Critical Juncture: Church Slavonic and the Discourse of Cultural Preservation in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

To date the subject of religion has been sorely neglected in the field of discourse studies. The encyclopedic 872-page Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Schiffrin et al., 2003), for example, manages to bypass the topic altogether. Yet of all the changes that have occurred in postcommunist Europe, the most striking has arguably been in the realm of religion. Societies which had hitherto been predicated on communist ideologies and which had pursued programmes of anti-religious propaganda and repression have now ‘got religion’. Of course, religion was never completely obliterated during the communist era. And different paths of religious transformation have obtained in post-communist Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, the former East Germany, and so on, depending on a number of interlocking historical, socio-political and confessional (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox) factors, as is evident from Sabrina Ramet’s panoramic comparative study, Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia (1998). Nevertheless, across the region the metamorphosis is undeniable and extraordinary.