SCIENTOLOGY IN UKRAINE

Randall K. Rogers

Studies in Post-Communism Occasional Paper no. 3 (2003)

Centre for Post-Communist Studies

St. Francis Xavier University www.stfx.ca/pinstitutes/cpcs

ISSN 1711-4284

Abstract This paper analyzes the effects and processes of the penetration of the group Scientology into a large city in Ukraine, a country undergoing economic and other social transformations. The “debate” among various informants and interest groups concerning the efforts and activities of the Scientology in Ukraine will be examined, too. Various theorists’ ideas of group solidarity, the one dimensional, consumer-oriented aspects of modern, post-industrial or postmodern media society, and also the appeal of the offer of cult-type group certainty in changing times will provide a theoretical basis guiding the analysis of data collected. The working hypothesis is that the people of Ukraine are especially susceptible to the motivations and recruitment strategies of cult-type groups and the promises these groups offer. The research undertaken for this paper was to confirm or deny this working hypothesis, and to examine the processes of how a group like Scientology operates in a “new territory” and establishes a successful recruiting presence.

Introduction

In times of uncertainty and a waning of cultural and economic capital, religious or group-oriented social movement-type structures and thought systems (group-capital) offer a source of satisfaction and living enhancement (Blumer, 1951). In the areas of the former Soviet Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), many people are currently experiencing economic degradation, a by-product of the “transition” from communism and a command economy to capitalism, privatization of state-owned enterprises and freer markets. Also, in these areas of the

former Soviet Union, for some seventy plus years religion was officially prohibited.

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Religion existed, nevertheless, during the years of communism, and, connected with Soviet ideology and the Soviet regime’s beliefs about the liberating, progressive properties of science, at times produced unique folk-science blends of belief among the peoples of Russia and Ukraine (Barber, 2001). Russian holy men, or starets, who perverted or “trans-valued” (Nietzsche) accepted Eastern Orthodox Christian beliefs – these being mystic wandering faith healers – were, too, a part of the Russian pre-revolutionary fringe-religion landscape. So, too, were other mystic, scientific religious-psychological thinkers a part of this tradition, thinkers such as George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, Madame Helena Blavatsky, or even, from Czechoslovakia, Nicola Tesla. Following these pre-revolutionary esoteric traditions or precedents, in the Soviet era it could be said that in Ukraine and Russia, religious belief became commingled with science. Religious belief became a sort of state-supported religion, or a religious belief in Marxist principles of “history,” combining with the progressive properties of science and technology.

Currently in the areas of the former Soviet Union, among the people, from the author’s experience the old vestiges of Eastern Orthodox religion and folkways or area-specific cultural traditions remain or are currently being revived. These cultural-religious traditions co-exist, however, with a belief in the emancipatory powers of modern technology and science. In post-communist Russia or Ukraine, the old spiritual and traditional certainties and values of the old regime are being resurrected, and also, paradoxically, esteemed, though, too, often discounted. Often both the legacy of the Czarist past and the Soviet era leave the population at a loss, with no guidance in transition with all its aspects: privatization, growth, consumerism, economism, and modernity or postmodernity. It appeared odd to me that one enduring source of tradition in Ukraine

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was Nordic mythology. Nordic mythology is very popular in Ukraine, perhaps due to the early Vikings, from Sweden, who played a part in founding the early Kiev-Rus kingdom.

My point is that given the revival, the continuance, though, too, the discounting of extant cultural-religious traditions in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) areas, a matter of confusion concerning who and what it is to be a former Soviet citizen is now a common source of anomie among citizens of the former Soviet Union. A cultural anomic condition is bolstered by economic hardship and subsequent domestic-marital disturbance. This hardship and confusion creates fertile ground, in Russia-Ukraine and the areas of the CIS, for the spread and influence of new religious movements. An increased receptivity to the activities of new religious movements in the CIS is, therefore, due to the potential such groups have to provide group members or associates with an initial possible economic reward, a renewed sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, certainty, and direction in life (Blumer, 1951; Galanter, 1999; Habermas, from Docherty, 1993). The intent of this paper is to describe the manner in which a new religious movement, here the group Scientology, operates in an area where the group’s presence was previously unknown.

Theoretical Considerations

Each year a smattering of new books come out about new religious groups or new religious movements, some of which are also referred to as “cults.” Cults, Sects, and Spiritual Communities (Zellner, 1998) describes a number of different groups and sects. As it follows the founding and growth of various charismatic-lead groups and cult-like organizations it makes for good reading, but does not add much to the theoretical debate concerning the causes of a recent growth in the number of cult-type groups and an

increase in cult-type group membership worldwide. A paucity of new theorizing applies, too, to other recent books concerned with cult-type groups and new social movements. New, more theoretical approaches to understanding the seeming growth in cult-type group membership, given a review of the literature of works describing cults and new religious movements, in the author’s view, also appear to be lacking. For instance, though many sensationalized accounts of why people join cults or works detailing life in a cult have been published, serious sociological theoretical consideration of why people join cults, or theoretical considerations of new social conditions that have led to a recent increase in cult-type group membership, though they exist, often are thin theoretically and focus on psychological rather than sociological causes or methodologies.

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Classics in the cult-literature field, books such as Snapping (1995) or Festinger’s (1956/1990) seminal book When Prophecy Fails, do delineate the psychological and sociological aspects of joining and remaining with or leaving cult-type groups. Yet, these studies base their analyses on modernist or functionalist and accepted psychological canon interpretations of people’s reasons or reasoning in joining cult-type religious or other social movement-type groups. Newer books on cults and cult type phenomena (such as Marc Galanter’s Cults [1999], or Zellner’s book), generally rehash the old theories of “in-group out-group” solidarity, of alienation, or of the need or search for certainty or self-actualization in “service” or devotion to a belief as the causes for individuals joining cult-type groups.

