Rodnovery

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Rodnovery — from the Slavic rod, the kin-line that runs from a household back through its ancestors to the gods, joined to vera, faith — names itself “native faith”: the religion proper to a people rooted in a place, as against a creed carried in from elsewhere. In Russian the word is Rodnoverie, in Ukrainian Ridnovirstvo, in Polish Rodzimowierstwo; the family of cognates is itself the first datum, since the movement spans the Slavic languages without a common tongue, a common founder, or a common church. It is a loose family of contemporary Pagan movements that aim to reconstruct and revive the pre-Christian religion of the Slavs. Adherents are found across Russia, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech lands, the Balkans, and the Slavic diaspora in North America, organized in scattered communities — obshchina in Russia, hromada in Ukraine, gromada in Poland — rather than under any single hierarchy. What binds them is a wager: that beneath the thousand years since the official conversion of the Slavs there survives an ancestral way of belief and worship, recoverable from what conversion left behind. It belongs to the broad current of modern Paganism, the family of twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals that also includes the reconstructed Celtic Druidism and the various streams of contemporary Witchcraft — sibling movements, distinct from the Slavic case in their materials and their gods, but moved by the same conviction that a pre-Christian religion can be brought forward into the present.

A reconstructed wooden idol of Perun raised in 2009 on Old Kyiv Hill, Kyiv — open-air idols of this kind are central to Rodnover worship. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

That wager has a long prelude before it became a religion. The Romantic nationalism of the early nineteenth century already turned to the pre-Christian past for a national soul, and in 1818 the Polish antiquarian Zorian Dołęga-Chodakowski published O Sławiańszczyźnie przed chrześcijaństwem (“On Slavdom before Christianity”), reading Christianity as a foreign layer pressed over a buried native culture. The argument — that the real Slav lay underneath the church — would outlast its author. Between the wars it hardened into organized circles. In Poland, Jan Stachniuk (1905–1963) founded the journal Zadruga in 1937, naming it for the old South Slavic extended-family commune and fusing an anti-Catholic cultural program with currents drawn from Max Weber and Georges Sorel; Stachniuk fought in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and was later imprisoned under the communist regime. In the Ukrainian emigration, the philologist Volodymyr Shaian dated his vocation to 1934, to a folk rite witnessed in the Carpathians, and built from it the framework of a Ukrainian native faith. His onetime disciple Lev Sylenko broke with him and carried the project into the diaspora as RUNVira — Ridna Ukrainska Natsionalna Vira, the Native Ukrainian National Faith — formalized in North America in 1966; where Shaian kept a pantheon, Sylenko narrowed it toward a single god, Dazhboh, so that even within the Ukrainian line the polytheist and the monotheist parted ways.

As a visible, organized phenomenon, though, Rodnovery belongs to the years around 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened religious life across the region and lent urgency to the search for distinctly national, distinctly Slavic roots, and communities multiplied quickly. In Russia the Kaluga Slavic Community was founded in September 1993 by Vadim Kazakov, a student of the polemicist Alexey Dobrovolsky (Dobroslav); out of such groups grew the Union of Slavic Communities of the Slavic Native Faith, established in 1997 and, in 2014, the first Rodnover body formally registered by the Russian state. Alongside it the Circle of Pagan Tradition gathered communities of a markedly different temper. Across the border the Ukrainian scene carried Shaian’s and Sylenko’s competing legacies, while Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Balkan groups developed their own registers — so that the single name covers a wide internal range from the outset.

The reconstructed pantheon and the shape of practice

The gods Rodnovery worships are assembled from scattered notices. Perun the thunderer — wielder of lightning and the axe, lord of oath and war, whose idol Vladimir of Kiev is recorded to have raised and then, at the conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, ordered dragged to the river — stands at the head of most reconstructions. With him come Veles, god of cattle, wealth, the dead, and poetry, set in mythic opposition to Perun; Svarog, the sky-smith, with his son Svarozhich the fire; Dazhbog the sun-giver; Mokoš, the one securely attested goddess, spinner and moist mother of the earth; and regional figures such as the four-faced Svetovid of Rügen, known from the Baltic Slav shrines. This is a pantheon reassembled rather than received: a working order imposed on a scatter of names whose original relations the sources never fully preserve.

