The introductory paper deals with theoretical issues related to the study of ritual and the sacred in secular and post‑secular cultures. Social research in recent decades shows that the unambiguous opposition between religion and secularism is not quite workable as a socio‑historical concept, and that perceptions of the sacred in modern societies turn out to be dynamic and contradictory in their own way. The articles collected focus on various anthropological aspects of the production of the sacred in Russia in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The results of these studies allow making several general observations. First, we observe a very dynamic picture of the processes of sacralisation and ritualisation in various segments of everyday life. Secondly, in present day culture, personalised ritual agents are gradually losing their status and generally giving way to impersonal (and accordingly poorly controlled) forces. Thirdly, the types of sacralisation observed in contemporary society are related to the formation of a new ontology that blurs the boundaries between natural, social and moral order.

The article deals with various actors of the anti‑sectarian movement in Post‑Soviet Russia. More specifically, the focus is on their rhetoric against the new religious movements, as well as the values they claim to defend. The text identifies a tradition of anti‑sectarian rhetoric in imperial, Soviet, and post‑Soviet Russia. Then follows a discussion of the current state of the anti‑sectarian movement and the key organisations and individuals within it, as well as the values they declaratively defend. The article also offers hypotheses about the origins and mechanisms of the anti‑sectarian rhetoric that emerged in post‑Soviet Russia. In addition, the paper outlines the grounds to argue about the existence of an overall anti‑sectarian field in post‑ Soviet Russia, of which the actors, regardless of their affiliation with religious institutions, produce a similar rhetoric based on the need to protect the boundaries of the secular sacred from the encroachments of the religious movements they criticize.

The paper focuses on the resemantisation and the new mythologies of Russian obscene language in present day Orthodox culture and larger cultural contexts. The social history of Russian obscene language (known as mat or maternaia bran’) still appears to be quite obscure and intriguing. Unlike profanities in many other European languages that employed a lot of symbols and topoi from Christian culture, Russian swearing concentrated predominantly on sexual symbolism. Certain researchers still follow the hypothesis by Boris A. Uspensky who argued that Russian mat was historically related to pre‑Christian mythology and rituals including the allegedly existing pagan cult of the “Mother Earth”. Yet this point of view does not seem to be well‑grounded; religious connotations of Russian mat Uspensky proceeded from were probably ascribed to particular formulae only in the 16th and 17th centuries. However, the hypothesis of “pre‑Christian origin” influenced the reception of Russian obscenities in present day Orthodox and secular discourses where mat can be considered as a survival or even a driving force of paganism and Satanism. On the other hand, both Orthodox and other religious / spiritual ontologies in contemporary Russia usually involve “holistic” understanding of obscenities, the latter believed to transmit particularly harmful “energies” which are understood and discussed in terms of physics and biology. Proceeding from these beliefs, ideas, and practices, the article deals with how post‑secular religious ontologies elaborate their own ideas and senses of language that paradoxically intertwine linguistic and semiotic ideologies, moral reasoning, political expectations, and the image of human body. This new mythology of language is obviously linked (but not limited) to the New Age or holistic worldview, where conventional boundaries between material and spiritual, individual and collective, human body and its environment are erased or blurred, and deserves special investigation as an important part of post‑secular and postmodern ontology in general.

The article deals with a pattern of Soviet civil rituals of the 1960s where a soldier killed at the WWII was “given” a personal voice to address the living. In an atheist state, listening to the voices of the dead should not have been a conventional metaphor; however, the organizers of these ritual performances took what was happening as seriously as possible. The article focuses upon the story of three such “letters to the future” written for the so‑called “time capsule” in 1967. These letters were created by members of the Novorossiysk teenage club “Schooner of Peers” on behalf of the teenagers who volunteered for the WWII and died there. These letters offer a frame of communication between the deceased teenagers of the 1940s and the yet‑to‑be‑born teenagers of the 2010s. The paper considers the case as an example of Soviet ritualized speech. Drawing on Erwing Goffman’s theory of “social voice”, the article places the practices of speaking on behalf of the dead in the broader context of late Soviet state‑building practices that used the figures of dead young volunteers to promote the concept of the “unpaid debt of the living to the dead.”