I suggest in this paper most of these works fail to view a larger, more current and opaque causal factor for people joining cults. I will use Singer’s (1995) conceptualization of what a cult group is in this paper, though agreeing with Dawson (1998) that all new religious movements are not cult-like in Singer’s sense and some may even benefit group members and society in general. Singer classifies a cult as possessing three factors: a) the origin of a group with a role

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of a leader, b) a power structure, or relationship between the leader (or leaders) and the followers, and c) the use of a coordinated program of persuasion (which is called thought reform, or more commonly, brainwashing) (Singer (1995). There also is a working definition of what a cult is as delineated in Melton’s book. In his Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America (1992) Melton uses the famous anti-cult crusader Marcia Rudin’s “fourteen commonly accepted characteristics of a cult” (Melton, 1992). These are:

In this paper, I suggest that theorists who are claiming that “alienation” is the most prevalent cause of cult-group association come closest to defining the present root cause of an increase in involvement with old religions and new religious movements or cult-type groups. But, whose or which theories of alienation most adequately describe the growth in religion and cult group phenomenon? The Frankfurt School and the Consumer Culture

1. Members swear allegiance to an all-powerful leader whom they believe to be a Messiah.

I propose it is the works of the Frankfurt School theorists, their descendants, and the works of those in the Postmodern-Consumer Culture field that are coming closest to most adequately explaining the root of, and defining the alienation responsible for, the postwar spread, growth in membership, and increase in influence among the citizenry (in both developing and developed nations and areas) of cult-type groups and new religious movements. Especially important for understanding the increase in cult-group association worldwide I suggest are Jean Baudrillard’s (1983, 1984) theories on the media-dominated simulational society, the implosion of reality, and the hyper-real.

2. Rational thought is discouraged or forbidden. 3. The cult’s recruitment techniques are often deceptive. 4. The cult weakens the follower psychologically by

making him/her depend on the group to solve his/her problems

5. The cults manipulate guilt to their advantage. 6. The cult leader makes all the career and life decisions

of the members. 7. Cults exist for their own material survival and make

false promises to work to improve society. 8. Cult members often work fulltime for the group for

little or no pay. Baudrillard’s ideas of simulational or “not real”

society – a society of abstractions and free-floating misrepresentations, as well as lacking concrete representations and experiences – are fundamental to understanding the alienation and lack of cohesion experienced by today’s postmodern “consumer” citizen. This is a citizen confronted by a world of media-created needs, needs whose fulfilling, in the end, leaves one at a deep psychological level unsatisfied, longing for what? More consumer goods? A new lifestyle? More of the same? Important in this theorizing vein are the theories of Frederic Jameson, with his postmodern “depthless” personality, or Herbert Marcuse (1964) with his “one-dimensional man.”

9. Cult members are isolated from the outside world and any reality testing it could provide.

10. Cults are anti-women, anti-children, and antifamily. 11. Cults are apocalyptic and believe themselves to be

the remnant who will survive the soon-approaching end of the world.

12. Many cults follow an “ends justify the means” philosophy.

13. Cults, particularly about their finances, are shrouded in secrecy.

14. There is frequently an aura of or potential for violence around cults. These theorists describe the alienation or

contradictions which are the social result of the rationality of 5

capitalist production and consumption. They describe the political and social underpinnings of the Consumer Society, with its attendant citizenry following media-produced needs, consumption needs that produce the demand for the engines of capitalist production and the “new” mass media messages of magazines, advertising and marketing.

Marcuse’s work examines more the underpinnings of the idea of Modernity, a deeper probing perhaps of Whyte’s Organizational Man. Like Whyte, Marcuse probes the social foundations of the certainties that fueled the beliefs of postwar Western Societies. Writing in the 1950s and 1960s Marcuse and Whyte demonstrated how modernity and a blind belief in rationality, progress, and science may lead to a spiritual and mental prison, a norm and rule-driven world where self-actualization is nearly impossible. More recent writers such as Fredric Jameson (1991), Zygmunt Bauman (1992, 1998) or Douglas Kellner (1995) suggest the effects of a centralized, socializing media (for Kellner especially TV) are affecting world citizens in new, mostly negative ways. Modern media creates the “depthless” person interested in superficial wants, needs, and images only.

Worse, these more recent “postmodern” writers suggest Western beliefs in free trade and a pax-McWorld Americana are now increasingly affecting world citizens in a negative manner (Barber, 2001; Bauman, 1998). The rise of the influence of media-created needs leads to confusion or anomie, and, ultimately, for the individual citizen, unhappiness. As Bauman and others suggest, it is the loss of the certainties of Modernity, whether these certainties be expressed in Capitalist or Scientistic or Socialist terms, that is to account for an increase in alienation experienced in the post-industrial world. According to these postmodern writers, it is the erosion of the world-beating notions of the human application of reason - a crumbling of the importance and world dominance of three hundred years of Western Enlightenment thought – and a fragmentation and discounting of the ideas and philosophical systems

associated with Modernity that accounts for a new world-cultural relativism and resulting alienation (Lyotard, 1984).

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With no one guiding light (read Western light) or “metanarrative” demonstrating the most correct, undisputed and best way to envisage and organize society, world citizens or the citizens of the Western world experience what is now called the condition of postmodernity. To view the matter from a functionalist perspective, the latent pattern maintenance, to use Parson’s term, of the dominant culture has been upset. No culture or path is the undisputed best way, all cultures and ways of being may be in some ways better than the next, though all cultures are best left to flourish or falter, alone, without the one big guiding idea or set of ideas distorting them (Rorty, 1998).

