Among Western Pagans, there is a joke: if you ask ten Pagans you will get eleven answers. This also aptly portrays Rodnoverie, the Russian movement of the followers of the pre-Christian Slavic spirituality. Therefore, even though some ritual and doctrinal uniformization has taken place within Rodnovers during the last decade, it is difficult to draw any general picture of what Rodnoverie beliefs are, what kind of background Rodnovers usually have or what kind of social views they attach to their religiosity.

Such differences have been addressed in earlier studies, but they usually focus on the ideological differences between publications. What seems to be missing is a grassroots perspective of the Rodnoverie believers which could make sense of the contradictory features. As with some studies of similar Pagan movements, we felt that general surveys of the Russian organizations do not fully capture the richness of the religion as it is lived by its adherents. Thus the aim of this article is to provide a contextual view by presenting six case studies.

The narratives presented in this chapter are based on people whom we have met in the course of our fieldwork, but the cases that are presented are composites of two to four individuals. The stories illustrate some of the backgrounds of Rodnovers, the paths by which they arrived at Rodnoverie, and some of the changes that have taken place in the movement over the past twenty years. These examples introduce different ways of understanding Rodnoverie and some of the common viewpoints within the movement.

INTRODUCTION

In the late 1980s and early 1990s with the end of the totalitarian system and the emergence of freedom of speech in Russia, people (especially young people) got the opportunity to communicate freely with each other for the first time. Technology often enabled this communication, such as the Efir (“Ether”) or Leningrad Telephone Air chat rooms of the 1980s (when callers dialed a certain secret telephone number, they could interact collectively). There, various issues were discussed, including Pagan-related topics like the historical re-enactment and role-playing movement (originally, largely inspired by the books of J. R. R. Tolkien in the USSR). FidoNet (a BBS system for PCs with modems) became widely available after 1990 and carried similar topics. Nevertheless, as some participants later explained “Nothing there was serious.” By the mid-1990s, the “Runet” (that is, the Russian-language segment of the Internet) had spread to cover an increasing number of people in the former USSR. In 1996, the first Pagan-dedicated website on Runet appeared. It involved Vadim Kazakov, who at that time left the Moscow Slavic Pagan community and organized the SSO (Union of Slavic Communities).

Today, Rodnover Runet resources include not only followers from Russia, but also the Russian-speaking population of the former USSR and other 2011 the Russian Federation ranked first in the number of Internet users in Europe.