Russian neo-paganism (to be correct in speaking of paganism in modern Russia) appeared yet in USSR towards first shifts of Perestroika in 1980’s. Those were first small groups of people in Moscow, Kaluga, Kursk, St. Petersburg and etc. where they tried to rebuild mentality and adequate idea of paganism for modern time where so many things prevented to accept any ancient kind of view. That was almost impossible all along of perceptible lack of different sources about this topic even in the official history science, libraries and books, as a consequence to Soviet politics of keeping such information in secret. There were several reasons to that for Soviet party politics right after some cases of growing opposition to current government in Baltic republics. One of the Lithuanian pagan community founders whose name was Jonas Trinkūnas suffered real seriously with persecutions for his straight pagan concepts and ideas to create a real pagan community in Soviet Lithuania, he was summoned for questioning in KGB many times so he was forced to quit all the works and his own scientific thesis about paganism of ancient Baltic tribes. That was a precedent to quit almost any investigations in such subjects in different USSR republics.

Anyhow new policy of Perestroika allowed us at least to begin this practice of investigation and promotion among civil environment, not in local closed places like private apartments nor underground clubs. One of those pioneers was the founder of our organization, he is name is Vadim Kazakov. Once in the end of 80’s he with a couple of others pagans declared to create a “Russian Party” which was aimed at a fairly nationalistic ideas to rebuilt identity of Russians, one was lost during the USSR period of course.

Our organization completely was founded in 1997 as the Union of many communities in various cities of Russian Federation. That was a year of our common declaration signing where we had announced and confirmed our main tasks and goals to follow. One of them is a constant work to make the paganism of Slavs an official religion along with others in Russia like Christianity is. Then it’s a systematic work on the different sources study goes after, we had reached a splendid success in this working. As one of the biggest heathen organizations we have to come after the official sources and classic way to discover any historical materials. That’s why we don’t recognize any other kind of pagan organizations which practice quite pseudo-scientific way to rebuild Slavonic paganism using different frank esoteric or Hindu approaches; those can’t be marked as an impartial way to study historical issues, just because lots of those groups live in their own world, each does in its own.

Quite large list of different sources and books serve now as a result of our work for almost 20 years. It’s scientific articles, different historical books, ancient epics and tales and so on. The restoration of Slavic paganism was consisted of gleanings and turned onto fundamental ethnographic and historical works.

For now we can present the concept of ancient Slavs belief as possible it used to be in 7-9 centuries. Despite the efforts of the Russian Church to destroy all evidence and sources about paganism we collected all the survived in centuries-old inquisitions data, so we can announce main points of these concepts. First, most of the resources ironically were carefully saved and transformed among Christians who still believe in different saints of Russian Orthodox Church, which were transformed from some pagan Gods of Slavs. For example it’s St. Blaise whose name was Veles in ancient times. The God of wealth and animals, knowing the sacral knowledge and ways to the World of Dead suddenly turned onto St. Blaise who helped animals and whom people prayed to in their desires to make the harvest big and guard the livestock from plagues. In second, lots of pagan sources were saved in different Slavic national tales and legends. In third, diligent and constant requests to state archives produced some profits, and we could find some real scientific investigations in Slavic paganism, like the fundamental works of  Soviet academician Boris Rybakov and his book “The Paganism of Ancient Slavs”, where he, conducted extensive ethnographic and historical research, had presented the full image of what the ancient mode of life looked like. Such works are in priority for us of course.

Slavic outview was pretty different from each Slavic tribe to other though. Some of tribes accepted Veles, the God of wealth and mystery, who had to be the main god, others thought it’s Dazhbog who had to be such. We can’t say were such contradictions like reasons to start any wars among ancient tribes but that was a fact, large areas where the Slavic habitat was widespread just possessed to different approaches, cause even the geographical locations of each individual tribes forced to create their own subculture and perception of nature. One from northern areas was often in need for warm weather and sunshine so they prayed to the Gods of harvest and Sun. Another one from the southern borders suffered with constant raids of nomadic tribes, so they preferred to pray to the Gods of the power, death and rage like Perun, the God of rage, thunder and wars. Here we can find out how different particular qualities were within Slavic world. Large areas managed wide and large approaches. Nevertheless we can be sure that some of Slavic tribes came to the conclusion that the Union of several tribes is one of the best solutions to struggle nomadic tribes from the East. For instance Vyatichi tribes created a powerful confederacy of tribes; the territory of this state was bigger than modern France. Unfortunately this state existed not so long as everyone expected those times because the growing power of the Novgorod and Kiev forced Vyatichi tribes to join new form of the state, which one called ‘Rus’. That was already the background for Russian state to begin with.

As the fourth point of the Slavic concept we might accept its obvious similarities with the European paganism from Celtic to German tribes. This fact was explained with obvious common Indo-European origins of both European parts – Slavic and Germanic. Genetic investigations confirm this relationship in its turn. Unfortunately, we cannot say with certainty about the exact origins of certain nations but we took a guess that it’s fairy possible to use the heritage of the Scandinavian and Germanic sagas in our works. However, in the world there is not one single ‘sacred’ book of the Slavs like Elder Edda in Scandinavia. The popular Velesova Kniga (Book of Veles) seems to be a very good fake made in the beginning of the 20^th century by emigrant writer from Russia (Mirolyubov Y.P.). Whatever the disheartening situation is, we still have the widest range of sources, which includes our own ethnographic research in different regions in Russia where we had collected and saved the dying heritage of Russian paganism, which had been living among ancient traditions.

Varg