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The Medicalization of Religious Deviance in the Russian Orthodox

Church (18801905)

Beer, Daniel.

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume

5, Number 3, Summer 2004 (New Series), pp. 451-482 (Article)

Published by Slavica Publishers

DOI: 10.1353/kri.2004.0035

For additional information about this article

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Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, 3 (Summer 2004): 45182.

Articles

The Medicalization of Religious Deviancein the Russian Orthodox Church(18801905)

DANIEL BEER

For most of the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox Church in the post-emancipation era was dismissed as a handmaiden of the state, a moribundinstitution, a purveyor of empty rituals, increasingly isolated and irrelevantin the context of industrial modernization and secularization. The last decadehas witnessed a renewed interest in the Church among cultural and socialhistorians of late imperial Russia. Gregory Freeze has recently observed thatin its preoccupation with social and political factors in the revolutionary pro-cess, the traditional historiography has ignored its cultural and especially re-

ligious dimensions; apart from examining the ideology of the intelligentsia, ithas otherwise discounted the role of culture, especially in conguring popularperception and behavior.1 Seeking to redress the balance, Freeze contends:the Russian Orthodox Church, without question, provided one of the majorcultural dynamics in the Russian pre-Revolution it claimed a strong holdover the faithful and subjected the laity to a constant barrage of liturgies,sermons, publications, and religious instruction in schools.2

Versions of this article were presented in 2002 at the BASEES conference and the CulturalHistory Seminar, both held in Cambridge, UK. I would like to thank the participants,especially Eric Naiman and Catriona Kelly, for their suggestions and critiques. I am alsograteful to Susan Morrissey, Steve Smith, Hubertus Jahn, Inessa Medzhibovskaya, MichaelDavid-Fox, and Peter Holquist for their incisive comments on the articles various drafts.

The research and writing of this article were supported by the Arts and HumanitiesResearch Board and by Kings College and Downing College, University of Cambridge. 1 Gregory L. Freeze, Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late ImperialRussia, Journal of Modern History68 (June 1996): 308. 2 Ibid., 3089. For an overview of the renewed concern with Russian spiritual culture, seeLaura Engelstein, Paradigms, Pathologies, and Other Clues to Russian Spiritual Culture:Some Post-Soviet Thoughts, Slavic Review57, 4 (1998): 86477; and Simon Dixon, HowHoly Was Holy Russia? Rediscovering Russian Religion, in Reinterpreting Russia, ed. GeoffreyHosking and Robert Service (London: Arnold, 1999), 2139.

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The present article addresses a narrow but important component of thisreligious discourse: the stigmatization of religious dissent. Alarmed by thegrowth of sectarianism in post-emancipation Russia, the servitors of spiritualpurity increasingly drew on languages of illness and contagion to illustrate

the scale and nature of the threat to the Church. Here I discuss the Churchsrepresentation of religious dissent not to make a case for its role in cong-uring popular perception and behavioralthough that role is by no meansdiscountedbut to explore the ways in which discursive innovations withinthe Church both reected and creatively appropriated signicant contem-porary developments in secular understandings of the social order and thethreats posed to it by the spread of moral deviance.

Languages of illness and contagion have historically formed a stable part ofthe lexica of European churches in their attempts to stigmatize religious dissent-ers, and I make no claims for particularity in the existence of this language inRussian Orthodoxy.3 What does appear particular to Russia is the persistence ofthis preoccupation with the purity of faith right into the 20th century and itscoexistence with the secular, scientic languages of epidemiology, psychology,and psychiatry. The church authorities drew on these disciplines to emphasizethe contagious properties of religious deviance. In so doing, they increasinglymoved away from a traditional insistence on the virtues of therapeutics, under-stood as pastoral care, to calls for a prophylactic quarantining of the infected inthe interests of collective health. Such a strategy would inevitably require the in-tervention of the state as it lay beyond the institutional capacities of the Church.Anxious therefore to encourage the expansion of the states involvement in thepersecution of the sectarians, leading church gures sought to stress the intimaterelationship between religious and political dissent through a secular languageof criminal deviance that stressed their fundamental equivalence. Not only werethe state authorities uniquely capable of dealing with the sectarian threat, butthey also could not afford, any more than the Church could, to ignore it. Thus

the medicalization of religious deviance in late 19th-century Orthodox discourseconstituted part of a sustained campaign to summon the secular arm of the stateto crush the sectarian movements. On the very eve of the religious liberaliza-tion of 1905, the Churchs secularization of its rhetoric paradoxically illustrateda reinvigoration of traditional concerns with spiritual and moral purity as thefoundation of a secure socio-political order. The Churchs resort to medical andsecular remedies in the campaign against spiritual nonconformity leads us atthe end of this article to reconsider the links between religion and revolution,

Orthodoxy and Bolshevism, a disputed issue that has long been debated but hasrecently been addressed by a number of historians.

3 See, for example, Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, 3vols. (New York: Harbor Press, 1955); and Monique Zerner, ed., Inventer lhrsie? Discourspolmiques et pouvoirs avant lInquisition (Nice: Universit de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, 1998).

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THE MEDICALIZATION OF RELIGIOUS DEVIANCE 453

The Churchs Inner Mission and the Campaign against SectarianismThe Churchs missionary movement in the second half of the 19th century wasin part directed against the empires non-Christian minorities. Paul Werthsrecent study of the Churchs efforts to convert the non-Orthodox peoples of

the VolgaKama region and its role in the promotion of imperial governancein the course of the 19th century has pointed to the perceived importanceof Orthodoxy as the soundest moral foundation for the development andimprovement of the empires population. Werth argues that the period fromthe late 1820s to the Great Reforms initiated a transitionnever completedunder the old regimefrom an imperial model featuring tolerance of ethnicand religious diversity and emphasizing dynastic loyalty above all else, to oneof a unitary national state, which aspired to a higher degree of integration ofits diverse population.4 The Churchs missionary efforts were also directed atthe various sects that, while still adhering to basic principles of Christianity,were believed to have repudiated the teachings of the ofcial Church. It is thestigmatization of this latter group that forms the focus of this article.

Freeze has noted that the Orthodox Church perceived Old Belief andthe various sects as threats of the rst order in the post-emancipation era.5 J.Eugene Clay has examined the related efforts in this period of a new classof professional missionaries to purify the Russian Orthodox Church ofwhat they regarded as superstitious and false religious practices.6 As GlennysYoung has observed: Invoked rhetorically in ofcial synodal publications ofthe 1870s, 1880s (and beyond), the ambiguous term religious-moral situa-tion meant clerical vigilance in shielding parishioners from competitivethreats to Orthodox belief and practice, such as pagan traditions, the doctrines

4 Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics inRussias VolgaKama Region, 18271905(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 5, 7.

5 Gregory L. Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform,Counter-Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), xxxvi; Freeze, TheRechristianization of Russia: The Church and Popular Religion, 17501850, Studia SlavicaFinlandensia 7 (1990): 118; and Freeze, Going to the Intelligentsia: The Church and ItsUrban Mission in Post-Reform Russia, in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and theQuest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, andJames L. West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 21532, esp. 222, 232. Iuse the terms sectarian, schismatic, and Old Believer interchangeably. This is neitherto ignore nor to deny the sizable and important differences within the Old Belief properand between it and the multitude of religious sectssome of Old Believer origin, othersnotin late imperial Russia. Rather this terminological vagueness is a function of sourcesthat themselves often neither distinguish among these currents and sects nor provide enoughinformation for the historian to do so. 6 J. Eugene Clay, Orthodox Missionaries and Orthodox Heretics in Russia, 18861917,in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Robert P.Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 38.

