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Book Launch -- <i>Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Milennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917</i>

Sergei Zhuk, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Ball State University, and former Title VIII-Supported Research Scholar, Kennan Institute

Date & Time

Tuesday
Nov. 30, 2004
1:30pm – 3:30pm ET

Overview

At a recent Kennan Institute talk, Sergei Zhuk, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Ball State University, and former Title VIII-Supported Research Scholar, Kennan Institute, discussed his new book Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism , and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917. Zhuk argued that there were significant numbers of radical Christian sects in pre-Revolutionary southern Russia and Ukraine. Zhuk gave an overview of several of the many different Christian sects that were active in southern Russia and Ukraine.

Russia's "radical reformation" began during the 1830s and 1840s in the small communities of Russian migrant peasants from the central provinces of Tambov and Kursk, who brought the traditions of the old Russian dissident religious movement, "Kristovshchina," to the provinces of Tavrida and Bessarabia in the South. Different versions of this movement were incorporated into the new religious practices of the Shalaputs, the successors of the Christ-Faith tradition there. These old traditions also converged with new Western Protestant influences, including Lutheran Pietism and the Mennonite Jumpers' movement. During this cultural dialogue between the Russian Shalaputs and their Protestant co-religionists from the German colonies, all participants contributed equally to the new phenomenon of Ukrainian Stundism, an evangelical movement that appropriated various Russian and Western European traditions of religious dissent. Later on, after 1884, Ukrainian Stundism together with the Pashkovites, the intellectual evangelicals from the Russian aristocracy, and the evangelical movement among the Molokans from the Caucasus, laid the foundation for the Russian Baptist Union.

The institutionalization of the evangelical movement and the spread of Baptism led to the division of Stundism into Stundo-Baptism and the radical "spiritual" version of Stundism. A new stage of the radical reformation began among the radical Stundists and the Maliovantsy, who rejected human authorities and church rituals. During the 1890s the radical reformation demonstrated the revitalization of the ecstatic and millennial elements of the Shalaputs within the context of the Stundist movement in the South. As a result, after 1900, these three phases of the evangelical movement—Shalaput, Stundist, and Stundo-Shalaput—determined the main framework of the entire popular reformation not only on the southern frontier, but also in other provinces of Russian Empire. The Shalaput, Stundist and Stundo-Shalaput movements became the main versions of the evangelical dissent, which differed from the traditional dissent of the Russian Old Believers who had been shaping a religious opposition in Russia since the late seventeenth century.

From the 1860s it was not the Old Believers, but the Shalaputs, the radical Stundists, and the Maliovantsy who structured the popular oppositional discourse in imperial Russia. They developed theologies and religious practices equivalent to those of the Western Radical Reformation. Russian religious evangelical dissent was not an aberration in the cultural development of the Russian countryside. This movement was an integral part of the universal development of the Christian Reformation, which had begun in the sixteenth century in Western Europe and reached the southern provinces of the Russian Empire only in the nineteenth century.

According to Zhuk, the religious practices of the Shalaputs and Stundists were very similar to the practices of Christian sects that came out of the American radical reformation, such as the Quakers. Shalaputs and Stundists devoted much of their leisure time to reading and studying the Bible, and therefore valued literacy and education. Zhuk argued that they advocated a number of values that were not traditional in Russian and Ukrainian society, including: temperance, separation of church and state, and equal partnership between husband and wife. He explained that sects frequently faced persecution from state authorities. They responded to government pressure by petitioning the state for the right to continue practicing their faith, portraying themselves as model citizens. Zhuk cited evidence from memoirs and court cases in which both sect members and local Orthodox peasants describe Shalaputs and Stundists as hardworking, temperate, honest, and responsible, in contrast to the Orthodox, who were described as drunk and lazy.

Radical Christian sects, according to Zhuk, have received very little attention in the field of Russian and Ukrainian studies. He argued that they deserve more scholarly attention because they provide a useful framework for approaching many aspects of Russian and Ukrainian history and culture. For example, the Shalaputs' use of female church leaders and the ideal of equal partnership in marriage sheds light on the nature of gender relationships in Russia and Ukraine; and the relationships between radical sects and local authorities can improve our understanding of politics in the Russian Empire.

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Kennan Institute

The Kennan Institute is the premier US center for advanced research on Russia and Eurasia and the oldest and largest regional program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Kennan Institute is committed to improving American understanding of Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the surrounding region though research and exchange.  Read more

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