Despite state efforts to repress them, the Spiritual Christians, who were also called the Dukhobors (Spirit- Wrestlers), survived. In an effort to isolate them from their Orthodox neighbors, the Russian state in 1802 first resettled them in Melitopol in Crimea, and then in 1841-1845 forcibly moved them to the Caucasus. In these isolated colonies, the Dukhobors largely governed themselves and followed their own folkways. Led by charismatic descendants of Pobirokhin and a Council of Elders, the Dukhobors preached that God’s Spirit lived in all people, both men and women. Although they used the Bible, they emphasized their own oral tradition of spiritual psalms, which they called the Living Book.
By the 1880s, the Dukhobors numbered about twenty thousand. A radical group of Dukhobors led by Petr Verigin (d. 1935) preached pacificism, rejected military service, and struggled to take over the community in 1886- 1898. In 1898, Verigin led his followers to immigrate to Canada.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
A second group of Spiritual Christians, known as the Molokans (milk-drinkers, because they did not observe the Orthodox fasting periods in which milk was forbidden), broke away from the Dukhobors. Semen Uklein (d. 1809), an erstwhile follower of Ilarion Pobirokhin, insisted on the authority of the Bible, and went on to preach his own version of Spiritual Christianity throughout the provinces of the lower Volga in 1790s. Like the Dukhobors, the Molokans rejected icons, sacraments, and priesthood. But as serious students of the Bible, Uklein’s followers also observed Old Testament holidays and dietary restrictions.
In the 1830s, a group of inspired apocalyptic Molokan prophets predicted that the world would end in 1836 and introduced ecstatic dancing and singing into the Molokan meetings. Lukian Petrov Sokolov (d. 1858) led his followers to Mount Ararat to await the return of Christ. Despite the failure of this prophecy, these Molokan “Jumpers” retained their ecstatic practices and regrouped under a new charismatic leader, Maksim Rudometikin (d. 1877). From the late nineteenth century, new prophets taught pacifism and their new apocalyptic visions encouraged the Jumpers to emigrate and establish colonies in California, South America, Mexico, and Arizona.
WESTERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS
In the 1830s, German pietists introduced a revival in the German colonies of the Ukraine. By the 1860s, this revival, which emphasized personal prayer and a Bible study hour [Stunde in German], had been adopted by Ukrainian and Russian peasants who lived near the German colonists. Although initially these Shtundists, as they came to be called, wanted to remain in the Orthodox Church, the Orthodox hierarchy rejected their independent Bible studies and the Protestant doctrine of salvation through faith alone. Ultimately, many of these Ukrainian and Russian peasants turned away from Orthodoxy to embrace Baptism. In 1867, Nikita Voronin, a convert from Molokanism, was the first Russian to receive baptism. A Russian Baptist Union was created in 1884.
Other Protestant movements also gained Russian adherents. German and American preachers brought Seventh-Day Adventism into Russia in the 1880s. In the 1870s in the northern capital of St. Petersburg, the pietistic preaching of the English Lord Radstock established a pietistic following that later helped to support the formation of a Union of Evangelical Christians in 1909. Overwhelmed by the 1905 revolution, the tsarist government issued an edict of religious toleration that allowed much greater freedom of worship-though not of proselytizing-to most sectarians. Baptists, Molokans, Seventh-Day Ad-ventists, and Evangelical Christians created their own legal organizations, published newspapers, books, and journals. A 1912 census counted 393,565 sectarians (not including the Old Believers). Taken together, Baptists and Evangelical Christians were the largest group, with more than 143,000 adherents; Molokans represented the next largest group with 133,935.
THE SOVIET PERIOD
After the 1917 revolution, the Bolshevik government initially courted sectarians, but this policy came to an end in 1929 with the First Five Year Plan. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union attempted to eliminate religion altogether by closing and destroying churches and arresting religious leaders. This policy failed, and resistance to the forced collectivization of agriculture actually provoked new apocalyptic sectarian movements which attacked the Soviet state as the “red dragon” of the Apocalypse. Persecution of the Orthodox Church forced some of its members underground to form the True Orthodox Church. Rejecting the Moscow Patriarchate as hopelessly compromised, the members of the True Orthodox Church claimed that they alone maintained the true faith.
The German invasion of the USSR in 1941 forced Josef Stalin to moderate his antireligious policies and to allow limited legal existence of sectarian groups. In 1944, Baptists and Evangelical Christians formed the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians and Baptists, and soon Adven-tists also were granted a national organization. Dissatisfaction with the limits on religious freedom and a renewed antireligious campaign under Nikita Khrushchev led some Baptists and Adven-tists to form independent, underground organizations in the 1960s: the Council of Churches of Evangelical Christian Baptists and the True and Free Seventh-Day Adventists. The Soviet period also witnessed the vigorous growth of Pente-costals, who had first appeared in Russia in 1913. In the 1970s and 1980s, circles of educated urban intellectuals sometimes faced persecution for their interest and participation in Eastern religions, including Tibetan Buddhism and the Hare Krishna movement.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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In 1990 the Soviet parliament passed a law allowing complete religious freedom and ushered in a new, open spiritual marketplace. Missionaries from the United States and Western Europe helped to establish and finance Mormon ward, Jehovah’s Witnesses kingdom halls, and charismatic and evangelical churches. Underground movements, such as the True Orthodox Christians, the International Society of Krishna Consciousness, and the Baptist Council of Churches, emerged to compete in the new atmosphere.
The new freedom, and the collapse of the Soviet economic and political systems, also encouraged the formation of new sectarian movements. Distressed by the moral degeneration of Russian society, prophets from the Church of the Transfiguring Theotokos claimed that the Mother of God had appeared to warn Russia and the world of an impending judgment. The White Brotherhood, a syncretic movement, combining elements of Hinduism and Orthodox Christianity, gathered to witness the end of the world in Kiev in 1993.
Alarmed by these apocalyptic movements and by the influx of foreign missionaries, the Russian parliament in 1997 passed a new law that favored the traditional religions of Russia. Local administrations have interpreted the law quite differently, so that the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have peacefully established their headquarters in St. Petersburg, have also had to defend themselves in Moscow courts.
Sectarianism first became significant in Russia in the seventeenth century. On the one hand, sectarianism represented the growth of individual initiative and freedom, as religious virtuosi took upon themselves the responsibility of constructing and living out new religious visions. But on the other hand, the classification and enumeration of sects reflect the growth of bureaucratic systems of social control in both state and church. The continued vitality of sectarianism in the twenty-first century is a product of the dialectic between these two opposite trends. See also: OLD BELIEVERS; ORTHODOXY; PROTESTANTISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, John. (1994). Religion, State and Politics in the Soviet Union and Successor States. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bolshakoff, Serge. (1950). Russian Nonconformity: The Story of “Unofficial” Religion in Russia. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
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Conybeare, Frederick C. (1962). Russian Dissenters. New York: Russell and Russell. Engelstein, Laura. (1999). Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sawatsky, Walter. (1981). Soviet Evangelicals since World War II. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press. Witte, John, and Bourdeaux, Michael, eds. (1999). Pros-elytism and Orthodoxy in Russia: The New War for Souls. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press.
