Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917 (review)

Zhuk's detailed account of peasant evangelical religion in southern Russia draws on a rich array of archival and contemporary sources, which he analyzes with the tools of comparative cultural anthropology. The type of nonconformity that he examines emerges as deeply contradictory. On the one hand, the various local communities shared a common set of practices and beliefs: ecstatic worship rituals, influence of charismatic prophets, and anticipation of the Second Coming or Last Judgment. On the other hand, they were unable to maintain stable boundaries, continuously fragmenting in the wake of new leaders. Their sobriety and discipline promoted industriousness and respectability, but their millenarian expectations led some to embrace radical political ideas. The authorities were convinced that they were both alien and subversive.

In the effort to counteract the image of traditional Russian religious culture as prone to irrational, mystical forms, and thus inimical to "modernity," Zhuk asserts the direct link between this type of peasant sectarianism and radical popular Protestantism as it evolved in German lands and was imported into Russia by German colonists. This Protestant evangelical strain, he maintains, merged in the southern provinces with native sectarian tendencies, offshoots of Orthodox mysticism such as the Khlysty and Skoptsy. Groups such as the so-called Stundists and Shalaputs combined a millenarian outlook, expecting heaven on earth, with a practical attitude toward worldly endeavors.

Zhuk characterizes the Stundists and Shalaputs as people of the book and bearers of the Weberian "Protestant ethic," in Russian (or Ukrainian) guise.¹ But the prejudices of historians and officials—whether loyal Orthodox or Soviet atheists—may not entirely explain why the history of these groups has been "lost." Their closest models are not the Calvinists and Lutherans, who exerted a major influence on European culture and politics, but the Albigensians and Mennonites, who were marginal in their own context. In Russia, despite the odd upper-class convert, the new beliefs were confined to the geographical as well as social fringe—the minimally literate masses of the southern frontier. Zhuk shows how the sectarians' sobriety, discipline, nonviolence, and productivity distinguished them from Orthodox peasants. Yet, in arguing for their importance, he contends that their dreams of a better world articulated a discontent shared by their more conventional neighbors.

In Zhuk's view, the Protestant-style mystics of the Ukraine had many virtues: They were (usually) tolerant of Jews; they preached and also practiced the equality of men and women; and they manifested not only a talent for productive economic activity but also the same respect for the individual that characterized the Reformation in the West. They were, in short, enlightened modernizers, who, by virtue of their visionary expectations, at the same time inclined the local peasant culture to embrace the promise of social transfiguration when it arrived in Bolshevik form. One may remain skeptical of the claim that evangelicals were either natural radicals or dedicated individualists; one may wonder whether any peasant community, however pious, could have demonstrated such consistent highmindedness. But readers will find Zhuk's interpretation of south Russian or Ukrainian peasant culture to be worth consideration and his careful description of popular beliefs and religious syncretism of compelling interest.