As the writers of postmodernism claim, into this vacuum rides a possible new universalist idea – the idea of a postmodernism - or the view that all beliefs, creeds, or identities, may be considered equally valid (Lyotard, 1984; Bauman, 1992; Jameson, 1991). Individuals living in this postmodern world – on a micro-individual level and collectively, with the erosion of an ideological blueprint and traditional social mores that in an earlier time more definitively guided them – are now socialized by a fragmented though uniformly pro-consumerist media message. With the proliferation of social movement-type groups and organizations, individuals in this increasingly “postmodern” world then look for social movements, identity (racial, ethnic, sexual) politics, economic success, and, increasingly, religion to guide them back to a level of satisfaction, of comfort and certainty in life. The Consumerist Burden

The people in this new postmodern world also face a new burden, a consumerist burden of making the correct career and consumer choices, choices which are often interactive. Their need is now to make their life a work of

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art, to engage in increasingly refined consumer choices concerning who and what they are and want to be, and what they want to project to others about themselves (Featherstone, 1991). In an increasingly globalized and choice-laden consumer and media-oriented world these decisions and choices expand for everyone. Faced with these choices and the fruits of an increasingly differentiated cultural-social world (Bourdieu), for some the result is a feeling of “meaninglessness” that leads them to search for, and embrace of, a more spiritual orientation in life. Given the false satisfactions of the media-consumerist world escapism, often the escapism offered by religion becomes an even greater panacea than even Marxists allowed. This new religiosity is further fueled by a cultural fragmentation, which in turn is caused by the fast pace of change and the ennui associated with the new consumer-oriented and “new-experience” driven world. This is a media-driven consumerist world, a world which creates the new so fast that “all that is solid melts into air” (Berman, 1988). Faced with this media-driven creation of human needs, according to the postmodern writers (and earlier writers like Frankfurt School writers such as Herbert Marcuse or Walter Benjamin), the depthless personality is to be abolished by creativity, study, consumption of the arts, and, according to Benjamin (1988), the mind-expanding or vista opening effects engendered by the use of drugs. All are offered by postmodernists as one way to combat the effects of a conformist, one dimensional “philosophical” and media system. The Advertising Industry

In his book The True Believer Hoffer (1948) states that the bigger the lie or story, the more emotional exertion or mental convincing efforts it takes to believe it. Therefore, once convinced of the validity of an idea or thought system, the more a True Believer will cling to the idea and

vigorously defend his/her group-inculcated beliefs rather than give them up. Taking this view and broadly applying it to a critical view of television, or media, we may consider consolidation in the media broadcasting industry as a form of increasing the lie by limiting the message (though increasing the number of channels gives an impression of variety and a multi-viewed world-critical media stance). In 2003, media content that criticizes the status quo, given a media industry concentration, is more rarely being aired. Only in universities or in academic books (although with corporate sponsorship of research decreasingly within those outlets) does one discover bona fide academic critical thought, a thought mode that questions even its own validity (Horkheimer and Adorno, from Durning, 1993; Beck, 1999; Bauman, 1998). The media industry concentration and lack of a “message,” except a message of how to live one’s life as a happy consumer, theorists of the Consumer Culture or Consumer Society tell us, is what accounts for the “depthless” non-questioning, non-political nature of modern or postmodern human and society (Marcuse, 1964; Baudrillard, 1983; Featherstone, 1991; Jameson, 1992). The media-seduced postmodern man or woman suffers from false-consciousness and cannot or has not the “intellectual tools” to seriously question or change the order of his or her world. His or her false consciousness is a product of a limited media message and the new socializing power of media. This is the alienated one dimensional man or woman, an individual who cannot find happiness, given the media created “advertised” needs and values that have been inculcated in him or her following a life of media consumption.

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This view of the postmodern individual is echoed in Berger’s book, Ads Fads and Consumer Culture (2000). Berger claims that advertising does not influence the individual so much directly, in the sense of sending the individual out to buy the product advertised, but advertising influences the larger culture and its character more generally.

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Berger’s view is similar to the view of the theorists of postmodernity who claim that a lifetime of media consumption and the strategies of the cultural industries and cultural intermediaries result in the creation of a non-thinking, patriotic-nationalistic, easily manipulable consumption-oriented personality. Here the works of such Frankfurt School theorists as Eric Fromm, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse (Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 1982), mixing Freudian theory with sociological theory, are relevant. Theodor Adorno’s “administered society,” for example, destroys the “Eros” (Marcuse) or eroticized life of the individual. Everything becomes a bore, we follow the scripts and the machines we are given by the elite owners of the factories, the media organs – people who do not follow the same scripts or rules the rest of us are supposed to follow. We do not experiment; we are limited in our ability to enjoy life. We work within and are controlled by the pre-planned, scripted “models” and the robotic structures emanating from our technologies and our knowledge industries (Featherstone, 1991), which define and control the pace and substance of our lives. We are increasingly socialized by mass media - news magazines, advertising, our computers and our TVs. Models and polls permeate and distort or create the natural and unnatural rhythms of our lives (Baudrillard, 1983).

In relation to modern or postmodern society these de-individualizing tendencies lead to a collective lack of differentiation, grafted onto an increasing differentiation or plurality of voices heard. This is called “glocalization” or a “glocal” concern by some (Beck, 1999), while it is a local concern with one’s culture and maintaining it, when confronted with globalization of capital, people, technology and ideas for others (Friedman, 1999; Barber, 2001). Religion, or joining religious oriented groups is one way in which people as groups or individuals confront this newly found decline of tradition, the lack of pre-ordained guidance, the plethora of ways of being. Alienation is the price, then,

that postmodern citizens must pay for the freedoms that are attendant with a “free” capitalist organization for society. Here I suggest as a working hypothesis if a society or social system gives sanction to social stratification, and a multitude of ideas or models or ways of being - if many competing ideas exist in defining the organizational and thought-field - the greater the level of uncertainty will be among the individuals of that society. Some will choose and find happiness in their hobbies, consumerism, their work, their niche, but others, perhaps the great mass of others, will be adrift, searching. This greater level of uncertainty I then suggest, will lead to a cognitive dissonance that will lead greater numbers of people in such a social system to desire the rigidity of belief and thought certainties and structure offered by religion or cult type groups. The same alienating forces will move people to join in greater numbers social movements and to practice identity politics (Habermas, from Docherty, 1993).

