Book Launch -- <i>Converging Worlds: Community and Religion in Peasant Russia</i>

At a recent Kennan Institute event, Chris Chulos, an Adjunct Professor of History and Assistant Director of Institutional Advancement at Roosevelt University, discussed his new book Converging Worlds: Community and Religion in Peasant Russia, written in part during his time as a Title VIII-Supported Research Scholar at the Kennan Institute. Chulos noted that his book examines the everyday practice of faith among peasants in the Voronezh region during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as how these peasants understood the relationship between Orthodoxy, Russian-ness, and their own identities.

Chulos explained that he chose to study peasant religious practices because the topic was largely absent from literature on the Russian Orthodox Church when he began his research nearly twenty years ago. He noted that scholars of religion tended to disdain the religious beliefs and practices of "ignorant" lay people and focus instead on theology or on the role of the Orthodox Church as an institution. Chulos particularly disagreed with previous scholars who had contended that the Bolsheviks' easy victory over the Church demonstrated that religion could not have been very important to ordinary Russians. Using little used archival sources and provincial newspapers, he demonstrated that religion remained important in everyday life. Because Russia is too large and diverse a country to make generalizations about the religious practices of all peasants, he focused on just Voronezh because in the pre-Soviet period it was a heavily agricultural and isolated region that was typically viewed as the quintessential Russian heartland.

Orthodox belief and practice handed down through the generations were central to how peasants in Voronezh organized their lives and viewed the world around them, according to Chulos. Peasants lived hard, uncertain lives and practiced a wide variety of rites, customs, and magic that were intended to heal the sick, safeguard the harvest, improve their material circumstances, or fend off disaster. They had a fascination with miracle-working icons, spiritual healers, and local saints. Chulos argued that peasants divided the world into spheres of good and evil in a way that clearly reflected the division between spiritual perfection and material imperfection in Orthodox theology. In addition, Voronezh peasants observed a large number of religious feast days, as well as celebrations marking birth, death, and marriage.

According to Chulos, the religious practices of Voronezh peasants often put them at odds with both secular and Church elites. As Russia began to modernize both politically and economically, local elites disapproved of the peasants' continued observance of time- and labor-consuming festivals and rituals. For the peasants, Chulos argued, these rituals were a means of providing stability in a changing world, while for both local and national elites they were a sign of backwardness. Church leaders were also remote from the concerns of ordinary parishioners. Chulos explained that when the Church instituted a reform program in the revolutionary year of 1905, peasants often responded by trying to oust the appointed parish clergy and replacing them with candidates of their choosing. When the Bolsheviks took power and began their anti-Church campaigns, there was substantial discord between the Church leadership, the parish clergy, and ordinary believers, thus preventing the Church from taking a united stand against the onslaught of state-sponsored atheism.