Religious Seminars and the Ethics of Truth

Visegrad Lecture Series

Religious Seminars and the Ethics of Truth: Alternative Discourses of Faith and National Imagination in the Late Soviet Underground

by Ivan Sosnovskii, independent researcher

This presentation examines how late Soviet religious dissidents created underground seminar communities and samizdat journals as alternative spaces of thought and communication. It focuses on networks connected to the journal Obshchina and other religious intellectual circles in Moscow and Leningrad in the 1970s. The study treats these initiatives as counter-publics, where texts and personal ties helped to form an alternative moral and intellectual community under conditions of surveillance and repression.

A central question is how participants understood “truth” not as knowledge, but as an ethical practice based on faith, personal responsibility, and readiness to accept risk. Drawing on samizdat materials, persecution records, and émigré sources such as Radio Liberty archives, the presentation argues that these groups developed a non-state vision of Russia and a distinct language of resistance.

The presentation may be followed online on Zoom:

https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/91299097034?pwd=GuYK1oqUT8ZZRLA3amgQNQQ1KLmeE9.1

Meeting ID: 912 9909 7034 Passcode: 315067