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Ukraine in 2003 remains a society in transition. The roots of a consumer culture have been planted, indigenous Ukrainian culture is being revived (after being brutally beaten down by communism), yet over seventy year of absence of an organized religious tradition, and a great new disparity of haves and have-nots (Blau’s relative deprivation, [Blau and Blau, 1982]) have left the population seeking answers for difficult questions posed by life, the transition to capitalism, or fate. I suggest in this paper that many of the citizens of the Ukraine are experiencing extreme hardship that may lead them to be susceptible to depression and demoralization. In this capacity the people of Ukraine are especially susceptible to the motivations and recruitment strategies of cult-type groups and the promises these groups offer. The research undertaken for this paper was to confirm or deny this working hypothesis, and to examine the processes of how a group like Scientology operates in a “new territory” and establishes a successful recruiting presence. Also, the research was undertaken to discover the

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positive or negative effects of a new religious movement, Scientology, among the people of Ukraine.

Methodology

For ten months in the Fall to Summer of 1999-2000 I was a Visiting Lecturer with the Open Society’s Civic Education Project, lecturing in sociology at Kharkiv National University in Kharkiv, Ukraine. While living and teaching in Kharkiv – a mostly Russian speaking city of 2.3 million in north-eastern Ukraine - I visited the premises and asked the director of the Hubbard Learning Center - Scientology’s representative group in Ukraine - if I could interview her staff and some of the people studying at the Center. I visited the Center and either interacted informally or formally at group events or talks ten or more times, sometimes attending two events in one day. At all times my own sociology students accompanied me to the Center and group activities, acting as research assistants and interpreters. Though the Center’s director spoke some English, when I spoke with her and the students at the Center most of our speaking was in Russian (Kharkiv being close to the Russian border, Russian and not Ukrainian is the most commonly spoken language in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine).

Our conversations took place mostly through the two student volunteers who accompanied me to the Center. Upon returning home from these visits, I wrote up my experiences and views in an ethnographic notebook I kept. I explained to the Center’s director my intentions were to “write an article about Scientology and its activities in Ukraine.” The director initially appeared excited, even eager to work with us even though I explained to her I was a sociologist teaching at Kharkiv National University and that I had read some negative things concerning Scientology operations in Europe, especially in Germany. She agreed I

could interview her staff and send out via e-mail a survey I created to Hubbard Center participants and Scientology students in Kharkiv and throughout Ukraine.

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We created and sent out the survey. We received few completed interviews, and these were wholly positive as to the effects and procedures of the Hubbard Center, Scientology, and Scientology’s practices in Ukraine. It soon appeared that we would see no bad interviews (or at least it appeared so) and then all replies to the survey stopped. Surmising the Hubbard Center director was controlling the completed interviews we received (controlling who received the interviews), I altered the research procedure to encompass more qualitative techniques, informal conversation, and informal personal interviews with those in the group to whom I could gain access. I spoke with individuals working for, or involved with, the Hubbard Center, and, conversely, with those not affiliated with the Center and critical of Scientology and the Hubbard Center’s activities in Ukraine. The cessation of completed interviews was accompanied by a visible cooling toward our research team by the Center’s director. This change in attitude toward our research team occurred three or four weeks into the research. Perhaps the director had spoken to her superiors in the Scientology organization and they had asked her to break off her interaction with us. One can only speculate without directly asking and jeopardizing continued good relations. I must stress, however, that the group Scientology is not generally known of as Scientology or a quasi-religious cult type group by those who come to the Hubbard Center in Kharkiv. The “religious” aspect of Scientology is downplayed in Kharkiv, at the Hubbard Learning Center, which is the “front group” name for Scientology in Kharkiv. The Hubbard Learning Center is a place to learn new life skills, to learn crude Freudian techniques to better deal with life, and to learn how to survive and possibly prosper in the transformational society that is Ukraine, the Center’s director told us. Students view the Hubbard Learning Center in the

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Russian religious-scientific tradition, teaching an esoteric, though in its initial stages a practical, systematic way to deal with the strains and troubles and questionings posed by everyday life. (Madame Blavatsky move on over, Ronnie Hubbard is in town!)

In my research, I relied mostly on participant observation and my ethnographic writings. I often acted as a participant in Hubbard Learning Center group activities, engaging in participant observation, attending Scientology public lectures, then returning home to write up my experiences. I made copious notes following each visit to the Center, and I spoke often with its director. I also spoke with a few apparently showpiece followers. One Scientology member we were introduced to was a Kharkiv-based chiropractor who claimed she used the Hubbard techniques in her work. She claimed an eighty percent success rate, using the Scientology/Hubbard Learning Center mind control techniques in the treatment (relieving) of her patient’s chronic pain. I also spoke with those who are opposed to and critical of Scientology and the Hubbard Learning Center being in Ukraine and in the city of Kharkiv. The conclusions and interpretations that follow, therefore, are due to my previous study of new religious movements and cult type groups, observation and participant observation of the group Scientology in Ukraine (one of my sociology students and I went through the initial testing and introductory classes), and document analysis.

Findings The Group

The group and thought system that is Scientology is the brainchild of L. Ron Hubbard, an explorer, science-fiction writer, world traveler, some say genius-messiah,

some say charlatan. The quasi-religious organization that developed around his ideas, exposed most definitively in his book Dianetics (first published in 1950), has grown into a worldwide organization. Scientology “Learning Centers,” or places where one’s “hang-ups” or life problems (called “engrams”) can be assessed and cleared are penetrating into areas of the CIS. In Kharkiv, the Hubbard Learning Center is where one first meets the group Scientology, having first possibly heard their ads on the radio or been passed one of their flyers at the subway entrance. One goes into the Hubbard Learning Center (in Kharkiv at the top floor of the imposing Railway Workers’ Building) to take a psychological test, with about 200 questions asking such things as “Do loud noises disturb you?” There are variations of strength of responses available to the questions on the questionnaire, including a “don’t know” type choice. Yet, if one does not choose three fourths of responses as some variation of the yes-no continuum, the Center’s people will not analyze your test. So, for most of the questions, if you want your test analyzed you must choose some degree of the yes/no response continuum. In effect, this forces the respondent to choose some level of a positive or negative response, leading the test taker to disclose often personal aspects of one’s character.

