Indigenous Siberian Shamanism and the Post-Soviet Esoteric Ecosystem – Research Compilation

Status: COMPLETE (compiled 2026-05-14)

PURPOSE

The comparative-mystery-schools dossier and its modern-operative-orders companion cover the Western, Indian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern strands of the encoded-teaching pattern. The African-diasporic dossier covers the Yoruba and Kongo Atlantic transmission. The Mesoamerican / Pacific / Aboriginal dossier covers the Indigenous traditions of the Americas, Polynesia, and Aboriginal Australia. None of the four covers the indigenous shamanic traditions of Siberia or the broader post-Soviet esoteric ecosystem, and neither does any other regional file in the corpus.

The gap matters for two reasons. First, shamanism as a category in the contemporary Western esoteric vocabulary was constructed largely from European ethnographers’ encounters with Siberian Tungusic-speaking peoples in the 17th-19th centuries (the word shaman itself is Evenki / Tungus šaman, transmitted into European languages through Russian traveler-accounts in the late 17th century and then through 19th-century academic anthropology (Etymonline)), and the Siberian source material is the empirical ground beneath the entire global neo-shamanic movement. Second, the post-Soviet 1991-2026 period is one of the most institutionally-active esoteric environments in the contemporary world. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and the autonomous republics of the Russian Federation host: registered indigenous shamanic organizations with formal state recognition; the Ringing Cedars / Anastasianism communal-property movement at roughly ten million estimated readers; the various Rodnover Slavic neo-pagan branches with substantial nationalist political alignment; a Russian Theosophical-Roerich revival operating through state-adjacent cultural institutions; Russian Cosmism’s post-2000 academic and state-philosophical re-floating; and the Alexander Dugin / Eurasianism Fourth-Political-Theory complex that has had documented influence on contemporary Russian state ideology. The state-religious-political entanglement in the post-Soviet space is denser than in any comparable region.

This dossier covers ten clusters:

1. Indigenous Siberian shamanism: the regional substrate and the kham / udagan / üzeen vocabulary
2. The Soviet suppression: 1928-1960s, the executions, the deportations, the documented mechanism
3. The post-1991 revival: the Tuvan Shamanic Society, the Buryat and Sakha registered organizations, contemporary status
4. The neo-shamanic and tourism layer: Western reception, the “core shamanism” question, contemporary cross-traffic
5. Anastasianism / Ringing Cedars: Vladimir Megre’s corpus, the rodovye pomestya concept, the antisemitic-conspiracy material in specific volumes, the international scale
6. Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian Rodnover neo-paganism: the post-1991 Slavic revival, the nationalist alignment, the Ukrainian Native Faith parallel
7. Russian theosophical and Roerich revival: Living Ethics / Agni Yoga, the International Centre of the Roerichs, the 2017 closure controversy, the state co-option
8. Russian Cosmism: Fyodorov, the Silver-Age cosmist circle, the post-2000 revival, the Transhumanism crossover
9. Alexander Dugin, Eurasianism, and the Fourth Political Theory: the state-philosophical reception, the documented operational layer
10. Cross-tradition analysis: the state-religious entanglement, the published-edge methodology under the post-Soviet conditions, and the framework questions

Two methodological notes before the substance.

First, the post-Soviet ecosystem is unusually politicized. Anti-Putin and pro-Putin framings are positions, not facts, and this dossier records the documented entanglement between specific esoteric organizations and specific state institutions without adopting either framing as voice. The Russian Orthodox Church’s state-aligned position vis-à-vis the Russian state is a matter of treaty and practice; the various neo-pagan, Rodnover, Roerich, Anastasian, and Cosmist groups have varied and asymmetrical relationships with the state, and this dossier documents those relationships as they appear in the academic and journalistic record without adopting any of the available political voices.

Second, the Anastasianism literature contains material that has been documented as antisemitic-conspiracy in specific Megre volumes by named scholars. This dossier attributes the documented material to the specific volumes that contain it. It does not adopt a generalized anti-Anastasianism framing or extend the characterization to the movement as a whole or to all of its readership, who number in the millions and whose engagement with the material is not uniformly ideological.

TOPIC 1: INDIGENOUS SIBERIAN SHAMANISM – THE REGIONAL SUBSTRATE

The peoples and the linguistic-cultural map

Siberia, defined broadly, is the landmass east of the Urals and north of the Kazakh and Mongolian steppes, comprising roughly thirteen million square kilometers. The indigenous peoples of Siberia speak languages from at least five distinct language families (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Uralic, and the so-called Paleosiberian isolates), and the shamanic complex is documented across all of them, with regional and ethnic variations that the older “Siberian shamanism” general category collapses but that the contemporary specialist literature treats as distinct.

The principal traditions, listed by region:

• Tuva (Tuvan Republic / Tyva, southern Siberia, on the Mongolian border): Tuvan-speaking, Turkic. The Tuvan tradition is the most institutionally-active of the post-1991 revivals and has produced the largest Western-facing scholarly and practitioner literature. The Tuvan shaman is kham (the Mongol-Turkic root that gives Mongolian böö its alternative names and is cognate with the Buryat böö and Mongolian kham/khamlal). Tuvan shamanism includes drumming, throat-singing (khöömei), spirit-helper relations (eeren, ongon-figures), soul-retrieval, and the cosmic-tree visualization.
• Buryatia (Buryat Republic, around Lake Baikal): Buryat-speaking, Mongolic. The Buryat tradition has the closest connection to Mongolian shamanism proper and shares much of its vocabulary and ritual structure. Buryat shamans are böö (male) and udagan (female). The Buryat region also has a substantial Tibetan Buddhist (Gelug school) presence, and the two traditions have coexisted and occasionally syncretized since the 17th century.
• Sakha Republic / Yakutia (northeast Siberia, the largest subnational administrative entity in the world by area): Sakha-speaking, Turkic. The Sakha tradition is documented from the 18th century forward. The Sakha shaman is oyuun (male) or udagan (female). The Sakha worldview centers on üs sürük (three souls per person), the aiyy (high deities) versus abaahy (lower spirits) division, and the cosmic-tree (aal luuk mas) cosmology.
• Khanty and Mansi (Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, western Siberia, Ob River basin): Khanty-Ugric and Mansi-Ugric, both Uralic. The Khanty and Mansi shamanic complexes are documented in the older 19th- and 20th-century Russian and Finno-Ugric ethnographic literature (Karjalainen, Castrén, Kannisto). The traditions are smaller-scale than the Tuvan or Sakha but documentarily significant for the comparative Uralic shamanism question.
• Nivkh (Sakhalin Island and the lower Amur): Nivkh language, a Paleosiberian isolate. The Nivkh bear ceremony (chxyf-leghend) is one of the most thoroughly documented circumpolar bear-ceremonialism complexes, and the Nivkh shamanic tradition is documented by Lev Shternberg (Sotsial’naia organizatsiia giliakov, 1933; the Bogoras-Shternberg circle of pre-Soviet Russian ethnographers).
• Chukchi (Chukotka, far northeastern Siberia, opposite Alaska): Chukotko-Kamchatkan family, Paleosiberian. The Chukchi shamanic complex is documented in the classic Bogoras work The Chukchee (American Museum of Natural History / Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1904-1909) (Internet Archive), which remains the standard reference. Bogoras’s documentation of the Chukchi soft-man / transformed-shaman category was among the early ethnographic instances of what later anthropology called the gender-variant or “third gender” shamanic figure.
• Even and Evenki (the broad Tungusic-speaking population scattered across central and eastern Siberia): Tungusic family. The Evenki are the source-population for the word shaman itself (šaman, “one who knows,” the root attested in 17th-century Russian sources). Evenki shamanism is documented by Mikhailov, Anisimov, Vasilevich, and the Soviet-period ethnographers; it is one of the principal source-traditions for the comparative shamanism literature precisely because of the etymological centrality.
• Nanai (Hezhen in Chinese sources; lower Amur River, on the Russia-China border): Tungusic family. Nanai shamanism is documented by Russian and Soviet ethnographers (notably Shimkevich, and later Smolyak, Shaman: Lichnost’, funktsii, mirovozzrenie, 1991). The Nanai cosmology includes the three-world structure (upper, middle, lower) standard across Tungusic shamanism.

