russian ethnic nationalism and religion todaydevelop their own individual religious practices. Sevastianov, for
example, gives the following account:
I was an Orthodox Christian, I got baptised when I was 24 years old... But for ten years I was beset by questions about the Orthodox
Church, to which [the Church] didn’t give me satisfactory answers.
I gradually moved away from Orthodoxy and now don’t consider
myself a Christian, although I consider very many Orthodox rituals
effective, necessary and I carry them out.^20
In her blog, the nationalist poet and activist Marina Strukova
describes a period of religious searching: ‘Christianity was always
alien to me, I do not even know why. From 2001 until 2007
I considered myself a native believer. Then I took up Judaica’
(Strukova 2013a). She is studying Hebrew and reports positively
on Judaism:
Jews consider only Jews as neighbours. For Christians it is everyone.
The Christian interpretation is striking, but unrealistic – like, for
example, requiring every person to be able to fly into space or compose
a symphony – not everyone is capable. Judaism is realistic. (Strukova
2013b)Another source of the secularists’ indifference to religion is their
anti- immigrant sentiments. According to Lebedev (2007), one of
the ideological innovations of the secular nationalists is ‘the image
of the main enemy’ not in the shape of Jews or Freemasons, but in
culturally alien migrants. This innovation was first articulated by
Nikolai Lysenko. Some secularists, like Perin’s Slavic Community
of St Petersburg, continued to focus on the Jewish theme – which
is why, perhaps, they did not achieve national reach. However,
the anti- Semitic constructs of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies (the Jewish- Masonic conspiracy, the ‘Elders of Zion’ and
so on) have now practically disappeared from the nationalist
lexicon.
Nationalists oppose not only Muslim migrants, but also
Christians, such as Georgians, Armenians, Ossetians, and
Abkhazians. However, the fact that the majority of migrants