Conference Presentations by Tatiana Vagramenko
Post-Soviet social, political and religious changes in Russia extended to indigenous peoples of S... more Post-Soviet social, political and religious changes in Russia extended to indigenous peoples of Siberia and stimulated the emergence of indigeneity as a political and cultural trend in Siberian ethnically-based regions. Among other factors, the indigenous movement bases its policy on the promotion of ‘indigenous religion’, which is represented as the foundation of indigenous revitalization. Throughout the expanses of Siberia, the multiplicity of local religious beliefs and practices that were repressed and driven underground since the 1930s began to come out onto the public sphere as symbols of indigenous resilience.
However, the post-Soviet process of ‘unmaking and making of relations’ (Humphrey 2002) implied multidimensional trajectories. Siberia has become one of the most striking spots of recent changes on the Russian religious map, and is associated with an increasing presence of various Protestant denominations and churches in its vast territories. The rapid influx of foreign missionaries and evangelicals, and the mushrooming of indigenous religious communities became a feature characteristic of the highly competitive Siberian religious landscape.
The paper draws on examples from author’s ethnographic research on conversion into Evangelical Christianity amongst the rural Nenets indigenous people of the Polar Urals (North-Western Siberia). Local religious landscape is highly unstable and is determined by anti-conversion activism and intertwined with the indigenous movement. In local public discourse the image of ‘alien sects’ that destruct ‘Nenets indigenous culture’ and Nenets authenticity is prevalent.
However, the author argues that newly established Evangelical communities amongst the natives often carry most expressed ethnic awareness and defensiveness. Evangelical conversion becomes a foundation for re-assemblance of Nenets system of identities and for revision of Nenets authenticity. New religiosity is simultaneously perceived as change of and return to the true ‘Nenetsness’, true Nenets ‘traditional lifeway’. In the given ethnographic case, religious conversion provides a foundation for ‘indigenous awakening’ and ideological tools to develop Nenets resistance to the dominant system. Thus, new religious practices are being transformed into a strategy of indigenous empowerment.
“A group’s vision of its future… arises out of its embedded understanding of its past”, argues Je... more “A group’s vision of its future… arises out of its embedded understanding of its past”, argues Jean Jackson (2009). Likewise, Marshal Sahlins points out that when people undergo culture change, encompassing “the existentially unique in the conceptually familiar”, they embed their present in the past (1985:146). In this paper I discuss how converted into Evangelical Christianity Khanty and Nenets of the Polar Urals re-narrate their family stories and local histories, while trying to suit it to their new Christian life. They revise their past, adjusting it to Christian paradigm, internalizing Christian values and key concepts such as prophecy, salvation, predestination, Old and New Testament, thereby creating a new history of salvation. As I will show, these narrative strategies produced a new sensibility and explicitly new awareness of indigeneity, moving the native converts into a process of indigenous revitalization.
While re-narrating the oral histories, native Christians constructed an alternative soteriology, in which God prevented the Devil’s intent and saved those whose offspring would be future religious leaders. When believers told their Christian testimonies and personal conversion narratives, they usually started by telling stories not about themselves, but about their grandparents and great grandparents, reconsidering their ancestors’ lives as God’s prophecy and Providence.
They have come to embed Christian logic and the Christian message in their social and personal histories, thereby defending their “cultural legacy”, and sacralizing it in Christian terms. Hence they did not merely embed their present in the past, but plunged it into their future, constructing a new project of the world future and salvation in which they play crucial role.
This approach was developed by native converts in a way that it became a means for empowerment. Remembrance and revision of the past has brought to self-conscious movements of cultural differentiation and essentialization, when Nenets and Khanty believers become aware and defensive of what they call their “traditional culture”. It was also the way to mobilize and reshape their indigeneity, both as ethno-consciousness and as political agency.
The paper examines the phenomenon of conversion into Evangelical Christianity amongst the Nenets... more The paper examines the phenomenon of conversion into Evangelical Christianity amongst the Nenets indigenous people of the Polar Urals (North-Western Siberia).
The affinity between Protestantism and modern economic development has been widely discussed after Weber, and the post-Soviet case is no exception. As scholars argue, in the early 1990s, the neo-Evangelical movements gradually contributed to social changes after socialism by bringing neoliberal capitalistic culture. The paper, however, outlines the case when Evangelical movement became a form of ‘ritual resistance’ to the process of disenchantment. Religious conversion amongst the Nenets became a form of un-making capitalism in the Arctic – a mode to slow down the Western shape of ‘modernity’.