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of the Old Belief, and sectarian movements.7 Yet Nadieszda Kizenkos study ofFather John of Kronstadt and the Ioannite sect has demonstrated that pop-ular religiosity was also perceived as a threat to the supremacy of the ofcialChurch and was frequently greeted by initial unease and then outright hostil-

ity by some church leaders and by Procurator of the Holy Synod KonstantinPetrovich Pobedonostsev (18271907).8

Indeed, under Pobedonostsevs tenure as procurator of the Holy Synodfrom 1880 until 1905, the Church was especially vigorous in its stigmatiza-tion and persecution of Old Believers, small sects such as the Dukhobors, andother religious denominations such as the Baptists. Pobedonostsevs personalantipathy toward the sectarians was pronounced. In his annual report tothe tsar for 1901, he referred to the countrys Old Believers as a cancerousgrowth on the Russian body politic [na politicheskom tele Rossii] which wemust somehow eliminate.9 Pobedonostsev and his advisor, Professor NikolaiIvanovich Subbotin, who had been a member of the Moscow EcclesiasticalAcademy in the Holy Trinity Monastery since 1852, agreed on a two-prongedassault on the power of the Churchs religious rivals. First, they consistentlyurged use of the states authority to deny the Old Believers and the sectsany rights not granted under Russian law and to harass them in every waypossible.10 Second, they devised an educational and propaganda campaignintended to promote sectarian conversions to Orthodoxy and Orthodox hos-tility toward the sects.

Seeking to strengthen the Churchs limited missionary campaign,Pobedonostsev and Subbotin introduced several novel strategies. In 1884,a congress in Kiev of the hierarchy and clergy of the southwestern provinceswas intended to raise the prole of the campaign, while another congress inKazan endeavored to fulll the same function in that region. In 1887 and in1890, Pobedonostsev turned to the bezpopovtsy, or priestless Old Believers,

7 Glennys Young, Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in the Village(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 17. 8 Nadieszda Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 21014, 22627. 9Vsepoddaneishii otchet ober-prokurora sviateishego sinoda K. Pobedonostseva po vedomstvupravoslavnogo ispovedeniia za 1901 god(St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipograia, 1904), 199200.10 A law issued in 1883 claried the legal position of the sectarians. They were granted theright to hold passports, to engage in trade and industry, and to hold minor ofces. They were

permitted to hold religious services in their homes and in houses of prayer, but these buildingswere not to have bells or any other distinctive features. Crucially, there were to be no publicdemonstrations of worship or processions, and all proselytizing and missionary work was strictlyforbidden. As Robert Byrnes has observed: Church and State policies from 1883 until 1905were devoted to a precise implementation of this law and an effort to hamper the various sectsin every way. See Byrnes, Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought(Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1968), 181.

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who accepted the rule of the Synod but used the forms and rituals of the OldBelief, by holding conferences of missionaries at a monastery of priestlessOld Believers in Moscow. The failures of the conferences to inspire the clergyand of missionary congresses to organize effective diocesan campaigns against

the sectarians prompted Pobedonostsev and Subbotin to target seminaries.Accordingly, in 1887 the Synod ordered every seminary to establish withinthree years a chair on the history and evil inuences of the Schism and thesects.11

The Churchs missionary activity and the repressive measures undertakenagainst the sectarians impinged on the lives of both the Russian peasantry andthe capitals urban elites. The Shtundists, an evangelical sect with beliefs muchlike the Baptists, who left the Orthodox Church in approximately 1870, thenincreased their following substantially in the dioceses of Kherson and Odessa,particularly among peasants. A form of peasant Puritanism, shtundizm re-jected smoking, alcohol, and dancing; declared the state an evil force; reliedentirely on personal interpretations of the Bible; and rejected the sacramentalsystem and many Orthodox rites. Its members even proposed communalproperty.12 After the 1884 Kiev conference failed to arrest the growth of thesect, the Holy Synod turned to the state. A new Shtundist journal was closed.The hierarchy of the Southwest, with Pobedonostsevs support, had the meet-ing houses of the Shtundists closed in 1894 when the Council of Ministersdeclared them an especially dangerous sect. The repression then intensied:Shtundist schools and chapels were shut down; and Shtundists were deniedinternal passports and other ofcial documents.13

Edmund Heier has detailed a similar appeal to the secular arm to dealwith a Protestant sect, the Pashkovists, which took hold among the Russianaristocracy in St. Petersburg in the 1880s. Colonel Vasilii AleksandrovichPashkov and his aristocratic followers had been converted in the 1870s byLord Radstock, a Victorian revivalist of the Plymouth Brethren persuasion.

Pashkov set up a Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and EthicalReading in 1876. Within a month of his appointment as procurator of theHoly Synod, Pobedonostsev persuaded Alexander II that Pashkovs preach-ing without permission, the singing of English hymns, and sermons stress-ing faith and love were creating an indifference to sin among the aristocracythat might easily spread throughout the rest of society. Heier notes: unableto make good headway the church authorities fell back upon the aid of thecivil authorities, and it was then that the long and bitter story of persecution

11 Ibid., 18485.12 As I discuss below, the state became alarmed at the degree to which sectarian ideas were seento disseminate values conducive to the growth of socialism in Russia.13 Ibid., 182.

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began.14 Radstock was forced to leave Russia, and Pashkov and his supporterswere sent into exile. When, a few years later, Radstock and Pashkov returnedto St. Petersburg and resumed their evangelical activities, the director generalresponded with greater ferocity. Pashkov and some of his main followers were

forced to leave the country, their property was put into trust, their ofceswere closed, and their literature was conscated.15

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the campaign for spiri-tual purity undertaken by the synodal and church authorities enjoyed thesupport of Russias prominent spiritual leaders in the post-emancipation era.There were inuential dissenting voices calling for a more tolerant attitudetoward religious deviants. The religious philosopher Vladimir SergeevichSolovev (18531900) spoke out against persecution and the use of pressureto convert others to Orthodoxy. His well-known ecumenical convictions ledhim to champion those who fought the persecution of religious dissenters,arguing that they had acted in the spirit of Christ: We will consider as thetrue representatives of the Russian people those who honorably served socialjustice [pravda] and to the best of their abilities brought the Kingdom of Godcloser to earth, for the Kingdom of God is the kingdom of justice and truth[pravda], not of violence and arbitrariness.16

One such religious deviant was the enormously inuential Lev Tolstoi(18281910), who was removed from the Church in 1901. A sharp criticof the Orthodox Church and a defender of sectarians, Tolstoi assisted theDukhobors in eeing to Canada to escape persecution and spoke out infavor of religious freedom. He was himself subject to severe harassment fromthe synodal authorities, which sought to restrict the publication of his booksand the appearance of his plays and condemned him in their journals andnewspapers.17

It was perhaps a reection of the mounting isolation of the Churchsinner mission within late imperial religious culture that the Churchs mis-

sionary effort remained under-funded and underdeveloped. Founded only in1870, within ten years the Orthodox Missionary Society had less than 7,000members, almost a third of whom lived in Moscow. After 23 years, therewere still less than 10,000 members. After 30 years, when it had only 15,000members, it spent less than $150,000 a year on its activities, about half ofwhich were concentrated in Siberia, with the rest in European Russia and

14 Edmund Heier, Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy, 18601900: Radstockism and

Pashkovism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), 143.15 Ibid., 12543.16 Vladimir Sergeevich Solovev, Sobranie sochinenii, 2nd ed., 10 vols. (St. Petersburg:Prosveshchenie, 191114), vol. 5, 423.17 Tolstoi was never ofcially excommunicated from the Church for fear that labeling him aheretic would only increase his inuence. Byrnes, Pobedonostsev, 183, 25558.

