1869, Ep. 169 with Joseph Kellner, author of The Spirit of Socialism

    3:01PM Jun 26, 2025

    Speakers:

    Jonathan Hall

    Joseph Kellner

    Keywords:

    Soviet collapse

    spiritual seeking

    Joseph Kellner

    The Spirit of Socialism

    Russian history

    faith traditions

    cultural response

    economic crisis

    intellectual intelligentsia

    astrology

    Hare Krishnas

    Anatoly Fomenko

    New Chronology

    Russian identity

    spiritual leaders.

    Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Joseph Kellner, author of the new book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse. Joseph Kelner is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union at the University of Georgia, we spoke to Joseph about why the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in a dramatic increase in spiritual seeking by the mainstream population, the many colorful and memorable spiritual leaders who rose to prominence at that time, and why these new and apparently un Soviet spiritual pursuits were most avidly supported and practiced by people with university and graduate degrees. Hello, Joey, welcome to the podcast.

    Thank you, Jonathan.

    Well, I look forward to talking to you about your new book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse. Super interesting book. Tell us the backstory of how it came to be.

    So the book's been in some kind of production for for almost 15 years beginning at UC Berkeley in my graduate program. That means a step even further back. I grew up without a strong faith. I grew up in a secular Jewish household. So we were, it was certainly culturally Jewish, but more cultural than spiritual and and then when I arrived in Berkeley, I met a lot of people who just had wide, widely varying experience with faith, people who had grown up in very, very tight knit evangelical Mormon communities, people who had come from all kinds of traditions and and so I was already interested in the topic, in the things that people believe and how it shapes their worldviews. And then my advisor there had been was working on a book that frames Bolshevism itself as kind of a millenarian faith, a political movement, but with the underlying logic and form of an apocalyptic faith. And so all around me, I was learning and trying to better understand this. This aspect is obviously important aspect of human experience, but one that I didn't have kind of intuitive understanding of. And then there was a specific incident, a really peculiar one, that the Berkeley the Bay Area has enormous variety of sectarian leftist groups as maybe, you know, and I saw a flyer around town that was advertising a talk with some it was like the real truth about North Korea. And I thought, Okay, I'll go see you know what the I've never seen a North Korea apologist before. I'm curious. I'll go tell I'll go check this out. It was being hosted by what was called the revolutionary Communist Party USA, which is one of the even in among these leftist groups, very, very extreme and cloistered, weird kind of holdover from the 60s. And so I thought, Okay, this is, you know, Bay Area culture. I should see what this is about. And I went to this meeting, and they had somebody who's going to speak about North Korea, but they opened with a 20 minute video from the leader of this movement who is in self imposed exile, and it was just him speaking in front of a curtain, and I was watching, and over the course of this 20 minutes, the room was silent, and I registered that this guy was indeed a really, really talented speaker. He spoke in perfectly formed paragraphs. He had a very, very coherent worldview, a Marxist, but a very peculiar type. And by the end, they turned off the video, and the person running the show said, Well, you know, I'm not going to try to add anything to his remarks. And everybody just agreed that basically his remarks should serve as the meeting itself. And I was just really taken with how with the rapt attention in the room, and the way that he really did command this group, and it made me think very seriously about this idea of political faith and of a movement, or these sort of small sects that, you know, if this guy didn't hit it big, maybe in a different time and place, he could have been, you know, a Lenin figure, or some major, major historical figure. And so I just came to take it more seriously, not necessarily that Bolshevism is a sex, but that faith and faith groups are super important for understanding the movement of history, even though they don't there's something slippery about it. There's something that doesn't always come across in written sources. This is a roundabout way to say that I just came to believe that faith from the late Soviet period and through the collapse and And there really was a really public flourishing of faith, might be a really useful way to look at the culture and that society at that time, to understand what people were believing and why, because it it does move people in huge numbers. And so all those things together have made me, for the last 15 years, really fixated on faith and how it works in society.

    Nice, nice. That's super interesting. So you mentioned the Soviet collapse. This is what the book is about. And it's about faith and spiritual traditions and new spiritual traditions, or or renaissances of existing spiritual traditions brought up to the present. Your so your book is the first cultural history of the Soviet collapse, and explores this time of heightened spiritual interest by the mainstream population, what you call the quote seeking phenomenon. This occurred during the transition after the collapse of the USSR. And you label the ideas of this time as representing quote a vast expansion of what was possible in an era defined by an exhilarating and frightening erosion of limits. Tell us more about this.

