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Accepted Paper:

Religion as a worldwide conspiracy: activists of the "Community of Free Ruses" movement in search of the causes of wars and epidemics  
Sergei Shtyrkov (EPHE PSL Research University Paris)

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Paper short abstract:

The "Community of Free Ruses" formed around Maria Kamenskaya understands religion as an integrated fraudulent project of legal enslavement of humanity. Any global cataclysms are interpreted by them as attempts by religious elites to stop the process of Slavs' realisation of their legal rights.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 2010s, a legalist millennialist movement of so-called citizens of the USSR who consider the modern Russian state a legal fiction has been gaining popularity in Russia. Looking as a leftist political project, this movement is largely based on the ontological and epistemological tenets of New Age spirituality. This involves treating most official institutions as organisations specifically designed to suppress the will and consciousness of the individual. A particular role in this criticism is played by the protest against religion, understood as an integrated fraudulent project of ideological and legal enslavement of humanity.

The paper examines the activities of the "Community of Free Ruses", formed around a “USSR citizen” Maria Kamenskaya. The movement is both a network of local organizations and an online community, united by the activities of a telegram and YouTube channels. Its members create their own dogmatics, language and system of rituals, which, in their opinion, are simultaneously based on the ultra-modern science and on the ancient system of knowledge which their distant Slavic ancestors allegedly possessed. The purpose of all this activity is to enable the members of the movement to carry out legally valid actions that destroy the secret system of laws and legal stipulations that prevent people from realising their rights to limitless resources.

In these conditions any global cataclysms - epidemics and wars - are interpreted by the "Ruses" as desperate attempts by religious elites to stop the unstoppable process of the Slavs' "awakening" from the nightmare of their legal disempowerment.

Panel Reli03
Religion, geopolitics, and conspiracy theories in post-socialist societies
  Session 1 Friday 9 June, 2023, -