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Japan. Throughout this period, it claimed only 120,000 converts. Indeed,between 1880 and 1905, all the Churchs efforts, including those of theOrthodox Missionary Society, led to the conversion of less than 400,000people.18 Yet the failure to convert large numbers of the populationor in-

deed, the seemingly inexorable fragmentation of the post-emancipation con-fessional uniformityshould not be confused with the failure of the Churchto shape the languages in which this fragmentation was perceived. The par-ish clergy employed a number of tools to fulll their mandate of improvingthe religious-moral condition of the parish. They relied in particular onreligious instruction offered in formats (besedy, chteniia, vnebogosluzhebnyesobesedovaniia) distinct from liturgy and religious services.19 While extra-liturgical instruction had taken place since the beginnings of Christianityin Russia, parish clergy began to increase their efforts along these lines afterthe emancipation of the serfs.20 These discussions often met with limited andquestionable success, and the Church itself began to voice anxieties over thevictories of the sectarians in staged debates.21

The sources for this article might be described loosely as normativechurch literature in the last two decades of the 19th century. This literaturecomprised theological writings and articles that might be reasonably seen asshaping the ways in which priests represented the Church and its rivals totheir parishioners in villages and towns across the empire. Textbooks writtenfor church schools and Orthodox seminaries also contributed to the fash-ioning of a certain discourse both within and beyond the institution of the

18 Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, Izvlechenie iz vsepoddaneishego otcheta ober-prokurorasviateishego sinoda K. Pobedonostseva po vedomstvu pravoslavnogo ispovedeniia za 1881 god(St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipograia, 1883), 811, 6263; Vsepoddaneishii otchet ober-prokurora sviateishego sinoda K. Pobedonostseva po vedomstvu pravoslavnogo ispovedeniia za 1879god (St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipograia, 1882), 1121, 5961; Vsepoddaneishii otchetober-prokurora sviateishego sinoda K. Pobedonostseva po vedomstvu pravoslavnogo ispovedeniia za

18881889 gody(St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipograia, 1891), 5960; Vsepoddaneishii otchetober-prokurora sviateishego sinoda K. Pobedonostseva po vedomstvu pravoslavnogo ispovedeniiaza 1899 god (St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipograia, 1900), 4978 (cited in Byrnes,Pobedonostsev, 18687); and Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy,13738.19 For a discussion of these forms of religious instruction, see Chris J. Chulos, PeasantReligion in Post-Emancipation Russia: Voronezh Province, 18801917, 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss.,University of Chicago, 1994), vol. 1, 11516.20 See for example, Opyt rukovodstva dlia pravoslavnykh pastyrei v borbe s iuzhno-russkimsektantstvom, Rukovodstvo dlia selskikh pastyrei(hereafter RDSP), no. 9 (1898): 198205.Heier has written, the innovation of preaching by the Orthodox clergy now provided theanswer to a spiritual need too long neglected within the established Church (ReligiousSchism in the Russian Aristocracy, 148). His comments have been echoed by Renate Weber,Die russische Orthodoxie im Aufbruch: Kirche, Gesellschaft und Staat im Spiegel der geistlichenZeitschriften (18601905) (Munich: Hieronymus, 1993), 245.21 See, for example, the complaints expressed in Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 1 (1883): 912.

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Church. Ecclesiastical journals, both from the centersuch as Pravoslavnoeobozrenie, Rukovodstvo dlia selskikh pastyrei(hereafter RDSP)and from theperiphery (diocesan literature), all functioned in part as advice literature forvillage priests. As Freeze has noted: The era of the Great Reforms ushered

in a veritable explosion of the ecclesiastical press. From a tiny collection ofperiodicals, geared more to theological scholarship than general readership, theChurch developed a complex set of diocesan gazettes and popular spiritual-religious magazines.22 These journals and gazettes identied areas of concern,exhorted priests to improve the moral-religious condition of the parish, andcrucially provided a vocabulary of persuasion. Nowhere was the effort topersuade more in evidence than in the Churchs battle with sectarianism.The missionary congresses and the journal Missionerskoe obozreniewere in-tended to raise the prole of the Churchs crusade against the spread of reli-gious dissent in Russia and to establish the terms in which supporters of theChurch should perceive the threat to its ideological supremacy. Directed atmissionaries and priests operating in the front line of the war against sectar-ians, the literary production of the Churchs inner mission sought to providethe discursive munitions necessary for the daily skirmishes and battles withsectarians and Old Believers.23

Spiritual Doctors

Vladimir Lossky has noted that among the many images of the fathers ofthe Church and the Scriptures of Christ accomplishing mankinds salvation,there is also the medical image, that of a sickly nature cured by salvationas the antidote to a poison.24 Jean-Claude Larchet has also argued that theEastern Orthodox Church has a tradition, dating back to the church fathers,of regarding sin and redemption in medical terms.25 He points out that theverb to save used in the New Testament also means to cure. Indeed, thereare multiple references in the Gospels to Christ as a doctor who heals the

spiritually sick. In Mark 2:17, for example, Christ states: Those who arewell have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to callnot the righteous but sinners.26 Larchet notes that if Christ is presented asmedical practitioner, then it is humanity that is sick: The salvation brought

22 Freeze, The Rechristianization of Russia, 117.23 The Churchs preoccupation with the battles being fought against these groups pervaded theecclesiastical literature of the period. See Weber, Die russische Orthodoxie im Aufbruch, 22956.

24 Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1974), 100.25 Jean-Claude Larchet, Thrapeutique des maladies spirituelles: Une introduction la traditionasctique de lglise orthodoxe, 3rd ed. (Paris: ditions du Cerf, 1997), 9.26 For further examples, see Matthew 8:1417; 9:1013; and Luke 4:31. See also Paul Evdokimov,La saintet dans la tradition de lglise orthodoxe, Contacts7374 (1971): 11999; and Stanley

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about by Christ is conceived in the Tradition as a cure of ailing human natureand the restoration of its original health.27 Larchets study of the patristicliterature points to a spiritual moral economy pervaded by notions of health,illness, prevention, and cure.28 Such a medical representation of the priest-

hood appears to have had enduring currency in Russian Orthodoxy. A churchpublication from 1776, The Book of Duties for Parish Priests, also denedthe role of parish priests in overtly medical terms: The priest has to watchover every member of his parish, survey the condition of each, and know

Samuel Harakas, The Eastern Orthodox Tradition, in Caring and Curing: Health andMedicine in the Western Religious Traditions, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and Darrel W. Amundsen(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 14672.27 Larchet, Thrapeutique des maladies, 11. The Orthodox Churchs self-denition as the body

of Christ has its origins in the New Testament. In his epistles to the Corinthians, St. Paulemploys the term sma, or body, for the bread received in the Eucharist and for the communityof the church, referring to both of these as the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 10: 16). Themetaphorical power of these representations was undoubtedly reinvigorated in the 1830s andthe 1840s in Russia under the impact of German idealism, with its repeated use of organismicimagery to validate the primacy and autonomy of communities and states. The progress oforganismic ideas is most clearly and consistently traceable through the political theories ofFriedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (17751854) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel(17701831) (F. W. Coker, Organismic Theories of the State: Nineteenth-Century Interpretations

of the State as an Organism or as a Person [New York: Longmans, 1910],

911). Subsequently,Russian church leaders such as Filaret Drozdov, the metropolitan of Moscow from 1826 to1867 and one of the most inuential churchmen of the 19th century, made repeated referencesto the Epistles to propagate the image of the Orthodox Church in bodily metaphorics intendedto stress its cohesion and unity: On the basis of the word of God, I conceive of the ecumenicalChurch as a unied great body. Jesus Christ is to it both like a heart or the source of lifeand like the Head or the governing wisdom. In this visible form [obraz] or the visibleChurch stands the invisible body of Christ (Metropolitan Filaret [Vasilii MikhailovichDrozdov] of Moscow, Slova i rechi, 5 vols. [Moscow: A. I. Mamontov, 187385], vol. 2,13132). In his celebrated essay, rst published in 1864, The Church Is One [Tserkov

odna], Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov (180460), one of the most respected theoreticiansof the Slavophile movement and an inuential theologian, also described the Church in theseterms: The unity of the Church is unchanging, not allegorical, but truthful and essential likethe unity of several members in a living body. The visible Church, or the Church on earth,lives in perfect communion and unity with the whole body of the Church, the head of which isChrist (Khomiakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. [Moscow: Universitetskaia tipograia,18731914], vol. 2, 3). The essay was rst published as Tserkov in Pravoslavnoe obozrenie,no. 3 (1864): 23358. The use of bodily metaphors to represent the Church was so prevalentin the 19th century that by 1894 it warranted a sizable study. See Evgenii Petrovich Akvilonov,Tserkov: Nauchnye opredeleniia tserkvi i apostolskoe uchenie o nei kak o tele Khristovom (St.Petersburg: Tipograia A. Katanskogo, 1894). The concern here is only to demonstrate thecurrency enjoyed by the bodily or organismic representation of the Church in late 19th-century Russian Orthodox theology, rather than assessing the relative merits of such a view orits relationship to other aspects of that theology.28 Such language has, of course, been common to many different denominations of theChristian Church.