Besides, newly established Evangelical communities amongst the natives often carry most expressed ethnic awareness and defensiveness. It might seem paradoxical, religious conversion into ‘Russian faith’ (as often Evangelical Christianity is perceived by the Nenets themselves) becomes a foundation for re-assemblance of Nenets system of identities and for revision of Nenets authenticity, when new religious practices are being transformed into a strategy of empowerment.
Papers by Tatiana Vagramenko
ISTORIYA
This article focuses on the formation of the image of the “ecclesiastic-monarchist underground” a... more This article focuses on the formation of the image of the “ecclesiastic-monarchist underground” and “True Orthodox church” as reflected in the documents and photographs produced by the Soviet secret police during the late-1920s to the late-1950s. The concept of the “True Orthodox church”, as an incrimination in criminal cases against religious believers, was developed on the pages of penal files, agent-operational files, secret reports and manuals of the secret police. It, however, oftentimes had little in common with the historical phenomenon of the catacomb True Orthodox church. The Soviet system framed popular religious traditions as political resistance and counterrevolutionary conspiracy in visual terms, a process in which the secret police too played an important role. The research integrates into the scholarship previously unknown archival documents, photographs, charts and photocollages pertaining to criminal cases against the alleged followers of the True Orthodox church. T...
Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea
Este artículo examina la historia de las prácticas y la experimentación fotográfica de la policía... more Este artículo examina la historia de las prácticas y la experimentación fotográfica de la policía secreta soviética, argumentando que la rica gama de metodologías visuales de la agencia contribuyó a crear una imagen duradera del "enemigo del pueblo" en el imaginario socialista soviético. La investigación integra en la historiografía documentos de archivo, fotografías, gráficos y fotocollages hasta ahora desconocidos, pertenecientes a causas penales contra los supuestos seguidores de la Iglesia Oortodoxa Verdadera de las Catacumbas. El análisis de este material visual revela los mecanismos internos de producción de conocimiento, cuando la fotografía de la policía secreta servía como una especie de "mapa ideológico" y cuando era objeto de manipulación, cuyo objetivo era exponer al enemigo y probar el delito.
Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea
Hidden Galleries: Material Religion in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe, Oct 1, 2020
This research is part of the project Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries i... more This research is part of the project Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe. The project has received funding from the European Research 2020 research and innovation programme No. 677355
National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest, 2021
The article tells the story of the use and perception of images of violence from an unusual trial... more The article tells the story of the use and perception of images of violence from an unusual trial against a group of believers, arrested in 1952 in Ukraine. Visitors to an exhibition held in 2019 at the Museum of Art in Cluj-Napoca were invited to look at two sets of photographs: originals and spruced-up copies coming from a recently opened criminal file retrieved from the SBU (former KGB) archive in Kiev. Through the reconstruction of the story of the people who suffered the arrest, we attempt to question the use of research ethics and of heritage in relation to retrieving from archives and displaying violent images of the past. What are the attributes and limits of showing? And what can we learn from the hand at work, the process of actively manipulating the image?
This digital archive presents visual and textual materials relating to the creative practices and... more This digital archive presents visual and textual materials relating to the creative practices and material culture of the religious underground located within the archives of the secret police in Central and Eastern Europe. These unique materials offer an insight into the religious lives of ordinary members of minority communities under repressive regimes in twentieth century Hungary, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. The archive is designed to enable researchers to find difficult to locate files that contain materials confiscated from religious groups as well as representations of these religious groups created by the secret police.
This research is part of the project Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries i... more This research is part of the project Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: Hidden Galleries in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe. The project has received funding from the European Research 2020 research and innovation programme No. 677355.The article discusses the use and perception of images of state violence in a museum space. It tells the story of an unusual trial against a group of believers, arrested in 1952 in Ukraine and charged as members of the “ecclesiastic-monarchist underground organization” the True Orthodox Church. Images from the group penal file (preserved nowadays at the Archives of the Ukrainian Security Service in Kiev) were displayed at the exhibition held in 2019 at the Museum of Art in Cluj-Napoca. Visitors were invited to look at two sets of photographs: originals and spruced-up copies, both produced by secret police officers. Through the reconstruction of the story of the people on trial, we discuss the role of images of state viol...
