34-IV Resilience or Resistance: Repressive Regimes and the Blurring of Boundaries Between the Political and Religious 16:40 - 18:20 Thursday, 2nd September, 2021 Roland Clark, James Kapalo

779 “Initiativniki”: Heroes of Faith & Political Dissidents. On the Specifics of the Relationship with the Government of the Illegal Baptist Movement in the Brezhnev-Era USSR

Nadezhda Beliakova Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation

Abstract

The Council of the Evangelical Christian Baptists Churches movement among the Evangelical-Baptists, which was structurally shaped in the 1960’s was known as the “Initiative Movement”. The “separated” movement is usually examined in historiography as part of an anti-totalitarian discourse, as a resistance movement that opposed the Soviet regime, or in the discourse of religious awakening (see the works of Michael Bordeaux). The appeal for religious freedom made them international actors of the Cold War (for more on the subject, see the article by Beliakova, Dobson (2016)). In my report, I will analyze the daily collective practices of Evangelical and see how they could be perceived and dubbed as political acts of opposition. I will consider the perception of their specific collective practices by both fellow believers and Soviet officials from various departments. Based on the texts of the petitions of the initiators themselves and their memoirs and oral history materials, I will raise the question of how much they themselves perceived their actions as a confession of faith or a political demonstration and how their activities were interpreted in the context of the Cold War. 781 Sacred Objects as Tools of Imperialism: Orthodox in Kazakhstan

Daniel Scarborough Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan

Abstract

In the late 19th century, some members of the hierarchy of ’s official Church advocated state support for Orthodox Christianity among settlers in Central Asia as a means of securing territory for the empire. Imperialists such as the priest, Ioann Vostorgov, argued that Orthodox farmers were more important than soldiers for the acquisition of territory. He proposed that holy relics be introduced into newly acquired territory in order to promote religious practice among local settlers. Yet, Church authorities were also concerned that popular Orthodoxy be protected from “schismatic” and “sectarian” practices. Thus, popular religion was both promoted and regulated. This paper discusses a pilgrimage by the bishop of Turkestan in 1910 to a holy spring near the modern city of Almaty, which had been locally venerated since the 1860s. It argues that this visit constituted an attempt by the hierarchy to coopt popular Orthodoxy for use as a tool of its own religious and political authority. The paper also examines the targeting of sacred sites by opponents of imperial authority in the 1916 uprising by the Muslim population and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, which suggest that the identification of Orthodox sacred space with imperial authority was shared by the opponents of that authority. 587 Ukrainian Political Religion: Structural Analysis, Dimensions of Becoming and Development

Olha Prymak Taras Shevchenko National University of , Kyiv,

Abstract

This paper attempts to substantiate the reality of the formation of a specific ideological complex and its acquisition of religious character in the form of political religion during the Euromaidan events of 2013-2014 and after them on the basis of structural-functional and phenomenological analysis. The investigation revealed elements of the Ukrainian political religion and their functional role in the whole complex, which gave grounds to consider them not purely situational organic social phenomena, but intertwined with following formed ideological system and particularly mythologized. Among such elements the author distinguishes: sacred symbols (elements of space (Institutskaya Street, some drawings on buildings, the Trade Unions building, St. Michael's Cathedral) and time (Maidan events as part of sacred history), sacred figures (Nebesna sotnya); “honouring memory” and actions as part of a political ceremony, where the events of 2013-2014 are an integral part of the consideration of Ukrainian statehood and independence at the vast majority of public official state events. Then the worldview principles of this religion are analysed, which include, in particular, the inadmissibility of ambiguous analysis or interpretation of the events of 2013-2014, that are in fact sacred in this system of views and actually correlate with the religious faith. The inquiry outlines the transcendent character of the original Maidan movement’s ideas (a symbol of the “Revolution of Dignity”) and the principle of coalescence in national, religious and political dimensions. The Author emphasizes that the Ukrainian political religion went beyond the platform of public ideas and became real political decisions and state regulation, which can be seen in specific legislation, in particular, on decommunization and the amnesty of the Maidan participants, which show support for state power elements and their participation in the relevant propaganda. In addition, the question arises of potential causes and motivation for the intensification of these processes in public space and their power implementation, with reflective understanding of the dynamics of socio-political change by scientific thought (the concept of “religious-political space”). The article concludes that the subsequent political religion was endowed with the inconsistency and low level of development, which has already caused its marginalization as a certain artificial ideological system and has gradually been demonstrating its populist nature as political technology. Finally, the article analyses the prospects for the development of Ukrainian political religion. 365 Materiality and Emptiness in the "Garden of Paradise": The Conversion of the Inochentist Spiritual Center into a Soviet Site of Proletarian Pilgrimage of 1920s

Dumitru Lisnic University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

Abstract

The presentation explores the textual evocations of the materiality of the "Garden of Paradise", an underground monastery and a utopian communal religious society from Oblast of Ukraine, produced before and after its violent closure by Soviet authorities in 1920. The study examines the intuitive side of the confrontation between believers and atheist actors over the role and place of religion in society, by looking at how at a local level people dealt with the absence of confiscated sacred objects, and identifies and analyses the effects of the agentive power of the missing material religion removed as part of the conversion of the monastery into a state collective farm. Removal, displacement, and replacement of religious and nonreligious objects and practices, each of them exercising its own agency, were part of a complex confrontation between religious actors and state officials, and were central to a creative process in which religious groups resisted or manifested resilience while atheist officials elaborated new antireligious policies. My research draws on newspaper articles written by sel'kory, or the rural correspondents of Soviet newspapers, who describe various aspects of everyday life, encountered people and events. My study is centered on the case of Inochentism, a vernacular version of Eastern Orthodox Christianity that emerged amongst Romanian-speaking peasants at the beginning of the 20th century in the northern part of today's Odessa Oblast of Ukraine.