Cultural Transformation at the End of Soviet Socialism

BOOK REVIEW

The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse
by Joseph Kellner

Cornell University Press
2025. 242 pp.
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-5017-8151-3

Reviewed by Margaret McCool

Joseph Kellner’s monograph, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, offers a fresh and illuminating perspective on how ordinary Soviet citizens navigated the collapse of the Soviet Union by turning to new cultural phenomena to orient themselves to a rapidly changing world. Kellner centers cultural disruption, as opposed to economic or political transitions, to examine how Soviet citizens made sense of the collapse through alternative forms of science and belief. As Kellner demonstrates, a large swath of Soviet citizens engaged in the “seeking phenomenon” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, marked by the arrival of droves of psychics to public life along with palm and tarot readers, astrologers, missionaries, gurus, and self-described prophets (p. 2). These individuals questioned official history and engaged in a variety of spiritual movements, while also mapping onto an existing Soviet cultural landscape. In examining this seeker phenomenon, Kellner’s work identifies the various forms this phenomenon took and asks: Why did former Soviet citizens seek in the first place? In pursuit of an answer to this question, The Spirit of Socialism elucidates the multifaceted ways culture and belief developed during a moment of immense crisis and “a disorientation in history, both for the seekers and for society at large” (p. 14).

In his examination, Kellner argues that “the erosion of intellectual or epistemological authority; the loss of cultural identity...; and, most fundamentally, a growing uncertainty about the direction of historical time” all contributed to making the seeking phenomenon widespread and appealing as alternative forms of belief supplanted waning state authority (p. 14). In his introduction, Kellner notes that the seekers were mostly young men, were part of the Soviet technical intelligentsia, were by and large not dissidents, were influenced by both the old and the modern, and often served as lecturers for the Knowledge Society. However, untangling these various movements, as Kellner points out, is not an easy task, as the seeker community actively rejected categories and labels and often mixed various forms of belief to create innumerable variations. Kellner’s careful approach is commendable as he makes the culture of the seekers understandable for the reader while preserving the intangible characteristic that permeated the movements. This is mainly possible because Kellner’s analysis rests on oral interviews with leaders and followers in the seeker phenomenon, supplemented with a variety of published sources. These interviews give the reader intimate insight into the experiences and motivations of the seekers, and Kellner’s masterful weaving of these narratives immerses the reader in these communities and groups. Insights from interviews that Kellner conducted permeate all of the chapters, each of which examines a different strand of the movement: astrology, the Soviet Hare Krishnas, the Vissarion sect, and finally the reimagining of world history by the mathematician Anatolii Fomenko. Linking these four chapters is Kellner’s argument that a culture of collapse allowed Soviet citizens to push the boundaries of existing official culture, engage with alternative forms of belief, and popularize these movements.

A reoccurring theme throughout Kellner’s analysis is the claim that these movements often mapped onto existing Soviet culture or to some extent overlapped with previous Soviet epistemology. One of the clearest examples of this appears in chapter 1, “The Astrologers: As Above, So Below,” which locates the astrology movement’s roots in the Soviet space age of the 1960s, Russian popular science fiction, and broader European trends. Kellner argues that astrology became popular largely because it intersected with an existing “Soviet spirituality” that one could find in the pages of Science and Religion, which focused on collective morality, self-improvement, a celebration of world art and culture, and humanity’s achievements in technical power. Kellner contends that this turn to speculative science helped astrology become “shorthand for the much larger cultural transformation” (p. 23). Not only did astrology become more mainstream in the pages of Science and Religion in the 1990s, but the Moscow Academy of Astrology was founded in 1990 by mathematician Mikhail Levin as well. Kellner examines the transformation of Science and Religion from a magazine dedicated to atheist enlightenment and articles on Marxism, with muted themes of speculative science, to “a reliable source for those serious about astrology” as a way to trace the broader shifts that happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s as astrology, the occult, and speculative science reemerged in the public discourse (p. 48). In conjunction with interviews with Olga Galankina, a Soviet scientist and later student of Levin’s, Kellner’s work explicates how those enmeshed in mathematics and sciences academia embraced this new outlook.