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completely, as if the palm of his own hand, whether each is healthy and inthe grace of God, or ailing with sin and with which one in particular, and forhow long and to which degree the illness is dangerous, and which particularmedicine is required.29

This medical metaphor persisted into the closing decades of the 19thcentury, when it became reinvigorated by developments in the medical sci-ences. The research of eminent Russian scientists raised the prole of thelife sciences in Russia and made some of their Western colleagues householdnames in educated society. The embryologist Ilia Ilich Mechnikov (18451916) did much to disseminate Louis Pasteurs germ theories of disease inRussia, while Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenovs (18291905) research on thenervous system increased public knowledge of physiology.30 One of the mostdynamic elds of physiology was cell theory, which offered a paradigm ofrelations between element and compound as it applied to organic, living mat-ter. The theory had broad sociological and philosophical implications, as thecellular biologist and pathologist Rudolf Virchow (18211902) elaborated inhis essay Atoms and Individuals (1859) and in his more specialized studyof 1858, Cellular Pathology, which was translated into Russian the followingyear.31 In these works, Virchow clearly invited an analogy between the indi-vidual (a community of cells) and society (a community of individuals).The object of medical science and the object of social science were dened inthe course of mutual projection. Virchow argued that the difference betweenlife and death, health and disease, depended on the degree of integrationamong the individual parts of this collective whole.32

The application of this medical standard of health and illness to the condi-tion of the Orthodox Church was evident in an article published in RDSPin1880, The Causes of Our Illnesses. Pavel Runovskii, a priest from NizhniiNovgorod province, argued that a terrible disease was aficting society:

29 Georgii Konisskii, Kniga o dolzhnostiakh presviterov prikhodskikh (St. Petersburg, 1776),cited in Kakimi sredstvami mozhet raspologat prikhodskii sviashchennik v dostizheniisvoikh pastyrskikh nravstvenno-vospitatelnykh tselei? RDSP, no. 36 (September 1898): 2.30 For a discussion of the signicance of Sechenovs work, see Daniel Todes, From Radicalismto Scientic Convention: Biological Psychology in Russia from Sechenov to Pavlov (Ph.D.diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1981); and Torsten Rting, Pavlov und der Neue Mensch:Diskurse ber Disziplinierung in Sowjetrussland(Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2002), 7276. OnMechnikovs life and work, see Alexander S. Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 18611917(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 11129.

31 R. Virkhov [Virchow], Tselluliarnaia patologiia kak uchenie osnovannoe na ziologicheskoi ipatologicheskoi gistologii(St. Petersburg: Universitetskaia tipograia, 1859). For a discussion ofVirchows work and inuence, see Erwin H. Ackerknecht, Rudolf Virchow: Doctor, Statesman,Anthropologist(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).32 Rudolf Virchow, Atoms and Individuals, in Disease, Life, and Man, trans. Lelland J.Rather (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 12041, here 139.

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It seems, moreover, that we have barely begun to cure [the disease]; weare only discussing both the nature of the disease and the means of cur-ing it, and have not yet arrived at any general or precise [diagnosis].In order to cure the patient, one has to know the root of the disease, itscause; otherwise it is only possible to patch up the wounds but not to

provide substantial remedies for the origin of the disease. Left inside theorganism, the evil juices will once again show themselves in the form ofexternal wounds.33

Runovskii identied this malaise as a moral apathy that owed from thereligious indifference of the population, the extreme paralysis of religiousfeeling under cover of religious formalism, [which] is eating away at the foun-dations of our life and constitutes the source and cause of that very disease

lodged within our social organism.34

The medical metaphor was extended inanother article in the same journal a few years later, On the Struggle withUnbelief. The author argued that those who repudiated the teachings of theChurch should be treated with the compassion usually shown to the sick: weshould never forget that, in struggling with unbelief, the aim should not be toinict wounds on our adversaries but to doctor them, to return them to the bo-som of the Lord. Therefore, as with the treatment of bodily diseases, the mostimportant thing, but the most difcult, is a correct diagnosis.35

This comparison of the priest with a medical practitioner or aspiritual doctor remained an established motif in ecclesiastical journalsthroughout the 1880s and the 1890s.36 Indeed, priests were encouraged towork in cooperation with their secular counterparts, the zemstvo doctors.An article on The Spiritual Doctor and the Physical Doctor appeared inRDSP in 1886. It explicitly divided illness into two realms, each requir-ing its own specialist: The patient often simultaneously needs the help ofboth a spiritual and a physical doctor each of them has his own particu-

lar mission and should not prevent the other from fullling his.

37

Indeed,many priests possess some quite essential, if not theoretical then practicalknowledge of medicine and can scarcely be accused of prejudice againstdoctors. The same was unfortunately not true of the zemstvo doctors,many of whom have materialist convictions and to a large degree con-sider the spiritual assistance of the priest to the patient undesirable, even

33 Pavel Runovskii, Prichiny nashikh nedugov, RDSP, no. 18 (April 1880): 23.34

Ibid., 7.35 N. D., O borbe s sovremennym neveriem, RDSP, no. 7 (February 1884): 14243.36 See, for example, Borba pastyrei Tserkvi s sueveriem, RDSP, no. 8 (February 1889):22733; no. 10 (March 1889): 3039; no. 11 (March 1889): 33947; no. 14 (April 1889):42431; and no. 18 (May 1889): 53945.37 N. D., Vrach dukhovnyi i vrach telesnyi, RDSP, no. 17 (April 1886): 505.

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express outright hostility to the clergy in front of the patient, and dissuadehim from summoning a priest.38 The article concluded with a call for theintroduction of elementary medicine into the curriculum of seminariesacross the empire.39

The medical standard of spiritual health and illness reinforced con-cerns over the purity of the faith. Ecclesiastical texts made repeated refer-ence to waverers in the faith (kolebaiushchiesia v vere) and individuals ofdoubtful honesty and steadfastness in Orthodoxy (litsa somnitelnoi chest-nosti i tverdosti v Pravoslavii).40 The St. Andrews Brotherhood in Odessa,which conducted missionary activity among the Shtundists in southwestRussia, argued for the need to devote attention not merely to those whohad fallen away from the faith but also [to] those who wavered in it underthe inuence of the sectarians.41 While this belief or faith usually wasidentiably related to a set of religious practices, it did not have to be. Inthe war against sectarianism, doubtful spiritual allegiance was regarded asa symptom of a progressive illness. In the opinion of one author, unbeliefwas a distancing from the content of true belief [istinnaia vera] and an ac-ceptance of false views on life, but the condition could be treated only inits early stages: [Priests should] proceed like an experienced doctor, whodoes not wait until the disease develops until the nal stages and assumes amore dangerous form but who, as soon as he notices the symptoms of thedisease, immediately takes appropriate steps to prevent its developmentto a stage that might threaten life. In the same way, doctors of the soulshould not ignore those spiritual conditions that pregure unbelief in itsfull-blown stage.42

Four conditions warranted the careful attention of the priests of theChurch: skepticism [maloverie], superstition [sueverie], scientic doubt[nauchnoe somnenie], and a state of indifference [indifferentizm].43 While thedeployment of such language against ill-dened notions of sin and religious

doubt might appear to be merely a colorful adornment of church rhetoric, thesecond half of the 19th century did in fact witness the emergence of a genuine

38 Ibid., 507.39 Ibid., 510.40 Borba pastyria Tserkvi s sueveriem, RDSP, no. 11 (March 1889): 431; VasiliiMikhailovich Skvortsov, ed., Vtoroi Missionerskii Sezd v Moskve (Moscow: Universitetskaia

tipograia, 1891), 35. The term kolebaiushchiesia will be familiar to historians of the SovietUnion in the 1920s and the 1930s as a stigma applied to unreliable party members.41Desiatiletie Odesskogo Sviato-Andreevskogo Bratstva, uchrezhdennogo pri Odesskoi DukhovnoiSeminarii(Odessa: Sviato-Andreevskoe Bratstvo, 1891), 179.42 N. D., O borbe s sovremennym neveriem, 143.43 Ibid.