Other Siberian indigenous shamanic traditions worth note in passing: the Yukaghir (Kolyma River basin, Paleosiberian isolate, documented by Jochelson in the Jesup expedition); the Koryak (Kamchatka, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, also Jochelson); the Itelmen (also Kamchatka); the Selkup, Nenets, and Enets (Samoyedic Uralic, the Yamal region); the Dolgan (Sakha-speaking but ethnically distinct, Taymyr Peninsula); the Tofalar (Turkic, Irkutsk Oblast); the Tozhu Tuvan reindeer-herders (distinct from the steppe Tuvans).

The shaman role: vocabulary and structure

Across the regional variants, the shaman category has recurrent structural features that the older comparative literature consolidated into a category and that the contemporary specialist literature has substantially refined.

The recurrent elements:

• Election by the spirits. The shamanic vocation is not chosen but received; the candidate is selected by spirit-beings (the üzeen in Tuvan, the ayami in Nanai, the seven in Even, the various local terms in other languages) who indicate the candidate through illness (the shamanic-illness complex, the prolonged psychic-physical breakdown that is read as initiatory pressure rather than as pathology), through dreams, through visions, through hereditary descent, or through a combination of these.
• The initiatory crisis. The selected candidate undergoes a prolonged crisis – in some traditions a literal psychic dismemberment vision (the body is taken apart by the spirits, the bones counted and named, the body remade and returned), in others a wandering-in-the-forest period, in others a sequence of trance-states resolved by formal initiation under an established shaman.
• The drum and the costume. The shamanic drum (düngür in Tuvan, yvy in Nivkh, dingar in Evenki) is the principal instrument; in the older comparative literature it was named the “horse” of the shaman, the vehicle for the journey to the spirit-worlds. The shamanic costume (the iron, bone, and metal ornaments attached to a long coat, the headdress with bird-feathers or antlers, the boot-stamping accompaniment) is documented across the regional variants with regional variations.
• The three-world cosmology. The recurrent cosmological frame divides reality into an upper world (sky, high deities, ancestors of the higher kind), a middle world (the visible earth, human-inhabited), and a lower world (underworld, spirits of the dead, certain animal-spirits). The shaman’s journey traverses these worlds along a vertical axis – the cosmic tree, the world-pillar, the smoke-hole of the yurt understood symbolically as the opening to the upper world.
• Soul concepts and soul-retrieval. Most Siberian shamanic traditions operate with a multiple-soul concept (two, three, or more distinct souls per person, each with different functions and different fates after death). Illness is often interpreted as soul-loss: one of the souls has wandered, been stolen, or been trapped, and the shaman’s task is to retrieve it. Kut in Sakha, süld in Mongol-Buryat, and various cognates name the soul-substance that can be summoned, gathered, restored.
• Ongon and spirit-helpers. The shaman works through relationships with named individual spirits, often anchored in physical objects (the eeren in Tuvan, the ongghon in Mongol-Buryat) that house the spirit and that are fed, ritually attended, and consulted. The üzeen in Tuvan are the specific spirit-helpers of a given shaman, distinct from the general ancestral and territorial spirits.
• The udagan: female shamans. Female shamans are documented across the Siberian variants – udagan in Mongol-Buryat-Sakha-Yakut, the equivalent terms in other languages. In some traditions (notably Buryat and Sakha) the female shamanic line is documented as ritually distinct rather than secondary. The older comparative literature, working mostly from male ethnographers and male informants, systematically under-documented the female-shamanic layer; contemporary scholarship (notably Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity, 1999 (Princeton University Press); Religion and Politics in Russia: A Reader, 2010 (Routledge); and her decades of fieldwork among the Sakha) has corrected this.

The category is not flat. The 19th-century Tuvan ethnography distinguishes “white” (ak) and “black” (kara) shamans by sphere of operation, not by moral valence – the white shaman works with sky-deities and beneficial spirits, the black shaman with chthonic and ancestral spirits, but both are licit and both are recognized. The Buryat tradition recognizes a similar distinction (sagaan böö white, khara böö black). The Sakha tradition distinguishes aiyy oyuun (shamans of the high deities) and abaahy oyuun (shamans of the lower spirits) similarly.

Scholarly authorities (Indigenous Siberian shamanism)

• Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (French 1951; English Princeton 1964) (Internet Archive). The canonical 20th-century comparative work. Eliade’s framework – shamanism as a worldwide complex sharing a stable structural core (election, initiation, soul-flight, three-world cosmology) – structured the field for a generation. Subsequent specialists (Hultkrantz, Atkinson, Hamayon, Humphrey) have substantially qualified the Eliadean synthesis, particularly the universalist claim, while continuing to use Eliade as the entry point.
• Ronald Hutton, Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination (Hambledon, 2001) (Google Books). The standard contemporary work on the construction of “shamanism” as a Western category and the relationship between the Siberian source material and the global neo-shamanic movement. Hutton’s central argument: the Siberian shamanic complex is real and documented, but the Western reception has projected a unified comparative-shamanism category that the regional Siberian material does not by itself support, and the contemporary neo-shamanic synthesis (Harner, Eliade-influenced practice) is a distinct phenomenon that draws on the Siberian record selectively.
• Caroline Humphrey with Urgunge Onon, Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Daur Mongols (Oxford, 1996) (Oxford University Press). The standard Mongolian / Daur ethnography, written in collaboration with a Daur informant born into a shamanic-elder family. Indispensable for the Mongol-Buryat side of the comparative question.
• Galina Lindquist, Conjuring Hope: Magic and Healing in Contemporary Russia (Berghahn, 2005) (Berghahn Books). The Stockholm-based anthropologist’s ethnography of contemporary urban-Russian magical practice in post-Soviet Moscow. Less specifically Siberian than the other entries but the standard contemporary work on the Russian / post-Soviet ritual-healing economy, with detailed treatment of the shamanic, Roerich, and folk-magical layers as they exist in 21st-century Russian urban space. Lindquist died in 2008; her work is closed.
• Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity (Princeton, 1999) (Princeton University Press); ed., Shamanism: Soviet Studies of Traditional Religion in Siberia and Central Asia (Sharpe, 1990) (Routledge); Religion and Politics in Russia (Sharpe, 2010) (Routledge). The standard American specialist on the Sakha and broader Siberian indigenous-religion question, with continuous field engagement since the 1970s.
• Roberte Hamayon, La chasse à l’âme: Esquisse d’une théorie du chamanisme sibérien (Société d’Ethnologie, 1990; print only); Why We Play: An Anthropological Study (HAU Books, 2016) (HAU Books). The leading French specialist; Hamayon’s argument against the universal “ecstasy” framework and for a regional Siberian-hunting-society specific reading of shamanic practice.
• Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (HarperCollins, 2005) (HarperCollins); Shamanism (Oklahoma, 2001) (University of Oklahoma Press). The standard popular-and-specialist work on the Even reindeer-herding tradition in northeastern Siberia, drawing on Vitebsky’s decades of fieldwork.
• Andrei A. Znamenski, Shamanism in Siberia: Russian Records of Indigenous Spirituality (Kluwer, 2003) (Springer); The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and the Western Imagination (Oxford, 2007) (Oxford University Press). Znamenski’s documentary translation of the 18th-21st-century Russian ethnographic record on Siberian shamanism, with extensive introductions; and his subsequent intellectual history of the Western neo-shamanic reception.

TOPIC 2: THE SOVIET SUPPRESSION

The 1928 turning point and the antireligious campaigns

The Soviet state’s relationship with religion shifted multiple times in the 1917-1991 period. The early Bolshevik period (1917-1928) treated indigenous shamanism somewhat ambivalently: it was identified as “backward” but was also seen, in some Bolshevik-anthropological circles, as an authentic folk-cultural form that was potentially recoverable as proletarian-precursor heritage. The Vladimir Bogoraz / Lev Shternberg circle of pre-revolutionary Russian ethnographers, who continued to work in the early Soviet period, treated the Siberian shamanic traditions as scholarly subjects of legitimate documentation.

The 1928 turning point came with the consolidation of Stalinist policy. The First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), Collectivization, and the broader campaign against “kulaks” was extended to indigenous shamanism as a parallel campaign against the “kulak-shaman” (the shaman recast as the indigenous equivalent of the wealthy peasant, the class-enemy obstacle to socialist transformation). The Society of Militant Atheists (the Soyuz Voinstvuyushchikh Bezbozhnikov, founded 1925, peaked 1929-1932 at around 5.5 million members) (Encyclopedia.com) extended its campaign into the indigenous regions. Shamans were stripped of ritual costumes (the costumes were confiscated, sometimes burned, sometimes deposited in regional museums where some of the surviving artifact corpus is today preserved precisely because of the museum-deposit), prevented from practicing, denounced in the press, and subjected to the standard apparatus of class-enemy treatment.