The middle two chapters turn our attention away from the general trend of astrology, which captured the imaginations of broader swaths of Soviet citizens, to the work of two specific groups: the Soviet Hare Krishnas and then the Vissarion sect. Chapter 2, “The Hare Krishnas: Let Communism Live Forever,” examines the Soviet Hare Krishnas, which Kellner describes as one of the most well-known groups during the Soviet collapse, both in terms of their membership numbers and centrality in public memory. To examine the beliefs and work of this group, particularly what made its teachings attractive to Soviet citizens during this time, Kellner visited the Hare Krishna temple in Moscow and conducted interviews with its members. The origins of the Hare Krishnas, he contends, were archetypal, as existing Soviet culture made the group both plausible and understandable to the Soviet public. Kellner shows that Soviet support of decolonization, academic exchanges with India, and the relative lack of censorship of ancient and Eastern scholarship all contributed, during the Soviet period, to the adoption of Hare Krishna by a variety of urban and educated Soviet citizens. These citizens, despite state persecution of the group in the 1980s for being subversive, “looked for Krishna beyond the intentions of official culture” in the universities and personal kruzhki or kitchen circles, in this case informal gatherings of Soviet intellectuals often in apartment kitchens where unsanctioned topics, such as Hare Krishna, were discussed (p. 65). A central component of the Hare Krishna movement was its reorientation of time, which was appealing to former Soviet citizens who felt lost with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the official state narratives on history, progress, and the future. The Soviet Hare Krishnas’ focus on dependable cycles of time, nostalgia for a Vedic past, and portrayal of that past as a path forward appealed to many individuals who sought structure, particularly by the collapse in the early 1990s.

Chapter 3, “The Vissarion Sect: Those Who Know History,” shifts our focus to the Vissarion sect, a post-apocalyptic group that sought to create a new world out of the post-Soviet collapse by combining multiple forms and themes of belief, such as Christian faith, UFOs, veganism, environmental concerns, and ideas around a second coming. By using Christian ideology as a scaffolding for this varied ideological content, the sect, as Kellner finds, effectively harnessed the attention of those in the seekers community and proposed a new world with vestiges of both early twentieth-century Russian beliefs (messianic faith) and Soviet beliefs. The sect’s ideology was predicated on a coming apocalypse that would “set time on a new track,” which derived from previous Russian crises and was influenced by a distinctly Russian past, despite the sect’s declared apathy toward national thoughts or Russian historical development (p. 89). This chapter is by far Kellner’s richest in terms of his oral interviews, immersing the reader into the members’ day-to-day lives. To gather information for the chapter, Kellner visited the sect at the Abode of Dawn or the Mountain, as it is colloquially known, where many of the disciples of this sect live along with the teacher, Vissarion. In examining the varied and diverse beliefs of this sect, Kellner contends that we can trace influences on their views to traditional Russian orthodoxy, Nikolai and Elena Roerich from the early twentieth century, and the role of beauty. Kellner’s research into the Vissarion sect and the Roerichs demonstrates a strong link between the two as the Vissarion sect seemed to adopt and adapt many of the philosophies and aesthetics of Roerichism. Both movements faced similar questions about modern science and technology as well as disenchantment within a moment of crisis.

