I would like to start by thanking the International Consortium for researching the humanities

and Dr. Thomas Crona in particular for making all this happen and Dr. Moritz Florin, the

Interim Chair in Eastern European History for this opportunity to share some of my recent

research with you.

In my current research project I'm engaged in dialogues with several fields in addition

to my primary field, Russian history, so I'm looking forward to discussing my ideas with

this interdisciplinary audience.

My current book project, something that I'm working on right now, examines the circulation

of knowledge in Soviet society during the Cold War and today I will present some of

my materials on the communities and narratives of extraterrestrial intelligence in the Cold

War USSR.

But let me start with a somewhat more recent story because I hope it will serve as a nice

introduction to my talk.

In spring 2017 I was invited by a popular science website, indicator.ru, to comment

on a notable event in Russian academia and that notable event was the first ever defense,

dissertation defense in theology, which was forthcoming in June the same year, 2017.

While undergraduate and graduate degrees in theology had been awarded by Soviet and Russian

theological academies before that, all of that was recognized only within the Russian

Orthodox Church and it was only in 2015 that the Higher Attestation Committee, a Russian

government agency which was responsible and still is responsible for awarding advanced

scholarly degrees, added theology to its list of disciplines, officially recognized disciplines.

The first defense was said to take place, as I said, two years later and Russian academia

still operates very much in the traditions of Soviet era militant atheism, so it should

come as no surprise that this impending defense had mobilized a significant part of the academic

and especially the Russian science popularization community, mobilized them for a campaign against

the recognition of theology as an academic discipline in public universities and the

Russian Academy of Sciences.

Led among others by a prominent science popularizer, Alexander Panchin, the campaign produced an

impressive corpus of texts as well as some images as you can see in this slide that ridiculed

the very idea that theology can have an equal standing with other academic disciplines.

A number of official protest letters and petitions were submitted to the Higher Attestation Committee

in which from Russian scholars in which their authors argued that theology could not be

qualified as a scholarly discipline because it's based on entirely subjective approaches.

Their main argument in essence was that theology was a pseudoscience and as such had no place

in academia.

Now I have spent five years at the University of British Columbia where the Department of

History overlooked the Vancouver School of Theology, yes that was my view for five years

from my window and knowing how much the historical method owes to the Hermeneutics, I was unconvinced

by this theology as a pseudoscience argument.

Nevertheless one particular aspect of this campaign attracted my attention, namely the

approach to discredit theology and broader religious thinking by associating them with

such alternative knowledge systems as theology and astrology.

This approach was fundamental to Pantin's second book, Popular Science book published

the following year in 2018 in which he examined a wide range of what he classified as archaic,

rational, erroneous and outwardly dangerous beliefs and in which he claims that a theology

degree stands on the par with convictions and alien abduction.

The tendency to bring together religious faith and paranormal beliefs as something radically

opposed to science had been of course hardly original since at least the Enlightenment.

The notable thing here is that in developing their argument about theology as a form of

pseudoscience Russian science popularizers of the early 21st century inverted the formula