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When you have completed the test you wait while the testing personnel take your test to a back room. In fifteen minutes the Center’s staff return with the test statistically analyzed. Your score on the test, the Hubbard Center representative tells you, shows where strengths and weaknesses exist in your life, in your personal psychological makeup. Then the Scientology representative explains to you how the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics can improve your life. Classes are offered at the Center, on weekends and at convenient times, for around 100 hryvnas (roughly US$20 at the time) a course. A course lasts three to four months. When one graduates from one class, there are other, higher-level classes to take.

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L. Ron Hubbard and the Kharkiv Center

L. Ron Hubbard was famous even as a youth, for winning a Boy Scout skills contest that led him to be one of the youngest persons sent along on a US Geological Scientific Mission traversing the globe. Moreover, his father was a Navy Captain, and the young boy from Nebraska often visited his father in various exotic ports of call. The boy even accompanied his father on a few Navy missions and lived with his father in various places around the world. According to Scientology literature, it was Hubbard’s initial contact with the holy men or ascetics of the East – as a young boy while visiting his father – that initially got him excited about the nature of reality and matters of the spirit (Scientology Literature, L. Ron).

Hubbard was later hired as the director of a National Geographic style documentary film that sent him, now a young man, exploring the West Indies in the 1930s. It was these travels, and his speaking with holy men especially in the Far East, that Hubbard contends, helped him form his ideas. He also had a lifelong interest in and briefly studied physics at George Washington University before dropping out to pursue his travels. He also was experiencing success with his fiction writing at that time. By the late 1940s, established somewhat as a science fiction writer, Hubbard began to apply his science fiction ideas and his ideas about physics to create what he deemed a science of the mind. Employing logico-deductive thinking, Hubbard went on (until his death in 1986) to find or search for the mechanisms or the causes of peoples’ happiness or sadness experienced in their lives. His ultimate goal was to find the optimum functioning of the human mind.

Hubbard believed an effective self-help thought system, taught widely all over the world, would result in an optimal functioning for societies, the development of optimal human happiness, and sustainable development for the

world. Pursuant to this meta-idea he developed an essentially Freudian-behaviorist ideational synthesis that posits that neuroses or whatever prevents a person from self-actualizing to their highest potential is due to unresolved personal issues, or what Scientologists call “engrams”. These engrams, though the root of their negative effect lies in actions or behaviors that occurred in the past, now carry on as subconscious fears or neuroses that prevent individuals from fully grasping, fulfilling, or properly utilizing the present. The idea is that memories of, and neurotic reactions to, negative experiences that occurred in the past have to be remembered, and defused or mastered, before the individual can clearly think about and act rationally in relation to the now, the past, and the future. This overcoming or becoming a “clear” or an OT (Operating Thetan) must be accomplished through Scientology’s “auditing.”

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During auditing a trained Scientologist elicits the causes of negative present actions and thinking and then talks an individual through his or her concerns or problems, explaining how the negative past is affecting the individual’s present and will continue affecting the individual negatively into the future. The auditor then teaches or informs the “pre-clear” of what is causing this negative affect and how to prevent the negative experiences or engrams from negatively affecting the individual and restricting his/her achieving their fullest potential. According to Hubbard and Scientologists, through auditing and becoming cleared of engrams we as individuals and the human race will be able to optimize our God-given capabilities and potentialities both as individuals and as a species.

By taking classes at the Hubbard Learning Center, and studying the message of the book Dianetics and other books by Hubbard, Scientologists claim an individual can be free of the engrams that affect and make less than fully productive a person’s everyday life. On a larger scale, with everyone realizing his or her true potential with Scientology techniques, the world will be a better, more efficient,

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equitable, and satisfying place in which to live. Beginning level classes are offered at the Kharkiv Hubbard Learning Center. More advanced students become Scientology teachers (auditors) or travel to another city or country to learn the more esoteric teachings of the group.

Dianetics Explained

Dianetics may be thought of as a practical application of Freud’s idea that childhood or traumatic experiences lodge in the subconscious and affect subsequent life choices and actions. The key in Dianetics is to rid oneself of engrams, which are considered psychological defects or bad subconscious memories that affect in a negative way one’s present (or future) actions and life choices. To rid oneself of engrams is the practical, psychological side of Scientology, and is called “auditing,” as described above. Auditing is similar to Freudian psychoanalysis (or transference) except more superficial and geared toward more immediate results. For example, when confronted with problems or difficulties in life, “patients” or subjects are encouraged to “think of themselves as being three feet behind themselves” and to view their actions, or, more appropriately, their reactions, “as someone viewing what they are doing as an observer, not as the initiator of the action” (Scientology video, Celebrity Magazine). Using this “view yourself and your actions from three feet behind yourself, think and analyze before you act” technique, Scientology practitioners or students of Dianetics are taught to consider, contemplate, or debate their actions, words, and thoughts before they engage in them. In this manner they are trained to act not so impulsively, which Scientology adherents point out assists them tremendously in their lives.

It is important to stress that the Hubbard Center director persistently stated that the Center was a place where life skills can be learned and taught. She repeatedly stressed that the Center’s personnel (all Scientology followers) and those who come to learn at the Center, and she herself, do not think of the Center or of Hubbard’s teachings as a religion. In the view of the Center’s personnel and its directors, Hubbard’s thoughts and works constitute a type of psychological learning system, a system used to learn life-coping or life-enhancing skills. As stated above, Russia has a history of promoting psychological thought-systems, and shamanistic, Rasputin-style holy men have been a part of the Russian-Ukrainian religious landscape since Czarist times. The appeal of Hubbard and the Center are the life-skills and psychological empowerment that the study of Hubbard’s teachings provides followers, learners, practitioners. People in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine (and in the areas of the CIS) are suffering from poverty and what Kharkiv intellectuals I spoke with have termed a “spiritual crisis.” Divorce rates are high, unemployment rampant - the Center and Hubbard’s teachings of empowerment, therefore, appeal to a population such as that of Ukraine, a population and a country “in transition” from communism and protected markets to capitalism and free markets. The “religious” side of Scientology, which I will touch on shortly, was not a part of the Center’s agenda. According to its director, the Hubbard Learning Center in Kharkiv was a Scientology component intended to introduce people with psychological but also physical disabilities or problems to the healing properties of the mental and physical improvement system that is Dianetics.

