Commonalities of Modern Political Discourse: Three Paths of Modern Activism in Late Imperial Russia's Alternative Intelligentsia

Commonalities of Modern Political Discourse

Three Paths of Modern Activism in Late Imperial Russia's Alternative Intelligentsia

Freed by the Great Reforms of the 1860s, sons of Russian Orthodox parish clergymen, or popovichi, departed from the caste-like clerical estate in large numbers and entered virtually every Russian profession and political movement.¹ Once detached from their traditional social estate, popovichi were compelled to construct new identities. Faced with adversity from the noble-dominated secular society they entered, popovichi tended to cling to aspects of their traditional clerical pasts, refusing to assimilate. They did not become citizens who subscribed to universalism; and as such, they can be seen as another example of the Russian state's incomplete modernization. Yet popovichi were not simply unfinished products of a modernization orchestrated by Russia's seemingly omnipotent state. Most of them chose voluntarily to leave their native estate, and they succeeded as self-made men. In this sense, they became modern, self-reliant agents distinguished by both introspection and the belief that they could and should change their world. They thus helped shape the era of "modernity" in Russia as they shaped themselves into agents of change, just as educated "sons of commoners" and marginalized groups who reach the center have throughout the modern world.²

Collectively, popovichi formed what can be called an "alternative intelligentsia."³ Like the nebulous phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia itself, which has aptly been described as a "nascent civil society," this alternative intelligentsia did not ever espouse a specific political agenda.⁴ Popovichi were a remarkably diverse group professionally and politically; their ranks included Bolshevik revolutionaries as well as monarchist professors of theology. They tended to draw on aspects of their clerical heritage, but not all of them agreed on how to define it; as modern men they defined it individually. Much like turn-of-the-century German academics, united by a broad range of common assumptions despite their opposing views of modernity, some popovichi saw clerical values as tradition; others as modernity.⁵ This seemingly contradictory interpretation of their native estate was aided by the fact that tradition itself is a modern concept invented by 19th-century intellectuals in response to the anxieties caused by modernity.⁶ Russia's caste-like clergy, similar to the religiously sanctioned caste system of India and to the biblical Levites, to whom clergymen not infrequently compared themselves in the 19th century, encouraged this diversity—it allowed popovichi who became atheists to subsume and secularize Orthodox religious values in the guise of social estate values while discarding theological dogma.⁷ The group's native estate identity could thus be simultaneously religious and social or merely common, without necessarily altering the content of its values. In this sense popovichi were similar to contemporary American Jews: all may identify themselves as Jewish, but many qualify their Jewish identity with labels—"cultural," "secular," "religious," or "ethnic" Jew—while retaining key aspects of their heritage.⁸

The traditions popovichi brought with them were so different from the noble-dominated culture they entered, and thus new and revolutionary, because in no other European country was there such a strict differentiation of the priesthood, extending from birth to marriage, education, law, and bureaucracy.⁹ Russia's caste-like clergy was to some extent so segregated that it was racialized, as were Russia's peasant serfs due to their protracted enserfment.¹⁰ This racialization of social estate groups helps explain why ethnic Russians belonging to estate groups could produce the types of alternative cultures associated with national, regional, or religious minorities, despite the predominance of Orthodoxy as their faith.

What cemented popovichi's collective identity was their affiliation with their common social origin as well as a common foe: the nobility...