The 1937-1938 Great Terror was the worst single period. Documented executions of shamans during the Yezhovshchina include numbers in the high hundreds and likely the low thousands across the various Siberian autonomous regions; comprehensive numbers are not available, partly because shamans were prosecuted under generic “anti-Soviet activity” charges rather than under a religion-specific category, partly because the documentary record was destroyed or remains classified. The deportation of indigenous peoples in the 1940s – the deportations of the Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, and Karachais, with parallel smaller-scale deportations affecting some Siberian groups – and the wartime mobilization disrupted indigenous shamanic transmission across the entire Soviet north.

The postwar period (1945-1953) was a partial relaxation; the Khrushchev period (1953-1964) saw a renewed antireligious campaign focused principally on Orthodox Christianity and Islam but extending again to indigenous shamanism through the early 1960s. By the mid-1960s the operative shamanic practice in most Siberian regions had been driven underground or extinguished; documented shamans were rare, elderly, and rarely able to train successors openly. The “Soviet ethnography” period (1960s-1980s) treated the historical shamanic traditions as folkloric / museum subjects, often with sensitive documentation by the academic specialists, but the operative-tradition layer was largely closed.

The documented mechanism

The mechanism is documented in regional detail by several specialist studies. For Tuva, Mongush Kenin-Lopsan’s own 1990s writings and the contemporary Tuvan oral-history collections record specific named shamans executed in 1937-1938. For Buryatia, the closure of the major Buddhist datsans in the late 1930s was accompanied by parallel actions against the Buryat shamanic-tradition holders. For the Sakha Republic, Balzer’s fieldwork documented the specific generational gap: shamans active in the 1920s, executed or silenced in the late 1930s, with the next openly-practicing generation not emerging until the 1980s and 1990s.

The disruption was severe but not total. Some shamans practiced clandestinely throughout the Soviet period – treating illness in private, conducting low-key family rituals, transmitting selectively to next-generation candidates who themselves practiced underground. The post-1991 revival drew on this clandestine continuity where it existed and on the museum-and-academic record where it did not.

Scholarly anchors (Soviet period)

• Caroline Humphrey, Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society, and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Cambridge, 1983; reissued Marx Went Away – But Karl Stayed Behind, 1998) (University of Michigan Press). The standard ethnography of late-Soviet Buryat collective-farm life with detailed treatment of the residual religious / shamanic layer.
• Mathijs Pelkmans, ed., Conversion after Socialism (Berghahn, 2009) (Berghahn Books). On the religious transformations of the post-Soviet period, including indigenous religious revival.
• Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Sacred Genders in Siberia (Routledge, 1996, as ed.); various articles. On the gender-variant shamanic figure and on Sakha shamanism’s specific suppression history.
• Znamenski, Shamanism in Siberia (2003) (Springer) – includes translated 18th-20th-c. Russian documents on the suppression mechanism.

TOPIC 3: THE POST-1991 REVIVAL

The institutional shape

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was followed by a rapid institutional emergence of registered shamanic organizations across the Russian Federation’s Siberian regions. The 1990 Soviet (then Russian Federation) law on freedom of conscience permitted the registration of religious organizations on terms substantially more permissive than the Soviet regime had allowed, and the indigenous-shamanic communities used the opening to create formal organizational structures.

The principal organizations:

• Düngür (“Drum”), the Tuvan Shamanic Society, founded in Kyzyl in 1992 under the principal leadership of Mongush Borakhovich Kenin-Lopsan (1925-2022), a Tuvan scholar, poet, and lifelong documentation-and-practice continuant of the Tuvan shamanic tradition. Kenin-Lopsan had spent the Soviet period working as a historian at the Tuvan Institute of Humanities and as the chief curator of the Tuvan National Museum, where he had documented the surviving shamanic costumes and the oral-tradition record; he was the only Soviet-period scholar permitted to publish on Tuvan shamanism, and his postwar publications (notably Algyshi tuvinskikh shamanov, 1995, recording the shamanic invocations and prayers; Mify tuvinskikh shamanov, 2002; and the English-language selection Shamanic Songs and Myths of Tuva, ed. Mihály Hoppál, ISTOR Books, 1997) are the standard reference. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies (Michael Harner’s California-based neo-shamanic organization) named Kenin-Lopsan a “Living Treasure of Shamanism” in 1993 (Foundation for Shamanic Studies). Düngür operates as a registered religious organization, runs shamanic-clinic spaces in Kyzyl that practitioners and clients use for soul-retrieval, healing, and ritual consultations, and has spawned secondary organizations (Adyg-Eeren, Tos Deer, others) representing different Tuvan shamanic lineages and ritual sub-traditions.
• Buryat shamanic organizations, registered from the early 1990s onward. The Boo-Murgel (“Path of the Black Shaman”) and Tengeri (“Sky”) organizations are the most prominent, though the Buryat field has factional disagreements about ritual purity, lineage legitimacy, and the relationship between Buryat shamanism and Mongolian shamanism. The Buryat case is doctrinally distinct because of the parallel Tibetan Buddhist presence: many Buryat practitioners maintain ritual relationships with both the shamanic tradition and the Buddhist tradition, and the Buryat Khambo Lama (the head of the traditional Buddhist Sangha of Russia, currently Damba Ayusheev) has at times engaged with and at times marked distance from the registered shamanic organizations.
• Sakha (Yakut) shamanic and religious organizations. Sakha shamanism in the post-1991 period has emerged together with the broader Sakha cultural-revival movement, which includes the Yhyakh summer-solstice ceremony (now functioning as a public Sakha cultural-religious holiday with mass attendance), the Aiyy Aymakh religious organization (a contemporary reconstructionist movement promoting a Sakha-specific monotheism of the high deities, related to but distinct from operative shamanism), and the various lineage-based shaman groups operating around named individual practitioners. Balzer’s later fieldwork (Religion and Politics in Russia, 2010; subsequent articles) documents the Sakha case in detail.
• Khakass, Altai, Khanty, Mansi, and other regional revivals of varying institutional density. The Altai Republic in particular has seen a substantial shamanic and Burkhanist (the Altaian indigenous reform-religion documented from 1904 forward) revival, with regional-cultural significance.

Kenin-Lopsan and the Tuvan case as the institutional model

Kenin-Lopsan’s Düngür is the most thoroughly-documented and institutionally-stable case. The Tuvan model – registered religious organization, public clinic space, scholar-leader bridging the academic and operative roles, formal accreditation of individual shamans through internal society procedures, and willingness to receive Western practitioners and researchers as students or clients on terms set by the society – has been imitated with variations in the other regions. Kenin-Lopsan died in 2022 at age 96; the post-Kenin-Lopsan succession question is unresolved in the contemporary Tuvan field.

The Tuvan case is also where the kham / udagan distinction operates most legibly in the contemporary period. Düngür accredits both male and female shamans with no formal hierarchical distinction in office, though traditional ritual divisions of labor are observed.

The ongoing transmission question

The 1928-1990 Soviet suppression created a transmission gap of roughly two generations. The post-1991 revival has had to reconstruct from a combination of: surviving elderly practitioners who had practiced clandestinely; the academic-ethnographic record (which is unusually thick for the Siberian case because of the strong 18th-21st-c. Russian ethnographic tradition); the museum-deposited material-culture record (costumes, drums, ritual objects); and contemporary self-organization by the indigenous communities themselves. The contemporary specialist literature (Stepanoff, Pimenova, Vasilyeva, Quijada, Halemba) treats the post-1991 revival as a partly-reconstructive partly-continuous phenomenon that should not be evaluated against an idealized pre-Soviet “authenticity” benchmark; the more useful question is what the contemporary practice does, who it serves, and what its institutional and cosmological commitments are.

