‘The deepest sort of spiritual disorientation’

Historian Joseph Kellner on the zeitgeist of the Soviet collapse and its lessons for today’s democracies

For decades, Russia’s “wild 1990s” have been remembered for economic hardship, libertarian freedoms, and rampant crime. Historian Joseph Kellner suggests another defining feature of the era: profound spiritual disorientation. In his book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, Kellner tells the cultural story of the “end of history” and argues that the USSR’s disintegration was the final blow to a centuries-old European idea of progress. He also describes what emerged from the ruins as a “seeking phenomenon” — an explosion of mystics, astrologers, and fringe sects in Russia in the early 1990s. For Meduza, journalist and author of the Playing Civilization research project Georgy Birger spoke with Joseph Kellner about what drove post-Soviet Russians toward radical new worldviews, how this spiritual crisis paved the way for Putinism, and why the West — now facing its own crises of meaning and truth — might be walking a similar path.

The following Q&A has been lightly edited and abridged for length and clarity.

— For those unfamiliar with your work, can you briefly describe what your book is about?

— The book is, I believe, the first cultural history of the Soviet collapse. There are many good studies of late-Soviet culture; it’s a booming field right now. Previously, historians would have called it the Era of Stagnation and said that nothing significant happened in the 1970s and 1980s. Now, there’s a major effort by many scholars to reverse that and reassess late-Soviet culture. There are also histories of the collapse — roughly 1989 to 1993 — that focus, for good reasons, on the economic crisis and the various traumas of transition.

Instead, I focus on a spectacular and visible flourishing of new and radical worldviews, spiritualities, and orientations that cropped up all at once around the time of the collapse. That includes the popularity of Hare Krishnas, astrologers, apocalyptic sects, and [Anatoly] Fomenko’s New Chronology. I see all these things together as an acute manifestation of the cultural crisis that comes with the collapse.

What’s all this about?

The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse examines a range of phenomena familiar to anyone who experienced the 1990s in Russia that were previously treated as marginal in broader research. Kellner deliberately sets aside institutional Orthodoxy and mainstream nationalism, considering them a different kind of response to the same crisis. Instead, he focuses on:

• Television psychics like Alan Chumak and Anatoly Kashpirovsky: “Extrasensory” healers who offered remote cures and promised psychic intervention to audiences of tens of millions during Perestroika. Late-Soviet viewers would place glass jars in front of their televisions for Chumak to “charge” and watch Kashpirovsky’s mass hypnosis sessions.
• The astrology boom: The rapid spread of late-Soviet and early-1990s astrology, offering a “cosmic perspective” and a new form of epistemic authority amid the USSR’s collapse.
• The Hare Krishna movement: A Soviet underground and then openly post-Soviet Krishna Consciousness scene, where seekers embraced bhakti Hinduism, ritual practice, and an Orientalized vision of “the East.”
• The Vissarion sect (Church of the Last Testament): An apocalyptic Siberian commune founded by Sergei “Vissarion” Torop, blending Russian messianism, ecological utopianism, strict communal living, and a reimagined sacred history, and attracting tens of thousands of followers in the 1990s — including many former doctors, teachers, musicians, and politicians.
• Anatoly Fomenko’s New Chronology: A radical revision of world history by mathematician Anatoly Fomenko that compresses recorded time to roughly the last millennium, posits a Eurasian “Great Empire” centered on Rus, and casts official historiography as a chain of falsifications, while modeling a mathematically grounded, anti-traditional form of historical authority. One of its faithful evangelists was the famed chess player — and now opposition leader in exile — Garry Kasparov.

The book takes up the people I collectively call “the seekers” and looks at two things. First, why did they come to believe the things they did? For instance, why was astrology so credible to so many people all at once? Or “extrasensory healing” [by TV psychics] like Kashpirovsky and Chumak? And second, why the seeking? Why in this period do you see this amazing public searching? Because not every crisis brings this kind of cultural ferment.

Essentially, I find that what unites all these people is a set of deep questions about the world. They are looking for orientation in a world where it has been lost. There are questions of intellectual authority: who can we believe, and where does true knowledge derive? Then, [there are] questions of identity: what does it mean to be a Russian at this time? In Russia, the identity question often takes this form of East versus West: are we Europeans, or are we not? And finally, questions about the direction of historical time — where it is headed and where it has been. There is a deep spiritual orientation to all this: how do we affix ourselves to something permanent when so much of our world has eroded?

— The question about time was probably tied to the concept of the “end of history.”

