More Than Alive: The Dead, Orthodoxy and Remembrance in Post-Soviet Russia

The process of the Orthodoxization of memory in Russia started long before the Russian Orthodox Church engaged in the memory politics. It was a grassrooted process initiated by both the living and the dead. By using religious symbols and rituals, various groups of living were restoring their relationship with the forgotten dead of Soviet repressions and war. When the Moscow Patriarchate has returned to active public life and started developing its religious memory infrastructure, the Orthodoxization process got a new up-down dimension. Finally, a turn of the Putin’s regime towards religious commemorative practices caused the disappearance of the boundary between religious and political memory. The bricolage memory, consisting of elements of Orthodox tradition and Soviet memory culture, appeared.

Zuzanna Bogumil is an assistant professor at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences. She specializes in memory studies, museum studies and anthropology of religion. Since 2006, Bogumil has worked on the memory of Soviet repressions, focusing on its secular, religious, postsecular and decolonial dimensions. Bogumil has authored, co-authored or co-edited several books.
Tatiana Voronina is an independent researcher interested in the social and cultural history of the late Soviet Union, rural history, memory politics, religion and oral history. She holds PhDs in history from the European University in Saint Petersburg (2005) and the University of Zurich (2022), and she currently works on late Soviet culture. Voronina is the author of a monograph and has published a dozen articles in leading academic journals on Soviet memory, late Soviet temporalities, and urban and rural inequality.