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From Culture to Experience: Shamanism in the Pages of the Soviet Anti-Religious Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2020

Justine Buck Quijada Open the ORCID record for Justine Buck Quijada [Opens in a new window]
Justine Buck Quijada*
Affiliation:
Dept. of Religion, Wesleyan University, 171 Church St. MiddletownCT, 06459USA
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Abstract

In the 1960s a shift occured in how shamanism was represented in Soviet anti-religious journals, in which shamanism was 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 and a precursor of various forms of mysticism. The article argues that this shift coincided with a shift in the Soviet atheist project, as well as a point of comparison that reveals similarities and differences between Soviet and Western modernist projects.

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Contemporary European History , Volume 29 , Special Issue 2: Religion and Socialism in the Long 1960s: From Antithesis to Dialogue in Eastern and Western Europe , May 2020 , pp. 187 - 201
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

1 McLeod, Hugh, The Religious Crisis of the 1960's (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

2 Fascination with Eastern and indigenous religions in Western Europe and the United States goes back further than the 1960's, most notably among the theosophists, and other occult movements in the nineteenth century, but there is a shift in scale and presence in popular culture in the 1960's. On Western New Age approaches to shamanism see Heelas, Paul, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996)Google Scholar; Jakobsen, Merete, Shamanism: Traditional and Contemporary Approaches to the Mastery of Spirits and Healing (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999)Google Scholar; Znamenski, Andrei, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Although there is a large body of work on post-Soviet shamanism, there is, for obvious reasons, much less work on shamanic practices during the Soviet period. Soviet scholars publishing on shamanism during the Soviet period were usually careful to frame their work as historical reconstructions of past practices, even if some of these scholars were themselves indigenous practitioners who later went on to influence post-Soviet shamanic revivals, such as Basilov, Vladimir, Isbranniki Dukhov (Moscow: Politizdat 1984)Google Scholar; Dashinima, Dugarov, Istoricheskie Korni Beloro Shamanstva (Na Materiale Obriadovogo Folk'lora Buriat [Historical Roots of White Shamanism (on Materials of Ritual Folklore of the Buryats)] (Moscow: Nauka, 1991)Google Scholar; Galdanova, G.R., Dolamaistckie Verovaniia Buriat (Pre-Lamaist Belief System of the Buryats) (Novosibirsk: Nauka - sibirskoe otdelenie, 1987)Google Scholar; Mikhailov, T. M., Iz istorii buriatskogo shamanizma: S drevneishikh vremen po XVIII v. [From the history of Buryat shamanism: from the most ancient times to the18th century] (Novosibirsk: Izd-vo “Nauka,” Sibirskoe otd-nie, 1980)Google Scholar; Valentina Kharitonova, Politika, korrektiruiushaia traditsii: (neo)shamany I (neo)shamanism v SSSR i RF (1922–2010), 85–120 in Narodnostni politika na teritoriu byvaleho SSSR (Prague Etnologisky Ustav Akademie ved Ceske Republiky, 2010). English sources for shamanic practice during the Soviet period include Dioszegi, V. and Hoppal, M., eds., Shamanism in Siberia (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1978)Google Scholar; Balzer, M.M., Shamanic Worlds: Rituals and Lore of Siberia and Central Asia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1997)Google Scholar; Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam, The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Humphrey, Caroline, Marx Went Away – But Karl Stayed Behind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Humphrey, Caroline, ‘Shamans in the City’, in The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002) 202–21Google Scholar.

4 Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Random House / Vintage Books, 1979)Google Scholar. In regards to applying the concept to Siberian populations see Nikolai Tsyrempilov, ‘Noble Paganism’, Inner Asia, 17, 2, 199–224. He argues that Said's idea of Orientalism applies to Russian discourse about internal minorities (in his example, Buryat Buddhists). See also Slezkine, Yuri, Artic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1994)Google Scholar for a history of the representation of Siberian nationalities in Soviet literature.

5 For general histories of how shamanism has been represented, see Flaherty, Gloria, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Narby, Jeremy and Huxley, Francis, eds., Shamans through Time (New York: Penguin Books 2004)Google Scholar; Znamenski, Andrei, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Smolkin, Victoria, A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 83Google Scholar.

7 Anna Krylova, ‘Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament’, Contemporary European History, 23, 2 (May 2014), 187, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0960777314000083.

8 Sonja Luehrmann, ‘The Spirit of Late Socialism and the Value of Transformation: Brezhnevism Thorugh the Lens of Post-Soviet Revival’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 54, 3/4, 543–63.

