Miraculous visions / signs on the eve of the Great Patriotic war in 1941-1945

Mass and individual visions / signs in Siberia on the eve of the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 can be classified as phenomena reflecting pre-Christian beliefs, as well as the Christian worldview. Such signs continued for a long time in the memory of ordinary people who unequivocally interpreted them as Divine signs sent from charity as warning signals. The value of researching people’s visions (illusions) lies in the fact that they, according to popular belief, allowed to predict the future, performed the function of warning signs. Visions, actual “manuscripts” of Orthodox monks, etc. raise the question of the correlation of historical events and the facts of Ethnography. The data from the field interviews clarify our understanding of the dynamics of social change, namely: a significant delay in cultural phenomena, especially concerning the worldview. So, it was relative to 1939-1941, the bulk of the stories-memories of the signs, which, according to popular beliefs, gave information about the upcoming terrible war and the death of millions of people. As an example, we can tell a case of a mass vision in the village of Malaya Bobrovka, Suzunsky district of the Novosibirsk region, whose inhabitants saw two fiery horses at sunset. These horses, in the reminiscences of eyewitnesses, stood opposite each other as if rising on their hoofs. As we know, the horse in the Slavic mythological tradition was one of the sacred animals, an attribute of the highest pagan gods (Horse, Perun) and Christian saints (St. George the Victorious, St. Elijah the Prophet, etc.). Simultaneously, this image was conceived as a chthonic creature connected with the cult of fertility and death, the afterlife, the guide to the “next world” and, accordingly, the harbinger of death. In those Belarusian villages in which executions were carried out already during the occupation by the Germans, people saw the woman’s figure shuddering the day before. Evidences of eyewitnesses, as well as stories recorded from the words of other villagers, allow us to understand the power of the impact of these visions on the minds of people of that time. During the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 and after, the Orthodox believers handed over to each other manuscripts “On the Miraculous Vision of the Valaam Monk Mikhail on the Divine Providence against the Russian People”, “On the Divine Salvation of Mother Russia”, “On the Miracles and Signs of the Recent and Present Time”, that is, about prophetic visions of individuals.

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