The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe
The chapter presents a close reading of a specific type of Soviet secret police (OGPU) files, nam... more The chapter presents a close reading of a specific type of Soviet secret police (OGPU) files, namely model collective criminal cases against religious believers published by the OGPU in the 1930s. The top-secret internal publications served as a sort of textbook for the OGPU’s struggle against the so-called “ecclesiastical-monarchist underground”. The latter was an umbrella term used by the Soviet secret police for multiple vernacular forms of Russian Orthodox dissent. The early-Soviet political repressions against the Russian Orthodox Church triggered the development of Orthodox dissent movements. When the majority of monasteries and churches were closed down, many believers continued their religious practises underground, in private homes, wandering from village to village. Numerous prophets, holy fools (yurodivye) and former priests, monks and nuns preached the arrival of the Apocalyptic Red Dragon personified by the Communists, hence the name "red-dragon-type organisations" used in Soviet anti-religious discourse. In 1930-1933, Stalin’s secret police launched the all-Union “liquidation campaign” against the growing Orthodox dissent movements. Selected penal cases were published as top-secret manuals, circulated internally, in order to facilitate coordinated and homogenised repressive actions against underground religious communities. This type of documents can also be read as a form of conceptualization and visualization of dispersed and often unseen dissent Orthodox communities. The files contained artistically made photo-collages and religious network schemes that sought to reinterpret secrecy, hierarchies and relationships of religious dissent. Drawing upon recently declassified and never published OGPU files from Ukrainian archives the chapter analyses narrative and visual technics the Soviet secret police developed to criminalise religion and discusses how they “aestheticized” their constructions of popular religious dissent turning them into organized political enemies. How these political and aesthetic strategies affected individual religious lives and determined survival strategies of underground communities is also a point of scrutiny in the chapter.
Sibirica
This article discusses the contribution of the chronotope as an analytic category in studies of C... more This article discusses the contribution of the chronotope as an analytic category in studies of Christian conversion, applying it to postsocialist religious changes in the Russian Arctic. Looking through basic categories of human experience—space and time—the article focuses on the comparative analysis of the two missionary movements working in northwestern Siberia—neo-Pentecostalism and Baptism. The article examines postsocialist Evangelical missionary movement among the Nenets people who live in the Polar Ural tundra. The Nenets tried out multiple faiths on the emerging religious spectrum, choosing in the end fundamentalist Baptism. The article elaborates on possible conditions that made Christian fundamentalism appealing in this part of the Arctic. I suggest that Nenets historical experience as a colonized periphery of the Russian state, particularly the Soviet experiments with space and time, have bridged Nenets social expectations and a radical form of Evangelical Christianity.
Theological Reflections: Euro-Asian Journal of Theology
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics
The article addresses a conflicting encounter of two ideologies of kinship, ‘natural’ and ‘religi... more The article addresses a conflicting encounter of two ideologies of kinship, ‘natural’ and ‘religious’, among the newly established Evangelical communities of Nenets in the Polar Ural and Yamal tundra. An ideology of Christian kinship, as an outcome of ‘spiritual re-birth’, was introduced through Nenets religious conversion. The article argues that although the born-again experience often turned against ancestral traditions and Nenets traditional kinship ties, the Nenets kinship system became a platform upon which the conversion mechanism was furthered and determined in the Nenets tundra. The article examines missionary initiatives and Nenets religiosity as kin-based activities, the outcome of which was twofold. On one side, it was the realignment of Nenets traditional kinship networks. On other side, it was the indigenisation of the Christian concept of kinship according to native internal cultural logic. Evangelical communities in the tundra were plunged into the traditional practi...
This is the introduction to the visual album Hidden Galleries: Material Religion in the Secret Po... more This is the introduction to the visual album Hidden Galleries: Material Religion in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe (Lit verlag, 2020) produced as part of the Hidden Galleries project which received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme No . 677355.
Религиоведческие исследования
В статье обсуждается тема восприятия и использования в музейном пространстве изображений государс... more В статье обсуждается тема восприятия и использования в музейном пространстве изображений государственного насилия. В центре внимания-история одного необычного уголовного дела 1952 года, когда группа верующих из украинских сел была осуждена как члены «церковно-монархической антисоветской подпольной организации "Истинно-православной церкви"». Фотографии из этого уголовного дела были представлены на выставке в 2019 году в Румынии. Посетителям было предложено посмотреть на два варианта фотографий арестованных верующих: оригиналы и их копии, отредактированные оперативниками. Реконструируя долгую историю архивного дела, авторы пытаются показать, как по-разному могут прочитываться архивные фотографии и тексты, и как они, становясь частью музейного пространства, обретают новый потенциал в формировании исторической памяти. В статье обсуждается вопрос трансформации травматического прошлого (многие участники которого еще живы) в культурное и историческое наследие, а также то, как эти «трудные» формы культурного наследия порождают новые смыслы и создают новые пласты исторической памяти.
