Sonja Luehrmann

The purpose of the fellowship period is to work on a book manuscript entitled Sin and Soviet Memory: Mobilizing Tainted Pasts in Russian Orthodox Anti-Abortion Activism. Since abortion was the most accessible method of birth control in the Soviet Union, many of the elderly women who form the backbone of any Russian Orthodox congregation had multiple abortions during their reproductive years. Some of them now participate in public outreach and emergent ritual practices as part of a regimen of penitence. While other scholars have noted a retreat from critical memory of the Soviet past during the Putin era, I interpret debates about the status of dead foetuses as a heavily gendered microcosm in which larger questions of how to mourn the dead of the twentieth century are simultaneously occluded and made representable. Drawing on ethnographic research among Russian Orthodox pro-life groups and interviews with lay women and clergy in capital and provincial cities, I trace the theological and therapeutic understandings of memory, social change, and self-cultivation that authorize this form of conservative women’s activism.

As an issue that both the state and the church have identified as a potential area of collaboration, reproductive policy in Russia is a good test case for the extent and limits of the political power of the Russian Orthodox Church. I argue that the ambivalent status of abortion as a commonplace practice that is rarely considered ideal invites ritual mediation, but also undermines the church's attempts to translate its moral expertise into legal or political influence. As a broader theoretical intervention, my work calls for more attention to culturally specific means of dealing with transgression in anthropological studies of morality and social memory.