Religion and Popular Music Artists, Fans, and Cultures

Article “My Pravoslavnye: Russkii rok, Orthodoxy and nationalism in post-Soviet Russia” published


An area I have been thinking about for a long time is the relationship between music and religion in Russia. I have touched on this in my research before, but not explicitly focused on it.

When Andreas Häger contacted me about writing an article for a planned book on popular music and religion in 2015 I grasped the opportunity to dig in a little deeper. I also decided to use my trip to St. Petersburg during the winter 2016/2017 to do some fieldwork. Around the same time I was invited by one of my former lecturers from Berlin, Karsten Mackensen, to give a guest lecture at the musicology department at the TU Dresden. This provided a good platform to present my first ideas in spring 2016. Focusing on Pussy Riot, Leningrad and Konstantin Kinchev (Alisa) the lecture (and a subsequent class I taught in Mannheim on music and religion) developed into an article on popular music and the Russian-Orthodox Church in post-Soviet Russia.

Today the article was published in the book “Religion and Popular Music – Artists, Fans, and Cultures” edited by Andreas Häger:

Wickström, David-Emil. 2018. My Pravoslavnye: Russkii rok, Orthodoxy and nationalism in post-Soviet Russia. In Religion and Popular Music – Artists, Fans, and Cultures, edited by Andreas Häger, 123-36. London, New York: Bloomsbury.

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