Students also learn to confront the painful details of their life, and, with the help of a Scientology auditor, attempt to re-experience and “live through” and “defuse” their negative past experiences and debilitating memories. The ultimate goal is to become a sort of rationally thinking, non-overanalyzing (in an emotional sense) automan who can act and think clearly without encumbering "too-human” thoughts. When the level of “clear” has been achieved an individual is thought to be able to live and act most rationally

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given any situation, unhindered by a possible over-emotionality.

These are some of the “learning strategies” taught at the Hubbard Learning Center in Kharkiv, Ukraine. There are levels of classes taught at the Kharkiv Center, though for the highest level classes one must travel to and take classes in Moscow or the larger cities of Europe. Most preferably, advanced students should travel to the Los Angeles area in California where Scientology headquarters are located. Initial classes at the Hubbard Center are either free (the introductory classes my students and I attended were free) or students are charged a nominal fee. However, students must pay increasingly higher costs for the classes as they progress in learning about the techniques and ideas of the group. Especially the higher-level classes can cost a student up to $1000 or $10,000 an hour. And this is the problem outsiders see with the group and why they label it a cult-type organization. Individuals’ life savings have been lost to the group as students and initiates progress in the organization and spend their money taking upper level “specialized” or esoteric classes (Behar, 1991).

These problems of continuing with higher priced classes may occur only in “bad” Scientology franchises, according to the Kharkiv Hubbard Center director. Still, at the highest levels the organization starts to get strange, following Hubbard’s training in physics and initial success as a science fiction writer. Beginning as a science fiction writer is a common motif among cult-type or new religious movement leaders and founders (Heard, 1999; Melton, 1992, 2000). Paul Twitchell, a one time science fiction writer and disciple of Hubbard, a man who began his own religion Ekkanckar, is one such writer turned theologian.

According to Scientology’s cosmology, individuals and the human race are said to be originated from “Thetans” who lived in a different solar system “trillions” of years ago. These Thetans created and entered a material “human” existence to escape the boredom of their purely spiritual

existence. In the meanwhile, humans have forgotten their origins as spirit creatures. Advanced Scientology training allows the initiate to return to this all-powerful, spiritual state, yet remain in human form (Ankenberg and Weldon, 1999). However, the more esoteric aspects of Scientology – though they are known to the group leaders – are generally not taught at the Hubbard Learning Center in Kharkiv, or anywhere else in Eastern Europe. For the more esoteric “religious” aspects of Scientology the initiate must travel to special centers in Europe or the USA, or join the Scientology “group within a group” named the Sea Organization (which I will explain later).

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The Scientology thought system, which involves a life-philosophy of reflectively or psychologically examining one’s life, blends well with the Russian view of the benefit of psychoanalytical thought systems. Similar to pre-existing Russian psychological beliefs, the Scientology thought system is therefore readily understood and accepted by most Russian and Ukrainian class attendees at the Hubbard Center.

Freudian techniques of remembrance and discovery of engrams form a large part of the Hubbard life-learning techniques. However, when one delves further into the religious side of Scientology one finds that engrams or problems in the present life are caused by events that occurred in past lives. It is at this point that the group becomes religious and subjectively cult-like. A cosmology, based on Hubbard’s writings and the efforts of the group’s current leaders, has been developed around Hubbard’s science-fiction ideas as they interface with the dynamics experienced by Scientology group members as they experience everyday life putting into practice Scientology techniques and beliefs. Blumer (1995) writes of the development of a cosmology or ideology to explain a group’s ideas as a response to outside criticisms of the group. A social movement or cult-type group creates a cosmology to further explain its ideas and raison d’être to members, and

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to counter and defuse external criticisms of the group and its ideas and beliefs.

At the Kharkiv Hubbard Learning Center, similar to other cult-type groups, members and those who interact with the group appear to come and go. The interested take a few classes, the teaching works for them or not, they continue with the group or abandon their interaction with the group. Exchange theory would consider this a cost-benefit analysis to explain an individual’s continued interaction with the group. Some Hubbard Center attendees become marginal members of the group. Others join the group and work for the organization. Group members work for the individual chapter because the Scientology organization gives the “franchise” to group members. Group members run the finances of the group and the leaders have ties in a loosely centralized organization run from church headquarters in Los Angeles, USA (Melton, 1992).

Qualitative observations I made suggest the thought system of Dianetics is helping Ukrainians who attend and follow the life and work strategies offered by the Hubbard Learning Center. In post-communist Ukraine, the uncertainties or lack of opportunities offered by the living environment transmit into recruiting and operational success for Scientology. The offices of the Hubbard Learning Center in Kharkiv are usually abuzz with people taking classes and those coming in off the street for the initial testing. The group offers life-coping strategies, and, using psycho-dynamic regression techniques, allows attendees or group members both a structure suggesting how to live life and a psychological release from the supposed causes of one’s problems. The initiate is told through study of Dianetics and Hubbard’s teachings that mental blocks or engrams that repress the full-flowering of an individual’s potential can be erased. In this sense one’s problems are not one’s own but are accrued from early life experiences and even past lives. This freedom from, or distancing oneself from, the cause of one’s problems possibly plays a role in the Hubbard Center

techniques helping their students feel better about themselves and their lives.

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Criticisms of the Group

Critics of Scientology and new religious movements are present, one might say prevalent, among the more highly educated in Ukraine. Although, as I have mentioned, members of the Hubbard Learning Center are free to associate with the group and leave at their will, others who join and work for the group in an organizing and recruiting capacity may have a more difficult time leaving the group. Criticisms of the group from sources in Ukraine indicate the more highly educated a person the greater the likelihood the person will be critical of Scientology and new religious movements and cult-type groups in general. This correlation of education with cult-group skepticism and avoidance is opposite to that which occurs often in North America and Europe, where it is often the more highly educated that are drawn to cult-type groups. Curiously, in the US and Europe, young people of the Judaic faith, appear to be over-represented in their attraction to and joining of cult type groups (Galanter, 1999; Snapping, 1995). From the academic and popular literature and from Scientology’s own promotional video (only to be seen by Scientologists and others who are interested in the group), the in-group organization named the Sea Organization or “Sea Org” is part of the innermost core of Scientology.

