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 only the dynamics of believers’ conversion as relayed in interviews, but also these communities’ prehistory in the Soviet and occasionally pre-Soviet periods. Herein lies the book’s key contribution—in the spirit of renouncing the binaries that have long structured thinking about the Soviet society, Kellner meticulously traces the Soviet roots of four seemingly anti-Soviet belief systems and communities: astrology, the Hare Krishna, the apocalyptic sect of Vissarion and, finally, The New Chronology, a speculative and pseudo-scientific revision of historical chronology developed in the 1980s by the Soviet physicist Anatoly Fomenko. Though this is a work of cultural history, written by a historian of Russia and The Soviet Union, the book borrows from anthropological methods, relying—alongside extensive analysis of primary and secondary literature—on interviews with prominent figures within the four discussed communities of belief, as well as their more rank-and-file followers. As such, the book is a contribution to a growing body of literature on the esoteric and its connections with scientific, cultural, and ideological discourses, which, having persisted throughout the Soviet period, re-emerged in force in the 1990s and 2000s, at times chiming with nationalist and right-wing agendas.

The book’s chapters sketch out the many ways in which Soviet ideology and its promotion via publishing and education, and enforcement through censorship interfaced with various areas of knowledge production, whether in academic settings, through Soviet educational initiatives like The Knowledge Society (Obshchestvo Znanie), the journal Science and Religion (Nauka i Religiia), or in the few tolerated forms of civic assembly, like hobbyist circles (kruzhki). Established in 1947 by the party, The Knowledge Society was a mass learning organisation aimed at educating the Soviet public in social, scientific and political issues, as well as eradicating what was left of religious belief. Its key activities included publishing magazines and books, and employing large numbers of lecturers who would speak on approved topics in public fora across the Soviet Union. As Kellner notes, by the end of the 1970s the society had printed around 200 million books and magazines annually, and counted more than a hundred thousand lecturers across the USSR. Science and Religion was one of the magazines printed by the Knowledge Society. Founded in 1959, it was intended to be a key instrument in promoting the Soviet kind of atheist, rationalist enlightenment. In the years of relative liberalization following Stalin’s death, it also catered to the party’s desire to appeal to the Soviet people’s hearts and minds, inspiring them with a vision of science that approached magic. Popular science, science fiction, and speculative science came together in Science and Religion to intrigue and inspire the Soviet citizen, while also reviving and rehabilitating some earlier speculative traditions, like Cosmism.

The Spirit of Socialism contends that in the late 1950s Soviet society came closest to developing its own secular “spirituality,” consisting of belief in science, awe at humanity’s technical achievements, a collective spirit of self-improvement and morality, and a celebration of art and culture around the world. This optimistic outlook peaked at the height of Soviet space age in the late 1950s – early 1960s and was followed by a steady decline, as broad disillusionment set in during the period of so-called stagnation in the 1970s. According to Kellner, it is this period of disillusionment that gave the first impetus to the “seeking phenomenon”—with highly educated but disillusioned Soviet technical intelligentsia forming esoteric kruzhki to seek new meaning amidst stagnation and the impending collapse of the Soviet Union. Attendance of such kruzhki runs like a red thread through the individual stories collected in the book: the astrologer Mikhail Levin frequented them, eventually setting up his own; the first Soviet followers of Hare Krishna learnt about the movement in the context of kruzhki dedicated to the study of far eastern cultures and yoga that proliferated in the 1970s; and Vissarion, the enigmatic leader of a popular apocalyptic sect, first began to formulate his claim to the status of messiah under the influence of extraterrestrial intelligences at UFO observing kruzhki.  The groundwork laid in the kruzhki during the 1960s and 1970s allowed the “seeking phenomenon” to bloom in full force under conditions of liberalization during the Perestroika in the late 1980s, later amplified by the profound disorientation and economic hardships of Soviet collapse in the 1990s.

