“The Soviet New Age” Dissertation Report from Emma Friedlander

AABS is pleased to recognize Emma Friedlander for the completion of the grant associated with her dissertation “The Soviet New Age: Alternative spirituality and the collapse of communism, 1975-2005,” for which she received the AABS Dissertation Grant in the 2023-2024 cycle.

The Impact of an Award: Report from Emma Friedlander

After the completion of her dissertation, Emma Friedlander submitted a reflection to AABS.
We thank her for her permission to publish her thoughts, which have been lightly edited.

The AABS dissertation grant supported my dissertation research in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania during the 2023-2024 academic year. In combination with other grants, this funding allowed me to dedicate several months to focused research abroad. As the past few years have highlighted, the best laid research plans are subject to unexpected changes. The grant from AABS was invaluably flexible. I was able to alter my research plans, extend or shorten trips, and receive funding in advance with the full understanding and support of the grant administrators. I was lucky to receive support that specifically promoted work in all three Baltic countries, the only grant of its kind to do so. I am also grateful to be integrated into the Baltic studies community through AABS.

Introduction

My dissertation is titled “The Soviet New Age: Alternative spirituality and the collapse of communism, 1975-2005.” In the years surrounding Soviet collapse, a craze for the paranormal swept the masses, despite decades of official atheism. The trend emerged in the 1970s, when people grew interested in mysticism, alternative healing, and paranormal ideas. It accelerated in the 1980s and exploded during perestroika. Celebrity TV psychics garnered hundreds of millions of viewers, horoscopes dominated the press, and faith healers took advantage of the new free market. After Soviet collapse, alternative spirituality remained popular through the now independent countries.

In my dissertation, I examine the popular Soviet New Age as a lens onto the lived experience of the Soviet collapse. I follow the historically majority Christian regions of the Eastern European areas of the Soviet Union then subjected to state atheism: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Moldova. I examine similarities and differences of the Soviet New Age in these countries to ask how the popular culture of Soviet collapse persisted and diverged through the former republics.

My primary research sites are Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. For historians of the former Soviet Union, the growing focus on the Baltic countries for archival research is often practical as other research sites have become inaccessible. But the Baltic countries play a pivotal, distinct role in the Soviet New Age story — and Soviet and European history as a whole — in their own right. They were a real hub of New Age activity and cultural innovation. They were also distinct from one another. Despite often being lumped together as “the Baltics,” I found that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania each experienced this widespread phenomenon in a distinct way, informed by regional history and context.

From October 2023 through May 2024, I conducted research in Riga, Latvia; Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia; and Vilnius, Lithuania. I previously conducted preliminary research in these sites in summer 2022, so this return trip allowed me to cover different collections and revisit previous ones in greater depth.

The main archival collections I consulted included television, radio, and film committees and editorial plans; the Latvian SSR Ministry of Health; Communist Party central committee and district committee files on ideology; the Latvian SSR “Knowledge” society; and newspapers, magazines, and film reels from the 1970s through the 2000s. At the National Library I read popular books and memoirs.

Probably my favorite find in Latvia, deep in the editorial archives of the State Television and Radio Committee, was a 1989 television interview with psychic Jānis Zālītis. Zālītis was a famous sexologist who wrote the sensational 1981 sex manual “In the Name of Love.” He then pivoted to a career in extrasensory healing. Zālītis debuted his televised seances in 1989 on the heels of the biggest perestroika-era celebrity psychics, like Anatoly Kashpirovsky. In this interview, Zālītis sells his TV seances to the republican audience by stressing that they are in the Latvian language. This addresses, he claims, complaints from Latvian viewers of Kashpirovsky’s Russian-language seances, who report to have a negative physical effect from his broadcast hypnosis because it is in Russian. I love this source because it shows how even the most pertinent questions of national identity and language politics also danced in the realm of the paranormal.

I delved into archival collections from TV, radio, and film, the Ministry of Health, and newspaper and magazine editorials from the 1970s-2000s. Inspired by my conversations with locals, I was led down a path of archival discovery that constituted my favorite archival find from Estonia. In the early 1980s, a production plant in Estonia started manufacturing AU-8, a so-called miracle drug (comprising ingredients like pig stomach and watermelon rind). It became a sensation as people from across the Soviet Union flocked to Tallinn to queue for the so-called miracle drug. The ensuing state case against the manufacturers convicted them of false advertising of a quack cure-all and evoked language of pseudoscience, charlatanism, and superstitious belief in miracles. The case highlights the growing role of entrepreneurism and health in the alternative spirituality and wellness through the 1980s. This was fomented by popular fanaticism and people’s desperation for health cures.

I studied files from the Lithuanian Communist Party central committee and districts, dedicated to ideological questions; television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and propaganda reel materials and their editorial production archives; the Ministry of Health and Council of Ministers. Many important popular culture materials were found by chatting with locals, unleashing relics of the phenomenon that I could only find by talking to the people who lived it. This is how I found a wonderful, quintessential Lithuanian New Age artifact: described to me as perhaps the first Lithuanian internet meme, a Catholic priest discussing his UFO encounter in the 1990s in a viral TV interview.

Conclusion

In carrying out the research funded by AABS, my driving question was, what is this country’s Soviet New Age story? I found that the Baltics, sometimes assumed to play a largely unified role in Soviet history, need to be understood as three distinct countries who experienced this phenomenon in different ways. These differences — what was popular, how did it mix with religious tradition, what were its unique innovations, how did it interact between the Russian imperial core and the looming West — reflect the distinct place of these countries in a larger Soviet, post-Soviet, and European context.

During the AABS grant period, I collected all the materials required to now write a first draft of my dissertation.

– Emma Friedlander, 2024