Thirty Years Ago, Traditional Faith of the Maris Emerged from the Shadows

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 18 – The Soviet government enormous difficulties in its effort to stamp out religious faiths not organized around churches with official hierarchies that the powers that be could subvert, seize or destroy. Precisely because of their lack of such features, traditional religions, often referred to as pagans, survived even the worst anti-religious campaigns.

            But these faiths too suffered. Those who took part in collective services were often arrested, and the sites where people met were destroyed, with the Soviet authorities blowing up or burning down places like special groves and rocks and trees those who followed these traditional faiths held to be sacred or magical.

            Consequently, when Soviet power collapsed, the followers of the traditional faiths reemerged from the shadows and became more publicly active, often organizing in ways that increased their influence, on the one hand, but made them more susceptible to government control, on the other.

            This month marks the 30^th anniversary of such a public reemergence of the traditional animist faith of the Finno-Ugric Maris. On October 11, 1991, several thousand Maris assembled in a holy grove for the first all-Mari prayers in many decades. Now, Maris are marking this anniversary not with one big meeting but many smaller ones (idelreal.org/a/31505209.html).

            Maris involved with the traditional faith of their nation are often reluctant to talk about their beliefs, fearful that the involvement of outsiders may compromise their faith and thus their nation. And many fear that a more public and more structured religion is at odds with what they have practiced for centuries.

            In this, they reflect many of the values of catacomb groups from other faiths who retreated from official organizations they believed to have been compromised by involvement with the civil authorities but with this major difference: the Mari pagans until recently never had such an official component.

            But they merit attention as one of the ways those with genuine faiths respond to official pressure from outside rather than as a mere ethnographic curiosity. And fortunately, the IdelReal portal has assembled a major collection of materials on the Mari faith and how it has evolved over the last decades (idelreal.org/a/28239000.html).