Introduction: the image of Islam in Russia

ABSTRACT

Russia has a long, complicated and, at times, contradictory relationship with Islam and Muslims. Islam is classified as one of the ‘traditional’ religions, along with Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism. Throughout Russia’s history across the centuries, the efforts by the state and Muslims to define their relationship have led to contradictory outcomes. This special issue grew out of a conference that took place in 2016, seeking to explore the complicated nature of the image of Islam in Russia from a multidisciplinary perspective. A collection of six contributions explore how Islam is viewed and projected in the public and media sphere in contemporary Russia, including state attempts to ‘manage’ the development of Islam, initiatives to transform the public image of Muslims and the charitable work of a mosque at the local level.     

Buddhism in Russia: challenges and choices in the post-Soviet period

This paper considers the position of Buddhism in contemporary Russia, with a focus on the three national republics where Buddhism is historically practised: Kalmykia, Buryatia and Tuva. I provide a brief overview of the history of Buddhism in each of the three regions. Turning to the current situation, I then review religion–state and intrafaith relations within Russia’s Buddhist republics. Of particular interest are the politics surrounding the pastoral visits of the 14th Dalai Lama to Russia. Since his last visit in 2004, the Russian government has consistently denied solicitations for visas for the Dalai Lama. I draw on interviews and focus groups conducted in Kalmykia and surveys from both Kalmykia and Buryatia to underscore the importance of such a visit both to Buddhists in these republics and to the larger Buddhist community in the Russian Federation. The paper concludes by reiterating the Dalai Lama’s opinion that Russia and Russia’s Buddhists will play a pivotal role in the development and preservation of Buddhism as a religious tradition.     

Values and behavior: Validating the refined value theory in Russia

Researchers recently introduced a refined theory of 19 basic human values. They demonstrated its utility and discriminant validity through associations with attitudes and beliefs, but not with behaviors. We assess the discriminant and predictive validity of the theory by examining associations of each value with everyday behaviors in a Russian sample. Two hundred sixty‐six respondents reported their values and the frequency with which they performed each of the 85 everyday behaviors during the past year. We derived indexes of 19 latent value factors and of 19 latent behavior factors using confirmatory factor analysis. A confirmatory multidimensional scaling analysis arrayed the values, excepting benevolence, on the circular motivational continuum of the theory. Structural equation modeling analyses supported the discriminant and predictive validity of the theory. Of the 19 values, 18 correlated more positively with the behavior chosen a priori as likely to express it than with any other behavior, and all values correlated negatively with behaviors chosen to express motivationally opposed values. The patterns of correlation between the values and behaviors approximated the sinusoid curve implied by the motivational continuum of values in almost all cases. The study suggests that the same motivational compatibilities and conflicts that structure value relations largely organize relations among value‐expressive behaviors. The study examines moderation of value–behavior relations by gender and tests the normative pressure explanation of variation in the strength of value–behavior relations across value domains. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Lenin and the Jacobin identity in Russia

By what process was the Jacobin identity transplanted into nineteenth-century Russian radical culture? According to the conventional account, the Jacobin label was coined by proponents like Zai?nevskij and Tka?ev. Lenin, in turn, is said to have derived his Jacobin identity from them, thus revealing the non-Marxian source of his political ideas. This article contests that interpretation through a study of the origin and spread of the Jacobin terminology in post-emancipation Russia. I show that the Jacobin identity in Russia was invented by anti-Jacobin populists and that there were scarcely any self-proclaimed Jacobins prior to Lenin. I also reconstruct the path by which Lenin came to identify with French Jacobinism. That path remained within the territory of Marxist theory from beginning to end.     

Hasidism in Tsarist Russia: Historical and Social Aspects

It is difficult to ascribe to Hasidism sets of distinctive regional characteristics, because Hasidism transcended both communal and national boundaries. Aware of this problem, the authors of this article seek to characterize Hasidism in Russia, while eschewing the essentialist assumption that Hasidism in Russia had a Russian character. The article describes Hasidism in Tsarist Russia from several perspectives. From an internal Jewish perspective, it discusses features of dynasties of hasidic leaders and the courts they lived in. This is followed by a discussion of relations between hasidic centers (the courts) and hasidic peripheries (the local communities). Relations between Hasidism and the Russian administration are also analyzed, as are the various ways in which hasidim in Russia adapted to the challenges of modernity, while hasidic leaders in Galicia and Hungary were usually more hostile towards modernization. Finally, the article describes the consequences of the upheavals of the First World War, Bolshevik Revolution, and the Civil Wars that followed. During these dramatic events and in their aftermath, the majority of the hasidic leaders in Russia moved to other places in Europe, America, and Palestine, and only some of them remained under the Soviet regime.     