Kellner’s final chapter broadens our perspective and examines the work of Soviet mathematician Fomenko, who, in the 1990s, devised a “New Chronology” that led to him becoming one of the most popular historians in Russia. Kellner aims to understand not only the ideology behind Fomenko’s writings and lectures but also the reasons why Russian citizens read his work and believed him. The popularity of Fomenko’s work, Kellner argues, hinges on the fact that it gave people a new orientation of history and time when the official Soviet history had largely been discredited. As Kellner points out, Soviet historians in the humanities had been largely denounced after the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving a vacuum of historical authority. With his work, Fomenko sought to fill this vacuum with an ideology that purported that traditional historical chronology was falsified to serve political purposes, alleged that events that happened in ancient times actually occurred in the Middle Ages, and claimed that there existed a “vast but forgotten Slavic-Turkic Great Empire” (p. 143). With these assertions, Fomenko sought to answer “questions about Russian identity between East and West, and questions about the shape and direction of historical time,” significant questions at the time (p. 134). He displays the popularity of these writings by noting that supporters of Fomenko extended beyond the seeker phenomenon to capture the imaginations of a wide variety of the public. Ultimately, Kellner understands the popularity of the Fomenko phenomenon not in the traditional way it has been portrayed, as aligning with national impulses in centering Russian history, but rather as a cultural phenomenon akin to the seekers.

Kellner’s work successfully elucidates the variety of meanings that culture had in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the Soviet Union and the unique ways Russians engaged with these new beliefs, thanks to the wealth of information he uncovered through his oral interviews. These interviews form the bulk of the evidence that Kellner presents to the reader, making various beliefs and ideologies concrete and spotlighting how citizens used this new language of seeking to make sense of a rapidly shifting world. It is not an easy task to make legible the kaleidoscope of beliefs that the seeker community and ordinary Soviet citizens engaged with during this period, and Kellner’s masterful disentangling of the various strands of the movements through oral testimony is commendable. However, with oral interviews forming a core component of the monograph, more attention to the process of conducting this oral research in the introduction and each chapter may have helped to orient the reader. For instance, how many individuals did Kellner interview and how did he identify individuals willing to talk about their recollections and experiences? In a fascinating section in chapter 2, he discusses how members of the Hare Krishna movement reflected on the past using an adopted lens of belief that included a “new language and categories with which to describe it” (p. 74). I wanted to know whether this was a recurring theme that Kellner witnessed in his interviews across movements and beliefs. How was language reframed and what did it ultimately replace from the Soviet era?

Additionally, I am curious how gender played a role in this phenomenon. Kellner notes in his introduction that the majority of the individuals involved in these movements were men, but he spotlights the experiences of numerous women in his chapters. Was this a conscious decision to center female experiences? How did gender play out in these different movements in terms of members and leadership? Including a discussion on gender—such as whether the roles in these movements were gendered—would have been useful to understand the movements’ dynamics. Finally, I would have also liked to have seen more information about how the economic realities helped influence this culture. While Kellner’s intervention into the existing literature helpfully expands our perspective to the cultural nature of these developments, it seems that the economic realities of the late and post-Soviet space would have also pushed individuals toward the perceived stability and inexpensiveness of nontraditional activities. However, Kellner writes that many of the seekers were from the technical intelligentsia­: Does this also describe the majority of the followers, or mainly the leaders? What was the role of economic pressures in the crystallization and popularity of the seeking phenomenon?

Overall, Kellner’s work adds immensely to our understanding of how ordinary individuals navigated the collapse of the Soviet Union. His decision to frame the various beliefs, ideologies, and seeking movements as cultural phenomena usefully elucidates how the Soviet collapse had far-reaching cultural implications, as well as how ingrained Soviet culture had become by 1990. Kellner persuasively shows how new attempts to navigate history, time, and belief in an era of uncertainty and change often mapped onto existing cultural edifices. The spirit of socialism and Soviet ideology that he maps out on these pages, with its “regard for modern science, an informed and generous internationalism, [and] confidence in humanity to chart its own course,” all became, as Kellner shows, vital currents that ran through the seeking phenomenon and other ideological and spiritual movements during the collapse (p. 169). Readers will find in this monograph a reinvigorating and novel approach to examining the continuities and ruptures that occurred culturally in 1990, lending greater nuance to how we understand the experiences and beliefs of Soviet citizens.

(Review author: Margaret McCool, Indiana University)

[Reproduced here under a Creative Commons license from H-Net]