If there is a tendency among cult-type groups to have a hierarchy of in-group and out-group designations, then the leaders of the group Scientology based in Los Angeles (where the mother church is located), and the members of the Sea Organization or Sea Org are at the inner core of the group. When Hubbard was alive, he maintained that he and his group were being persecuted or at least spied on by the US and Soviet authorities. The interest of the authorities, Hubbard claimed, was due to Scientology’s mind control

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research and practices, in addition to Hubbard’s mind control philosophy, which Hubbard claimed the US government thought could be useful in their own intelligence practices. Hubbard at this time purchased a few large yachts or sea going vessels. He equipped them with state of the art technology, including more esoteric psycho-technical machines designed to measure, like a lie detector machine, chemical-physiological changes emanating from the skin.

It is on his yachts, that Hubbard and his closest followers spent the last years of Hubbard’s life. They lived on the sea, docking at various ports around the world (often staying moored at the Grecian islands, especially the island of Corfu), performing thought and other experiments on and off board the ship. For example, Hubbard would send group members on “thought experiments” performed on land. Hubbard would the day previously place hidden objects on the island. The following day, Hubbard would direct - through thought alone - followers where to find the objects.

According to Scientology reports Hubbard and group members were very successful in these telepathic thought transmission experiments. Group members’ success in these experiments, of course, further increased the group’s and Hubbard’s paranoia, as they believed the US intelligence services and the Soviet authorities were determined to infiltrate the group, or in some manner learn of the successes Hubbard was having with his thought-transmission experiments.

Shortly after 1950, when Dianetics was published, Hubbard’s ideas became fashionable in the general US population and were studied with interest by the US intelligence authorities. Furthermore, in the 1950s US law enforcement agencies raided Scientology offices in search of evidence of espionage and brainwashing activities (Scientology video). Following the Korean War, the US government and US popular culture were both fearful and enamored of the idea of brainwashing and mind control (see the film “The Manchurian Candidate”). All of these add

credence to Hubbard’s and the group’s belief in the group’s persecution and being watched by Soviet and US intelligence agencies.

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Critics of Scientology in Kharkiv, in Ukraine, and throughout the world center their argument not so much on the effects of the psychological practices or techniques that occur within the group. Criticisms involve the way the group raises its revenues, and the aggressive stance the group takes against those who criticize, leave or oppose the group. Numerous stories (Behar, 1991) describe the group as cleaning out the bank accounts of followers, inducing followers to take higher and higher priced, and increasingly esoteric, classes. Higher level classes even go so far as to follow students into past lives to erase “engrams” or psychological problems generated in previous lives.

Aspects of the Scientology, which make it cultic in its critics’ views, pertain to its operational and organizational structure. They include practices and beliefs such as delving into current and supposedly past lives of its members, the “religious” cosmology the group has created to surround and give substance to Hubbard’s initial psychological theories, the persecution faced by those who investigate the group, and the harassment experienced by some members who leave the group (some Scientology critics claim their relatives who joined Scientology were made penniless by the group and subsequently committed suicide). Critics of the group and its activities in Ukraine allege that the group preys on the loss of hope and anomie/atomie (Galtung, 1995) residents of Ukraine are experiencing. In Ukraine critics also contend that the group preys on women who experience marital difficulties, which in reality are due to the impoverished conditions of the Ukrainian economy and not due to any inherent weakness in the institution of matrimony or women’s position in Ukrainian society. Nevertheless, in my view the psychological life-coping techniques offered by Scientology at the Hubbard Learning Center in Kharkiv do

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seem to help women and men in the transitional society that is Ukraine in the initial years of the new millennium.

Ukraine has experienced difficulties with quasi-religious cult type groups in the past. In the mid-1990s a group called the Great White Brotherhood, associated with the Japanese cult group Aum Shinrikyo or Aum Supreme Truth, threatened mass suicides among its Ukrainian followers unless they were allowed to worship and recruit freely in the nation. The group was denied permission and the group in Ukraine, along with the parent group in Japan (whose leaders were arrested), has subsequently been drastically scaled down in its operations. The cessation of the White Brotherhood’s operations occurred after the parent group in Japan perpetrated Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, and other murders in Japan. Group leaders in Japan are now jailed (Kaplan, 1996). Additionally, groups like The Family and Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons are all actively and aggressively proselytizing and recruiting new members in Ukraine. In the course of my teaching year in Ukraine I noticed most Westerners in Ukraine were either Peace Corps volunteers, English language teachers, businessmen, environmental or other consultants, and representatives of various churches and new religious movements. Traditional, Eastern Orthodox Church membership has also blossomed with the independence and opening up of Ukraine in 1991.

Conclusion

Although Scientology has experienced legal or “right to exist and operate” problems in other countries in Europe (especially in Germany where the group is banned), in Ukraine the group appears to be prospering and actually providing an effective service, helping people cope with the uncertainties of life in a transformational economy and

society. Though critics of the group and its activities in Ukraine exist, it appears that the group plays a positive part in the lives of the people who visit the Hubbard Learning Center in Kharkiv. Informants I spoke with, and the few completed interviews we did receive, together with qualitative observations and documentary analysis suggest many in Ukraine are at a loss as to how to improve their economic condition or sense of well-being in life. The Hubbard Learning Center, offering its classes in personal psychological control, and, offering strategies to divorce oneself from - or at least to rationally encounter - the problems posed by a difficult life, appears to be experiencing success in helping those who attend and study at the Center and apply Hubbard Center principles to their life.