Scholarly anchors (post-1991 revival)

• Konstantinos Zorbas, Shamanic Dialogues with the Invisible Dark in Tuva, Siberia: The Cursed Lives (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021) (Cambridge Scholars Publishing); various articles. Zorbas’s ethnography of Tuvan shamanism in the 2010s, with particular attention to the kargysh (curse) and sorcery-accusation framework.
• Charles Stépanoff, Voyager dans l’invisible: Techniques chamaniques de l’imagination (La Découverte, 2019) (Éditions La Découverte). The Paris-based ethnologist’s comparative work on Siberian shamanic practice in the 21st century.
• Justine Buck Quijada, Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets: Rituals of History in Post-Soviet Buryatia (Oxford, 2019) (Oxford University Press). The standard contemporary work on Buryat religious revival and the Buddhism-shamanism relationship.
• Galina Lindquist, Conjuring Hope (Berghahn, 2005) (Berghahn Books) – though Moscow-focused, includes substantial material on how Siberian shamanic motifs and practitioners circulate in post-Soviet urban-Russian space.
• Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Religion and Politics in Russia (2010) (Routledge), and various articles on Sakha post-1991 religious revival.
• Agnieszka Halemba, The Telengits of Southern Siberia (Routledge, 2006) (Routledge). On the Altai-region revival.

TOPIC 4: THE NEO-SHAMANIC AND TOURISM LAYER

Michael Harner and the construction of “core shamanism”

The Western neo-shamanic movement that became globally visible from the 1980s forward has a documented genealogy that runs principally through Michael Harner (1929-2018), an American anthropologist who began his career working in the Ecuadorian Amazon with the Shuar (Jivaro) people in the 1950s-60s. Harner’s The Way of the Shaman (Harper & Row, 1980; subsequently revised editions and the founding text of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, 1985 (Open Library; Foundation for Shamanic Studies)) proposed that the recurrent structural features documented across regional shamanic traditions (drumming-induced trance, the three-world cosmology, the spirit-helper relationship, the journey-and-return structure) could be abstracted into a content-neutral “core shamanism” that could be taught to anyone outside an indigenous lineage. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies trained tens of thousands of practitioners over the 1985-2018 period through workshops in California, Vienna, and globally.

Harner’s framework is doctrinally distinct from any specific indigenous tradition. It self-consciously strips the named-spirit content and the lineage-and-initiation content from the practice in order to make the technique transferable. From the perspective of the Siberian (or Amazonian, or Pacific) source-traditions, Harner’s framework is a derivative-and-Western product, related to the source-traditions roughly as Theosophy is related to Tibetan Buddhism. The contemporary academic literature (Wallis, Shamans/Neo-Shamans, Routledge 2003 (Routledge); Znamenski, The Beauty of the Primitive, 2007 (Oxford University Press); Hutton, Shamans, 2001 (Google Books)) treats it as a Western religious movement in its own right, with documentable inputs and outputs, rather than as a continuation of any single source-tradition.

The Foundation for Shamanic Studies named Mongush Kenin-Lopsan a “Living Treasure of Shamanism” in 1993; the connection between the Tuvan-revival institutional structure and Western neo-shamanism is real and documented, though the relationship has been more transactional and recognition-oriented than doctrinally substantive.

Shamanic tourism in Tuva, Buryatia, and Mongolia

The post-1991 period saw the emergence of a substantial shamanic-tourism industry across the southern-Siberian and Mongolian regions. Westerners (American, German, Italian, French, increasingly Russian-urban-class clients) travel to Kyzyl, Ulan-Ude, Yakutsk, Ulaanbaatar, and the surrounding rural regions for shamanic consultations, healings, training programs, and pilgrimage tours.

The contemporary scholarship (Lindquist’s Conjuring Hope; Stépanoff; Zorbas; Pimenova on Tuva specifically) documents this layer without adopting a uniformly critical stance. Some indigenous practitioners regard the Western traffic as a useful income stream and as a legitimate part of the post-Soviet recovery; others regard it as a continuation of Western colonialism in a softer form; the indigenous communities themselves are divided. The dossier records the controversy without arbitrating it.

The authenticity question, framed as a binary, is less useful than the specifics: what specific practitioners do, with what specific clients, on what specific terms, with what specific institutional accountability, in what specific relationship to the registered indigenous-religious organizations of their region.

TOPIC 5: ANASTASIANISM / RINGING CEDARS

Vladimir Megre and the corpus

Vladimir Nikolaevich Megre (born Vladimir Nikolaevich Puzakov, 1950, Kuzbass region) is a former Soviet engineer-turned-trader who, beginning in 1996, published the first volume of what became a nine-book series, the Ringing Cedars of Russia (Russian Zvenyashchie kedry Rossii), describing an alleged encounter with a young Siberian-recluse woman named Anastasia in the taiga forest of the Ob River basin (Open Library). The series claims to record Anastasia’s teaching, which Megre frames as transmitted through Anastasia from an ancient Vedic-Slavic spiritual tradition still alive in the deep Siberian wilderness.

The nine principal volumes (Russian publication dates):

1. Anastasia (1996)
2. The Ringing Cedars of Russia (1997)
3. The Space of Love (1998)
4. Co-creation (1999)
5. Who Are We? (2001)
6. The Book of Kin (2002)
7. The Energy of Life (2003)
8. The New Civilization (2005; published in two parts)
9. Anasta (2010)

The corpus has been translated into more than twenty languages and is the foundation of an international diaspora reader-community. Estimates of total readership across all languages run from 10 to 20 million, with smaller numbers (in the low six figures globally) actively participating in the rodovye pomestya communal-property and homesteading network that the books advocate.

The rodovye pomestya (Family Domains) concept

The operative practical proposal in the Megre corpus is the rodovoe pomestye (singular; plural rodovye pomestya), the “family domain” or “kin’s domain” – a hereditary, communally-non-divisible 1-hectare (roughly 2.5-acre) parcel of land granted in perpetuity to a single extended family, used for self-sufficient organic agriculture, a living-hedge of woody plants, and a permanent cedar-grove component, with the family domain transmissible only across generations (not for sale, not subdivisible). The proposal is presented in the books as the foundation of a future Russian (and global) civilizational reconstruction; the family domain becomes the cell of a regenerative agrarian society replacing the urbanized industrial civilization that Megre’s Anastasia diagnoses as corrupting humanity.

The rodovye pomestya movement has produced documented real-world settlements in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine (pre-2022, complicated by the war post-2022), Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Germany, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. The Russian settlements number in the hundreds; the largest cluster is in Vladimir Oblast and around the Tomsk and Krasnodar regions. The Russian state has had a complex and varying relationship with the movement: at various points it has supported the rural-resettlement aspect (the 2014 Far East Hectare program offered free land to Russian settlers in the Russian Far East and was framed by some commentators as compatible with the rodovye pomestya vision, though the program was state-secular and not Anastasian-religious in its design), and at various points it has been administratively cautious about the movement’s quasi-religious dimensions. Specific legal-recognition initiatives at the Duma level have been introduced (notably by Communist Party deputies including in 2014 and again in 2017-2018, with proposed legislation creating a formal “ancestral homestead” category) but have not generally been enacted at the federal level.

The antisemitic-conspiracy content in specific volumes

The Megre corpus contains material in several specific volumes that has been documented by named scholars as belonging to the antisemitic-conspiracy genre. The principal documented passages are in volumes 6 (The Book of Kin) and especially 8 (The New Civilization), which include passages describing a “priestly” elite that has historically manipulated humanity through engineered religious systems, with the framing drawing on tropes recognizable from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion literature (the “priestly” elite figure is sometimes identified in the text with Jewish religious history, sometimes generalized, with the framing varying across translations and editions). The Russian-language original text has been examined by Demyan Belyaev (Religion, State and Society / Taylor & Francis), Rasa Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson (Vytautas Magnus University), Birgit Menzel, and others; the antisemitic-conspiracy reading is the consensus academic position on the specific passages, though the broader Anastasian readership engages selectively and many readers report engaging with the homesteading and family-domain content without taking up the conspiratorial passages.

The published academic treatments include:

• Demyan Belyaev, “Heterodox Religiosity in Russia after the Fall of Communism: Does It Challenge ‘Traditional’ Religion?” (Religion, State and Society, 2010) (Taylor & Francis).
• Rasa Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson, whose doctoral dissertation (Vytautas Magnus University, 2011 (Vytautas Magnus University)) and subsequent journal articles and chapters draw on her fieldwork in Lithuanian, Russian, and Belarusian Anastasian communities (2005-2020) – the most thorough contemporary academic treatment.
• Birgit Menzel, Michael Hagemeister, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, eds., The New Age of Russia: Occult and Esoteric Dimensions (Sagner, 2012; print only). Multi-author treatment of the broader post-Soviet esoteric ecosystem including the Anastasian movement.
• Julia Andreeva, articles on Anastasian rural settlements in Russia (Russian-language and English).

