The Russian anti-cult leader spoke in Novokuznetsk, the economic center of Kuzbass.
by Massimo Introvigne
Alexander Novopashin is an Orthodox archpriest from Novosibirsk and the Vice President of RATsIRS, the Russian national organization that was affiliated with the European anti-cult federation FECRIS until March 2023, whose President is the notorious Russian anti-cultist Alexander Dvorkin.
He peddles his poisonous merchandise internationally, including to China, but also to different regions of Russia.
On June 26–28, he visited Novokuznetsk, the main cultural and economic center of Kuzbass, where he gave a series of lectures to law enforcement and other personnel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and to priests and seminarians at the Kuzbass Orthodox Theological Seminar. He also gave an interview to the city TV channel.
The anti-cult leader reiterated his and other anti-cultists’ claims about a great cult conspiracy organized by the United States against Russia that uses in particular Satanist suicide cults, infiltrated into the Russian Federation to corrupt the younger generations. The only problem with these “Satanist cults” is that they do not exist outside of the anti-cultists’ imagination.
According to his own web site, Novopashin then showed to his Novokuznetsk audiences “documentary footage from Ukraine, showing the real danger of the spread of cultism, Nazism and overt Satanism on the scale of an entire state, something from which Ukraine now has to be freed and cleansed.“
While the importance of Novopashin and other Russian anti-cultists should not be exaggerated, they were always unleashed when it was needed for the interests of Russia’s propaganda. After the aggression against Ukraine, they are used to justify it by claiming that the Ukrainian society and government are dominated by “cultism, Nazism, and Satanism.”
On the one hand, this supports the lie that the war in Ukraine is really “defensive” and contributes the argument that the Ukrainians may spread into Russia “cults” and Satanism, and in fact have already started the corresponding “infiltration” work. On the other hand, the anti-cult activists offer to the Kremlin’s propaganda another theory that the war is really fought for the benefit of the Ukrainian themselves—in this case to “liberate” and “cleanse” them not only from the unavoidable “Nazism” but from “cultism” and “Satanism” as well.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
