ABSTRACT

Slavophilism, Pan-Slavism, and Eurasianism are probably the most well-known and well-studied ideologies on Russia's "uniqueness." In the Soviet Union itself, the rebirth of Russian nationalism, supported by Stalin from the second half of the 1930s onward,6 indirectly contributed to the consolidation of neo-pagan discourses. Aryan theories have gained some popularity in Russian provinces. In the 1990s, the Institute for Vedic Culture, established first in Tyumen and then in Yekaterinburg, popularized a view of Siberia as the geographical heart of the Aryan continent. Russian proponents of Aryanism have not offered any doctrinal innovations. They merely repeat, translate, and update the existing repertoires about the white race that have already been well developed in Europe and the United States. Rodnoverie ideology is strongly influenced by the ideas of European Romanticism, specifically by Herderian perceptions that it is God's will that the diversity of the world should be cultivated.