The honest record is: a substantial conspiracy-genre layer is documented in specific Megre volumes; the documented passages are scholarly characterized as antisemitic-tropic; the broader readership and the operational settlements engage with the corpus selectively and many participants do not foreground or even read the conspiracy material; and the Russian state has not treated Anastasianism as a target of antiextremism legislation in the way it has treated some other groups, partly because the conspiracy-content is not the operational center of gravity of the movement’s daily life.

Scholarly anchors (Anastasianism)

• Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson, doctoral dissertation (Vytautas Magnus University, 2011 (Vytautas Magnus University)) and subsequent articles, the contemporary standard.
• Belyaev, Religion, State and Society (2010 (Taylor & Francis)) and subsequent articles.
• Menzel, Hagemeister, Rosenthal, eds., The New Age of Russia (2012; print only).
• Andreeva on Russian rural Anastasian settlements.

TOPIC 6: RUSSIAN, BELARUSIAN, AND UKRAINIAN RODNOVER NEO-PAGANISM

The post-1991 Slavic neo-pagan revival

Rodnovery (Russian rodnoverie, Ukrainian ridnovirja, “native faith”) is the umbrella term for the post-1991 Slavic neo-pagan revival. The movement claims continuity with pre-Christian Slavic religion (the worship of Perun, Veles, Svarog, Mokosh, Dazhbog, and the other figures of the pre-Christian Slavic pantheon documented in chronicles, archaeology, and folkloristic record), though the operative practice is reconstructionist in the sense familiar from the Western neo-pagan parallel: a 20th-21st-century rebuilding from fragmentary sources, oriented to contemporary national-cultural-spiritual purposes.

The movement is fragmented, with multiple competing organizations and a substantial regional and ideological spread. The principal Russian umbrella organizations include:

• The Union of Slavic Communities of the Slavic Native Faith (Soyuz Slavyanskikh Obshchin Slavyanskoy Rodnoy Very, SSO SRV), founded 1997, the largest Russian Rodnover organization.
• The Circle of Pagan Tradition (Krug Yazycheskoy Traditsii), founded 2002.
• The Bitsa Appeal (Bitsevskoe obrashchenie, 2002) – a joint statement issued by leaders of the principal Russian Rodnover organizations attempting to reject overt neo-Nazism and to draw a public line between Rodnover practice and far-right paramilitary use of Slavic-pagan iconography (World Religions and Spirituality Project). The Bitsa Appeal is a central document for the contemporary literature: it acknowledges that the far-right alignment is a real problem that the Rodnover mainstream is attempting to address, and it provides scholars with a self-issued statement from inside the movement that can be referenced rather than only-externally-characterized.

The nationalist-alignment question

The Rodnover field has a documented far-right and nationalist alignment in some branches, alongside branches that have explicitly rejected the nationalist association. The documented far-right uses include: Russian neo-Nazi street groups in the 1990s and 2000s that adopted Slavic-pagan symbolism (swastika-derived solar wheels, runes, the kolovrat sun-wheel) and that claimed Rodnover religious cover; the publications of the Russkaya Pravda publishing house in the 2000s; specific named ideologues (Aleksey Dobrovolsky / Dobroslav, Viktor Bezverkhy / Ostromysl, the early Velesovich circle) whose Rodnover-adjacent writings were explicitly racist and antisemitic.

The scholarly literature handles this carefully. Kaarina Aitamurto’s Paganism, Traditionalism, Nationalism: Narratives of Russian Rodnoverie (Routledge, 2016) (Routledge) is the standard contemporary treatment and is the principal academic anchor; Aitamurto distinguishes the nationalist-radical branches from the larger non-radical mainstream and documents the Bitsa Appeal effort. Victor Shnirelman’s Russian Neo-paganism: From Ethnic Religion to Racial Violence (Religion in Eastern Europe, 1998; subsequent articles and the 2015 monograph Arijskii mif v sovremennom mire) has documented the radical-right wing in greater specificity; Shnirelman’s framework is more critical than Aitamurto’s, with the differences in part reflecting their differing access to and engagement with the various subgroups.

Andrey Beskov on the post-Soviet field

Andrey Beskov (Russian academic, based at Lobachevsky State University, Nizhny Novgorod) has produced the most substantial recent Russian-language literature on contemporary Russian neo-paganism, including articles in State, Religion and Church in Russia and Worldwide and in Antropologicheskij forum (Studia Culturae). Beskov’s work documents the field with closer attention to specific organizational and regional variations than the older overviews, and his publications are available in Russian with selective English translation.

The Ukrainian Native Faith parallel (RUNVira)

The Ukrainian Native Ukrainian National Faith (Ridna Ukrayins’ka Natsional’na Vira, RUNVira) was founded by Lev Sylenko (1921-2008), a Ukrainian émigré in Chicago and Hamilton, Ontario, who developed the RUNVira teaching in the 1960s-70s in the Ukrainian diaspora in North America and whose primary text is the Maha Vira (1979; print only), a thousand-page-plus systematic exposition of a Ukrainian monotheistic religion centered on the deity Dazhbog. RUNVira differs from Russian Rodnovery in two important ways. First, it is monotheistic rather than polytheistic; the RUNVira claim is that the original pre-Christian Ukrainian religion was a monotheism of Dazhbog and that the polytheistic pantheon is a later degeneration. Second, RUNVira’s institutional structure is more centralized than the fragmented Russian Rodnover field, with a single founding-text and a single founder-prophet figure (Sylenko); the comparison is closer to a 20th-century new religious movement than to the reconstructionist polytheistic neo-paganism of the Russian side.

RUNVira returned to Ukraine after 1991 and established communities, temples, and an organizational presence. The post-2014 and post-2022 Russian-Ukrainian war contexts have intensified the differentiation between Ukrainian and Russian Rodnover-adjacent movements; Ukrainian Native-Faith communities have increasingly defined themselves against the Russian Rodnover identification and have aligned with the broader Ukrainian national-religious differentiation from Russian-aligned institutions.

A separate Ukrainian Native Faith strand, the Ancestral Fire of the Native Orthodox Faith (Rodove Vohnyshche Ridnoyi Pravoslavnoyi Viry) founded by Volodymyr Kurovskyi, has operated alongside RUNVira since the 2000s and represents a polytheistic Slavic-pagan alternative; the post-2022 context has complicated and reshaped this field as well.

Belarusian Rodnover

Belarus has had a smaller Rodnover scene, with the political conditions under Lukashenko constraining religious-organizational activity outside the state-Orthodox-aligned mainstream. The Belarusian situation is documented in Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson and in regional articles; it has been smaller in scale and less politically activated than either the Russian or Ukrainian cases.

Scholarly anchors (Rodnover)

• Kaarina Aitamurto, Paganism, Traditionalism, Nationalism: Narratives of Russian Rodnoverie (Routledge, 2016) (Routledge). The standard contemporary treatment.
• Victor Shnirelman, various articles and monographs. The more critical and more far-right-focused treatment (World Religions and Spirituality Project).
• Andrey Beskov, Russian-language articles (Studia Culturae). The contemporary Russian-academic insider treatment.
• Mariya Lesiv, The Return of Ancestral Gods: Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation (McGill-Queen’s, 2013) (McGill-Queen’s University Press). The standard Ukrainian-focused work in English.
• Adrian Ivakhiv, articles on Ukrainian neo-paganism.

TOPIC 7: RUSSIAN THEOSOPHICAL AND ROERICH REVIVAL

Helena and Nicholas Roerich and Agni Yoga / Living Ethics

Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) and his wife Helena Roerich (1879-1955) are the founding figures of the Agni Yoga / Living Ethics movement, a Theosophy-derived spiritual system developed through the 1920s-1940s and transmitted principally through Helena Roerich’s recorded teachings (the Agni Yoga / Zhivaya Etika corpus, comprising fourteen volumes published 1924-1937 plus posthumous additions). Nicholas Roerich was simultaneously a major Russian painter, an explorer of Central Asia (the 1925-1928 Central Asian Expedition to the Altai, Mongolia, and Tibet), a peace activist (the 1935 Roerich Pact for the protection of cultural property in wartime, signed by the United States and Latin American nations under Franklin Roosevelt (ICRC IHL Treaties)), and an esoteric teacher whose international visibility was unusual for the period.