Through the Iron Curtain: analytical space in post-Soviet Russia

This paper discusses the experience of working as an analyst in post-totalitarian Russia in order to explore some of the general theoretical and clinical issues involved in working in a different cultural and linguistic context, and the particular problems encountered in the Russian cultural context. It describes how the Soviet regime worked actively to create a new totally collective mentality through the destruction of individual differences and the collectivization of private space, and the effects this produced in the individual and collective psyche. It examines the difficulties encountered when working with Russian analysands in creating and maintaining the setting, in preserving boundaries, in creating analytical space, and in working with certain particular transference-countertransference dynamics. It focuses on the contrast between my own Western experience of space and the spatial experience of the analysands, and describes the process of helping them use analytical space to interiorize and create a new experience of psychic space. The paper uses dreams to illustrate some of these dynamics, and the particular psychic problems associated with the traumas created by totalitarian regimes.     

On the cutting edge: Family therapy training in Russia

This article describes briefly the founding of the Moscow Institute for Family Studies and some of the far reaching results of beginning to offer family therapy training in Russia, as well as some of the challenges of this endeavor.     

Income and Satisfaction in Russia

The Russian Federation has undergone some drastic economic, social-cultural, and political changes since 1989. The income of nearly half of the population has sunk below the poverty line, which has had an enormous impact on their emotional life. In this study, the relationship between income and satisfaction in Russia was examined. Three theories – need, comparison, and personality theory – were considered. Data were drawn from the first three waves of the Russet panel study (1993–1995). Russians were a little more satisfied with their income and life when they had a higher income. A positive change in income caused an increase in income-satisfaction over a one-year period. Results also showed that there was a reciprocal relationship between income-satisfaction and life satisfaction, indicating that in addition to bottom-up effects, top-down mechanisms were also at work: life satisfaction is partly a sum of domain satisfactions, but it also reflects a more trait-like character. Furthermore, within comparison theory, social comparison had the largest effect on income-satisfaction, closely followed by income needed (person-environment fit theory), and income deserved (equity theory) with the smallest effect. The need effect of income on income-satisfaction became non-significant when controlled for these three comparison mechanisms. Correction for measurement error of relationships between the endogenous variables resulted in overall stronger effects.     

Russia and the West: The Root of the Problem of Mutual Understanding

I examine issues tied to the allegeddifficulties of mutual understanding betweenRussia and the West. I show that some of thebackground to these issues lies in thedifference of culturally grounded differencesin perceptual and conceptual schemata. In theWest, a broadly understood Aristotelianism andin Russia Neoplatonism designate dominantattitudes to the world. The Russian `lunar'consciousness, in comparison with the `solar'consciousness of the West, tends by and largeprecipitously to totalize the world, and theexperienced multiplicity of the real isreferred to its imagined center. The differencebetween Russia and the West, limited to somedegree by mutual similarities, can become thebasis of an axiological and intellectualdialogue important for one side and theother.     

Intellectuals as missionaries: the liberal opposition in Russia and their notion of culture

The present article is primarily concerned with the imagined community of liberal intellectuals (starting with the Westernizers, in the 1840s, and ending with the Kadets and the participants of the October Revolution in the early twentieth century), rather than the community that “objectively” existed. This imaginary community constructed notions of the collective identity of their own group as well as that of Russian society. For this purpose, they instrumentalized the notions of “progress,” “backwardness,” “culturedness” (kul’turnost’) and “benightedness” (temnota), thereby creating hierarchies in which the “constructors” of collective identities granted themselves the important role of intermediaries between state and society. Special attention is paid to the prominent role Russia’s liberal historians played in this process insofar as historians possessed great power in nineteenth-century Europe—the power to tell their states and societies about their past, present, and future—and this transformed them into professional producers of (national) identities. Their work combined expert knowledge and ideological clichés in a highly complex manner. The central question posed is to what extent and in what respect the reality constructed by Russian intellectuals coincided with the actions of intellectuals in other European regions or, on the contrary, to what extent their discursive activities had a specifically local character.