Rowboat Diplomacy. Part Two
Author: John Middleton Following the reception, I was summoned across the park to the director’s office of the Naval Engineering Institute and ushered through the neo-classical columned halls to the head of the...
Author: Daria Shevtsova
Meetings with Remarkable Men: Evgeny Shiffers (1934–1997)
Author: Emanuel Landolt Evgeny Shiffers was a spiritual seeker and charismatic personality whose life and works had an impact on underground intellectuals in the two Russian capitals in the 1960–1990s. Shiffers embodies...
Dzhuna and Soviet (Para)Science Experiments
Author: Daria Shevtsova This article grew out of the research for my master’s thesis on the Soviet healer Evgeniia Davitashvili (1949–2015), also well-known to many Russian-speaking people as Dzhuna. What gave the...
The Changing Political Alliances in Post-Soviet Russian Rodnoverie
Author: Kaarina Aitamurto Talking about contemporary Russian Slavic Paganism, Rodnoverie, politics and especially nationalism are topics that are difficult to avoid. Indeed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union had enabled contemporary...
The Mahatmas in the Soviet Union: Concordia Antarova’s Two Lives
Author: Marina Alexandrova The 1923 ban on occult societies in the Soviet Union drove them underground and led to the appearance of an underground network of spiritual seekers who continued to share...
The Telempathy Experiment
Author: Joan Channon The year is 1982. Michael Jackson has released “Thriller” and “Cats” opens on Broadway. Ronald Reagan is elected President of the United States and the British win the war...
Rowboat Diplomacy
Author: John Middleton The following article recounts a Russian-American episode of citizen diplomacy, which, unlike other examples of late 20th-century interaction between citizens, interacted with the military of the nascent Russian Federation and...
Vedic Femininity as a Post-Soviet Laboratory of Gender and Labor
Author: Irina Sadovina Scholars have observed that Russian alternative spiritual movements invoke traditional gender stereotypes more frequently than their Western counterparts (Aitamurto 2014, Tiukhtiaev 2017). Historically, this makes sense. In the 1960s,...
Birthing the American “Peace Baby” in Leningrad, USSR
Author: Ana Fatima Costa “It happened early in the morning on September 6. A foreigner came to stay at the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel in Leningrad, and the hotel administration knew absolutely nothing about...
Conference Report on the 5th Summer School on Esotericism: Facts, Meanings, and Texts
Author: Birgit Menzel The Association for the Study of Esotericism and Mysticism (ASEM), St. Petersburg, held by the Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy, together with the Center for the Study of Esotericism and...
Non-Slavic Paganism in Russia: Russian Wicca and Asatru
Author: Dmitry Galtsin In Russia, various religions are practiced, which roughly fit into the umbrella identity of “(Neo)Paganism” or “Heathenism”. While different strands of Slavic Paganism (Rodnoverie (literally “Native Faith”), and others)...
Leader of the Last Testament Church Vissarion arrested
Author: Alexander Panchenko On September 22, 2020, Sergey Torop (also known as Vissarion Christ), Vadim Red’kin, and Vladimir Vedernikov, the leaders of the Last Testament Church (the LTC), were arrested in the...
New Forms of Spirituality in Russia: Notes from a University Course
text: Birgit Menzel, Anna Tessmann & Romina Heim wordclouds: Daria Shevtsova in collaboration with Amelie Hahmann, Daniel Drosdezki, Anna Manukyan, Yuliya Folschette, Swetlana Ostrowski, Melis Sari, Evgenia Schäfer, and Laura Hülsenbeck In...
Soviet Esotericism: A Quest for Personal Autonomy in a Totalitarian Society
Author: Stanislav Panin One of the most intriguing questions in the study of esotericism for me always was why esoteric interests are so omnipresent and persistent throughout history. In other words, what...
Citizen Diplomats in the Garden: Biointensive for Russia from the 1980s to the Present
Author: Carol Vesecky Back in the day, as a homemaker and mother in Palo Alto, I volunteered at church and in community organizations, and fundraised for UNICEF. I managed our home for...