— Certainly. The concept of the “end of history” didn’t survive very long, but the notion was a triumphal one in the West and in the United States, where it was coined. In the Soviet Union, there was another, real sense to this concept. Soviet ideology was fixated on history, historical meaning, and the “right” direction of history. So, when that great vision collapsed completely, it left people afraid and unsure where anything was headed.

That is why people were looking to astrology, for instance; it offered a cyclical understanding of the world, putting the crisis in a much larger context. Or they looked to nostalgic worldviews — Hare Krishnas are, in fact, very nostalgic. They looked for different golden ages because the Soviet one so obviously failed.

— How did those questions about the direction of historical time manifest?

— When I look at these different groups — like the one around Fomenko’s New Chronology — I see a fixation on time. Fomenko is a Soviet mathematician who, in the 1990s, came out with this extraordinary revision of history, claiming all history happened in the last 1,000 years. He shifted all of history around and made a total, psychedelic new understanding of time.

I think the reason everyone was so fixated on time was that, during the crisis, there was a sense that the past was now unknown. Glasnost and the revelations of the Soviet press of the 1980s were all about uncovering Soviet crimes. Everything you learned in history class turned out to be untrue. History teachers were writing to the newspapers saying, “I can’t believe I’ve been lying to my students all this time.” There was no consensus anymore about what the past was.

Then, when the crisis is so acute, the future becomes equally dark. There is no natural “bottom” to the crisis, no sense of when it will end. People feel isolated and completely lost in time. That lends the sense of temporal displacement — of being nowhere. That is the deepest sort of spiritual disorientation.

— The way I understand it is that the loss of the Soviet timeline was, in a way, more psychologically damaging than the loss of the Soviet economy.

— The two things are hard to compare. The material crisis was staggering — male life expectancy dropped six years, murder and suicide rates spiked. But I do think the spiritual crisis is a meaningful compounding factor. After all, you can have an economic crisis of a similar scale — like the Great Depression — without this fundamental loss of orientation or this desperate attempt to reimagine everything about the world.

The spiritual crisis came from how certain Soviet ideology was about the big questions. Knowledge derived from reason along Western scientific lines; Soviet identity was a fixed thing with a clear place in world history. Even if people didn’t literally believe in communism per se by the 1970s and 1980s, it was the water they swam in. It was in the media and the education [system]: the values of Soviet society still rested on these Enlightenment values and the sense of progress. Seeing it collapse in a couple of years was spiritually jarring.

Perhaps the book’s biggest claim rests on the fact that Soviet communism and its value system were an heir to the Enlightenment and saw itself explicitly as carrying that mantle. And in this way, Soviet communism derived from the same time and place as 19th‑century liberalism. So, the collapse represented the end point of a very long, shared European arc of history, thought, and philosophy — a major, and perhaps the final, blow to the broader idea of historical progress, that shared 19th‑century belief among liberals and socialists that progress was effectively a law of history. Even after World War II, both sides of the Cold War remained fundamentally optimistic about progress, whereas 1989 and the Soviet collapse marked the end of this centuries‑long arc. This is an event whose consequences are still unfolding, including in the West, and whose full scale will be hard to grasp without greater historical distance.

In this sense, the “seekers” of the late-Soviet and early post‑Soviet period are like the canary in the coal mine: they are the first to go out actively searching for entirely new worldviews once this big idea of history has died.

— One thing I’ve found surprising is the claim that figures like Chumak or Fomenko were not just anti-rational charlatans, but also a way to preserve a scientific way of thinking. Can you explain that?

— Certainly. Kashpirovsky, for example, claimed authority as an educated psychiatrist; it was his medical background. The astrologers I focus on almost all have backgrounds in the hard sciences, such as mathematics, astronomy, or physics. At no point do they forsake that education; they still put enormous value on science. The dispute was over who defined science. And the truth is that it’s impossible to define pseudoscience. It is defined by whoever holds the scientific authority to do so.

In a time when official Soviet authorities were losing credibility, these people offered alternatives, but they did it in the language of science because there was still a deep understanding that science is a powerful window to the world. Even the Soviet Hare Krishnas, unlike their American counterparts, tried to demonstrate the scientific validity of their beliefs. It demonstrates a deep, lasting Soviet respect for science, even while, from the outside, it looks like unscientific ideas coming to the fore.

— Can you recall any immediate impact of seekers on Russian politics in the 1990s?