The article presents the results of the study of discursive construction and moralization of subjectivity in court documents. The research is based on the analysis of court decisions in criminal cases under Article 148 of the Criminal Code, Part 1 and Part 2 (better known as the article ‘on insulting the feelings of believers’), as well as demanding compensation for moral injury for ‘insulting the feelings of believers’ under Article 151 of the Civil Code. The documents create a model of an intersubjective situation of insult, considered with the reliance on the internal states of the participants of this situation — intentions in the case of the accused and emotions in the case of the victims, which are expressed through the legal language. The discursive reconstruction of the intentions of the accused is framed with reference to legal moral categories, this creates an image of a person who consistently and deliberately violates the norms of the moral order. To protect this order, ‘religious feelings’ translated into terms of moral injury and moral suffering. Hence, in the context of the legal protection of the ‘feelings of believers’, the anti‑social behaviour of the accused is contrasted with social, i.e. moral, behaviour, namely, respect for certain (most often Orthodox Christian) symbols. The typical antipode for the accused is a religious person, or, rather, someone who properly demonstrates an emotional reaction to acts of transgression of moral boundaries.

The article examines the contemporary art exhibitions in twenty‑first‑century Russia that sparked accusations of “blasphemy” and extensive public debate and prompted law enforcement interventions. In the first part of the article, I retrospectively illustrate the history of the most prominent “blasphemous” contemporary art exhibitions in Russia, leading to the application of Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code against the artists. These incidents, which followed the “Pussy Riot” case, resulted in the amendments to the Criminal Code that tightened the penalties for offending religious sentiments. Consequently, religious and radical nationalist movements were empowered to approach law enforcement agencies to initiate investigations and hold artists and activists accountable. In the second part of the article, I delve into two exhibitions held in one of the most conservative Russian state art museums, the State Hermitage Museum. These exhibitions are the 2012 Chapman Brothers’ “The End of Fun” and the 2016 “Jan Fabre: Knight of Despair — Warrior of Beauty.” Employing the concept proposed by the Dutch anthropologist Jojada Verrips, I aim to explore how the critics of the exhibitions conceptualized their outrage and offended sensibilities. Additionally, I analyze how various stakeholders, including Hermitage staff, Orthodox believers, and the prosecution, contested and justified the “blasphemous” nature of the exhibitions.

The article examines modern discourses about miracles to show how the discourses legitimize the sacred, i.e., justify its presence in the picture of the world. These discourses contain narratives about miracles as having a normative character: there are stories about proper and improper actions in contact with a miraculous object and about negative or positive results, desirable or undesirable transformations in the life of someone who had such contact. The article analyzes institutional religious discourses of the Russian Orthodox Church in comparison with modern vernacular discourses. The institutional religious discourses use narratives about miracles to form and maintain confessional norms and ideas, and they view negatively the vernacular forms with its emphasis on magical use of the sacred. At the same time, the article argues that the vernacular religious discourses generate miraculous plots, including those that ensure the reproduction of confessional norms and ideas.

The article is devoted to the study of the extent to which the fiction can have predictive potential in describing the religious life of the modern era and, in particular, the figure of the Orthodox priest in the Russian Empire. The focus is on the epistolary novel by Alexander Sturdza “Letters on the Offices of Holy Orders” (1840– 1841). The priest depicted by Sturdza must meet the requirements of modernity, be a “priest of the 19th century.” Moving away from the situation of estate‑based social structure, Sturdza depicts a priest who overcomes all cultural and social differences, excludes himself from the market interactions and triggers gift economy and early religious socialization of the children. All this allows him to “become the conscience of the Christians,” regardless of the social barriers separating them. The priest himself, in turn, cannot be imagined without a confessor, who allows him to withstand the stress of intense relationships in modern society. The priest image in Sturdza’s novel is significantly ahead of his time: many changes can be found in both normative narratives about the Orthodox priesthood and the social processes in Russian society. In this sense, we can say that the author’s “imagination” in this case was an artistic development of his historical anticipations that allowed him to predict the further course of development of the Russian religious life.

The author tests the cultural hypothesis of the evolutionary theory of modernization by R. Inglehart and K. Welzel using the cases of Muslim regions of Russia (North Caucasus and Volga region). Based on survey data from online communities, the author demonstrates that the classic idea of the theory about greater secularization in richer regions also works for Russian Muslim‑majority regions. Tatarstan and Bashkiria turn out to be less religious both in terms of subjective religiosity (self‑identification and the importance of God in life) and objective religiosity (fasting, frequency of prayers and visiting mosques), while the regions of the North Caucasus (Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Karachay‑Cherkessia) show the opposite trend. Moreover, the subjective religiosity of respondents turns out to be much higher than the objective religiosity. At the same time, the index of objective religiosity turns out to be a suitable instrument for measuring religiosity in Muslim societies, explaining up to half of the variation in subjective religiosity. The social class of the respondents (income, age and education), the share of the Russian population and ethnic homogeneity, as well as the economic situation of the region, are also correlated with religiosity, which once again confirms the hypothesis of the above theory.