The National Turn in the Soviet New Age, 1989-2000

• In Event: Allah, Tengri, Science, or Something Else?: Alternative Spirituality, Religion, and Nation-building in Perestroika and the Post-Soviet Era

Abstract

In December 1989, famed psychotherapist Jānis Zālītis delivered the first psychic healing session broadcast live for Latvian television. TV healing sessions had been massively popular across the USSR of late, as celebrity psychics Anatoly Kashpirovsky and Alan Chumak drew in hundreds of millions of viewers from all corners of the country. In advertising his session, however, Zālītis claimed that Latvians should watch his sessions instead, for it was reported that Kashpirovsky’s Russian-language seances produced negative physical effects in Latvians. Zālītis’s remarks were grounded in the language debates occurring in Latvia and other non-Russian republics during Soviet collapse and concurrent national independence movements. This paper examines the gradual shift from a unified, transnational, and often Russian-language “Soviet New Age” of the 1970s-1980s to the nationally-based spiritual cultures emerging in the 1990s. Ultimately, this paper argues that the popular New Age provides a window onto the complicated, transitional cultural landscape of extended Soviet collapse.

Author

• Emma Carol Friedlander, Harvard U