When Belarussian-born US journalist, Maurice Hindus visited the USSR in 1929-30, he expressed his amazement at the transformation of peasants’ beliefs. After interviewing young people in one village, he noted, dumbstruck, that “peasant boys and girls should not even know what a rusalka was!”
Hindus’
account, given in his memoir Red Bread (1931), can be read as an
attempt to explain how the Russian revolution was transforming the Russian
peasant from a superstitious, pre-modern being rooted in backward beliefs into
an enlightened citizen. Yet the reference to rusalkas – water-nymphs
long believed to inhabit rural rivers, lakes, and ponds – can be read in a
rather different way. In revealing the non-belief in these magical creatures of
local youth, Hindus was also offering a glimpse into the recent past of what
might be called Russia’s “popular religion”.
Hindus
recalls that “in my days, children…were afraid of the rusalkas…who were
supposed to be the lost souls of drowned girls… With the very milk of our
mothers we imbibed the notion that there was no resisting the rusalkas.”
The rusalkas
were, in fact, only one rather strange and surprising aspect of the religious
world of Russian Orthodox peasants, a religious world which was (for most
peasants) Orthodox Christian but which maintained its own idiosyncrasies. This world would be understood by many writers and academics at the time and afterwards to constitute one
of “dual faith”, in which ancient pagan and Orthodox Christian faiths coexisted.
But the idea of “dual faith” has fallen out of favour since the 1990s, as
historians have begun to reconceptualise the Christianity of Russia’s peasants.
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| Ivan Kramskoi, Rusalki (1871). Credit: Wikimedia Commons. |
In this post, I’ll consider what this peasant Christianity looked like by the early 1900s and this means for one question in our teaching of Russian history in particular: the power of the Orthodox Church in late-Imperial Russia.
Peasant Russia, Pagan Russia?
The lives of
Russian peasants in the early 20th century were, according to
historian Moshe Lewin, shaped by peasants’ self-conceptualisation as
pious, Orthodox people. As Lewin emphasised in an important 1990 article, however,
this did not mean that peasants’ faith was dominated by the official dogma and
strictures of the Orthodox Church. As he noted:
[If] religious beliefs and systems are products of societies
and status groups (or social classes)…then we can assume a priori that official
denominations never express reality in matters so complex [as popular
religion].
The Orthodox
Church by 1900 was certainly a powerful organisation in the Russian Empire,
thanks both to its institutionalisation in the Russian imperial state and the
integration of Orthodox faith into the lives of Russia’s peasants.
Yet the
religion practiced by Russian peasants did not always follow official Church
dogma. Alongside belief in God and the afterlife, peasants maintained beliefs
in such beings as the rusalkas, demons of the home and field, witches, and
magic.
These
beliefs are sometimes described as “pagan” and linked to ancient, pre-Christian
traditions (in the case of Russia presumably pre-dating the Christianisation of
the Rus begun by Prince Vladimir/Volodymyr at the end of the 10th
century). For a long time, many writers described them as existing within a system
of “dual faith” (dvoeverie in Russian), in which paganism
and Christianity represented parallel strands in peasant belief.
As historian
Eve Levin argued in 1993, the idea of “dual faith” was appealing to
writers and historians for different reasons. Amongst the advocates of strict
Orthodox Christianity, it was used to emphasise the Church’s efforts to root
out supposedly non-Christian beliefs amongst a superstitious population. For Marxist
historians in the Soviet Union, by contrast, the idea of “dual faith” was used
to attack the supposed ideological hold of the Orthodox Church over the Russian
people, justifying the contention that ordinary Russians (and especially
peasants) were not under the sway of organised, reactionary religious
institutions. The concept of “dual faith” has even entered modern popular culture
through American novelist Katherine Arden, whose Winternight fantasy
trilogy set in Medieval Russia presents an battle between ancient pagan gods
and the incoming force of Orthodox Christianity.
Since the 1990s, however, historians have challenged the idea of “dual faith”, questioning the extent to which ancient paganism coexisted with Orthodox Christianity. This has not necessarily undermined the importance of ostensibly non-Christian aspects of peasant popular religion. Instead, the emphasis for many historians has turned to how these were integrated into a single popular system of belief, as peasants constructed their own forms of Orthodox Christianity (rather than counterposing it to a parallel system of “pagan” beliefs). These forms of peasant Orthodoxy are often referred to as “popular religion” and constituted a key part of, to quote the sub-title of David Moon's important 1999 book, "the world the peasants made".