9 See Stone, Andrew B., ‘“Overcoming Peasant Backwardness”: The Khrushchev Antireligious Campaign and the Rural Soviet Union’, The Russian Review, 67, 2 (2008): 296–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baran, Emily, ‘“I saw the Light”: Former Protestant Believer Testimonials in the Soviet Union, 1957–1987’, Cahiers Du Monde Russe, 52, 1 (2011), 163–84Google Scholar; Smolkin-Rothrock, Victoria, ‘The Ticket to the Soviet Soul: Science, Religion, and the Spiritual Crisis of Late Soviet Atheism’, The Russian Review, 73, 2 (1 Apr. 2014), 171–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.1111/russ.10726.

10 Smolkin, A Sacred Space, 83.

11 Birgit Menzel also notes that official Soviet policy on matters of the occult was deeply contradictory at this time ranging from official condemnation in anti-religious publications, while at the same time funding research. See Menzel, Birgit, ‘Occult and Esoteric Movements in Russia from the 1960s to the 1980s’, in Hagemeister, Michael and Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, eds., The New Age of Russia. Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, New edition., 151–85 (München: Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2012)Google Scholar.

12 Ibid.; Lane, Christal, The Rites of Rulers (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; C. Binns, The Changing Face of Power: Revolution and Accommodation in the Development of the Soviet Ceremonial System, Man 1979, 14, 585–606 (1980), and 15, 170–87; Shnirelman, Victor A., ‘Perun vs. Jesus Christ: Communism and the Emergence of Neo-paganism in the USSR’, in Ngo, Tam and Quijada, Justine, eds., Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 173–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a broader Eastern European comparative perspective on the sources of socialist rites of passage see also Tóth, Heléna, ‘Writing Rituals: The Sources of Socialist Rites of Passage in Hungary, 1958–1970’, in Betts, Paul and Smith, Stephen A., eds., Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 179–203Google Scholar.

13 ‘Sectarianism’ (Sektantstvo) refers to ‘all old believer Orthodox Christianity as well as any christian religious group, existing outside of the acting Orthodox Church’. See A.I. Klibanov, ‘O Religioznom Sektantstvo’, Nauka i religiia, (Oct. 1960), 27. It should be noted that Klibanov explicitly, and his colleagues through practice, are adopting the Russian Orthodox perspective that all non-Orthodox forms of Christianity are ‘sectarian’. See also Baran, Emily, ‘“I saw the Light”: Former Protestant Believer Testimonials in the Soviet Union, 1957–1987’, Cahiers Du Monde Russe, 52, 1 (2011), 164, footnote 4Google Scholar.

14 As in the United States, for example, the ‘free exercise of religion’ is protected by the constitution, but courts routinely fail to protect the free exercise of religions which do not look like Protestant Christianity. See for example, Sullivan, Winnifred, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

15 Anti-religious propaganda made claims about the nature of ‘religion’ in general, using examples from specific religious practices, but these references sometimes undermined the arguments the authors were trying to make. For example, in a 1963 article on ‘Religion and National Difference’, the author compared Jewish claims of being a ‘holy people’ (cviashennym narodom) to Christian and Muslim rhetoric about the difference between believers and heretics, to argue that religion is socially divisive. While all three traditions do draw sharp distinctions between in-group and out-group members, by paralleling Judaism to Christianity and Islam the author erased significant doctrinal, rhetorical and practical differences about who can claim membership in these traditions. See S. Gershovich, ‘Religiia I Natsional'naia Rozn’’, Nauka i Religiia, (Oct. 1963), 20–3.

16 For example, articles on Islam in Nauka i Religiia in the 1960s devote a larger portion of attention to gender (including veiling) in comparison to articles on other traditions, paralleling Western anxieties about women and Islam. Gender is not discussed at all in articles on Buddhism or Shamanism, although the shamans depicted are all male, and young Soviet activists are often female. Articles on ‘sectarians’ often focus on anti-social behaviour and the risk of suicide, paralleling western discourse about ‘cults’ since the 1960s.

17 A.I. Klibanov, ‘O Religioznom Sektantstvo’, 27.

18 Northrup, Douglas, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Massell, Gregory J., The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 There are articles on Old Believer sectarians in Siberia in the issues of Mar. 1960, 53–6; Mar. 1963, 23–5; July 1963, 32–3; Apr. 1964, 26–31; Sept. 1968, 16–22.

20 Although this article addresses only the Soviet Union as a modernist project, there are strong parallels between the ways indigenous religious practices are represented as incompatible with modernity in both the United States and Australia. For examples see Wenger, Tisa, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom, 1 edition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Povinelli, Elizabeth, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Khalil Johnson demonstrates how state modernist projects in regards to indigenous education shared not just underlying principles but were actually designed by the same individuals. See Johnson, Khalil, ‘Problem Solver or “Evil Genius”: Thomas Jesse Jones & the Problem of Indian Administration’, Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal, 5, 2 (2018) 37–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Menzel, Birgit, ‘The Occult Underground of Late Soviet Russia’, Aries, 13, 2 (1 Jan. 2013), 269–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hagemeister, Michael and Menzel, Birgit, The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, edited by Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, New edition (München: Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lindquist, Galina, Conjuring Hope: Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005)Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Lemon, Alaina, Technologies for Intuition: Cold War Circles and Telepathic Rays (Berkeley: University of California Press 2018)Google Scholar.