A reconstructed idol of Perun near the National Museum of the History of Ukraine, Kyiv — the thunderer heads most Rodnover reconstructions of the pantheon. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

How these powers stand to one another is itself disputed within the movement: some communities are frankly polytheist, treating the gods as distinct persons; others read them pantheistically as faces of a single living nature; others again are henotheist or monotheist, taking Rod — the kin-source whose name the whole faith bears — as the one ground from which the pantheon issues, sometimes described as a sevenfold unfolding. Many groups also work with a threefold cosmos drawn from the Book of Veles — Prav, the binding cosmic order; Yav, the manifest world of the living; Nav, the unseen world of the dead and the ancestors — though the source of that triad is exactly the contested matter taken up below.

Worship is conducted in the open. The proper setting is the kapishche, a shrine ground laid out under the sky around carved wooden idols and an altar fire — the Temple of Svarozhich’s Fire at Krasotinka in Kaluga Oblast is among the best-known Russian sites — rather than an enclosed church, on the principle that the native gods are met in the land itself. The year turns on a wheel of seasonal festivals: Kolyada at the winter solstice, marking the sun’s rebirth; Maslenitsa at winter’s end; Kupala at midsummer, the festival of fire and water; and the spring and autumn ancestral days. Through all of it runs the veneration of rod and of the dead, who are addressed by name and held to remain present to their descendants, and of the land as the body of the faith. (What such rites mean to those who keep them is the matter here; their performance is not.)

Adherents of the Slavic Native Faith at an open-air celebration in Poland — Rodnover worship is held outdoors rather than in an enclosed church. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

A thin record and a famous forgery

The historical footing is uneven, and scholarship says so plainly. The written record of Slavic paganism is thin and was set down almost entirely by Christian outsiders — the Kievan Primary Chronicle, Thietmar of Merseburg, Helmold’s Chronica Slavorum, the Arab traveler Ibn Fadlan, Procopius — who described the old cult in order to record its overthrow, much as the Norse gods reach us chiefly through the Christian-era Icelandic texts that frame the world-tree Yggdrasil, and as so much of the world’s mythology survives only in the hand of those who had already left it behind. No native scripture, no liturgy, no theology in the Slavs’ own hand survives the conversion. Reconstruction therefore proceeds by triangulation: chronicle notices, the deep reservoir of folk song, calendar custom and ethnography, and the comparative method that sets Perun beside the Vedic Parjanya and the Baltic Perkūnas, reaching toward a common Indo-European inheritance much as the study of the historical Vedic religion reaches back through its own hymns. The result is genuine scholarship in some hands and free composition in others, and the boundary between them is where the movement’s deepest fault line runs.

The Zbruch Idol, a four-faced stone pillar of the ninth or tenth century, now in the Archaeological Museum of Kraków — among the few surviving material witnesses to pre-Christian Slavic cult. — photo by Silar, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Nothing exposes that fault line like the Book of Veles. Presented as an ancient Slavic chronicle incised on wooden tablets — the so-called Isenbeck planks, conveniently lost — it narrates centuries of pre-Christian Slav history and religion, and it is the source of the Prav–Yav–Nav cosmology that many Rodnovers prize. The text surfaced through the émigré amateur Yuri Mirolyubov, who claimed to have copied the tablets before the war, and was first published in the 1950s in the San Francisco Russian-émigré magazine Zhar-Ptitsa with Aleksandr Kurenkov. The philological verdict is overwhelming and old. The Soviet linguist Lydia Zhukovskaya flagged it as fabricated as early as 1960; Oleg Tvorogov’s detailed 1990 study concluded that its language was an artificial construct invented by someone ignorant of the actual history of the Slavic languages; the eminent linguist Andrey Zaliznyak reached the same judgment — the grammar and vocabulary mix modern Russian, Church Slavonic, and made-up archaisms in combinations no genuine pre-Christian text could contain. This is the scholarly consensus, not a contested point. And yet the Book of Veles lives a second life, championed in the popular editions of writers such as Aleksandr Asov — circulated in the same broad current of post-Soviet esotericism that revived interest in occult and ancient-wisdom literature — and held by some communities as authentic ancestral scripture, while other Rodnovers, conceding its modern manufacture, set it aside. A forgery, in other words, has been read back into the very record it was forged to supply — the case study, within the tradition, of its own central problem.

