Daniel Cardoza and Dr. Tony Brown, Russian Department
The traditional Russian mentality views life with an optimistic fatalism and passivity. This ideology is so inherently Russian that even grammar has adopted passive tendencies with phrases like mne prikhoditsia or mne nuzhno (“to me is necessitated,” or “to me is needed”), as opposed to standard English, constructions, “I must” or “I need” (with emphasis on the I as the agent of action). Typically, Russians see life as something that happens to them rather than something in which they participate. This mindset differs radically from the way in which Westerners view their place in the world.
Westerners tend to think that one must make oneself and one’s life. Max Weber, in his book Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, describes this phenomenon as having its roots in the Protestant reformation, as various Protestant faiths have doctrines that encourage an active—rather than passive or fatalistic—mentality. Although not strictly Protestant, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) coincides harmoniously with Protestant faiths in this regard. LDS doctrine teaches people to be self-empowering, self-sufficient, and that people have agency and are therefore in control of their own fates.
Russian culture has an ancient history, which Russian Orthodoxy has shaped in many ways. Even after decades of Communist rule, Orthodoxy’s influences are still present. Along with the revival of Orthodoxy in the years following Perestroika, many Western religions have sent missionaries to Russia and converted tens of thousands of people. Conversion to a Western religion for a typical Russian would mean more than simply giving up Russian Orthodox traditions. Rather, it would involve adopting a new mindset altogether, which would give rise to a host of internal conflicts and contradictions—conflicts between a newly adopted faith and an age-old culture.
This topic first intrigued me while I was in Moscow serving as a missionary for the LDS church from 2009-11. I wanted to know if Russian converts to the LDS faith maintained the fatalistic views common to the Russian people or if they adopted the “Protestant Ethic” along with their new faith. To answer this question I went back to Moscow. While there, I observed the people in different congregations throughout Moscow—luckily, all the Russian are converts, with the exception of a few children and teenagers—and conducted interviews.
I had four key informants. I conducted semi-structured interviews with them through a series of conversations. Unlike a survey or formal interview, the semi-structured interview allowed the informants to talk freely about their lives, rather than confining them to a set of answers. For me, as the interviewer, this also allowed me to notice cultural tells in the way they spoke that might show that they maintained a fatalistic mentality through their conversion. However, to guide our conversations, I had an outline covering broad subjects such as their conversion to the LDS faith, their careers, and setting life goals.
My interviews yielded three basic responses: the informants all placed a high value on education, the informants all believed that they could work hard that which they wanted to achieve in life, and that all the informants described how they were self-empowering before their conversion to the LDS faith, but that their conversion enhanced this characteristic. My observations from the congregations in Moscow seemed to support these findings. There were many businessmen and entrepreneurs and they seemed to believe that their lives were in their own hands; they seemed to work hard to achieve their dreams. However, as my informants described, many of these people probably held these attitudes before conversion to the LDS faith. Rather, the LDS faith simply appeals to those who already maintain an active, non-fatal mentality.
For my informants, the LDS faith acted like a lens, magnifying traits or attitudes that they already possessed. They claimed that their grandparents, specifically their grandmothers, played a critical role in the development of their active mentality. Even if an informant was getting a higher education before conversion, they said that afterwards, they viewed education as a means to advance their situation in life. They said that LDS doctrine gave them ambition and that they worked harder to achieve their goals. For many this did not mean creating goals, but rather redefining goals to include a career with strong enough economic potential, specifically to be able to support a family.
Because these converts already held active mentalities before conversion there was no personal cultural dissonance between their new religion and their Russian tradition. The scope of this study is hardly broad enough to claim that all Russian LDS converts possessed a strong active disposition before conversion or that some do not feel discord between LDS doctrines and their intrinsic Russian beliefs. Instead, this study gives me a platform from which I can build future research. With the understanding that Russian converts may already have active mentalities, I have significantly narrowed the scope of the study, and I can use surveying or structured interviews to gather further data. This also serves as basis from which I could base research with other converts to other Protestant religions.
Not only does this research serve as an introduction to the Russian fatalist mentality, but it also served as essential experience for me as an undergraduate anthropologist. Learning to conduct ethnographic research in English has been an emphasis in my coursework. But gaining experience conducting ethnography in a foreign language was something I could only get by going out into “the field.” This study has become an invaluable foundation for my education as an anthropologist and decisive in my understanding of social science.