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ideological rival to the Orthodox Churchsectarianismtoward the defeatof which the established Church came to direct its discursive resources.

The Disease of Sectarianism

Freeze has observed that throughout the 19th century, prelates cameincreasingly to regard the Old Believers as a serious menace.44 Ecclesiasticaljournals in the post-emancipation era repeatedly referred to sectarianismas a disease. Pravoslavnoe obozrenie reported on parishes infected with thespirit of the Schism or to the contamination [zarazhenie] of the Churchwith an anti-Christian spirit.45 Tserkovno-obshchestvennyi vestnik arguedthat Orthodox peasants were being converted to sectarianism, not throughrational arguments but rather through intermarriage with schismatics. Thisrepresented a real threat to Orthodox parishes, where the local authoritieslived in the part that had been infected with the gangrene of the Schism.46The Orthodox who found themselves living in the same homes as schismaticswere fearlessly and with no feeling of reproach infected by the disease.47 In aseminary textbook of the 1890s, Petr Semenovich Smirnov (1861?), profes-sor at the St. Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy, also equated religious schismwith disease: What is the Schism? [...] It is a disease of the organism of theRussian Church.48 The language of contagion also pervaded the annualreports of the procurator of the Holy Synod. The report for 189495, forinstance, portrayed the sectarians as pathogenic and applauded the efforts ofthe brotherhoods in Kostroma and Saratov dioceses to conduct missionarywork among villagers infected by the Schism.49 Another article in RDSPcompared the sectarians with bodily diseases: Just as there are a multitude

44 Freeze, The Rechristianization of Russia, 107.45 Zametki pravoslavnogo obozreniia, Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, no. 17 (May 1865): 13; N. I.,

Po povodu vyshedshei knigi o sovremennoi staroobriadchestve, Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, no.18 (May 1866): 75. For further citations to the sectarians as a disease, see Arkhipastyrskaiazabotlivost o nuzhdakh prikhoda zarazhennogo raskolom, Pribavleniia k tserkovnymvedomostiam, no. 3 (1889): 65.46 Po povodu borby s raskolom, Tserkovno-obshchestvennyi vestnik, no. 124 (October 1879):2. Of course, the use of the gangrene metaphor was deeply at odds with any notion of salvation,for the only legitimate response to the disorder at the time was amputation. The author waseither using the term clumsily as a device to emphasize the severity of the disease, or was actuallysuggesting that some kind of surgical interventionby the secular authoritieswas required to

preserve the collective health of the church body.47 Ibid., 5.48 Petr Semenovich Smirnov, Istoriia russkogo raskola staroobriadstva (Riazan: Tipograia V. O.Tarasova, 1893), 12.49Vsepoddaneishii otchet ober-prokurora sviateishego sinoda K. Pobedonostseva po vedomstvupravoslavnogo ispovedeniia za 1894 i 1895 gody(St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipograia, 1898),

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of causes of bodily diseases, and a multitude of means to prevent them andovercome their developmentso should there be useful remedies for spiritualdiseases.50

The Orthodox Churchs missionary congresses fullled a dual function:

on one hand, they were supposed to serve as a forum for the discussion ofthe Churchs achievements and failings in the war on sectarianism, and onthe other, they were instrumental in laying down the terms in which rank-and-le priests were to perceive and represent the sectarian threat.51 NikolaiIvanovich Ivanovskii, professor at the Kazan Theological Academy, suggestedin his speech to the Fourth All-Russian Missionary Congress in Kazan in1897 that the congress should fulll the same function as a meeting ofphysicians, either oblivious or indifferent to the obvious parallels betweensuch a concilium and a church council: Doctors often meet with obviousmutual benet to consult each other on how to cure a serious and persistentdisease. And the Schism and sectarianism are also kinds of diseasesdan-gerous, chronic diseases, with changing symptoms. Effort, ability, and sharedadvice are needed to cure them.52 Indeed, there appeared to be little consen-sus regarding the use of medical terminology among the servitors of spiritual

128. For further references to the Schism as an infection, see ibid., 124, 13032; Vsepoddaneishiiotchet ober-prokurora sviateishego sinoda K. Pobedonostseva po vedomstvu pravoslavnogo

ispovedeniia za 1896 i 1897 gody (St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipograia, 1899), 154; F.Chtyrkin, Po povodu mer protiv rasprostraneniia shtundy v odnoi iz eparkhii, Tserkovnyivestnik, no. 47 (1880): 10; Iona Moiseevich Atamanskii, Pravoslavnyi sviashchennik vprikhode zarazhennom shtundizmom i vozvrashchenie dvukh shtundistok v lono sv. Tserkvi,Khersonskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 9 (1891): 24665; and Pavel Kozitskii, O prichinakhpripiatstvuiushchikh uspeshnoi borbe so shtundizmom, Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 21 (1891):323. Glennys Young has noted that the reports of the Holy Synod implicitly portrayed OldBelief as a disease in her article Into Church Matters: Lay Identity, Rural Parish Life, andPopular Politics in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia, 18641928, Russian History23,14 (1996): 379.50 Userdie i edinoobrazie pastyrskoi deiatelnosti, kak odno iz glavnykh uslovii okhraneniiatserkovnogo mira i uspeshnoi borby s vneshnimi i vnutrennimi vragami Tserkvi, RDSP, no.12 (March 1892): 26263.51 The speeches to the congresses and the discussions they occasioned were widely reported inthe ecclesiastical press. See, for example, Vtoroi missionerskii sezd v Moskve, Pribavleniiak tserkovnym vedomostiam, no. 29 (1891): 96369; and Ilia Mikhailovich Gromoglasov,Tretii Vserossiiskii Missionerskii Sezd: Fakty i vpechatleniia, Bogoslovskii vestnik, no. 10(1897): 11449.52

Nikolai Ivanovich Ivanovskii, Obshchie zadachi i kharakter deiatelnosti missionerskogosezda, Missionerskoe obozrenie, pt. 1 (August 1897): 618. For further comparisons ofthe missionary congresses with medical consultations, see Soveshchaniia i resheniia 3-goVserossiiskogo Missionerskogo Sezda po voprosam o merakh i sposobakh vozdeistviiana raskolo-sektantstvo, in Deianiia 3-go Vserossiiskogo Missionerskogo Sezda v Kazani povoprosam vnutrennei missii i raskolosektantstva, ed. Vasilii M. Skvortsov (Kiev: I. I. Chokolov,1897), 195.

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purity. Some, like Ivanovskii, stressed that sectarianism was dangerous andchronic, the product of a native imbalance in the church organism; otherspresented it as an epidemic assaulting the collective from without. Whilethese differences may have reected genuine disagreements over the origins of

the disorder, it remains a distinct possibility that church ofcials themselveshad a very imperfect understanding of a rhetoric they had hijacked from theirformer enemies.