    So when I described the topic of this book to Americans, to an Anglophone audience, I have to describe it and explain why it matters. But every Russian that I raised the topic to just immediately understands what I'm talking about, because they all remember it at the time of the Soviet collapse, you could not walk outside without seeing crowds of Hari Krishnas, of astrologers of doom saying, sects of different kinds of pyramid schemes and Neo pagans and all these different really extraordinary and to the Soviet mind, very odd, heterodox beliefs, and all these people who were flocking to these different movements, it was a really striking and everyone has their own personal story of this event or this phenomenon, the seeking phenomenon. And this was part of, like you say, of a general erosion of limits. So most immediately, there was a stable, predictable order. In the Soviet Union, you had guaranteed income and health care and housing and employment. And within just a few years that that whole order breaks down, there is a economic crisis. Criminality is running rampant. Nothing is guaranteed anymore, and so that's probably the underlying chaos that I'm describing. But then it has all these cultural manifestations. Alcohol and drugs are suddenly all over the place and on the streets. Pornography, which had been very tightly controlled, is like visible everywhere. And advertising, even which had been tightly controlled, and obviously in a planned economy, there's not such a need for advertising suddenly unregulated all over every building, just visual noise everywhere. And so the whole era is just disorienting, deeply disorienting to people. And then the last, the last thing I'll add is people's sense of the past had eroded completely. You know, the 80s in the Soviet Union saw the entire official Soviet history picked apart and exposed as wise. And then in the crisis, there's no sense of the future and how deep. You know, there's no natural limit to how deep this crisis can go. And so people are in a state of total disorientation. And it is in that state that they are looking for new world views, new direction, new orientations. So it comes hand in hand. The seeking phenomenon is this cultural response to the loss of any kind of reference point in the society

    That makes sense, that makes sense. And what I think is interesting is, you know, again, to like a lay person, they might think, what did these traditions come from? You know, telepathy or astrology. These are very old concepts or nothing new. So to the average person, these might seem out of the ordinary within the Soviet framework, but state that within Russia itself, there's a long history of speculative science as part of their history of kind of combining science and spirituality. Tell us more about this.

    Yeah, Russia has a particular tradition of sort of probing the limits of science or the places where science and faith align, and that does appear in the history of several of these different if we take the seeking phenomenon and we break it into its constituent movement, constituent movements, there's a major esoteric current within it, occult sciences, astrology, bio healing and all that does find there are sort of specific Russian histories there. And each one that I take up that the book has four chapters, and each is kind of a. Study of some movement, or basket of movements that are that are related, and they all have roots in some Russian tradition. But they are more essentially, they're developed in the late Soviet period. So they're developed. They emerge in among disenchanted intelligentsia types, highly educated white collar, urban Soviet people who spent the 1970s and early 1980s really delving into these different traditions, elaborating them, adapting them to their own circumstances, and then at the time of and with, of course, no understanding that the collapse is coming, no anticipation that this will amount to anything, but then at the time of the collapse, they find millions of people interested in what they have to say

    That's super interesting. And there's a parallel within the West as well, with the 60s and the rise of interested here and in Eastern religions. So there's kind of like it's a parallel track going on in the West, which is interesting. Absolutely. A great quote that the astrologer Mikhail Levin said that it was kind of unknown, saying what was permitted was forbidden all the same, fantastic as far as what was verboten, so to speak, as far as a philosophy, yeah, yeah.

    It was, it was, I think, that the initial instinct for most people is to assume that these are kind of dissidents, or that these movements were anti Soviet in some way. And on the face of it, is very surprising, and for a lot of Russian people in the 90s, was very surprising. Where do these people come from? Because they've grown up in a Soviet world. But the book demonstrates that these are all both very Soviet. I mean, the they're within Soviet culture. They find all the resources they need and all the sort of ideological framing is already there to immerse yourself in astrology or in the Hari Krishna movement or something. But also they're not breaking the law. There's nothing here that's necessarily, there's little that's that's illegal. The Hare Krishnas are an exception, and they don't see themselves as an anti Soviet. They're not working towards essentially, they see the political world as superficial, and they are just exploring other views on the world. They are exploring faith. They're looking to find meaning that is maybe un Soviet. It doesn't align with sort of official Soviet worldview, but it's not anti Soviet, and it's fundamentally not political, so it's totally coherent with the late Soviet world as and I try to explain how that that is in the book, because the Soviet world is subject to a lot of caricature.

