Social composition of Russian Rodnovery The scholar Kaarina Aitamurto observed that a "substantial number" of Russian Rodnovers, and in particular the earliest adherents, belonged to the "technical intelligentsia". Similarly, the scholar
Victor Schnirelmann noted that the founders of Russian Rodnovery were "well-educated urbanized intellectuals" who had become frustrated with "cosmopolitan urban culture".
Physicists were particularly well represented; in this Aitamurto drew comparisons to the high number of computer professionals who were present in the Pagan communities of Western countries. The movement also involved a significant number of people who had a background in the Soviet or Russian Army, or in policing and security. A questionnaire distributed at the Kupala festival in Maloyaroslavets suggested that Native Faith practitioners typically had above-average levels of education, with a substantial portion working as business owners or managers. A high proportion were also involved in specialist professions such as engineering, the academia, or information technology, and the majority lived in cities. The "vast majority" of Russian Rodnovers were young and there were a greater proportion of men than women. The historian
Marlène Laruelle similarly noted that Rodnovery in Russia has spread mostly among the young people and the cultivated middle classes, that portion of Russian society interested in the post-Soviet revival of faith but turned off by Orthodox Christianity, "which is very institutionalized, moralistic" and "out of tune with the modern world", and "is not appealing [to these people] because it expects its faithful to comply with normative beliefs without room for interpretation". Rodnovery is attractive because of its "paradoxical conjunction" of tradition and modernity, recovery of the past through innovative syntheses and millenarian projections, and because of its values calling for a rediscovery of the true relationship between mankind, nature and the ancestors. Rodnovery has taken strong roots in the
North Caucasus region of Russia, especially among communities of
Cossacks and in the
Stavropol Krai, where in some areas it is reported to have become the dominant religion. It has also been reported that even former priests of the
Russian Orthodox Church have joined the Rodnover movement. Rodnoverie is a popular religion among Russian
skinheads. These skinheads, however, do not usually practice their religion. In Russia, in the context of the crisis and collapse of the communist ideology, some
communists turned to the ideas of Slavic neo-paganism, abandoning Marxism in favor of nationalism. Various small groups of communists adopted a neo-pagan ideology. In April 1991, at the second initiative congress of the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation, a member of the neo-pagan "Union of Veneti", Nina Taldykina, called for the rejection of the teachings of the "Jewish Talmudist" Karl Marx and the "non-Russian demagogue" Vladimir Lenin. Taldykina became one of the main ideologues of the Leningrad organization of the Communist Party. In a large number of writings, members of the "Vedic Center" "
Internal Predictor of the USSR" promote the idea that Stalin was the antagonist of Lenin and transformed the communist movement, distorted by Marxist internationalism, into a nationalist and genuinely socialist (i.e.,
National Socialist) movement. According to these authors, Stalin restored and enlarged the Russian Empire by conquering other peoples and suppressing the Jews, and the urgent task of the patriots is to revive the original pagan faith, Stalinism and the Stalinist state. Organized by this "Vedic Center", the movement "Toward the Power of God" was registered in 70 cities. The Ryazan community, which is part of the Union of Slavic Native Belief Communities, supports communists.