The book is divided into four chapters, each addressing a different case study. The first chapter focuses on the incredible popularity of astrology in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and tells the story of popular post-Soviet astrologer Mikhail Levin and his disciple Olga Galankina, exploring their individual journeys, as well as the broader popularisation of astrology through the magazine Science and Religion. The chapter traces Levin’s and Galankina’s trajectories as children of the Soviet space age, enchanted by the Sputnik-era optimism to pursue science— astronomy and astro-physics respectively. Levin, disillusioned with unfulfilled promises of Soviet Ideology joins the esoteric kruzhki, eventually arriving at astrology. Meanwhile Galankina arrives at her interest in astrology through university, learning of the historical uses of astronomy in divination. The chapter documents the unexpected journeys taken by highly educated representatives of the USSR’s technical intelligentsia to becoming “seekers.” The chapter’s discussion of Science and Religion’s editorial shift in the late 1980s—towards catering to its readers, republishing esoteric texts, and, in particular, becoming key in popularizing astrological thought—demonstrates how the key institutions of Soviet enlightenment were transformed by liberalization and collapse of the Soviet Union.

The second chapter explores the Hare Krishna, a belief community that formed in the Soviet period and was harshly persecuted until the late 1980s, eventually emerging to become one of the most visible and well-remembered “seekers” movements in the 1990s. The chapter touches on a curious way in which Soviet diplomatic efforts to keep close ties with India and the privileged status of academic disciplines that formed the field of Soviet Orientalism came together to provide ample opportunity for Soviet citizens to engage with Indian culture in both licit and illicit ways. Tracing the movement into the 1990s, Kellner demonstrates how the Hare Krishna view of historical time as cyclical and moving through periods of degradation and redemption mapped onto the circumstances in which many post-Soviet citizens found themselves, lending a transcendent meaning to often difficult lives.

The third chapter traces the emergence of the apocalyptic sect of Vissarion, from its humble beginnings in the Soviet kruzhki dedicated to observing and contacting UFOs, to international fame, and finally to the mass migration of the sect’s disciples to a number of secluded villages in Siberia. Kellner historicizes the sect’s peculiar mix of Christian and esoteric belief in relation to earlier examples of Russian esoteric thought—in particular, Agni Yoga (Living Ethics), developed by the early twentieth century artist Nikolai Roerich, and his wife Elena. The strong connection of both belief communities to art and craft, and their respective emergence during epochal turning points in Russian and Soviet history (the 1917 Revolution and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s) create a historical rhyme between the two, without direct succession. As Kellner analyzes, both the Roerichs and Vissarion can be seen as successors and inheritors to the Russian messianic tradition, which held a belief in Russia’s special place in the reconciliation of the East and West, and thus the world’s spiritual renewal.

The final chapter of the book deals with the case of Soviet physicist Anatoly Fomenko, who proposed a correction to the historical chronology broadly accepted by the international community of academic historians. In his book The New Chronology, he speculated that the Mongol invasion of medieval Russia was a fiction created by the Romanov dynasty, who usurped power from the “Slavic-Turkic Great Empire,” a multi-ethnic Christian empire that spanned much of Eurasia and had its capital first in Veliky Novgorod, then in Moscow. Much literature to date draws a connection between The New Chronology and right-wing and nationalist ideologies that began to take root in Russia in the 1990s. Kellner addresses a different question: how did Fomenko’s ideas become so popular, and why did people listen? The answer, according to Kellner, lies in Fomenko’s privileged status as a Soviet scientist and more-or-less successful visual artist, and in the degraded state that history as an academic discipline fell into in the final years of the Soviet Union.