    That makes sense. So, so we have this explosion of interest, and spiritual leaders come out of the woodwork. There are some. Many of them are very colorful, very memorable, and you explore their lives. Tell us some of the stories, some of your favorite stories, of some of these individuals that you studied and present in the book.

    Part of the fun of this whole project was to meet these people and to immerse myself in all these different movements. And there's, like I said, four chapters with four different case studies, but that was among many, many others that I spoke to people with all kinds of, you know, people who had these folk ice baths that they were convinced was the key to, it's not just health, you know, eternal life, people who were Jehovah's Witnesses, or people who had ended up as Russian Mormons, And that there's just a huge range of different directions people went. And the research was essentially just going from meeting to meeting and services and masses and meeting and talking to all these people and their leaders. The third chapter is about a man who, well, it's about a sect that forms around this guy who claims to be the second coming of Christ, and they, 1000s of them, move to Siberia, and they build this utopian community that persists to this day. And so lots of colorful characters, I think, the one that will stick out in people's minds the most is subject to the fourth chapter. He also happens to be the artist who drew the pen and ink drawing on the cover, a man named Anatoly Fomenko, who was a Soviet Russian mathematician and a mathematician of international round really, really talented in them, specifically In topology, the mathematics of complex surfaces. And fumenko in the 1970s becomes convinced that all of history as we know it is a lie or is misunderstood, that in fact, all of history transpired in the last 1000 years. And with this in. All kinds of conclusions he comes to that there was no Mongol invasion that was like a big one that made him famous. But within that, he has the Old Testament written. After the New Testament, He has the entirety of the Middle Ages dominated by this Slavic, Turkic great empire that we've forgotten about somehow, and that the Romanovs in conspiracy with Western powers kind of obscured from the historical record. And so he has this absolutely outrageous and really psychedelic reordering of all historical events the entire world's history. And he writes these books in the 1990s with, you know, his credentials on the front page. This is a brilliant mathematician from the top university in Russia, and he sells hundreds of 1000s of copies. So he becomes a really, really major, the most popular historian of the period, despite not having having absolutely no historical training. And I had the great privilege of interviewing him, and as I developed the book. And most striking of all is he comes across as a very reasonable and thoughtful person who nonetheless believes everything he's saying. He's not a charlatan. He's in no way doing this for profit. He worked on it for a decade with no prospect of making money on it. And so fumeko in Him and in His theory, I find so much about the Soviet world that raised him, his own worldview, the incredible premium put on hard sciences, on math and physics, and the intellectual authority that that brings, as well as the world of the collapse. You know, why so many people were willing to believe this theory, why so many people admired him, and what the theory? What need the theory fulfilled for people in Russia, again, in a world where there's just no easy points of reference and so Fomenko, I hope he's been treated in previous English language essays, but always focusing on his alleged nationalism and sort of narrowly focused on this ideology he has. I hope that this book does a much more bold and fair treatment of him, because he's really fascinating, an interesting figure, which I hope I've conveyed in a way that doesn't contribute to the sort of traditional and very visceral debates about his theory. The book is about the 90s. It's not about the Mongol Empire. And so I unfortunately, I just don't touch on you know, what actually happened in the 13th century.

    So out of curiosity, for those who don't know, you've kind of laid out the broad brush strokes of his theory. What is it about his concepts and his philosophy that is attractive? Was attractive to people in the 90s and still is. What does it give someone if they embrace it?