This dissertation examines the phenomenon of post-Soviet Evangelical conversion among the Nenets ... more This dissertation examines the phenomenon of post-Soviet Evangelical conversion among the Nenets people living in the Polar Ural tundra. In the post-Soviet period new opportunities have been created for cross-cultural interaction, revealing a global religious market place and opening up Siberia to an ‘army’ of missionaries from different countries, making the Polar Urals a ‘battlefield’ of competitive missionary principles and life strategies. The Nenets people turned out to be open to religious change, and during the 1990s and 2000s many Nenets, both nomadic and settled, were converted into various types of Protestant Christianity. Moreover, on the emerging religious spectrum the most conservative form of Baptism, claiming from adherents the most rigorous alienation from their pre-converted past and social surroundings, appeared to be most authoritative in the region and the most successful in regard to its missionary initiatives among the rural Nenets.This appeared unexpectedly, g...
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Conference Presentations by Tatiana Vagramenko
However, the post-Soviet process of ‘unmaking and making of relations’ (Humphrey 2002) implied multidimensional trajectories. Siberia has become one of the most striking spots of recent changes on the Russian religious map, and is associated with an increasing presence of various Protestant denominations and churches in its vast territories. The rapid influx of foreign missionaries and evangelicals, and the mushrooming of indigenous religious communities became a feature characteristic of the highly competitive Siberian religious landscape.
The paper draws on examples from author’s ethnographic research on conversion into Evangelical Christianity amongst the rural Nenets indigenous people of the Polar Urals (North-Western Siberia). Local religious landscape is highly unstable and is determined by anti-conversion activism and intertwined with the indigenous movement. In local public discourse the image of ‘alien sects’ that destruct ‘Nenets indigenous culture’ and Nenets authenticity is prevalent.
However, the author argues that newly established Evangelical communities amongst the natives often carry most expressed ethnic awareness and defensiveness. Evangelical conversion becomes a foundation for re-assemblance of Nenets system of identities and for revision of Nenets authenticity. New religiosity is simultaneously perceived as change of and return to the true ‘Nenetsness’, true Nenets ‘traditional lifeway’. In the given ethnographic case, religious conversion provides a foundation for ‘indigenous awakening’ and ideological tools to develop Nenets resistance to the dominant system. Thus, new religious practices are being transformed into a strategy of indigenous empowerment.
While re-narrating the oral histories, native Christians constructed an alternative soteriology, in which God prevented the Devil’s intent and saved those whose offspring would be future religious leaders. When believers told their Christian testimonies and personal conversion narratives, they usually started by telling stories not about themselves, but about their grandparents and great grandparents, reconsidering their ancestors’ lives as God’s prophecy and Providence.
They have come to embed Christian logic and the Christian message in their social and personal histories, thereby defending their “cultural legacy”, and sacralizing it in Christian terms. Hence they did not merely embed their present in the past, but plunged it into their future, constructing a new project of the world future and salvation in which they play crucial role.
This approach was developed by native converts in a way that it became a means for empowerment. Remembrance and revision of the past has brought to self-conscious movements of cultural differentiation and essentialization, when Nenets and Khanty believers become aware and defensive of what they call their “traditional culture”. It was also the way to mobilize and reshape their indigeneity, both as ethno-consciousness and as political agency.
The affinity between Protestantism and modern economic development has been widely discussed after Weber, and the post-Soviet case is no exception. As scholars argue, in the early 1990s, the neo-Evangelical movements gradually contributed to social changes after socialism by bringing neoliberal capitalistic culture. The paper, however, outlines the case when Evangelical movement became a form of ‘ritual resistance’ to the process of disenchantment. Religious conversion amongst the Nenets became a form of un-making capitalism in the Arctic – a mode to slow down the Western shape of ‘modernity’.
Besides, newly established Evangelical communities amongst the natives often carry most expressed ethnic awareness and defensiveness. It might seem paradoxical, religious conversion into ‘Russian faith’ (as often Evangelical Christianity is perceived by the Nenets themselves) becomes a foundation for re-assemblance of Nenets system of identities and for revision of Nenets authenticity, when new religious practices are being transformed into a strategy of empowerment.
Papers by Tatiana Vagramenko
However, the post-Soviet process of ‘unmaking and making of relations’ (Humphrey 2002) implied multidimensional trajectories. Siberia has become one of the most striking spots of recent changes on the Russian religious map, and is associated with an increasing presence of various Protestant denominations and churches in its vast territories. The rapid influx of foreign missionaries and evangelicals, and the mushrooming of indigenous religious communities became a feature characteristic of the highly competitive Siberian religious landscape.