Though the principal focus of the book’s chapters remains on the four esoteric belief communities, explored through interviews with their initiators and followers and historicized in relation to their beginnings in the Soviet and pre-Soviet periods, in many ways The Spirit of Socialism is about qualifying the profound disorientation of Soviet collapse, noted by many writing in the 1990s and remembering the decade retrospectively.(See, for instance, Olesya Turkina and Viktor Mazin, “In the Time When the Great Stories Collapse,” in After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe. Vol. 1, ed. Bojana Pejić and David Elliott (Moderna Museet, 1999); and Ekaterina Degot, “Catastrophe and Hedonism: An Unnostalgic Look at Russian Art of the Last Decade,” ARTMargins Online, May 6, 2000,https://artmargins.com/catastrophe-and-hedonism-an-unnostalgic-look-at-russian-art-of-the-last-decade/.) Kellner identifies three key forms of such disorientation, which run through the chapters like red threads. First, the erosion of epistemological authority; second, the perceived loss of Russia’s cultural identity (often formulated as its place between the East and the West); and third, a disorientation in historical time and uncertainty about its direction. This last is perhaps the most ubiquitous among the three. What emerges most strongly from Kellner’s combined examination of these four communities of belief is that their very attempts to engage with history and historical time differently – to foretell, revise, or stand outside of it altogether – is what locates them most firmly in the historical context of the Soviet collapse, with its concurrent anxieties, hardships, and a sense of spiritual loss.

Seen through this lens, the book’s value to those researching and writing about art and art history in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods is multifaceted. On the one hand, it provides important context for thinking about the less well-researched art practices that were often informed by spiritual and esoteric belief systems—something that has been the subject of several recent exhibitions in Russia, but few monographs.  For instance, two recent exhibitions at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow  addressed such practices from two different perspectives. ‘We Treasure Our Lucid Dreams.’ The Other East and Esoteric Knowledge in Russian Art 1905–1969 (2020) looked at the first generation of cultural practitioners interested in esotericism, such as the pre-revolutionary followers of Anthrosophy, many of whom were persecuted and perished in Stalinist purges. Meanwhile, Sekretiki: Digging Up Soviet Underground Culture, 1966–1985 (2019–2020) drew a parallel between the often-mystical performances of unofficial artists in the 1960–80s and the esoteric practices that were popularized around the same time through kruzhki within Soviet counterculture. Kellner’s discussion of the kruzhki offers a more nuanced view of these spaces—placed somewhere between the officially sanctioned spaces of knowledge production, and clandestine, unofficial circles frequented by dissidents—where a different kind of culture was created, stemming from Soviet foundations to profoundly anti-Soviet ends.

Further, the book sketches out some key characteristics of what Kellner calls the “culture of the collapse” – including disorientation in historical time, loss of epistemic authority, and nostalgia for a lost empire combined with uncertainty about Russia’s cultural identity. Especially in regard to disorientation in historical time, there are clear resonances with some artistic movements and phenomena that developed in the 1990s. For instance, the St. Petersburg artist and theorist Timur Novikov’s project of Neoakademizm, which looked to “revive” a lost classical culture, loosely defined in relation to pre-First World War European civilization and its roots in ancient Greece and Rome, while positing St. Petersburg as its last standing bastion. For Novikov, this turned from a camp neo-classical revival in the 1990s to pious religiosity, a Eurasianist orientation, and a neo-imperialist stance in the early 2000s. Kellner’s book  situates such shifts within a broader cultural context, showing how they could function as attempts to make sense of one’s place in a “culture of collapse,” while revealing that the wound of a lost empire remained ever-present within post-Soviet Russian culture.

Though Kellner does not directly address the present moment and Russia’s imperialist war of aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere, the relevance of his findings for understanding Russia in the present is never far from the surface. A key feature of the book is a persistent attention to the “whys” and “hows” of belief. Tracing personal trajectories that cut across epochal historical transformations, the book is able to suggest some ways of understanding the genesis of belief patterns, while pointing to the often syncretic, paradoxical, conspiratorial, and even contradictory nature of these belief systems. The Spirit of Socialism demonstrates how the very search for meaning became one of post-Soviet Russia’s defining cultural conditions, and how the complex entanglements of faith, knowledge, and power have conditioned this search from the Soviet period to the present.

Anya Smirnova

Anya Smirnova is a London-based researcher and curator. She holds a collaborative PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art and Tate, and is Curator at The Cosmic House. Her recent writing has appeared in The Journal of Curatorial Studies and Kajet.