Saving the Native Faith: Religious Nationalism in Slavic Neo-paganism (Ancient Russian Yngling Church of Orthodox Old Believers-Ynglings and Svarozhichi)

Abstract

Today dynamically developing neo-pagan communities in Ural and Siberia supply a discursive frame for national identities, group values and political ideologies. They share norms of ethnic solidarity, national unity, traditionalism and national awakening, just as the concepts of national peculiarity and anti-westernism. Russian patriotism, devotion to tribal ideals and the preposition about world's multiplicity (material and spiritual) are considered as ethical principals. The subject of this paper is the neo-pagan community of Ynglings in Western Siberia and the movement Svarozhichi in Ural region. These two movements have seldom been discussed in research literature and they provide interesting case studies of nationalistic new religiosity in the provincial Russia. Participants of these communities are fostering ethnic revival: not only remembering the glorious past, but also rebuilding it, here and now. The movement`s legitimacy is based on a presumed continuity with the cultural heritage of pagan ancestors. They advocate a conception of Slavs unity based on Aryan identity and the willingness to give up Christianity, which is deemed responsible for two thousand years of identity aberrations.