Estimates of the number of Russian Rodnovers Writing in 2000, Schnirelmann noted that Rodnovery was growing rapidly within the Russian Federation. As of 2003, the Russian Ministry of Justice had registered forty Rodnover organisations, while there were "probably several hundred of them in existence". The scholar Vladimir Yashin reported that in 2001 the specific denomination of
Ynglism had 3,000 adherents in the city of
Omsk alone, while in 2009 it was reported at the Omsk District Court that Ynglists in the city had reached the number of 13,000. In 2006, scholars reported that there were around 40,000 practitioners in the Slavic-Hill movement of Rodnover
martial arts. In the same year, the scholar B. K. Knorre estimated 10,000 practitioners of
Ivanovism. In 2016, Aitamurto noted that there was no reliable information on the number of Rodnovers in Russia, but that it was plausible that there were several tens of thousands of practitioners active in the country. This was partly because there were several Rodnover groups active on the social network
VK which had over 10,000 members. In 2019, the scholar Svetlana Tambovtseva estimated 7,000 to 10,000 adepts of
Vseyasvetnaya Gramota (Vseyasvetniks). The 2012 Sreda
Arena Atlas complement to the
2010 census of Russia, found 1.7 million people (1.2% of the total population of the country) identifying themselves as "Pagans" or followers of "traditional religions, worship of gods and ancestors". Of these 1.7 million people, 44% or 750,000 were ethnic Russians following the religions of their ancestors, while the remaining 950,000 were other types of Pagans (including
Ossetians following
Assianism, Siberian peoples following
Tengrism, and other religions). Besides Slavic Rodnovery, among ethnic Russians there are also followers of
Heathenry (Germanic religion),
Druidry (Celtic religion),
Hellenism (Greek religion), as well as
Wicca and other traditions. A polemical article entitled
Adversus paganos, published in 2015 by the journal of the Ascension Cathedral of
Astrakhan, cited sociological data saying that Rodnovery was already formally embraced by "more than 2 million Russians", while the number of people affected by Rodnover ideas was several times larger. This was based on data provided in 2012 by Igor Zadorin, the director of the research institute "Tsirkon", who said that in Russia the proportions of atheists, Orthodox Christians and "pagans" were of comparable sizes and their populations overlapped: Orthodox Christians were 30% of the total population; people who had some sort of "pagan", non-Christian spirituality, were 40% of the population, while the remaining population was composed of a 20% who were atheists, and a 10% who were believers of other religions (4–7% ethnic minorities professing
Islam). The movement of the Anastasians keeps official registers of the number of Anastasian villages and their dwellers. The scholar Anna Ozhiganova reported that in 2015, in Russia, more than ten years after the establishment of the first Anastasian settlements, there were 2,264 people in 981 families who were landowners of an ancestral homestead, and other 8,725 people in 4,725 families who were at different stages of construction of their own ancestral homestead. The scholar Artemy A. Pozanenko reported a similar number of Anastasian villagers, 12,000, in 2016, noting that the number had more than doubled between 2013 and 2015, and yet it was "unwittingly underestimated", given that although the statistics were based on the official registers of the movement, they were not promptly updated and many settlements and settlers did not register on purpose, so that a participant in inter-Anastasian events estimated the number to be closer to 50,000. Pozanenko also reported that there were on average 5-6 ancestral settlements in each region of
European Russia and western
Siberia, with some regions having a number in the double digits (such as 30 in
Krasnodar Krai); the largest settlements were found in
Moscow Oblast, in Krasnodar Krai, in the southern and middle
Ural region, and in
Novosibirsk Oblast. In 2019, the scholars Anna A. Konopleva and Igor O. Kakhuta stated that "the popularity of Neopaganism in Russia is obvious". According to the scholar Andrey Beskov, the number of Rodnovers and generally modern Pagans in Russia might be larger than what surveys attest, as many of those people who identify themselves as "Orthodox" might actually be Rodnovers, as the views of the two religious groups border each other, or "flow smoothly into one another, combining in the worldview of a modern Russian". Some scholars have determined that many self-identifying "Orthodox" are clearly Pagans, and that it is common in the Russian mindset to identify "Russian Orthodoxy" as Rodnovery, and as different and even opposite to Christianity. Many Rodnovers call themselves "Orthodox" because the Russian term for "Orthodoxy",
Pravoslaviye (Православие), means "to praise the Right" (славить Правь, ''slavit' Prav'''), a concept which also belongs to
Rodnover theology and cosmology, and which identifies the celestial plane of the gods of light and the order of the universe. According to Beskov, in modern Russia "interest in East Slavic Paganism is very large and remains unabated since the beginning of the 1990s", and there is "a tectonic shift in public thinking which is characterised by the return to the Russian culture of Pagan heritage and the public recognition of the significant contribution of East Slavic Paganism in the formation of national culture". The beliefs of such community are, however, very variegated and may be described as an
ietsism (an unspecified belief in an undetermined transcendent force) characterised by a Slavic coloration, or as Slavic "spirituality" or "spiritualism". ==Russian Rodnovers and the war in Donbas==