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Most of those who attend the Center do not know of the quasi-religious orientation of Scientology. The religious aspects of the group are the result of Hubbard’s start as a science fiction writer, the growth in the number of practitioners of Dianetics, and the group and Hubbard’s efforts to further “explain” the psychological techniques for personal mind control first developed in the book Dianetics. The book Dianetics was a hugely popular and commercial success, gaining adherents and supporters soon after its publication in 1950. Initially, informal study groups sprang up around the popular new self-help book. These were the first Scientologists. As the study groups expanded so did Hubbard’s desire or need to more fully explain his ideas to study group members. A quasi-religious or cosmological explanation for Hubbard’s ideas was generated.

This view was borne out by informal interviews and participant observation. Because the students attending the Center do not know, or should not know, of the controversies surrounding Scientology, the Center is simply called the Hubbard Learning Center. Sociologically, this “information restriction” can be understood as follows: if your group or audience does not know of something bad about your organization, if they probably will not discover the negative

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information, do not tell them. However, if they will in time discover the negative information you should inform them of the information in advance, to soften the adverse effect of the negative information and render impotent its possible effect in causing in group members a cognitive dissonance that may result in the adherents leaving the group (Galanter, 1999).

At the Hubbard Learning Center in Kharkiv, the higher level staff choose not to inform the attendees of the religious and negative aspects of Scientology. The staff does this, in part, by choosing not to speak about the religious aspects of the group’s teachings. Hubbard Learning Center staff maintains the Hubbard Learning Center is interested in teaching only Hubbard’s psycho-social techniques. Therefore, due to staff efforts at information restriction and lack of the availability of Russian language materials critical of Scientology, knowledge that the Hubbard Learning Center is associated with Scientology and the problems the Scientology has experienced in the West are not generally known by those who attend the Kharkiv Hubbard Learning Center. When the Center’s students attend the Center’s classes for some time, or they complete all the classes the Center offers and either join the group in a working capacity or travel to Moscow or another big city in Europe, Australia or the United States for further training, then do they realize that the Hubbard Learning Center is a part of the quasi-religious group Scientology, a religious-type group, and that the Hubbard Learning Center is a part of the Scientology organization.

Speaking English and access to English language source material may predispose Hubbard Center attendees or potential students to learn more quickly of the association of the Hubbard Learning Center with Scientology. This information may also predispose potential group members to be critical of the group and its activities in Ukraine. It appears facility with and access to “negative publicity” in English language or European media materials are especially

effective, assisting Ukrainians to understand the cultic group dynamics existing within a group like Scientology. In Kharkiv, facility with the English language and Western media materials therefore facilitates knowledge of cult-type “front” groups and the operating procedures of cultic groups in general. This is due to Western societies and English speaking countries being both the home to many of these types of groups and the many news stories and other literature about these type of groups that exist in English-speaking and other Western European countries.

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Yet, as the people who attend the Center’s classes initially pay little or nothing for the classes, it could be said that so far in Ukraine Scientology has had a successful recruiting presence and a beneficial effect on the lives of its attendees and members. However, in the sense of not being entirely forthcoming with information about the group, and the using of a “front group” to recruit new followers or group members, Scientology and its efforts in Ukraine fall under the cult-type group definition, suggested by Singer and Rudin and Melton. I do not wish to discount the beneficial or self-assuring nature of the techniques offered by the Hubbard Learning Center in Kharkiv. According to my research, when the religious orientation of the parent organization Scientology was left out of the activities at the Hubbard Center – which it was – the techniques taught at the Center appear to be effective. The techniques taught at the Center enhanced the coping ability of the people I interacted with who attended the Center’s classes and practiced the activities and ways of thinking taught there. Those I interacted with and informally interviewed appeared pleased with the techniques taught at the Center and the results they achieved following the instruction they received at the Center. Most attendees were positive concerning their interaction with the Center. Those not helped by the Center and its teachings either discontinued their interaction with the group or attended group activities sporadically. Most critics of the Center and Scientology were more highly

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educated, had not attended the activities at the Center, and had only read critical accounts of Scientology.

Barber, Benjamin (2001). Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalization and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World. New York: Ballantine Books.

Given the alienation currently experienced within Ukraine, where relative deprivation (Blau and Blau, 1982) and wealth extremes are common, a new type of late capitalist urge for certainty is expressing itself in Ukraine and throughout Eastern Europe. This urge for something concrete is the result of the alienation of people in budding capitalist states – the alienation of those who work hard but cannot make it in a system paying too low of wages to make any type of economic “advance” playing the “legitimate” game. It is alienation of pensioners who lost their right to be taken care of by the state, after sacrificing their entire lives for the communist cause. It is also the alienation of even the young and educated and those poised for success, who now must endlessly choose and worry over their consumption and career choice maneuvers. Now, in the “new times” that are globalization and the dominance of global corporations and markets, one hope left to the people of Ukraine – mostly losers in the globalizing game – is the security of social movements, new social groupings, religion, and the rise of the information technology sector. Scientology is one of those groups currently competing for members on the New World stage that is newly capitalist Russia and Eastern Europe, in that corner of the world stage that is Kharkiv, Ukraine.

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Marcuse, Herbert (1964). One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon. Melton, J. Gordon (1992). The Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America, 2nd rev. ed. New York: Garland. Melton, J. Gordon (2000). The Church of Scientology. Signature Books. Rorty, Richard (1998). Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers. New York: Cambridge University Press. Singer, Margaret Saler (1995). Cults in our Midst. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Storr, Anthony (1996). Feet of Clay: A Study of Gurus. London: HarperCollins. Whyte, William H. (1972). Organizational Man. New York: Simon and Shuster. Zellner, William W. and Marc Petrowsky, eds. (1998). Sects, Cults, and Spiritual Communities: A Sociological Analysis. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Other Sources Celebrity Magazine Scientology Millennium Celebration Video Dr. Randall K. Rogers teaches Sociology in the Adult and Distance Learning Department at the New School University in New York. Correspondence address: 5019 Carriage Hills Drive, Rapid City, South Dakota, 57702 USA. E-mail: randall_ro@yahoo.com

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