Intellectual life in the late Soviet Union, which took place under the sign of the boundless domination of the scientific-materialist worldview, was not monotonous. In its marginal zones, where admirers of “mysticism” and “esotericism” gathered, the most bizarre intellectual fruits could grow. In one such zone, known as the Iuzhinskii Circle, a group of young Moscow “nonconformists” led by Yuri Mamleyev carried out a unique analysis of late-Soviet spirituality. Mamleyev and his fellow circle members concluded that Soviet Russia had plunged into a metaphysical hell that only a “radical subject” could recognize; a “radical subject” could decipher the sacred history of the world and accept as fact that the world was coming to its end. For all the unusual nature of this analysis and these conclusions, the Iuzhinians were able to do what few others have been able to do — to distance themselves from the general spiritual situation in the USSR and to look at it from the outside. This intellectual experience was continued when Mamleyev, who was in exile, took the next step in his work and managed to formulate an ideal for a radical subject — a spiritually indestructible Russia Eternal. Upon his return to his homeland in the early 1990s, Mamleyev joined the discussion of Russias spiritual revival, and his ideas became a subject of public domain in the Post-Perestroika Age.
Dmitry Mikhel (Wed,) studied this question.