22 On Western New Age approaches to shamanism see Jakobsen, Merete, Shamanism: Traditional and Contemporary Approaches to the Mastery of Spirits and Healing (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999)Google Scholar; Znamenski, Andrei, The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamans and the Western Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heelas, Paul, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralization of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers 1996)Google Scholar.

23 I reviewed all the issues of Bezbozhnik published between Jan. 1929 and Dec. 1932.

24 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 4Google Scholar.

25 There is an extensive literature on the relationship between Soviet nationality and anti-religious policy. See Lenin, V. I., ‘Two Cultures in Every National Culture’ (654–59) and ‘The Question of Nationalities or Autonomisation’ (719–27) in Tucker, R.C., ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York: W.W. Norton and Co. 1975)Google Scholar; Stalin, National Factors in Party and State Affairs: Theses for the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Commmunist Party (Bolsheviks) Approved by the Central Committee of the Party (http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/NF23.html, last accessed 5 Oct. 2010). For a historical overview of Soviet nationalities policy see Slezkine, , ‘From Savages to Citizens: The Cultural Revolution in the Soviet Far North’, Slavic Review, 51, 1 (1992), 52–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slezkine, Yuri, ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, in Suny, R. and Eley, G., eds., Becoming National (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 203–38Google Scholar; , Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Suny, Ronald and Martin, Terry, A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Soviet Union, 1917–1953 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, , Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

26 Pospielovsky, D.V., A History of Marxist-Leninist Atheism and Soviet Anti-Religious Policies (New York: St. Martin's Press 1987), 137CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Bezbozhnik, 6 (Mar. 1930) 14–6.

28 Tungus was the ethnonym used at the time for people currently referred to as Evenki.

29 The ‘literal’ description of the service is very similar to a description of an Orthodox service described by Tolstoy in Resurrection (Part 1, Ch. 39–40), for the same critical purpose – to show the meaninglessness of the practice to those participating. While it is impossible to determine if the author intended to reference this scene, it is not unreasonable to presume that a Russian author for Bezbozhnik would be familiar with Tolstoy's work. Tolstoy, Leo, Resurrection (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), 154–61Google Scholar. My thanks to Susanne Fusso for pointing out this convergence.

30 Shishka, in Bezbozhnik, 6 (Mar. 1930), 14–6.

31 This is a very good example of the gap between practice and representation. It is highly unlikely that this description refers to a real ceremony. Bear sacrifices do take place, but among groups further to the northeast in Siberia, most notably among the Ainu in northern Japan. Although contemporary Siberian shamans sometimes use the Russian word for ‘god’ this would probably be better translated as an animal spirit master and does not make the equation that the author of Shishka is trying to. The article uses the term ‘god’ for both the bear and the Christian god in order to emphasise the ridiculousness of both.

32 See, for example, Danilin, A.G., ‘Cherty novogo byta Altaitsev’ [Traits of the new way of life of the Altais], Bezbozhnik, 11 (June 1930), 10Google Scholar and Grushko, V., ‘U Gol'dov’ [Among the Goldi], Bezbozhnik, 12 (June 1930), 18–9Google Scholar.

33 V. Mashchenko. Korotko o shamanizme I o tom, kak c nim boriutcia bezbozhniki’ [A little about Shamanism and how the Godless fight it], Bezbozhnik, 19 (Oct. 1930), 11.

34 For example, ‘Soviet Lands: In the Country of Herders and Hunters (Buryat-Mongolia)’, Bezbozhnik, 16 (Sept. 1930), 317–8, explains that the spirits have forbidden trapping Siberian marmot (hunted for fur) in the winter, during the hibernation period, when they are easier to catch, and that anyone who does so will die. The article reports that the local hunting collective disproved this superstition by hunting in the winter without negative consequences. One should note that although collectivisation did prove that supernatural sanctions would not be visited on hunters who broke these hunting rules, the ‘scientific’ collectivisation of fur trapping and hunting resulted in over hunting and depletion of resources.

35 This is a common Soviet criticism of all religions. The Orthodox practice of kissing icons was accused of spreading syphilis, and articles covering a trial of members of the Skoptsy, an Old Believer Orthodox group describe in great and gory detail (with photographs) self mutilations performed by members. For accusations against shamans for unhygenically sharing cups, prohibiting bathing and seeing Soviet doctors for their own illnesses while deceving their patients see Danilin, A.G., ‘Cherty novogo byta Altaitsev’ [Traits of the new way of life of the Altais], Bezbozhnik, 11 (June 1930), 10Google Scholar.

