emigree communities in other parts of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Germany. During era of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union (1920s–1950s), research into prehistoric societies was encouraged, with some scholars arguing that pre-Christian society reflected a form of communitarianism that was damaged by Christianity's promotion of entrenched class divisions. In doing so, pre-Christian belief systems underwent a rehabilitation. Joseph Stalin himself was a supporter of the idea of Slavic Vedism, the shared Indo-European origins of Vedic and Slavic cultures. Boris Rybakov (1908–2001), former head of the Institute of Archaeology, provided the first academic studies about ancient Slavic religion. In the 1960s, the renewal of militant atheism under Nikita Khrushchev also presupposed a recovering of pre-Christian and pre-Islamic traditions. Russian Rodnovery originated in the Soviet dissidents' circles of the 1970s, as intellectuals became concerned for the eradication of traditional Russian culture and identity. An intellectual circle that cultivated themes of Slavic indigenous religion formed as a wing of the predominantly Orthodox Christian samizdat nationalist journal Veche (1971–1974). The first manifesto of Russian Rodnovery is considered to be the letter "Critical remarks by a Russian man" (Kriticheskie zametki russkogo cheloveka) published on such journal, anonymously in 1973, by Valery Yemelianov (1929–1999), who was then close to Khrushchev. The letter criticised Christianity as a product of Judaism serving the interests of Zionism. The journal attracted various personalities, including Anatoly Ivanov, the artist Konstantin Vasilyev (1942–1974), and Nikolay Bogdanov, among others. Vasilyev's art is widely celebrated within the Rodnover community. Ivanov, who declared himself a Zoroastrian and subscribed to "Arism" or "Slavism", published a fervently anti-Christian pamphlet entitled "The Christian Plague" (Khristianskaya chuma). Throughout the 1970s, the nationalist dissident movement split into two branches, an Orthodox Christian one and another one that developed National Bolshevism, which eventually continued to harbour Pagan traditionalists. Other influential texts in this period were Valery Yemelianov's Desionizatsiya ("De-Sionisation") and later Istarkhov's Udar russkikh bogov ("The Strike of Russian Gods"). In the 1970s, explicitly religious Rodnover groups had still to operate in secret, although a few small groups were known to exist in Moscow and Leningrad (Saint Petersburg), closely linked to the nationalist intellectual circles. In Moscow, the occult Yuzhinsky Circle had been established by the poet Yevgeny Golovin, the novelist Yury Mamleyev and the philosopher Vladimir Stepanov in the 1960s, while a young Alexander Dugin would have joined the circle in the