    It's a great question, and it's not one that is easily answered, because there are no sources. You know people. We know that people read this book in huge numbers. These this theory in huge numbers. If you ask, come self, he says nothing. He says, I'm just a mathematician. I just plugged in the numbers, and this is what I found, and I have no investment in what it means whether or not we believe him, is kind of irrelevant. But what was striking is that the themes of these books align very closely with the questions that these other spiritual movements are also asking, that there are questions underlying all of these things together that unite flamenco with the astrologers and the Hare Krishnas. And so I see the New Chronology theory, flamenco theory as not a specific answer to or a specific worldview, but just a really, really rich text that you can interpret towards answering these key questions. And the questions specifically are about epistemology. How, who can we trust? Where does good information come from? And this is because all of the institutions of knowledge, historical science, the governments, the Communist Party, all these things have collapsed, and so there's just a search for some authority we can actually trust. So where does knowledge derive? Questions of identity. You know, for all these decades, we were Soviet people. We were a world power. We had this communist worldview, even if we didn't believe it so literally anymore. You know, we had a place in the world. And now, what is Russia? What does it mean to be Russian? What does it mean to you know, are we part of the West? Are we Eastern? There's like this whole uncertainty. You know that there was no national anthem for two or three years after the collapse, and when they reinstated the old one, they just got rid of all the words, because nobody knew what this country was. So questions of identity. And you can find answers in flamenco. And then the last one, which really unites the whole book, is question. Of the direction of history, of time and where it's headed, something that the Soviets had a very clear answer to. You know, there was sort of an upward March of history that the front of which was the Soviet Union. And now no sense of where we're headed, no sense of direction or any end point. And there we can see it in every group I look at the astrologers have a very cyclical understanding of time. The Hare Krishna is a cyclical but also a deeply nostalgic look at sort of the Vedic Golden Age and so forth. And for femenko, quite literally, he is just reordering all of time and just taking huge sections of history and putting them in different order to make a story that makes more sense to him and people latch onto it. So these really, really deep questions about the world animate all of the chapters, all of these people who are seeking with flamenco just being the most explicit and most colorful of them. I think.

    Interesting, interesting. Thanks for that. So you mentioned this earlier that, you know, millions of seekers came to the forefront during this transition. And you know, on the one hand, you'd be like, where are who are these people? And you said that they were just average people. You know this wasn't anything unusual about them, but you said that there was one key feature that was different from the urban population at large, and that was they were vastly over, over represented by people at university and graduate degrees, which is kind of surprising. Tell us why the intelligentsia made this dramatic move towards what, again, an average person might think was an un Soviet worldview beyond the state supported atheism and Russian Orthodoxy.

    This is really the crux of the book. I think one of the most, the most common question I've received, probably, is, why is it that these members of the intelligentsia, and really we should say that the technical intelligentsia, which in the Soviet world means people who are employed in engineering or some function of the planned economy, higher education, not necessarily the sort of poets and artists that we think of as intelligent in an earlier stage. It's a huge number of Soviet people who are educated in the sciences, typically, and they are quite clearly the ones seeding and developing these ideas in the Soviet underground. And this is surprising, because we think of, you know, the book never uses the term pseudoscience, because they're really if you look closely at the term, it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It's very difficult to decide what decide what is and is not pseudoscience. But we think of astrology, energy, healing, all these things that they're invested in, as kind of unscientific. The Soviet worldview understood science and religion, science and faith as polar opposites. We pit them against each other in very crude terms, and the assumption that scientific enlightenment is going to win out in the end and we are going to see the erosion of faith. We now know that that's not the case. I mean, this is a worldview that just doesn't hold water, and on the face of it, and it's not just the Soviets. I mean, I think in the United States, too, we have an assumption that there is some contradiction of science and religion. You know, it's, for instance, there's a strong current within American evangelicalism of trying to prove the scientific, literal truth of the Bible, right? And so the authority of science is so strong. But this opposition is just not real on the face of it. I mean, for virtually all of history, and certainly the modern era, there's all kinds of ways you can reconcile the two. You can say, well, you know, God sets in motion all of these different things, all you know, the clock, clock maker, God, and so forth. And so we don't have to worry about whether you know the existence of God is not in any way contradicted by modern science. And these people understand that these technical intelligent stereotypes. They are really highly educated, they're worldly, they're disillusioned. And they take their research skills and their reading and their interest in the world, and they just start to read. And they start to go into Soviet libraries and gather anything they can about esotericism, about non sort of communist world views. And they find that they can live perfectly normal Soviet lives, not at all politically dissidents or anything like that. Well, learning about astrology, the leader of sort of the astrologers in this book was computer scientists from enco a mathematician. All of the Hare Krishnas tended to be scientists of some form or another. And.And spiritual seeking and faith co exist perfectly comfortably with modern science, and I think that's actually the norm, and I think there's nothing intellectually difficult about that at all, but it does strike us a little bit as strange, and in the Soviet worldview struck many as strange.