36 Grushko, V., ‘U Gol'dov’ [Among the Goldi], Bezbozhnik, 12 (June 1930) 18–9Google Scholar.

37 Smolkin, A Sacred Space, 68.

38 Although the magazine began publication in 1959, the earliest issue I was able to access was Feb. 1960, and US holdings of 1960–2 are incomplete. I reviewed all copies of Nauka i Religiia from Feb.–Dec. 1960, May, Aug, Nov. 1961 and then Mar. 1963–Dec. 1969.

39 D. Myshnikov, ‘Mrachnyi khoziain Beloi gory’ [Dark Master of White Mountain], Nauka i Religiia (Mar. 1961), 86.

40 Ibid.

41 ‘On Errors in the Conduct of Scientific Atheist Propaganda among the Population’, 10 Nov. 1954. See Smoklkin, A Sacred Space, 67.

42 E. Anan'ev, ‘V poiskakh zolotoi baby’ [In Pursuit of the Golden Idols], Nauka i Religiia (June 1963) 29–33.

43 Ibid., 31.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., 33.

46 Luehrmann, The Spirit of Late Socialism, 557–63.

47 Smolkin, A Sacred Space, 133–41.

48 Menzel, Birgit, ‘Occult and Esoteric Movements in Russia from the 1960s to the 1980s’, in Hagemeister, Michael and Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, eds., The New Age of Russia. Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, New edition (Munich: Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2012), 151–85Google Scholar. See also Lemon, Alaina, Technologies for Intuition: Cold War Circles and Telepathic Rays (Berkeley: University of California Press 2018)Google Scholar for a fascinating discussion of occult research in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

49 ‘Telepatia: Za ili protiv’ [Telepathy, for or against], Nauka i Religiia, (Mar. 1966) 32–55.

50 On the Abominable Snowman see Zh. Kofman, ‘Sledy Ostaiutsia’, [Traces Remain], Nauka i Religiia, Apr. 1968, 86–91.

51 V. Bai'dalov, ‘Ekspeditsiia k kostopravu’ [Expedition to the Bonesetter], Nauka i Religiia (Feb. 1968) 30–1.

52 Ibid., 30.

53 The interest in folk rituals presumed that Soviet rituals would be more appealing if they drew on the national traditions of the population in question. In most of Russia this meant Russian pagan rituals, but in national republics this meant the folk traditions of the titular nationality. See Shnirelman, Victor A., ‘Perun vs Jesus Christ: Communism and the Emergence of Neo-Paganism in the USSR’, in Ngo, T.T. T. and Quijada, J. B., eds., Atheist Secularism and its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) 173–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lane, Christel, The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society – the Soviet Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 229–38Google Scholar. For a similar argument in regards to shifting views on churches in the Brezhnev era see Catriona Kelly, ‘From “Counter-revolutionary Monuments” to “National Heritage”: The Preservation of Leningrad Churches, 1964–1982’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, 54, 1/2, 131–64. See also S. Tokarev, ‘Tri obosnovaniia morali [Three foundations of morality]’, Nauka i Religiia, (Dec. 1967) 13–21, in which the author, a well-known Soviet anthropologist, argues that moral values should not be dismissed merely because they are religious, but rather evaluated rationally on their own merits.

54 V. Bai'dalov, ‘Ekspeditsiia k kostopravu’ [Expedition to the Bonesetter], Nauka i Religiia (Feb. 1968), 31.

55 Levit, M. ‘Mnogovekovoi narodnyi opyt’ [Many centuries of Folk Experience], Nauka i Religiia (Nov. 1968) 24–6.

56 Articles in the series appear in the June, July, Aug., Sept. and Oct. issues of 1968.

57 M. Rozhnova, V. Rozhov, ‘Vrata Istiny?’ [Gateway to the Truth], Nauka i Religiia (March 1969), 70.

58 Ibid., 71.

59 M. Rozhnova, V. Rozhnov, ‘Vrata Istiny?’ [Gateway to the Truth], Nauka i Religiia (Apr. 1969) 72, 75.

60 M. Rozhonova, V. Rozhnov, ‘Vrata istiny?’, Nauka i Religiia (May 1969) 72. Note, I have transcribed the etymology of the term ‘hippie’ as written.

61 Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1993), 45Google Scholar.

62 See, for example, Chapter 3: Ideological Strains: Spirituality and Science, in Bloch, Jon P., New Spirituality, Self and Belonging: How New Agers and Neo-Pagans Talk about Themselves (Westport, Praeger Publishers, 1998)Google Scholar.