Kuga Sorta

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Kuga Sorta (Cheremis, ‘big candle’). Popular name for a syncretist movement among the Cheremis people of the Mari Republic in the USSR from about the 1870s. Although nominally Christianized before this, the threat of Russian acculturation led to an attempt at cultural survival as ‘true Cheremis’ (their own term for the movement) through a synthesis of traditional and Christian elements.