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Death in the Early Twenty-first Century pp 63–84Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Quelling the “Unquiet Dead”: Popular Devotions in the Borderlands of the USSR

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Abstract

Communist ideology in the USSR envisioned a public sphere in which the presence of religious institutions and manifestations of belief were eliminated. However, lived religious practices circumvented or outright flouted Soviet secular mandates when it came to burial, funeral, and commemorative rites. Particularly after World War II, the Soviet state itself used commemorations of death, sacrifice, and transcendence in transformative rituals that made extensive use of the sacred. Such rituals privileged appeals to supernatural forces over those to an anthropomorphic God as worshiped in an institutional setting. Using ethnographic and archival sources, this chapter provides an analysis of the ritualization of death by those living in a state committed to promoting atheism and a supraethnic sense of nationality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In addition to deaths induced by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and the Revolution of 1905, Mark Steinberg notes the plethora of everyday violence in early-twentieth-century Imperial Russia in the form of brutal crimes, executions, assassinations, and diseases. This contributed to a consensus that “human life had lost value.” Steinberg, Petersburg: Fin de Siècle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 147. See also Irene Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

  2. 2.

    TsDAGO (Централний державний архiв громадських обєднань України [Central State Archives of Social Organizations of Ukraine]) f. 1, op. 24, str. 4263, ark. 227–230.

  3. 3.

    TsDAGO f. 1, op. 24, str. 4263, ark. 203–205. These priests were often accused of not strictly following Orthodox convention.

  4. 4.

    The Soviet government even pressed Metropolitan Sheptytsky of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church during World War II to use his moral authority in Galicia and beyond to quell inter-ethnic violence and restore order in the region. See Himka (2012).

  5. 5.

    Nineteenth-century ethnographers introduced the romantic concept of “folk religion” with their studies of peasant practices. Although there is much merit in these early works in terms of ethnographic detail, they tend to be ahistorical and bypass consideration of the relationship of lived religion to Orthodoxy and the socio-political context in which “folk religion” was practiced. For Ukraine, see Ivanov (1919).

  6. 6.

    Some of the best ethnographic analyses include Oksana Kis’, Zhinka v Traditsiinii Ukraïns’kii Kul’turi (Lviv: Institute Narodoznavstva NAN Ukraine, 2006); Christine D. Worobec, “Death Ritual Among Russian and Ukrainian Peasants: Linkages between the Living and the Dead,” in Stephen P. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg, eds. Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); earlier valuable studies include Vovk, Kh, Studiï z Ukraïns’koï Etnografiï ta Antropolohiï (Prague, 1928); and Ilarion, Metropolit Dokhristiians’ki, Viruvanniia Ukraïns’koho Narody (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Volyn’, 1965).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the valuable feedback I received from Alexander Agadjanian and Oksana Yurkova in preparing an earlier version of this chapter, which was published in Russian as “Perezhivaemaia religiia: Kontseptual’naia schema dlia ponimaniia pogrebal’nykh obriadov v prigranichnykh raionakh Sovetskoi Ukrainy” (Lived Religion: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Death Rituals in Soviet Ukrainian Borderlands) in Gosudarstvo, Religiia, i Tserkov’ v Rossii i za Rubezhom (State, Religion and Church in Russia and Abroad) 3/4 (30): 464: 484

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  1. History and Cultural Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Catherine Wanner

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  1. Catherine Wanner
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. IRIDeS Bureau, Tohoku University, Aoba, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan

    Sébastien Penmellen Boret

  2. John Carroll University , University Heights, Ohio, USA

    Susan Orpett Long

  3. Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA

    Sergei Kan

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Wanner, C. (2017). Quelling the “Unquiet Dead”: Popular Devotions in the Borderlands of the USSR. In: Boret, S., Long, S., Kan, S. (eds) Death in the Early Twenty-first Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52365-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52365-1_3

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