According to Shnirelman, it was the Soviet Union's official scientific atheism, which severely weakened the infrastructure of universalist religions, combined with anti-Westernism and the research of intellectuals into an ancient "Vedic" religion of Russia, that paved the way for the rise of Rodnovery and other modern Paganisms in Eastern Europe. After the Soviet Union, the pursuit of Rodnovery matured into the spiritual cultivation of organic folk communities ("ethnoi") in the face of what Rodnovers consider as the alien cosmopolitan forces which drive global assimilation (what they call "mono-ideologies"), chiefly represented by the Abrahamic religions. In the Russian intellectual milieu, Rodnovery usually presents itself as the ideology of "nativism" ("narodnichestvo"), which in Rodnovers' own historical analysis is destined to supplant the mono-ideologies whose final bankruptcy the world is now witnessing.