anti-Semitic philosopher Julius Evola, who influenced Speranskii. Moreover, Shizhensky tones down the import of mainstream fascist and Nazi ideas by arguing that “contemporary Russian pagans’ study and partial copying” of them “brings them close to the ideas of the pan-European neo-Romantic movement of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which in turn dates back to the first pagan treatises of the fifteenth century” (149). Only once does Shizhensky refer to Dobrovolskii's socialist paradise as “a racial dictatorship” (164), which he leaves undefined. He lauds Dobrovolskii's feminist embrace of a primordial matriarchy (while simultaneously condemning contemporary women who refuse to marry or have children) by contrasting it to the Norwegian nativist Varg Vikernes's vile misogyny.
The volume's final chapter's 2016 survey of “pagan tolerance” among a paltry 163 (out of a total 800) participants of the Kupala festival in Lukino village of Moscow oblast, hosted by the Rodnoverie Veles Circle and Circle of Yar, reveals racist views that require further research as well as comparison with views of the population of the Russian Federation who self-identify as Russian. Not calling attention to this extreme xenophobia, Shizhensky does note that considerable numbers left the question “I would not like to see them in my country” (299) unanswered. Just over 50.3 percent of those who responded identified practitioners of Islam and Judaism as what scholars would define as the “Other,” while almost 40 percent chose Jehovah's Witnesses.
Scholars and students interested in learning about New Age Russian and east European neo-paganist movements would be well advised to consult the scholarly works of Kaarina Aitamurto, Adrian Ivakhiv, Marlene Laruelle, Mariya Lesiv, the late Galina Lindquist, Viktor Shnirel΄man, and Scott Simpson.