Rening the Sectarian Threat: Psychopathologyand Social PsychologySuch traditionally established views of spiritual medicine proved very recep-tive to the revolution in the medical and social sciences in the second half ofthe 19th century. Psychopathologists and psychiatrists in Russia, as elsewherein Europe, were growing increasingly inuential in their identication of aparticular type of deviant whose corrupted mental and moral capacities sethim or her apart from the normal and healthy majority of human beings.Most of these physicians accepted the fundamental tenets of degenerationtheory as put forward by the French psychiatrist Bndict A. Morel (182074)in his highly inuential work of 1857, Trait des dgnrescences, intellectuelles,et morales de lespce humaine. Morel employed a neo-Lamarckian theoryof heredity to argue that an organism adapting to a pathological environ-ment concealed this pathology as an aptitude or tendency, but latergenerations experienced it as a worsening physical and nervous disorder ofa morbid type.53 Left unchecked, degeneration would result in sterility andnally death. Morels schema clearly underpinned the work of contemporaryRussian psychiatrists. Professor Ivan Grigorevich Orshanskiis 1897 publica-tion, The Role of Heredity in the Transfer of Illnesses, argued that pathologi-cal heredity differed from normal heredity in its transformative capacities:[normal] heredity is, for the most part, direct and consists of the transfer

of a type and likeness, pathological [heredity] for the most part expresses itselfin a transformative transfer and principally consists of a predisposition, whichis closer to the disease from which the parents suffered.54

Others stressed that exposure to corrupting social and moral inuencesin a normal individuals own lifetime could lead to the onset of disease. In

53 For a discussion of the degeneration theory in Western Europe, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 18481918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1989); and Robert A. Nye, Degeneration and the Medical Model of Cultural Crisis in theFrench Belle poque, in Political Symbolism in Modern Europe, ed. Seymour Drescher, DavidSabean, and Allan Sharlin (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1982), 1941.54 Ivan Grigorevich Orshanskii, Rol nasledstvennosti v peredache boleznei (St. Petersburg:Zhurnal Prakticheskaia Meditsina, 1897), 25. Born in 1851, Orshanskii was professor ofpsychiatry at the University of Kharkov and published widely on issues of physiology and

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his exhaustive General Psychopathology, rst published in 1886, ProfessorPavel Ivanovich Kovalevskii (18501923) acknowledged that everyone bornon the earth carries one form of propensity or another; already from birth,the construction of the nervous system and its functions will bear the germ

[zarodysh] of normality or the predisposition to abnormality. Kovalevskii waskeen to stress another factor equally inuential on the mental-moral natureof an individualthis is his education and the surrounding environment.55

Church authors quickly seized on this growing body of literature oncriminal deviance in their efforts to stigmatize the sectarian movement.56RDSP encouraged priests to turn to their erstwhile enemies, psychiatrists,for assistance in treating the spiritually sick, thus blurring the religious andpsychiatric denitions of deviance: it seems to us that it would be extremelyuseful for priests to familiarize themselves with the basic precepts of psychia-try.57 Invoking the models of psychopathology, the article claimed that: Inparticular the assistance of a psychiatrist is necessary in those instances where

pathology in both Russian and West European journals. Theories of degeneration rose toprominence in Russia in the 1880s and the 1890s. The theory came to inform discussions in thethick journals such as Vestnik Evropy, Russkaia mysl, and Russkoe obozrenie. See, for example,Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov, Konets veka, Russkoe obozrenie 23 (September 1893):36881; Vladimir Viktorovich Lesevich, Ekskursii v oblast psikhiatrii: O psikhicheskom

vyrozhdenii, Russkaia mysl, no. 2 (1887): 134; V. P. Zhilekhovskaia, Vyrozhdenie,Russkoe obozrenie43 (January 1897): 4167; 43 (February 1897): 64779; 44 (March 1897):17191; 44 (April 1897): 62044; 45 (May 1897): 14266; 45 (June 1897): 685719; and46 (July 1897): 93130. The translation of Max Nordaus bestselling Die Entartung(1892)into Russian (Vyrozhdenie, trans. and ed. Rostislav Ivanovich Sementovskii [St. Petersburg: F.Pavlenkov, 1894]), which by 1903 was already in its third edition, created a real stir in literaryand intellectual circles and was exhaustively discussed in the Russian press. For a discussion ofdegeneration theory in Russia and its impact on the understanding of deviance, see chap. 1 ofmy The Hygiene of Souls: Languages of Illness and Contagion in Late Imperial and EarlySoviet Russia (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2002).55 Pavel Ivanovich Kovalevskii, Obshchaia psikhopatologiia, 2nd ed. (Kharkov: Arkhivpsikhiatrii, neirologii, i sudebnoi psikhopatologii, 1892), 176. Professor of psychiatry at theUniversity of Kharkov, Kovalevskii published extensively on psychiatry and degeneration. Seealso Kovalevskii, Psikhozy vyrozhdeniia (Kharkov: Arkhiv psikhiatrii, neirologii, i sudebnoipsikhopatologii, 1894); Kovalevskii, Sudebnaia psikhiatriia (Warsaw: Arkhiv psikhiatrii,neirologii, i sudebnoi psikhopatologii, 1896); and Kovalevskii, Vyrozhdenie i vozrozhdenie:Prestupnik i borba s prestupnostiu. Sotsialno-psikhologicheskie eskizy (St. Petersburg: M. I.Akinev and I. V. Leontev, 1903).56 The speed and enthusiasm with which missionary leaders were able to appropriate, howeverimperfectly, these new secular theories is perhaps in part explained by the uncommonly highlevel of education that many of them had. Clay has noted that the rules for missionaries adoptedin 1888 specied a preference for academy graduates: In many respects, the missionary was atravelling seminary professorand in many [respects,] professors served as missionaries. Clay,Orthodox Missionaries, 42.57 Vrach dukhovnyi i vrach telesnyi, 507.

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there have been several cases of psychological illness among the relations ofthe patient, because [the illness] very often possesses a hereditary character.58Such an appeal to its long-term satanic rival, formerly punished for prac-ticing this heretical form of witchcraft, revealed the Churchs loosening grip

over the terms in which moral or spiritual deviance was regarded. But even asthe Church was effectively ceding authority to its secular competitors, sucha retreat should not be understood as a straightforward admission, albeitimplicit, of bankruptcy. The Church was seeking strategically to harness thenormative power of these rival languages only in cases where there was a co-incidence of psychiatric and religious denitions of deviance. The agenda tobe served remained very much the Churchs own.59

Addressing the Third Missionary Congress, one of the movements lead-ing gures, Vladimir Nikolaevich Terletskii, argued that sectarianism shouldbe categorized along with a series of diseased, pathological symptoms inreligious life.60

Because sectarianism is essentially a fact of inner, religious life, a predom-inantly psychological approach should be used to study it. Psychologicalanalysis, applied to the study of sectarianism, might lead to the acknowl-edgement of a special sectarian psychological type or perhaps we shouldsay, psychopathological type, which lies at the basis of these pathologicalgroups and should be studied.61

Terletskii then suggested that the weak nature of this psychopathological typerendered it more susceptible to the contagion of sectarianism: In the sameway that physical organisms contract illnesses only under certain conditions,so the psychopathological sectarian type is, as it were, called into being froma state of potentiality. In a way, it comes alive under certain favorable externalconditions that represent an inner basis, that general breeding ground wheresectarianism is born and develops.62 Terletskiis statements were underpinned

58 Ibid. It is worth noting that the notion of hereditary illness as a metaphor for original sin hasbeen an established part of the Christian idiom since Roman times. See, for example, Augustine,City of God against the Pagans(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 581.59 Such appeals to secular science remained, nonetheless, a perilous high-wire act. They are aspecic instance of a broader dilemma confronting the missionary movement. Clay has notedthat the missionaries made efforts to systematize and rationalize their theology to forge a moreeffective rhetorical weapon against the pietistic sects, but these were weapons that could beturned against them by the radical intelligentsia. Consequently, missionaries had to walk

the narrow ground between the charismatic enthusiasm of lay Orthodox leaders and theatheistic rationalism of the leftist intelligentsia (Clay, Orthodox Missionaries, 68).60 Vladimir Nikolaevich Terletskii, K voprosu ob izuchenii sektantstva, in Deianiia 3-goVserossiiskogo Missionerskogo Sezda, ed. Skvortsov, 91.61 Ibid., 92 (emphasis in orig.).62 Ibid., 9293.