The Roerichs presented Agni Yoga as a synthesis of Theosophical Mahatma-teaching (the Roerichs claimed direct contact with the Master Morya, the same Tibetan-Master figure with whom Helena Blavatsky had claimed contact), Russian Orthodoxy, Buddhist (especially Tibetan) elements, and a future-oriented planetary spirituality. The corpus is doctrinally a mid-20th-century Theosophical successor movement; it is not Tibetan Buddhism in any strict sense and is not received as such by the Tibetan tradition, but it does claim Tibetan-Master authority and operates in dialogue with the broader Theosophical lineage.

Post-1991 revival and the International Centre of the Roerichs

The Soviet period suppressed the Russian Roerich-following alongside other esoteric movements; the post-1991 period saw a rapid institutional revival. The International Centre of the Roerichs (Mezhdunarodnyy Tsentr Rerikhov, ICR) was founded in 1989-1991, principally through the work of Svetoslav Roerich (Nicholas and Helena’s younger son, 1904-1993), who in 1990 transferred a major portion of the family archive and art collection from his residence in Bangalore to the new institution in Moscow. The ICR was hosted in the Lopukhin Estate in central Moscow (a heritage building granted by the Moscow city government), operated a museum, library, and publishing program, and was the principal Russian institutional center for Roerich heritage from 1991 through 2017.

In 2017 the ICR was forcibly closed by Russian authorities (Christian Science Monitor). The state’s documented account is that the State Museum of the East (Gosudarstvenniy Muzey Vostoka) was to receive custody of the Roerich collection; the ICR’s account is that this constituted an illegitimate confiscation orchestrated by state-aligned officials with the consequence of subordinating Roerich-heritage management to a state institution rather than the family-foundation-aligned ICR. The dispute is documented in Russian-language journalism, in subsequent legal proceedings, and in international Roerich-following correspondence. As of 2026 the legal situation remains contested in part, with the ICR’s successor entities operating in reduced form and the principal collection held by the State Museum of the East.

The 2017 closure is the decisive event in the contemporary Russian Roerich field. Roerich’s status under the post-2000 Putin-era state is best characterized as a co-option: the Russian state has retained and promoted Roerich’s cultural-soft-power value (Roerich as a great Russian painter, Roerich as a peace-pact author, Roerich as a Central-Asian-explorer figure useful to the Russian Eurasian-identity project) while displacing the family-foundation institutional structure that had hosted the explicitly-esoteric Agni Yoga continuity. The state-controlled Roerich apparatus is more secular and more nationalist-cultural in framing than the ICR’s Agni-Yoga-centered approach had been.

The contemporary Russian Theosophical / Living Ethics community

Outside the ICR / State Museum of the East dispute, a substantial Russian and post-Soviet community of Agni Yoga / Living Ethics readers and practitioners operates through various smaller organizations, study circles, and publishing initiatives. The Sergei Roerich Memorial Trust in India, the U.S.-based Agni Yoga Society (founded 1920 by Helena Roerich’s American students), and various regional Russian Roerich societies continue to function. The contemporary Russian-language Living Ethics community engages with the corpus in the standard mode of devotional Theosophical practice: textual study, ethical self-discipline, meditation, an explicit cosmological commitment to the planetary-evolution narrative, and a degree of engagement with the broader Theosophical (Blavatsky-Besant-Leadbeater-Bailey) literature.

Scholarly anchors (Roerich / Living Ethics)

• Andrei Znamenski, Red Shambhala (Quest, 2011) (Open Library). On the early-Soviet-era esoteric currents including the Roerich circle and Gleb Bokii’s intelligence-and-esoteric work.
• John McCannon, Nicholas Roerich: The Artist Who Would Be King (Pittsburgh, 2022) (University of Pittsburgh Press). The standard contemporary biographical work.
• Anita Stasulane, Theosophy and Culture: Nicholas Roerich (Pontifical Gregorian University, 2005) (Google Books). The Latvian scholar’s standard study.
• Markus Osterrieder, Welt im Umbruch: Nationalitätenfrage, Ordnungspläne und Rudolf Steiners Haltung im Ersten Weltkrieg (Pforte, 2014; print only); various articles. On the Russian-cultural context of the Roerich circle.
• Birgit Menzel et al., The New Age of Russia (2012; print only) – substantial Roerich-related chapters.

TOPIC 8: RUSSIAN COSMISM

Nikolai Fyodorov and the 19th-century origin

Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov (1829-1903) was a Moscow librarian-philosopher whose teaching, transmitted principally orally during his lifetime and through Filosofiya obshchego dela (The Philosophy of the Common Task) published posthumously in two volumes (1906, 1913), constitutes the foundational text of Russian Cosmism (print only). Fyodorov’s central proposal was that humanity’s “common task” is the resurrection of the dead – not as religious metaphor but as a literal technological-scientific project, to be accomplished through the gathering of the physical-material remains of all who have ever lived and their reconstitution through (then-future) science, with the resurrected ancestors to be settled on other planets and in the broader cosmos as humanity’s resurrected population outgrew the Earth.

Fyodorov’s circle included Vladimir Solovyov, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky (who studied Fyodorov closely and incorporated Fyodorovian themes into The Brothers Karamazov), and a generation of Russian intellectuals who took Fyodorov’s resurrection-project seriously as a philosophical-scientific commitment rather than as a mystical metaphor. The post-Fyodorov Silver-Age cosmist circle (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the founding theorist of Soviet rocketry and a self-identified Fyodorovian; Alexander Chizhevsky, the heliobiologist; Vladimir Vernadsky, the geochemist and originator of the noosphere concept; Pavel Florensky, the polymath priest-mathematician) extended Fyodorov’s framework in technical, scientific, and theological directions through the 1900s-1930s, with the cosmist current substantively shaping early Soviet space-and-life-sciences ideology.

The 20th-century underground continuity

Cosmism was suppressed in the Stalinist period but not eradicated. Tsiolkovsky’s rocketry work was incorporated into Soviet aerospace; Vernadsky’s noosphere concept became a recognized geological-scientific term; Florensky was executed in 1937 but his work continued to circulate in samizdat through the late Soviet period. The post-Soviet 1990s saw a Cosmism revival in academic, popular-scientific, and esoteric registers, with publishing of Fyodorov’s previously-restricted works, founding of Fyodorov-studies academic groups, and the broader incorporation of Cosmist themes into Russian intellectual self-presentation.

The post-2000 revival and the state context

The post-2000 Russian state has had a complex relationship with Cosmism. On one hand, Cosmism is a real intellectual tradition that constitutes a recognizable “Russian” contribution to the global philosophy of science and of religion, and the state has had cultural-prestige reasons to support Cosmism scholarship and revival. On the other hand, Cosmism’s specifically esoteric and resurrection-project content does not fit neatly into the Russian-Orthodox-aligned ideological mainstream the state has otherwise promoted, and the state’s engagement has been selective.

The contemporary Cosmism revival in 2020s Russia operates through multiple registers: as an academic philosophical-historical subject; as a popular-scientific interest in transhumanism, life-extension, and space-colonization (the contemporary Cosmist-transhumanist crossover is documented and substantial; the Russian Transhumanist Movement and various life-extension organizations have drawn on Cosmist heritage); as an esoteric-spiritual register where Cosmism overlaps with the Roerich, Anastasian, and broader post-Soviet esoteric ecosystem; and as a state-philosophical register where Cosmism intersects with Eurasianism (see Topic 9 below).

The contemporary Cosmist-transhumanist crossover – the documentation that 19th-century Fyodorovian resurrection-project thinking anticipates 21st-century transhumanist life-extension, AI-mediated digital-resurrection, and mind-uploading proposals – has been the principal Western academic entry-point into Cosmism studies. The Bristol-based historian-of-science Stephen Lukashevich, the American Russian-cosmist specialist George Young, and others have drawn this connection systematically.