The paper draws on examples from author’s ethnographic research on conversion into Evangelical Christianity amongst the rural Nenets indigenous people of the Polar Urals (North-Western Siberia). Local religious landscape is highly unstable and is determined by anti-conversion activism and intertwined with the indigenous movement. In local public discourse the image of ‘alien sects’ that destruct ‘Nenets indigenous culture’ and Nenets authenticity is prevalent.
However, the author argues that newly established Evangelical communities amongst the natives often carry most expressed ethnic awareness and defensiveness. Evangelical conversion becomes a foundation for re-assemblance of Nenets system of identities and for revision of Nenets authenticity. New religiosity is simultaneously perceived as change of and return to the true ‘Nenetsness’, true Nenets ‘traditional lifeway’. In the given ethnographic case, religious conversion provides a foundation for ‘indigenous awakening’ and ideological tools to develop Nenets resistance to the dominant system. Thus, new religious practices are being transformed into a strategy of indigenous empowerment.
While re-narrating the oral histories, native Christians constructed an alternative soteriology, in which God prevented the Devil’s intent and saved those whose offspring would be future religious leaders. When believers told their Christian testimonies and personal conversion narratives, they usually started by telling stories not about themselves, but about their grandparents and great grandparents, reconsidering their ancestors’ lives as God’s prophecy and Providence.
They have come to embed Christian logic and the Christian message in their social and personal histories, thereby defending their “cultural legacy”, and sacralizing it in Christian terms. Hence they did not merely embed their present in the past, but plunged it into their future, constructing a new project of the world future and salvation in which they play crucial role.
This approach was developed by native converts in a way that it became a means for empowerment. Remembrance and revision of the past has brought to self-conscious movements of cultural differentiation and essentialization, when Nenets and Khanty believers become aware and defensive of what they call their “traditional culture”. It was also the way to mobilize and reshape their indigeneity, both as ethno-consciousness and as political agency.
The affinity between Protestantism and modern economic development has been widely discussed after Weber, and the post-Soviet case is no exception. As scholars argue, in the early 1990s, the neo-Evangelical movements gradually contributed to social changes after socialism by bringing neoliberal capitalistic culture. The paper, however, outlines the case when Evangelical movement became a form of ‘ritual resistance’ to the process of disenchantment. Religious conversion amongst the Nenets became a form of un-making capitalism in the Arctic – a mode to slow down the Western shape of ‘modernity’.
Besides, newly established Evangelical communities amongst the natives often carry most expressed ethnic awareness and defensiveness. It might seem paradoxical, religious conversion into ‘Russian faith’ (as often Evangelical Christianity is perceived by the Nenets themselves) becomes a foundation for re-assemblance of Nenets system of identities and for revision of Nenets authenticity, when new religious practices are being transformed into a strategy of empowerment.
The early-Soviet political repressions against the Russian Orthodox Church triggered the development of Orthodox dissent movements. When the majority of monasteries and churches were closed down, many believers continued their religious practises underground, in private homes, wandering from village to village. Numerous prophets, holy fools (yurodivye) and former priests, monks and nuns preached the arrival of the Apocalyptic Red Dragon personified by the Communists, hence the name "red-dragon-type organisations" used in Soviet anti-religious discourse.
In 1930-1933, Stalin’s secret police launched the all-Union “liquidation campaign” against the growing Orthodox dissent movements. Selected penal cases were published as top-secret manuals, circulated internally, in order to facilitate coordinated and homogenised repressive actions against underground religious communities. This type of documents can also be read as a form of conceptualization and visualization of dispersed and often unseen dissent Orthodox communities. The files contained artistically made photo-collages and religious network schemes that sought to reinterpret secrecy, hierarchies and relationships of religious dissent.
Drawing upon recently declassified and never published OGPU files from Ukrainian archives the chapter analyses narrative and visual technics the Soviet secret police developed to criminalise religion and discusses how they “aestheticized” their constructions of popular religious dissent turning them into organized political enemies. How these political and aesthetic strategies affected individual religious lives and determined survival strategies of underground communities is also a point of scrutiny in the chapter.
Highlighting the dual character of the visual and material aspects of religion in the secret police archives, the authors present the creative practices and lost cultural patrimony of repressed religious communities as well as the secret police’s visual means of knowledge construction about their targets. Beyond the archives, Hidden Galleries engages the voices and memories of descendant communities in an encounter with the secrets of the state weaving them into a fascinating story that both enriches scholarly debate whilst also accessible to a general audience.