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by the same set of assumptions that informed the writings of the contempo-rary theorists of moral and mental degeneration. Individuals with an inher-ited susceptibility to vice were more vulnerable to corrupting inuences oftheir milieu. Their deviance was the distinctive product of a combination of

heredity and environment that underlined fears of latent, hidden threats.During the 1880s and the 1890s, the representation of the disease ofsectarianism became increasingly complex and showed clear evidence of theinuence of social psychology. The disciplines of bacteriology and epidemiol-ogy had been gaining ground as explanatory models for the transmission ofbiological diseases and had come to inform the way in which social scientistssought to account for the spread of various forms of deviance throughout so-ciety. The concept of moral contagion enjoyed considerable currency amongcontemporary social psychologists, psychiatrists, and criminologists, who weregrappling with the mysterious spread of fear and panic among crowds, as wellas copycat killings and suicide throughout society as a whole.63 Sociologists,psychologists, and psychiatristsGustav LeBon (18411931) and GabrielTarde (18431904) in France, and Viktor Khrisanfovich Kandinskii (184989), Petr Narkizovich Obninskii (18671917), Petr Fedorovich Kapterev(18491922), Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovskii (18421904), andVladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev (18571927) in Russiaall employed theterm initially to explain the behavior of crowds but then increasingly used itas a mechanism for understanding social interaction in general.64 Perhaps themost paradigmatic application of an epidemiological model to the study of

63 See for example, Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The MedicalConcept of National Decline(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); and SuzannaBarrows, Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France(New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1981).64 Gustav LeBon, Psychologie des foules (Paris: Flix Alcan, 1895). LeBon was one of theleading French sociologists of the belle poqueand wrote widely on mass psychology. GabrielTardeLes lois de limitation, tude sociologique(Paris: Flix Alcan, 1890)became known forhis writings on criminology and social science while a magistrate in provincial France. Hisprolic output during the 1890s eventually brought him to the chair of modern philosophy atthe Collge de France (1900). Both French authors were widely translated into Russian. ViktorKhrisanfovich KandinskiiObshcheponiatnye psikhologicheskie etiudi (Moscow: A. Lang,1881)a graduate of Moscow University, worked as a surgeon at the St. Nicholas Hospitalin St. Petersburg. He wrote several works on mental illness in both Russian and German. PetrNarkizovich Obninskii, Contagion morale i kholernye bezporiadki, Zhurnal grazhdanskogo

i ugolovnogo prava, no. 1 (1893): 114; Petr Fedorovich Kapterev, O podrazhatelnosti vpsikhologicheskom i pedagogicheskom otnosheniiakh, Obrazovanie, no. 78 (1893): 141.Kapterev taught psychology and pedagogy at various higher educational institutions in St.Petersburg and was the author of several works on both subjects. Nikolai KonstantinovichMikhailovskii, Geroi i tolpa (1882), Sochineniia, 6 vols. (St. Petersburg: Russkoe bogatstvo,189697), vol. 2, 95190. Mikhailovskii owed his moral and intellectual authority to hisprolic writings as a publicist for the journals Otechestvennye zapiskiand, after 1892, Russkoe

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mass psychology was Bekhterevs 1898 Suggestion and Its Role in Social Life.Bekhterev began his study with an alarming description of the vulnerability ofall individuals to mental contagion:

At the present time, so much is being talked about physical infection orby means of physical contagion (contagion vivum) or what are calledmicrobes, that in my opinion it is salient also to recall mental conta-gion (contagium psychicum), which leads to mental infection. Althoughthese microbes are invisible under the microscope, they nevertheless, likegenuine physical microbes, act everywhere and are transmitted by words,gestures, and movements surrounding the face, through books, newspa-pers, and so on. In a word, wherever we are in the society that surroundsus, we are subject to the effect of mental microbes and are consequently

in danger of being mentally infected.65

By the late 1880s, terms and concepts explicitly drawn from the epide-miological models of society presented by crowd psychologists at home andabroad came to inform the writings of the ecclesiastical authorities. In anRDSParticle entitled The Activity of a Priest of the Church in CarryingOut His Duties to Treat the Moral Diseases of His Parish, Vasilii FedorovichPevnitskii (18311911), professor at the Kiev Ecclesiastical Academy, stressedthe contagious properties of certain forms of moral illness associated withsectarianism: should not [the priest] demonstrate solicitous attention whenhe sees that one of his parish deviates from the true path [pravyi put] andsuffers from some form of moral disease, or when a spiritual contagionappears and spreads in his spiritual family?66 The priest was to functionas a spiritual antidote to the disease of religious dissent once it had been

bogatstvo. Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev was one of the most eminent psychiatrists of late

imperial Russia. In 1908, he founded the Psychoneurological Institute in the capital; it wascharacterized by progressive attitudes toward both admissions and teaching. He remained arespected member of the scientic establishment in Soviet Russia until his death. For secondarydiscussions of the topic of moral and mental contagion, see Alexandre Mtraux, FrenchCrowd Psychology: Between Theory and Ideology, in The Problematic Science: Psychologyin Nineteenth-Century Thought, ed. William R. Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash (New York:Praeger, 1982), 27699; Vladimir Alekseevich Alekseev and Mikhail Aleksandrovich Maslin,Russkaia sotsialnaia losoia kontsa XIXnachala XX veka: Psikhologicheskaia shkola (Moscow:Issledovatelskii tsentr, 1992); and David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 8391. For a discussion of these theories and their

impact on the understanding of social and moral deviance in late imperial Russia, see chap. 2of my The Hygiene of Souls. 65 Vladimir M. Bekhterev, Vnushenie i ego rol v obshchestvennoi zhizni(St. Petersburg: K. L.Rikker, 1898), 1.66 Vasilii Fedorovich Pevnitskii, Deiatelnost pastyria Tserkvi po ispolneniiu dolgavrachevaniia nravstvennykh nedugov svoei pastvy, RDSP, no. 8 (February 1890): 204.

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contracted. Having himself acquired a great and absolute faith, his wordswould imprint themselves on the soul of the patient and would affect him inthe same way as powerful medicine does the physical organism.67 The casefor treatment was obvious: those infected with the virus of unbelief risked

spiritual annihilation if the disease was allowed to develop unhindered.Epidemiological notions of inoculation informed much of the ecclesi-astical writing on the dangers of religious dissent. One ecclesiastical journal,Trudy Kievskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii, described missionary work in Siberia interms of a massive program of spiritual inoculation: As the empire extended,the Orthodox Church sought to inject the new subjects with the salutaryfaith and, in so doing, to bind them to their new fatherland.68 An inocula-tory model informed an article which appeared in Kostromskie eparkhialnyevedomostiin 1894. It argued that village priests should effectively vaccinatetheir parishioners morally, in order to render them less susceptible to the con-tagions of religious dissent: The measures, which can be applied in this caseby every parish priest, should be directed toward protecting the parishionersfrom moral contagion by strengthening them morally in this way [theparishioner] becomes less susceptible to all the evil inuences that are takingroot around [him].69

Sectarianism was frequently portrayed as a spiritual contagion of epi-demic proportions. One article in RDSPreferred to the fatal contagion ofsectarianism, and another compared it to an epidemic disease spreadingthroughout parishes.70 The Third All-Russian Missionary Congress, held inKazan in 1896, also referred to a dangerous disease with an epidemic char-acter.71 By implication, the contagious and pathogenic nature of unbelief,repeatedly emphasized in the literature, meant that the entire collective or-ganism of the Church was vulnerable to contamination, if individual plague-bearers were neither quarantined nor treated.

