New Age in Late and Post-Soviet Russia

This research blog is dedicated to the socio-anthropological study of new religious cultures that attracted global attention at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries and that in modern scientific literature is often referred to as “New Age”. The term “New Age” is used as an umbrella term for a variety of at first sight diverse ideas, beliefs, practices, and narratives in contemporary culture. As a term of self-identification, “New Age” refers to the astrological meaning of the “Age of Aquarius”, which is linked to the anticipation of a new historical era which is said to bring about a radical change of psychological and physiological possibilities to mankind. This blog focuses on the history and social dimensions of New Age culture in the late USSR (from the 1960s to the 1980s), as well as in post-Soviet Russia.