As Moshe
Lewin, Eve Levin, David Moon, and other historians have noted,
the integration of supposedly non-Christian traditions into Christian practice
means there was actually no clear dividing line between popular “pagan” and Christian
beliefs. If people describing themselves as Christian believed in magic and
water-nymphs, does that not mean these in turn should be described as aspects
of Christian belief? It may well have been that the Orthodox Church hierarchy
disapproved of many of folk beliefs. But Russian peasants would nevertheless
have seen themselves as Orthodox believers; beings such as rasalkas, therefore,
were part and parcel of their own (version of) Orthodox faith.
Indeed, Moshe
Lewin argues there was a two-way process of constructing popular religious
belief, in which peasants adopted and adapted Orthodox Christianity according
to their own understandings and needs, while the Orthodox Church tolerated and
even tacitly accepted those aspects of popular belief it could not (or saw no
need to) eradicate. For instance, a number of Orthodox Christian saints (which
number some 300 in total) appear to have been adopted or “rebaptised” from pre-existing,
non-Christian deities.
There is an
interesting parallel here with many other Christian traditions in Europe, which
likewise saw the adoption of ostensibly non-Christian elements into popular
Christian faith. To give one example, folklore from medieval and early modern
Europe abounds with the fantastical, magical, and demonic, all the while framed
by wider Christian belief structures, as clearly seen, for example, in the
German fairytales recorded by the Brothers Grimm.
The Question of Church Power
This aspect
of popular religious belief is fascinating in its own right. However, in the
context of Russia by the early 1900s, there is also an important implication for
a tangible, practical question: the power of the Orthodox Church.
Students examining
late-Imperial Russia necessarily encounter the Orthodox Church as a powerful reactionary
force in society and politics. This issue can be approached through the
institutional power of the Orthodox Church, which was certainly significant. By
the reigns of Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II, the Orthodox Church had been
re-affirmed as the state religion, regained key powers over education, been
liberated to proselytise amongst non-Christians in the Russian Empire, and
retained powers over civil and family matters including marriage and divorce.
The
institutionalisation of the Orthodox Church within the Tsarist Imperial state
had, it should be noted, led to some loss of Church autonomy, as the Tsar sought
to control and monitor its decision-making processes. Most notably, the Over
Procurator of the Holy Synod, an official appointed by the Tsar to the oversee
the Orthodox Church’s ruling council, the Holy Synod, was the “eye of the Tsar”
and in effect a minister for religious affairs.
However, given
the peculiarities of peasant belief by the early 1900s, I’ve become
increasingly convinced we should consider the interplay and balance between the
Church’s institutional power and its authority over popular religion. Peasant
religious belief may have been a form of Orthodoxy, but it was not necessarily one
that reflected the wishes of Church leaders or officials. Indeed, in some
instances peasants maintained actively hostile relationships with official
representatives of the Orthodox Church, most notably with the village priest (pop
in Russian), whose income came almost exclusively from peasant contributions
and whose congregation often deeply resented the financial burden he imposed.
Village priests were well aware of the low esteem in which they were often held. As one put it, "Everywhere people disparage the clergy with the most vicious mockery, with words of the most profound scorn and infinite disgust." Perhaps more importantly, however, many aspects of peasant religious belief and practice appear to have been possible without the intervention of the priest at all, giving peasants a degree of power and autonomy of their own over the Church and its institutionalised power.
Teaching Popular Religion and Church Power in Imperial
Russia: A Proposal and Outline
Having
taught for three consecutive years the power of the Orthodox Church through its
“institutional power”, I have now resolved to begin teaching students more
explicitly about the interplay between the Orthodox Church as an institution
and popular peasant religious belief.
To do so, I recently produced a text situated in a Russian village. Taking students on a gamble through the village’s huts, Church, fields, and wider surroundings, the text introduces them to not just the institutional powers of the Church, but also to a range of peasant beliefs, presenting these as a single integrated Christian belief system, rather than an aspect of “dual faith” counterposed with Christianity.
The full text for the lesson and PowerPoint can both be found here. If you give the lesson a go, I'd be extremely grateful for any feedback on how it might have shaped students' understanding of Church power!
Selected Further Reading
Maurice Hindus, Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village (with forward by Ronald Grigor Suny), Indiana University Press (1988)
Eve Levin, "Dvoeverie and Popular Religion", in Stephen K. Batalden (ed.), Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, Northern Illinois University Press (1993)
Moshe Lewin, "Popular Religion in Twentieth-Century Russia", in Ben Ekloff and Stephen Frank (eds.), The World of the Russian Peasant: Post-Emancipation Culture and Society, Unwin Hyman (1990)
David Moon, The Russian Peasantry, 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made, Routledge (1999)
Stella Rock, Popular Religion in Russia: 'Double Belief' and the Making of an Academic Myth, Routledge (2007)
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