That problem the movement names for itself. Some Rodnover currents treat reconstruction as candid creative restoration: the old faith is gone, its fragments are real, and what is built from them now is admittedly new, an honest work of the living rather than a relic of the dead. Others insist on an unbroken hidden transmission — that the faith was never fully extinguished but carried in secret through the Christian centuries in folk custom, family memory, or concealed lineage, and is now merely brought back into the open. Between candid restoration and claimed continuity lies the whole spectrum, and the same artifacts — a chronicle line, a harvest song, the Book of Veles — are read by one camp as raw material openly reworked and by the other as proof of survival.

The political range

The movement’s politics are as varied as its theology, and have drawn the heaviest scholarly attention. A substantial set of currents is ethnic and nationalist, framing the native faith as the birthright of a Slavic people and its blood, and in their sharpest forms shading into the far right; the anthropologist Victor Shnirelman has documented the racialist and antisemitic strands within Russian Rodnovery, including the Aryan and anti-Khazar mythologies attached to figures such as Dobroslav, in studies running from his 1998 Russian Neo-Pagan Myths and Antisemitism onward. Against this pole stand currents that are ecological, pacifist, or universalist, reading the old gods as a path back to the land and to a tolerant religion of nature rather than a marker of descent; the Circle of Pagan Tradition explicitly defined itself in part by its distance from national-chauvinism, and in 2002 a coalition of Russian Rodnover bodies issued the Bitsa Appeal, condemning extreme nationalism within the movement and urging spiritual practice over political ideology. Kaarina Aitamurto, in her 2016 study of Russian Rodnoverie, found the boundaries between right-wing, left-wing, and apolitical adherents genuinely blurred rather than cleanly drawn, and Mariya Lesiv and Adrian Ivakhiv have traced in the Ukrainian case how the same native faith can underwrite a territorialized ethnic nationalism for some and an ecological, civic, alternative vision of the nation for others. Observers caution against collapsing the two: the single name covers communities that would refuse to recognize one another as kin.

The scholarship

Rodnovery arrived late enough to have been studied as it grew, and the academic literature is now substantial. The first English-language monograph on modern Russian Paganism, Kaarina Aitamurto’s Paganism, Traditionalism, Nationalism: Narratives of Russian Rodnoverie (Routledge, 2016), built its account around two contrasting Russian communities — the Circle of Pagan Tradition and the Union of Slavic Communities of the Slavic Native Faith — and parsed three competing narratives by which Rodnovers explain why the faith is needed; it is Aitamurto who proposed treating Rodnovery as an umbrella term gathering several forms of religiosity rather than a single creed. The regional spread is mapped in the edited volume she produced with Scott Simpson, Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe (Acumen, 2013), whose opening chapter by Simpson and Mariusz Filip lays out the tangle of native-faith vocabularies across the Slavic and neighboring languages. The Ukrainian case has its own literature: Adrian Ivakhiv’s prize-winning In Search of Deeper Identities: Neopaganism and “Native Faith” in Contemporary Ukraine (Nova Religio 8.3, 2005) reads the movement through a notion of territorialized ethnicity, and Mariya Lesiv’s The Return of Ancestral Gods: Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an Alternative Vision for a Nation (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013) follows Ukrainian and diaspora communities through the interplay of spirituality, national identity, and ecology. The critical study of the movement’s far-right edge belongs largely to Victor Shnirelman of the Russian Academy of Sciences, whose work from the 1990s documented the Aryan and antisemitic myths circulating in parts of Russian Rodnovery. Running beneath all of it is the philological dossier on the Book of Veles — Zhukovskaya’s 1960 note, Tvorogov’s 1990 analysis, Zaliznyak’s verdict — which the historical and linguistic guilds treat as closed even where the movement does not.

What holds across that whole range is the founding ambiguity itself. To reconstruct a religion from fragments is to act on the conviction that the gods of the rod are recoverable — and to confront, in the same act, the suspicion that what the fragments yield is not the buried faith but a new one wearing its face. Rodnovery does not resolve this. It lives in it: every kapishche raised under the open sky, every name called at the ancestral feast, every reading of a chronicle or a forged tablet is at once a claim of continuity with the converted Slavs and an admission that the continuity must be made by those who claim it. The native faith is, by its own internal logic, the religion that worships ancestors it has had to reinvent in order to reach.

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