    Yeah,

    Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. But I like that. There's moreseamless interact integration with those two worldviews versus like black or white thinking. So I was curious, where are these spiritual traditions? Now there was this huge explosion during the collapse. So I just thought before you answer, I just wanted to say I there was the astrologer that you feature in the first chapter, Mikhail Levin. I was like, Google him, and there he's still practicing Astrology, and he's a lot of YouTube videos, and you probably have already seen this, but there was an article on him in this magazine called coda, and it was talking about him during the during the pandemic. And I'll read this little quote from him, sure, because it ties in with what what you were studying and what the book is about. 11 says one thing is unmistakable, a change in his students and clients during the political and public turmoil of the past year that reminds him of times past. In 1990 and 1991 all my clients would call and ask, what will happen to us, emphasizing the last word us, they didn't ask what will happen to me. They asked about us. And now all my clients ask, What about our country? When will all this end? So it's an interesting you know, another huge turmoil, COVID brings a resurgence of this, of the seeking, because what's where's the future, it's unknown.And so with that in mind, I was curious, where are these traditions now in the current Russia?

    Yeah, yeah, there are, of all the different figures in the book, Levin is probably the one I'm I'm not directly in touch with him very often, but I know researchers who are and he is really an active intellectual. Generally. He's just a sort of a figure, a public figure, in Russia. And his academy of astrology, I believe, persists to the current day, and certainly outlasted the 90s and remains an institution in Moscow. Astrology remains very popular, not to the scale it was in 1990s I mean, the 1990s every business newspaper had horoscopes in it. There were political horoscopes television, every news program. I mean, it was, it was truly everywhere. The other groups have also declined. SoI think that the driving questions of the 1990s that I raised about identity, about the direction of history, they kind of lose their urgency. By the end of the 1990s the political system stabilizes the Putin regime as it's forming, provides some sort of answer to these things. There's kind of a backward looking nationalism, a sense of security, a sense of identity in the world for Russia and so all these movements shrink. I mean, they are definitely phenomena of the 1990s and in recent years, since COVID, when Russian society, by all outward signs, has become quite repressive. I've not been to Russia since, since I finished the research for this book. So before the war, or before the full scale invasion, anyway, and before COVID, Russian society has has become very restricted, restrictive and repressive. This has fallen very hard on religious groups that they consider to be non traditional. So that's the four traditional faiths of Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, have a formal status within Russia and the Hari Krishnas and Mormons and so forth, if not branded outright as foreign agents, are under different kinds of repression. So the sect that I mentioned that that formed in the 90s and moved to Siberia, their whole leadership has been arrested in the last several years. So they are no longer, I mean, they're still living there, but the leadership is detained, and I believe still, and so the impetus behind this movement faded, and then more recently, I think there's been more of a direct crackdown. The Orthodox Church has historically been involved in this backlash. They have a strong, what they call anti cult movement within the church, attacking any sort of what they see as non traditional, non native spiritual movements, and so a major backlash, as well as kind of the loss of the conditions that gave rise to the phenomenon. It is a it is really exemplary of the 1990s and I look at them as sort of a way into the history of the 1990s of that cultural moment. And. Today, it is already history for sure.

    Wow, wow. Well, it is a fascinating history, and I want to commend you on writing your book. Anyone that's listening to this, I strongly encourage them to go get Joey calendars, new book, The spirit of socialism, culture and belief at the Soviet collapse, it was a pleasure talking with you. Joy. Pleasure talking with you. Thank you. Thank you.

    That was Joseph Kellner, author of the new book The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse. Use the promo code 0POD to save 30% off his new book at our website. Cornellpress.cornell.edu,

    if you live in the UK, use the 30% discount CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combinedacademic.co.uk

    Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press podcast.