Among Western Pagans, there is a joke: if you ask ten Pagans you will get eleven answers. This also aptly portrays Rodnoverie, the Russian movement of the followers of the pre-Christian Slavic spirituality. Therefore, even though some ritual and doctrinal uniformization has taken place within Rodnovers during the last decade, it is difficult to draw any general picture of what Rodnoverie beliefs are, what kind of background Rodnovers usually have or what kind of social views they attach to their religiosity.

Such differences have been addressed in earlier studies, but they usually focus on the ideological differences between publications. What seems to be missing is a grassroots perspective of the Rodnoverie believers which could make sense of the contradictory features. As with some studies of similar Pagan movements, we felt that general surveys of the Russian organizations do not fully capture the richness of the religion as it is lived by its adherents. Thus the aim of this article is to provide a contextual view by presenting six case studies.

The narratives presented in this chapter are based on people whom we have met in the course of our fieldwork, but the cases that are presented are composites of two to four individuals. The stories illustrate some of the backgrounds of Rodnovers, the paths by which they arrived at Rodnoverie, and some of the changes that have taken place in the movement over the past twenty years. These examples introduce different ways of understanding Rodnoverie and some of the common viewpoints within the movement.

History is omnipresent in this anthology on many levels. The are historical reasons why, for example, Czechs are more secularized than some other nations in the region, or why Bulgarians are more oriented toward Russia. Furthermore, because the Pagan movements being studied often make reference to the pre-Christian past, there are many references to the historical figures, tribal kingdoms, and ancient mythologies of the nations featured in this volume. The modern Pagan discussion about how that past should be understood often becomes entangled in the discipline of history itself, as individual communities either attempt to mold their practice to match a mainstream academic understanding of history or critique that mainstream view and offer alternative interpretations.

All of the countries represented here share a common historical experience of some form of twentieth-century communism. But even their experiences of communism were not the same, with some becoming part of the new communist reality during the First World War, while others were brought into the Soviet sphere only after the Second World War. Different nations suffered different hardships and traumas, such as the Holodomor (forced starvation) of Ukrainians 1932–3 or the mass deportations of ethnic Balts from their homelands in 1944–55. All of the countries experienced forms of dissent and revolt against the system, but their most intense expressions happened at different times and in different manners (the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968, the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, and the Singing Revolution in the Baltic states in 1987–91).