ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to demonstrate the importance of the late Soviet spiritual journeys of three Russian intellectuals who all, in different ways, encountered and embraced the Islamic tradition: Valeriia Porokhova, Viacheslav Polosin, and Sergei Moskalev. Their life stories illustrate the diversity and fluidity of late Soviet spirituality and religious seeking. They show the importance of contingency – the various people, places, and ideas they encountered in their lives – in shaping their individual ideas in different directions, yet the similarities between their journeys illustrate that they were also in many ways a product of their time and location in late Soviet Moscow. All three protagonists would become central figures in the “boom” of interest in Islam and Sufism within the Russian intelligentsia after 1991, but it is impossible to fully appreciate their stories and impact without a careful consideration of their formative years in the 1970s and 1980s.
