From “Double-Belief” to “Religious Syncretism”: Research by N. M. Matorin and His Colleagues in the Context of Soviet Religious Studies in the 1920s–1930s

Abstract

The article discusses the peculiarities of the perception of peasant religiosity in the research of Soviet ethnographers of the 1920s–1930s who were members of the research groups led by N. M. Matorin (1898–1936). It is difficult to consider Matorin’s research activities outside the political history of Soviet ethnography, whose status and tasks were revised throughout the 1920s–1930s. In his early works, Matorin used the terms “double-belief” and “triple-belief”, while in later studies “religious syncretism” became the main subject of study. The traditional ideas of “mythological criticism” of Christianity were supplemented by Matorin’s “hypermythologism” of the semantic-paleontological approach. One of the group’s tasks was to show how the Soviet state was displacing the “old” way of life by collectivising agriculture, establishing schools and libraries, and bringing the “village” to a level of economic and social development close to that of the “city”. However, Matorin’s own texts pay very little attention to how the “'new” everyday life destroys the “old” one: his interest in the semantic-paleontological method was probably intended to create a universal model of cult development that could be used directly by anti-religious propagandists. Obviously, conceptually, the ideas and methods of Matorin and his followers were quite contradictory, forming a specific ethnographic “optic” determined by the ideological goals of modernisation and the “anti-religious struggle”. At the same time, the empirical material collected by the group’s members allows us to assess, at least in part, the peculiarities of the religious culture of the Soviet village in the 1920s and early 1930s.