Russian Store Is Mecca for Budding New Age Movement

Irina Matushenko braved a dirty overnight train to travel here from her Belarussian town more than 500 miles away. And she came not to shop for sausage or potatoes, but to search for spiritual enlightenment.

Like thousands of people from all over the now-fragmented Soviet Union, the fur-clad, middle-aged translator found her way to an unassuming shop three miles from the Kremlin claiming to sell nothing less than a whole new way of life.

“We never had a store like this before,” Matushenko says, breathing in the spicy scent of burning incense. “It’s a wonderful place for people like me who are discovering spirituality.”

This is mecca for the budding New Age movement in the former Soviet Union. With Russian society in transition and the Russian people frustrated by the unpredictability of their daily lives, thousands of people from Siberia to Estonia have turned for comfort to meditation, vegetarianism, holistic health, crystals and other aspects of spiritual study grouped together under the rubric “New Age.”

“In our country, I think that the crisis isn’t economic, isn’t political, but most of all it’s ideological,” says Alexandra Yakovleva, founder of Inner Path. “What we believe now is unclear, and people are trying to reorient themselves.”

The New Age movement, whose followers had to keep their beliefs secret during Communist rule, is emerging to try to fill the void. Yakovleva says that “an unbelievable number” of people put their faith in the remedies and creeds promoted by her center.

Whether in Russia or California, however, it is difficult to precisely define the New Age movement. “New Age is a term that’s been attributed to anything flaky,” says Jonathan Adolph, executive editor of the Boston-based magazine New Age Journal.

According to Adolph, many disciplines--from psychology to non-traditional medicine to environmental awareness--can be considered part of the movement. What they have in common, he says, is that all of them address the ways in which mankind fails to solve its problems.

Hundreds of New Age-related centers have sprouted in the former Soviet Union since the advent of perestroika in 1985, although perhaps none is as comprehensive and well-known as Inner Path--Moscow’s version of the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood. These centers not only give followers the fortitude to endure hard times, but also offer alternatives to provide a value system swept away by the death of communism.

“The New Age movement was forbidden before perestroika. It was not allowed to do yoga trainings. All esoteric teachings were not allowed,” says Nina Nikolaeva, Inner Path’s director. “I even know a few people who were in prison because they practiced yoga or because they were interested in alternative medical care.”

Now, as many Russians strive for the materialism and the morality of the capitalist system that their government is trying to build, others, like Nikolaeva, are trying to propagate spiritual values.

“We are trying to suggest as many ways of finding oneself as possible,” Nikolaeva says. “We’re trying to help people find their own path in this world in this tough time. We’re trying to explain that it’s not true at all that having money brings happiness. You can become happier when you understand who you are.”

To aid visitors in their search for enlightenment, 1 1/2-year-old Inner Path offers an array of courses on a variety of spiritual topics. Operating--although without all the necessary governmental permissions--out of two dreary rooms near the train station, the center offers classes on yoga, meditation, nutrition and New Age approaches to Russian life. For example, students at the center can enroll in the following courses this winter:

* “The Science of Success,” a four-day course costing 1,600 rubles ($3.40). “Positive thinking in union with the unlimited force of reason and of spirit will not only make each person happy, but guarantee him material well-being,” the course description promises.

* “The First Step to God” (three days, 1,500 rubles). “Uses the work of ancient Easterners in the original methods of spiritual work. Very serious seminar which will be very lively,” the catalogue says.

* “Business and You” (three days, $50). The fee in dollars is to encourage only serious participants, says Nikolaeva--who adds that this course is not about money but about realizing one’s own spiritual potential.

The center also has a well-stocked store that is visited by several hundred people every day who crowd shoulder to shoulder for a look at rarely seen products. In the first of the center’s two rooms, crystals, incense, tape recordings of soothing synthesizer music and other sorts of New Age paraphernalia are sold. The stock comes from a variety of sources, including geologists in Siberia and traders with Asian nations.

The prices run from affordable to exorbitant, from 40 rubles (less than 10 cents) for a single stick of incense to more than 5,000 rubles, or half a month’s average salary, for a globe of crystalline quartz.

In the second room are books, stored in brown paper packages and piled haphazardly on the center’s orange linoleum floor. Among the 40 available titles are studies of magic, New Age philosophy, classical yoga and astrology. Selling briskly is the album “White Music,” by a mysterious, white-scarved singer named Margarita Dombrovskaya whose spontaneously composed songs are thought to heal those who hear them.

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The people crowding the center seem to represent every age and profession, from teen-age students to gray-haired military officers.

Although the center advertises in a few Moscow publications, the Inner Path owes much of its fame to a widely read monthly magazine of the same name. The magazine covers a range of spiritual topics, from the practical--how to work more effectively--to the ethereal, including ghosts, faith healers and channeling.

The magazine was founded three years ago by Yakovleva, 28, a woman with journalism and business in her blood. Her father, Yegor, is a well-known journalist who until recently served as director of the national television company, Ostankino. Her brother, Vladimir, who has been described in one book as a shady dealer nicknamed “the Yak,” is a maverick entrepreneur who founded the Russian business newspaper Commersant.

Yakovleva sold her fur coat to finance the first issues of the journal, which she has seen increase from a scant 2,000 readers three years ago to what she projects as 150,000 in 1993. Readership is growing, she notes, at a time when circulation is falling for most of the Russian press because of the relatively high cost of subscriptions.

In addition, there is a bimonthly English-language edition with a circulation of 10,000. The English edition, which has a U.S. distributor in Philadelphia, is sold for $3 a copy in the United States and in other foreign countries by subscription and through sales at New Age centers.

Inner Path also serves as a travel agency: One tour of “Spiritual Russia” lasts 10 to 14 days and features stops in alternative healing and spiritual centers in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novgorod in northern Russia. Another tour takes visitors to a Siberian center for the study of shamanism, in which specially trained priests are believed to use magic to cure the sick and control events.

Now, the center is about to start its newest, and perhaps most important, venture to spread the New Age message. Beginning in February, a prime-time, twice-monthly Inner Path television show is planned on the same network once headed by Yakovleva’s father.

Unlike the circumstances of most American television, the producers of the Inner Path TV show must raise money to pay the network for the air time. But, Yakovleva says, the venture is worth the cost.