Scholarly anchors (Cosmism)

• George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers (Oxford, 2012) (Oxford University Press). The standard English-language scholarly work.
• Boris Groys, ed., Russian Cosmism (MIT Press / e-flux, 2018) (MIT Press). Multi-author anthology with translations of source-texts and contemporary critical essays.
• Anya Bernstein, The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia (Princeton, 2019) (Princeton University Press). The standard contemporary ethnography of Russian transhumanist-Cosmist movements.
• Michael Hagemeister, various articles on Fyodorov, the Silver-Age cosmist circle, and the early-Soviet reception.
• Asif Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge, 2010) (Cambridge University Press). On the Tsiolkovsky / Cosmism / Soviet-space-program continuity.

TOPIC 9: ALEXANDER DUGIN, EURASIANISM, AND THE FOURTH POLITICAL THEORY

Eurasianism: the 1920s origin and the 1990s revival

Eurasianism (Yevraziystvo) is a Russian intellectual-political tradition founded in the 1920s by émigré Russian scholars in Prague and Sofia (principally Nikolai Trubetzkoy, the linguist and ethnologist; Pyotr Savitsky, the geographer and economist; Georges Florovsky, the theologian who later broke with the movement; and others), which proposed that Russia is not a part of Europe and not a part of Asia but is a distinct Eurasian civilization with its own geographic-historical-cultural identity centered on the steppe, the rivers, and the Orthodox-Turkic-Mongol synthesis that characterized the Russian imperial trajectory. The original Eurasianism was a serious scholarly movement; its principal figures produced lasting work in linguistics (Trubetzkoy’s structuralist phonology), historical geography (Savitsky), and theology (Florovsky in his pre-Eurasianist phase) that is still in academic use.

The post-1991 revival of Eurasianism, principally through Alexander Dugin (born 1962), is doctrinally and politically distinct from the 1920s original. Dugin’s Eurasianism is a 1990s-2020s ideological reconstruction that draws on the original Eurasianist tradition selectively while adding substantial inputs from Traditionalist (Guénon-Evola) and Conservative Revolutionary (Carl Schmitt, Ernst Niekisch, Julius Evola) intellectual sources, plus a continuous engagement with German geopolitical theory (Karl Haushofer’s Geopolitik) and with the broader European New Right (Alain de Benoist and the GRECE / Nouvelle Droite circle).

The Dugin corpus

Dugin’s principal works:

• The Foundations of Geopolitics (Osnovy geopolitiki, 1997) (Open Library). The book that established Dugin’s position in Russian intellectual-political life. Used as a textbook at the Russian Academy of the General Staff in the late 1990s; widely circulated in Russian military and intelligence-aligned reading. Outlines a geopolitical doctrine framing Russia as the “Heartland” (drawing on Halford Mackinder) and the United States as the “Sea Power” Atlantic civilization opposed to and structurally incompatible with the Eurasian land-power Russia, with policy recommendations including dismembering the West through cultivation of regional separatisms, support for “anti-American” forces globally, and aggressive expansion of Russian influence into the Eurasian “Heartland” buffer-zone.
• The Fourth Political Theory (Chetvertaya politicheskaya teoriya, 2009; English trans. Arktos, 2012) (Arktos). Dugin’s attempt to articulate a post-liberal-post-fascist-post-communist political philosophy founded on Heideggerian Dasein, Traditionalist metaphysics, and a critique of modernity drawn from Guénon and Evola. The “Fourth” of the title refers to the proposal that the three modern political theories (liberalism, communism, fascism) have all exhausted themselves and that a fourth is needed; the Fourth Political Theory is Dugin’s nomination.
• Putin vs Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right (Arktos, 2014); The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory (Arktos, 2017); a substantial subsequent corpus principally published in English through the Arktos publishing house (the Swedish-based far-right and Traditionalist publisher Daniel Friberg founded), and in Russian through various smaller venues.

The state-influence question

Dugin’s actual operational influence on the Russian state has been the subject of substantial Western journalistic and academic controversy. The maximalist account (Edward Lucas, The New Cold War; some U.S. and U.K. policy journalism) treats Dugin as a major intellectual influence on Putin and the Russian state ideological apparatus; the minimalist account (Marlene Laruelle’s Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire, Johns Hopkins 2008 (Johns Hopkins University Press); and her continuous body of work on the Russian far right) treats Dugin as a more peripheral figure whose international visibility has exceeded his actual Kremlin-level access and whose influence is overstated by Western observers projecting onto Russia a more ideologically-centralized apparatus than actually exists.

The documented relationship has had varying phases. Dugin was prominent in mainstream Russian state media in the late 2000s and early 2010s; in 2014 he held a Moscow State University faculty position from which he was dismissed after public statements about the Ukrainian conflict that the university administration treated as extreme; in 2022 his daughter Darya Dugina was assassinated in a car bombing outside Moscow that the Russian authorities attributed to Ukrainian intelligence (and that Ukrainian authorities denied responsibility for), with Dugin himself widely speculated to have been the actual target (Al Jazeera). In the 2020s Dugin has continued as a public intellectual visible in Russian and international Russian-aligned media without being a formal-state office-holder.

The honest record: Dugin is a real and substantive Russian intellectual figure with a documented international reach, his work is read at various levels of the Russian state and military apparatus, and his ideas have circulated in Russian foreign-policy discourse; the maximalist “Dugin is Putin’s brain” claim is overstated and rejected by the principal academic specialists; the minimalist “Dugin is a marginal crank” claim is also wrong; the truth is in the middle and is institutionally complicated.

Scholarly anchors (Dugin / Eurasianism)

• Marlene Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Johns Hopkins, 2008) (Johns Hopkins University Press); Russia’s Strategy and the Far Right (Center on Global Interests, various); Russia’s Niche Soft Power (multiple). The principal contemporary scholarly voice on Russian Eurasianism and the Russian far right.
• Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2004) (Open Library); Key Thinkers of the Radical Right (Oxford, 2019) (Oxford Academic). Sedgwick’s standard work on Traditionalism includes substantial treatment of Dugin in the Traditionalist context; the 2019 collection includes a Dugin chapter.
• Andreas Umland, various articles. The Kyiv-based political scientist whose decades of work on the Russian far right has documented Dugin and the broader nationalist field.
• Anton Shekhovtsov, Russia and the Western Far Right (Routledge, 2018) (Routledge). On the international circulation between Russian and Western far-right movements.
• Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (Yale, 2016) (Yale University Press). The journalistic-historical narrative.

TOPIC 10: CROSS-TRADITION ANALYSIS

The state-religious entanglement comparative observation

The post-Soviet ecosystem documents a density of state-religious-political entanglement that is unusual in the broader corpus.

Russian Orthodox Church: not the subject of this dossier but the core background. The Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Kirill (since 2009) has operated in a documented symphonia-of-sorts with the Russian state, with overlapping personnel, ideological framing, and operational coordination on questions including Russian unity, traditional values, opposition to LGBTQ rights, and the post-2014 Ukrainian-conflict context. The state-Orthodox alignment is the central religious-political fact of post-Soviet Russia. (Separate dossier: russian hesychast 2007 onward.)

Indigenous Siberian shamanism: tolerated, regionally institutionalized, with formal state-registration recognition and varying degrees of regional-political support. The Russian state has not generally treated the Siberian shamanic revivals as targets for restriction; they are framed as ethnocultural heritage, fitting the broader state ethnic-federation narrative.

Anastasianism / Ringing Cedars: tolerated, occasionally engaged with administratively (the rodovye pomestya legislation drafts, the Far East Hectare adjacency), with the antisemitic-conspiracy content not surfaced as a target of antiextremism action. The movement’s nationalist-agrarian register is in some respects compatible with the state’s nationalist framing without being directly state-aligned.

Rodnover neo-paganism: a mixed field. The non-radical mainstream is generally tolerated; the explicit-neo-Nazi-aligned subgroups have been targets of selective antiextremism action; the field as a whole is not state-aligned and is in some respects in tension with the state-Orthodox mainstream, which views Slavic neo-paganism as a competing claim on Slavic-pre-Christian heritage.

Roerich / Living Ethics: the 2017 ICR closure is the principal documented state-action against an esoteric organization in the post-Soviet period. The state co-option of Roerich’s cultural-prestige value while displacing the explicitly-esoteric institutional structure is a specific and documented mechanism.

Russian Cosmism: state-tolerated and partially-state-promoted in its academic-philosophical and aerospace-historical registers, more selectively engaged with in its esoteric-and-transhumanist registers.

Eurasianism / Dugin / Fourth Political Theory: a documented but contested influence on Russian state ideology, with Dugin’s actual operational role smaller than the maximalist Western reading but larger than the minimalist dismissal.

