Sunday, March 16, 2014
Chairman's (Omni Shoreham)
Throughout Russia’s history, Christian modes of temporality have been central to the state’s modernizing projects. In the pre-Soviet imperial period, Russian state-building efforts drew on the historicizing and commemorative aspects of Russian Orthodoxy to create a national mythology and pantheon of national heroes. During the Soviet period, state leaders incorporated Christian eschatological traditions into Marxist visions of communist salvation and redemption. More recently in the post-Soviet period, Russian political leaders have creatively mobilized both historicizing and salvationist discourses to bolster the state’s legitimacy as a national entity and to foreground the economic promise of Russia’s capitalist future. Surprisingly, the contributions of Christianity have been noticeably absent in ethnographic and theoretical explorations of the “postsocialist transition” in Russia and other post-Soviet states. Instead, accounts informed by economic themes have focused primarily on the radical disjunctures, upheavals, and transformations between the socialist past and the postsocialist present, or on the continuity of a socialist habitus into the postsocialist period. Yet the emphasis on singularity and linearity in these approaches does not adequately capture the complexities and contradictions of postsocialist transformation as a multidirectional process with multiple, and often conflicting, beginnings and ends. In this paper, I elaborate how the salvationist and eschatological discourses promoted by Christian traditions in Russia today provide more satisfactory ways for understanding the “postsocialist transition.” In particular, the focus on personal and societal welfare promoted by Orthodox and evangelical Christian communities offers productive ways for post-Soviet Russians to make sense of their pasts, their presents, and their futures.
