The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse
Joseph Kellner, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2025), 258 pp.
Joseph Kellner’s The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse traces the outlines of what the author terms “the seeking phenomenon”—a highly visible search for meaning that millions of Soviet and post-Soviet citizens embarked upon in the years leading up to and following the collapse of the Soviet Union. With a focus on Russia, the book traces the emergence of four esoteric and syncretic belief systems that became widely popular in the 1990s, seeking to understand not … Read more
