Historian on Soviet collapse lessons for today's democracies

For decades, Russia’s “wild 1990s” have been remembered for economic hardship, libertarian freedoms, and rampant crime. Historian Joseph Kellner suggests another defining feature of the era: profound spiritual disorientation. In his book, The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse, Kellner tells the cultural story of the “end of history” and argues that the USSR’s disintegration was the final blow to a centuries-old European idea of progress. He also describes what emerged from the ruins as a “seeking phenomenon” — an explosion of mystics, astrologers, and fringe sects in Russia in the early 1990s. For Meduza, journalist and author of the Playing Civilization research project Georgy Birger spoke with Joseph Kellner about what drove post-Soviet Russians toward radical new worldviews, how this spiritual crisis paved the way for Putinism, and why the West — now facing its own crises of meaning and truth — might be walking a similar path.