— It’s interesting because the seekers themselves were almost universally not invested in politics. They considered politics to be superficial and were not after political solutions. That is an important thing that gets lost. People try to draw lines from the 1990s to the Putin era to explain Putinism, and while one helps explain the other, these seekers were not necessarily proto-Putinists.

Rather, political fatigue was almost universal in the early 1990s. Having invested so much hope in Gorbachev’s reforms and seen them fail, then seeing [Russian President Boris] Yeltsin as an inspiration and quickly hating him — there was no sense that the political system was going to save people. So, as they had in the 1970s and 1980s, they looked elsewhere for meaning. They looked outside the official political world.

— But did this movement still affect the current state of Russia?

— Yes. What is remarkable is that Putinism has concrete, confident answers to the driving questions of the 1990s: the shape and direction of history, what it means to be Russian, and who you can trust. It has a clear view of the West and where Russia stands. The questions that plagued the 1990s are now “settled” in a somewhat frightening mode that is hostile to pluralism. That may be one reason for the appeal of Putinism — it provided answers in a very uncertain world. The right wing always has a very simple story to tell, and it can be a very compelling story.

— So, did these fringe theories of the 1990s simply migrate from the grassroots to the Kremlin?

— I think most of these specific currents that I wrote about subsided by the end of the 1990s. The energy behind extrasensory healing, astrology, and the Hare Krishnas was in retreat by the time Putin came on the scene. However, there are still mystical currents within Russian culture — for example, people often see Eurasianism as a mystic, quasi-scientific nationalism. So, there are continuities you can find, and I think Eurasianism is probably the easiest one to point out.

— In an article for Jacobin, you argue that similar things are happening in the U.S. now. Who would be the Kashpirovsky or Fomenko of this process?

— I don’t think we have them yet. We don’t have an equivalent seeking phenomenon, although we certainly have a lively world of conspiracy thinking. We don’t have a similar cultural crisis, at least not in the form that I described in the Soviet case. And we haven’t had a big economic crisis yet — though everyone is expecting it, whether from the debt ceiling games, an AI bubble, or fossil fuels. I wouldn’t be surprised if such a crisis caused a dramatic spiritual seeking or “Great Awakening.”

For now, the major cultural figures setting trends are more explicitly political and tend to be on the right wing — people laying out visions that get a lot of followers. People like [white nationalist] Nick Fuentes and [right-wing blogger] Curtis Yarvin. But I don’t know anyone who I would draw parallels directly to Kashpirovsky and Chumak.

[Billionaire Peter Thiel’s theories about the Antichrist] might be as close as we get — the merger of reactionary politics and fundamentalist evangelical Christianity with tech utopianism/dystopianism. That is the making of a frightening ideology. All the ingredients are here. If an American “Fomenkoism” were to emerge with a charismatic leader, I think it’s easy to imagine millions of readers because there is nobody in America who has the authority to dispute such a theory anymore.

— Historians rarely draw parallels between Russia’s case of de-democratization and current worldwide and U.S. trends. The usual explanation is that democracy was too young and fragile in Russia, and that’s why it crumbled. What arguments do you have in favor of learning from post-Soviet Russia’s experience?

— Well, I can’t dismiss out of hand that democracy requires institutional memory. Imagining a democratic Russia is a very difficult task, especially compared to the United States, where there is a deeply rooted sense of popular power. But the common feature of both countries, as they move in the opposite direction of democracy, is the current state of capitalism. In the 1990s, Russia got the business end of capitalism — the sharpest and most aggressive form of the system — applied to a country that, coming out of the Soviet experience, simply could not compete on the world market and was picked apart by foreign capital and by its own state through corrupt privatization under Yeltsin. The rise of the oligarchs in a state with weak institutions and a huge concentration of wealth in a small circle of people is very hard to square with democracy, because those people end up functioning as a kind of pseudo‑government, producing the mafia state of the 1990s.​

The Yeltsin government attempted to install neoliberal capitalism as it existed in the United States: eliminating subsidies, leaving no real space for unions, keeping taxes low, and placing great faith in markets to solve every problem. In Russia [this was a] catastrophic and very fast [process], whereas in the U.S., it has been a slower, forty‑year process with similar results. In both countries, this has meant huge inequality, a dramatic loss of faith in the political system and in democracy, and a concentration of power in a very small set of oligarchs — though Americans are allergic to that word, even as today’s billionaires surpass the Rockefellers and Carnegies of their time. These shared developments make the similarity of the reaction unsurprising, and what we are seeing now is the long‑standing conflict between capitalism and democracy becoming extremely sharp.

Interview by Georgy Birger for Meduza