Lawfare Daily: Seeking Meaning at the Soviet Collapse, with Joseph Kellner

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

On today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Joseph Kellner, an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia to discuss his latest book, “The Spirit of Socialism: Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse,” which examines the millions of Soviet people who embarked on a “spirited and highly visible search for new meaning” during the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

They discuss the questions of epistemic authority, of cultural identity, and of history's ultimate meaning that drove people to seek new spiritual meaning during this period, as well as the era’s many colorful characters, including Hare Krishnas, astrologers, doomsayers, and neo-Pagans who pushed bio-healing, folk baths, and other answers to these questions. They also talk about why, when a superpower declines, shared reality dissolves.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	But ultimately, Putinism seems to present a clear answer to where does truth derive?
0:09.5	Well, it is in the media, it's in the government.
0:12.9	There's sort of a single voice that has now been consolidated around the Putin government.
0:18.2	It's the Lawfare podcast.
0:20.2	I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor of lawfare, with Joseph Kellner,
0:24.6	an assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia.
0:28.2	The sense of Russia's identity and of its place in time, this sort of takes the crisis and says,
0:35.4	yes, this is just a ripple, but in fact, this is the center of the world. And so all those things really appeal to people and appeal to people
0:43.0	not just for narrow political reasons, nationalist reasons, but because it is something
0:48.7	you can hang your head on. It's some orientation in the dark.
0:52.8	Today we're talking about Joseph's new book, The Spirit of Socialism,
0:57.4	Culture and Belief at the Soviet Collapse. So Joey, I want to start with some of the main
1:03.4	arguments in your book, especially that of the movement, which you've termed the seeking
1:09.8	phenomenon at the time of the Soviet collapse and transition've termed the seeking phenomenon
1:10.8	at the time of the Soviet collapse and transition.
1:14.2	Could you speak a bit about the main thrust of the book?
1:18.0	And also, I'm really curious where the seeds of this idea
1:21.9	came from for you.
1:23.9	Sure.
1:25.0	I'll describe the book first and then can return to the origins of it.
1:29.6	The central kind of hook of the book is that around the time of the Soviet collapse,
1:35.7	there was a very, very public, visible flourishing of radical new worldviews and orientations,
	...

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