Esotericism and Politics in Early Post-Soviet Russia: Forms of Political Participation

Abstract

The political orientation and participation of esoteric groups and movements remain under-researched and restricted by many stereotypes. There is an oversimplifying tendency to classify all esoteric groups as extreme right-wing and proto-fascist or, by contrast, as counter-cultural, left-wing, anti-authoritarian, and progressive. An equally persistent stereotype, often expressed by insiders, is that esotericism is beyond politics, immersed in thinking only about eternal or spiritual issues. In this paper, analysing the practices and discourses of Russian esotericists of the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we will show that the forms of interaction between the esoteric and political spheres are much more complex and ambiguous. What were esoteric groups like in the times of political cataclysms, namely during the Soviet collapse and subsequent turbulences of the 1990s? Which political participation and exclusion forms were practised inside Russian esoteric communities? Analysing the 1990s esoteric biweekly newspaper Anomaly, published in St Petersburg (1990–2019), we have identified two types of esoteric civic activity, which we call esoteric citizenship (actions and political statements performed by esotericists) and metaphysical politics (esoteric forms of political participation, such as predictions, divination, channelling, and utopian projection). We consider these concepts helpful in describing different variants of esoteric civic participation while being aware that the boundaries between both are rather flexible.