The pattern across these cases: the post-Soviet Russian state operates a selective curation of the esoteric ecosystem – promoting registers that fit its nationalist-traditionalist framing, displacing or constraining institutional structures it perceives as threats, tolerating registers that are politically inert, and engaging in cultural soft-power use of named figures (Roerich, Fyodorov, Dugin) detached from their original institutional contexts.

The published-edge methodology in the post-Soviet field

The post-Soviet ecosystem is substantially-but-not-uniformly accessible to the published-edge methodology. The Indigenous Siberian shamanic traditions have the strongest argument for an internal restricted-access layer (the operative shamanic transmission, like the operative Tibetan or Aboriginal Australian transmission, is lineage-controlled and not all of it is published); the published academic layer is thick but the operative layer is gated. Anastasianism, Rodnover, Roerich/Living Ethics, Cosmism, and Eurasianism are by contrast principally text-based movements with most of their content published and broadly available; the gating is on community participation and on the interpretive context, not on text access.

This produces an asymmetric application of the published-edge framework: the Siberian indigenous register is comparable to the Aboriginal or Q’ero register (operative material restricted by lineage), while the Russian textual-esoteric register is comparable to the Western Mystery Tradition register (operative material public but interpretive context lineage-mediated).

The Russian / Eurasian esoteric synthesis as a distinct regional phenomenon

The contemporary post-Soviet esoteric ecosystem is best understood not as the sum of its parts but as a distinct regional synthesis. The combination of Indigenous-Siberian shamanic revival, Russian-Orthodox-state alignment, Theosophical-Roerich heritage, Cosmist resurrection-and-space-colonization heritage, Dugin’s geopolitical-Traditionalist project, Rodnover Slavic-pagan revival, and Anastasian rural-utopian movement is not replicated in any other regional ecosystem in the corpus. The framing-shorthand that some commentators use – the Russian esoteric – is justified by the regional density and the cross-tradition interactions; though the framing-shorthand should not be taken to imply a unified movement or a coordinated apparatus.

The cross-tradition interactions are documented and significant:

• Anastasianism draws on Vedic-Slavic neo-pagan vocabulary that is also present in Rodnover; the boundary between them is permeable in some regional communities.
• Roerich / Living Ethics is engaged by Cosmist-transhumanist communities that read Fyodorov, by Indigenous-Siberian shamanic communities that read Roerich’s Central-Asian-expedition material, and by Russian state-cultural institutions that promote Roerich detached from his esoteric content.
• Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory engages Traditionalist-Roerichian, Eurasianist, and Cosmist heritage as available source-material for the Fourth-Political-Theory synthesis.
• Indigenous Siberian shamanic revivals have engaged with Roerich’s Central-Asian expeditions (Roerich himself documented Mongolian and Siberian shamanic practice during the 1925-28 expedition) and have at times been promoted in cultural-tourism contexts framed by Roerich-Living-Ethics aesthetic.
• The neo-shamanic Western reception (Harner et al.) intersects with the post-1991 Siberian institutional revival and with the broader Western interest in Russian / Eurasian esoteric synthesis (the Castaneda, Gurdjieff-Ouspensky, and Harner currents are documented as feeding back into post-Soviet Russian reception).

Scholar inventory

The principal scholars whose work this dossier rests on:

• Galina Lindquist (Stockholm, d. 2008) – contemporary Russian urban-magical practice.
• Ronald Hutton (Bristol) – comparative shamanism and Western reception.
• Caroline Humphrey (Cambridge) – Mongolian, Buryat, broader Inner Asian.
• Rasa Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson (Vilnius) – Anastasianism, post-Soviet new religious movements.
• Demyan Belyaev – post-Soviet heterodox religiosity.
• Kaarina Aitamurto (Helsinki / Aleksanteri Institute) – Russian Rodnover.
• Victor Shnirelman – Russian neo-paganism and far-right alignments.
• Andrey Beskov (Nizhny Novgorod) – contemporary Russian neo-paganism.
• Mark Sedgwick (Aarhus) – Traditionalism, Dugin.
• George M. Young (New Hampshire) – Russian Cosmism.
• Anya Bernstein (Harvard) – contemporary Russian transhumanism / Cosmism.
• Marlene Laruelle (George Washington) – Eurasianism, Russian far right.
• Andreas Umland (Kyiv) – Russian far right.
• Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer (Georgetown) – Sakha shamanism, broader Siberian indigenous religion.
• Andrei Znamenski (Memphis) – Siberian shamanism documentary translation, Western reception.
• Birgit Menzel (Mainz) and Michael Hagemeister (Bochum) – post-Soviet esoteric ecosystem, edited The New Age of Russia.
• Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Fordham, retired) – Russian Silver Age occult.
• Roberte Hamayon (Paris EPHE) – Siberian shamanism (French specialist).
• Charles Stépanoff (Paris EPHE) – contemporary Siberian shamanism.
• Piers Vitebsky (Cambridge) – Even / Eveny reindeer-herder shamanism.
• Justine Buck Quijada (Wesleyan) – contemporary Buryat religious revival.
• John McCannon (Sage / independent) – Roerich biographical.
• Anita Stasulane (Daugavpils) – Roerich / Theosophy.

NOTES ON COVERAGE AND FUTURE RESEARCH

What this dossier covers thinly or not at all

• The Caucasus region (Chechen, Ingush, Dagestani, Circassian, Abkhaz, Georgian indigenous and Sufi traditions) is touched on only obliquely. The post-Soviet Caucasus has its own dense religious-political field, including a substantial Sufi (Naqshbandi, Qadiri) presence and indigenous folk-religious continuities that merit a separate dossier.
• Central Asia proper (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan) is touched on only at the Mongol-Buryat-Tuvan borderlands. The Central Asian shamanic, Sufi, and post-Soviet religious fields are substantial and merit separate treatment.
• Russian Old Believer (staroobryadtsy) communities are mentioned in passing only. The Old Believer schism (1660s onward) and the surviving Russian Old Believer communities (numbering in the low millions, with continuous transmission through the Soviet period, with significant communities in the Russian Far East, the Altai, and emigrant communities in Romania, Australia, Alaska, and South America) constitute a major Russian-religious phenomenon that this dossier does not cover.
• Tibetan Buddhist transmission into Russia (the Buryat, Kalmyk, and Tuvan Buddhist communities; the post-1991 revival; the historical Russian-Tibetan-Buddhist relationships including the early-Soviet-period Soviet-Tibetan diplomatic-and-esoteric contacts) is touched on only at the Buryat / shamanism intersection. The broader Russian-Tibetan-Buddhist field is documented elsewhere in the corpus (Tibetan dossier).
• Russian Orthodox hesychast and Jesus-Prayer continuities are the subject of the separate russian hesychast 2007 onward dossier.
• Specific contemporary Russian “new religious movements” (the Vissarion / Church of the Last Testament in Krasnoyarsk Krai, the various Russian-language messianic groups) are mentioned in passing only. Vissarion’s group was the subject of substantial 2020 Russian state action and merits separate treatment.
• Belarusian and Baltic indigenous religious continuities (Romuva in Lithuania, the Latvian Dievturība, the Belarusian rural folk-religious continuity) are mentioned only at the Rodnover-comparative level.

Operational notes

The post-Soviet esoteric ecosystem is the densest example in the corpus of state-religious-political entanglement, but the specific entanglements are not uniform and should not be treated as a single phenomenon. The Indigenous-shamanic state-tolerance, the Anastasian state-engagement-with-cautions, the Rodnover-state-mixed-relationship, the Roerich-state-displacement-and-co-option, and the Dugin-state-documented-but-contested influence are five distinct patterns, not one pattern with regional variations.

The framework question for the broader comparative project: the post-Soviet field is the case where the texts published are an unusually-unreliable guide to what is happening institutionally. The Megre corpus is published but the actual operative life of the Anastasian settlements is not what one would predict from the corpus alone. The Dugin corpus is published but the actual operational reach is contested in ways that the corpus alone cannot resolve. The Roerich corpus is published but the 2017 closure is the load-bearing institutional fact that the corpus does not explain. The Indigenous-Siberian shamanic record is published in part but the operative lineage transmission is partly closed. In the post-Soviet field more than in any other regional ecosystem in the corpus, the published-text layer and the operative-institutional layer have to be tracked separately.

End of dossier