Cult Phenomena

The campaign against so-called "cults" began long before the establishment of Center E. In fact, it is part of the process that led to the adoption of the 1997 Religion law.  In the 1990s, both foreign protestant evangelists and new religious movements ("NRMs," the neutral term scholars prefer to "cults") saw the former Soviet Union as an untapped market for the business of saving souls.  During those same years, the Branch Davidians and Heaven's Gate in the United States and Aum Shinrikyo in Japan became object lessons in the dangers of "cults" (especially since Aum was also active in Russia).  Homegrown NRMs such as the Great White Brotherhood of Maria Devi Khristos, the Mother of God Center, and the followers of Vissarion fueled a panic about malevolent Svengalis "zombifying" the country's youth.  

Much of the blame for the panic can be cast on the sensationalist media, but they had a great deal of help from self-proclaimed "experts" who warned of the NRMs dangers in no uncertain terms.  These experts were usually affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church (the organization that had the most to lose), most notably Alexander Dvorkin.  Dvorkin's most significant intellectual contribution to the anti-cult movement is the phrase that will (soon!) bring us back to the Citizens of the USSR: to describe organizations such as the Society for Krishna Consciousness and the Great White Brotherhood, he coined the term "totalitarian sect."  

It was a brilliant, if ironic, turn of phrase. Ironic, in that the American panic over NRMs "brainwashing" naive recruits was a repackaging of 1950s Cold War anxieties about Communist "thought reform" (most notably dramatized in The Manchurian Candidate), and brilliant, because it took advantage of the then-current desire for distance from the Soviet "totalitarian" past.  Dvorkin creates a folk devil who is both foreign (like the Hare Krishnas) and disturbingly familiar (a variation on his country's own experience with the suppression of individual freedoms).   "Totalitarian sect" reconciles two ideas that might seem mutually exclusive, in that totalitarian theory posits the attempt at a total control that admits no difference of opinion or approach, while the word "sect" denotes a group that has splintered off from the mainstream.  Totalitarianism thus gets projected onto a small group that can be condemned in good conscience, a group that can be despised by cultural conservatives for its deviation from the norms, and by liberals for its offenses against human agency.  

Perhaps one of the inevitable ramifications of defining the state as the subject and hero of history is how easily the deviation from social norms is traduced as a crime against the state. The fight against totalitarian sects (I'm abandoning the square quotes, but only because they are tedious) became part of the ever-expanding scope of Center E, lumping religious minorities and political protesters together with terrorists and anarchists. Recently, Dvorkin's mantle has been taken up by Roman Silantiev, a professor of the history of religion who has held a series of positions within the Russian Orthodox Church.  As a specialist in Islam, Silantiev has spent most of his career offending Muslims, but he also frequently speaks out about new religious movements.   Now Silantiev is developing a unified theory of social deviance that implicitly justifies Center E's determination to lump all "threats" into a single category:  "destructology."  And the Citizens are the theory's most visible test case.

In the run-up to unveiling his new theory, Silantiev was frequently asked to comment on the Citizens, and he wasted no opportunity to paint them as a cult-like threat to the country's morals.  Even without Silantiev, the media had frequently compared the Citizens to religious "sects," even deploying a nickname sure to set off alarm bells: "The Witnesses of the USSR."  The association in the mind of a Russian speaker  is obvious: the Russian name for the Jehovah's Witnesses translates back into English as "The Witnesses of Jehovah."   American non-believers tend to dismiss the Witnesses as a minor annoyance ("How can I close the door on them without being rude?"), but in Russia, they are more likely to be perceived as sinister . The Jehovah's Witnesses have a long history of persecution dating back to the Soviet period, and they remain in the public mind as a prominent example of a totalitarian sect.  [2] 

Silantiev's only problem with this term for the citizens is apparently that it is not derogatory enough. Together with Olga Strelakova, he published a short book in 2020 called Necromancers of Our Times (Nekromanty nashikh dnei). The book is about the Citizens, or, as he and Strelakova like to call them, the "necrocommunists." In so doing, they are focusing on the magical thinking that I have already argued is at the heart of the movement, but for them, this is no playful metaphor.  While it does contain a fair amount of useful information about the ideological similarities between the Citizens and the Western groups we have already discussed,  Necromancers of Our Times has one task: to make the reader see the Citizens as a totalitarian cult.  The Citizens' ideology thus loses any political import, since the group is now just an extravagant variation on the familiar theme of religious sectarianism.  

In particular, Silantiev and Strelakova are at great pains to connect the Citizens with the various strains of neopaganism that have developed throughout Russia over the past three decades.  These connections are real, but not primary; like the group's antisemitism, neopaganism is something that part of the movement picked up through the predictable process of conspiratorial osmosis.  The Foundation for Traditional Religions, a Russian neopagan website that monitors media coverage of pagan themes, responded to a positive review of the book by pointing out that Silantiev and Strelakova are continuing the process of "connecting (neo)paganism with yet another extremist marker.” In other words, the authors are using the years of negative press about neopagans to show the Citizens in a bad light, while also using the Citizens to smear the pagans.  As villification goes, it's quite efficient. 

Notes

[1] Even Varlamov engages in a a similar approach, if in a more casual manner.  Immediately after  his statement about the "freaks," he writes "But as for the organizers....of course, something has to be done." (Граждане СССР" остались без президента и без страны.")

[2] See Emily B. Baran's Dissent on the Margins: How Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses Defied Communism and Lived to Preach About It (Oxford: Oxford Up, 2014), as well as her articles “From Sectarians to Extremists: The Language of Marginalization in Soviet and Post-Soviet Society,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 46, no. 2 (2019): 105-27 and “Contested Victims: Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Russian Orthodox Church, 1990 to 2004,” Religion, State and Society 35, no. 3 (2007): 261-78.