In 1897, Missionerskoe obozreniepublished an article by the eminent psy-

chiatrist Professor Ivan Alekseevich Sikorskii (18421919), Psychopathologyamong the Population of the Sectarian Monastery of Tiraspol.72 It indisput-ably demonstrated the conation of the psychiatric and ecclesiastical languages

67 Ibid., 211.68Trudy Kievskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii(Kiev: Tipograia Kievskoi Akademii, 1888): 79.69 Odin iz predmetov, zasluzhivaiushchikh osobenno vnimaniia selskikh pastyrei,

Kostromskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 13 (July 1894): 274.70 Borba s raskolom i sektantstvom, RDSP, no. 16 (April 1900): 379; and Kakimisredstvami mozhet raspologat prikhodskii sviashchennik, 29.71 Soveshchaniia i resheniia 3-go Vserossiiskogo Missionerskogo Sezda, 196.72 Ivan Alekseevich Sikorskii, Psikhopatizm v srede zazhivo-zamurovannykh naselnikovraskolnichikh tiraspolskikh skitov, Missionerskoe obozrenie, pt. 1 (November 1897):

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of disease. The article was a reprint, in slightly abbreviated form, of an 1897 pub-lication, Epidemic Voluntary Deaths and Murders at Ternovskie Khutora.73 Thiswas the second of Sikorskiis studies of the psychopathologies of sectarianism;his rst, entitled The Psychopathological Epidemic of1892in Kiev Province, had

been published in 1893.74

In both publications, Sikorskii investigated the caseof more than 20 Old Believers who took a short cut to immortality by bury-ing themselves alive with small childrenan act apparently motivated by fearthat interference by the authorities into their liturgical practices threatened tocompromise their salvation.75 Sikorskii identied the leader, Vitalii Malevanyi,as suffering from a form of paranoid delusion, the spread of which shows allthe features of a nervous-mental epidemic.76 Sikorskii argued that this act ofself-immolation presented society with a pathological phenomenon [iavlenie],which was related to a series of mental epidemics. The Ternovskie Khutorasect became a pathological culture[podbor] and the most dangerous source ofmental contagion.77 In the study reprinted in Missionerskoe obozrenie, Sikorskiialso referred to the events in Kiev as a contagion: The inuence of the insaneon healthy people undoubtedly exists and becomes especially noticeable inperiods of mental ferment and psychological epidemics.78 Sikorskii was notsimply using epidemic as a piece of journalistic rhetoric; the epidemiologicalmodel was central to his understanding of mass suicides.79

93761; and pt. 1(December 1897): 107094. Sikorskii was professor of mental and nervousdiseases at Kiev University and editor ofVoprosy nervno-psikhicheskoi meditsiny. Sikorskiis ownprofessional activities illuminate the growing public prole of psychiatry during the period; heappeared as a prominent expert witness for the prosecution at the notorious trial of MendelBeilis in 1913 and published a popular pamphlet justifying his conclusions. See his Ekspertizapo delu ob ubiistve Andriushi Iushchinskogo (St. Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin, 1913).73 Ivan A. Sikorskii, Epidemicheskie volnye smerti i smertoubiistva v Ternovskie Khutora (Kiev:Voprosy nervno-psikhicheskoi meditsiny, 1897).74 Ivan A. Sikorskii, Psikhopaticheskaia epidemiia 1892 goda v Kievskoi gubernii (Kiev:Universitet Sviatogo Vladimira V. I. Zavadzkogo, 1893).75 Such self-immolation may also be viewed as part of a countervailing discourse withinChristianity that stressed how stigma, sin, and depravity were indications of holiness,martyrdom, and asceticism. Indeed, the stigma of depravity was presumed by every trueChristian as part of his or her post-lapsarian condition. Some saw the salvation offered bythe Orthodox Church as a satanic interference with a necessary stigma or vice that should beaccepted as gifts by true martyrs. Self-immolation was thus an effective measure to sabotage theunholy and secularized sanctions of the state-owned Church.76 Ibid., 6.77 Ibid., 83, 92 (emphasis in orig.).78 Sikorskii, Psikhopatizm v srede zazhivo-zamurovannykh naselnikov, 1090.79 Nor was Sikorskii alone in his assessment of the tragic events at Ternovskie Khutora. Thepsychiatrist Pavel Ivanovich Iakobii also contended this was evidence of a mental contagion

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While Sikorskiis texts dealt specically with the extreme cases of de-lusional leaders and self-immolation, the editors of Missionerskoe obozrenieprefaced the article with comments that also afrmed the pathological natureof sectarianism in general: There is no doubt that much of what is in that

[sectarian] world is the result of psychopathy and cruel fanaticism [psikho-patizm i izuvernyi fanatizm]. If we analyze psychiatrically the mental condi-tion and the motives behind the criminal actions of the schismatic leadersand the followers of sectarianism, it will without doubt emerge that the over-whelming majority of them are mentally ill.80 The preface praised Sikorskiispioneering work in his rst psychiatric study of sectarian delusions. Notingthat Malevanyis sect represented nothing other than a psychopathologicalreligious epidemic, which was extremely dangerous in sanitary terms for thesurrounding Orthodox population, it concluded that Sikorskiis applicationof psychiatric methods had amply demonstrated the psychological abnormal-ity of many sect leaders.81

Sikorskiis study shows how the theories of psychopathology and mentaland moral contagion could intersect in the scientic literature. The rst em-phasized the importance of heredity and environment in the emergence ofdeviance; and the second, epidemiology, provided a model for understandingthe spread of deviant attitudes and behavior. Church authors were clearly draw-ing on both and fusing them to emphasize both the pathological origins of thedisease of sectarianism and its power to infect healthy members of the spiritualcommunity. The merging of these two languages, the psychiatric and the eccle-siastical, conrmed that the danger of contamination posed by the sectarianswas not merely metaphorical but real. Moreover, this recasting of religious dis-sent in a quasi-scientic language of psychopathology underlined that manyreligious deviants were in need of secular rather than spiritual doctors.

Spiritual Prophylactics and Calls for Quarantine

The repeated invocation of the contagious properties of sectarianism and themoral degeneracy of its practitioners served to promote, logically enough, aninsistence on the need for spiritual prophylactics and quarantinethat is, re-pressive measures legitimized with a medical discourse of disease prevention.Missionerskoe obozrenie insisted, for example, that the frightening epidemicquality distinguishing sectarianismin this case the sect of the Flagellantsdictated the means employed by the Church to combat it:

affecting a signicant number of people, who had undoubtedly been infected by somementally ill person. See Iakobii, Religiozno-psikhicheskie epidemii, Vestnik Evropy, no. 10(1903): 11920.80 Ibid., 937.81 Ibid.

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we should treat sectarians with greater sympathy than we would show,for example, to the physically crippled and the mentally ill or insane.The physical disability and mental illnesses remain with the latterand are not passed on to others. On the contrary, the disease of theFlagellants is extremely contagious. It moves from one person to many

others and infects not only families but entire settlements and locali-ties. Therefore we must all struggle with the Flagellants as with one ofthe most dangerous infectious diseases.82

Accordingly, there was a growing insistence in the literature on the need forprophylactics rather than therapeutics as the rst line of defense against thecontagions of sectarianism.83 The Report from the Holy Synodon missionaryactivity noted that the establishment of church schools had proved a useful

method of fencing in [the local population] from the inuence of the pow-erful Schism. In 1894, Tserkovnyi vestnikafrmed in similar terms the needto fence in parishioners from the inuence of the sectarians.84 In an articleconcerning the forthcoming missionary congress in 1897, one of the leadersof the inner mission, Vasilii Mikhailovich Skvortsov (18591932), suggestedthe following aims for the congress: The fencing in [ograzhdenie] of thehealthy organism of the Orthodox people from the decay [rastlenie] spread bypernicious false doctrines the protection and defense of our national faith

and Church, which have been sacred for centuries.85

Medical notions of prophylaxis were also explicit in Ivanovskiis analysisof the tasks facing missionaries. He argued that missionaries must concernthemselves not merely with treating the sick but also with containing thesick to prevent the development of the source of the illness, and with protect-ing the healthy from infection and so forth. In many cases, hygienic condi-tions, the returning of localities to health, and the isolation [razobshchenie] ofthe sick from the healthy are what save [people].86

82 Besedy v ograzhdenie chad pravoslavnoi Tserkvi ot sektantskogo (khlystovskogo)zabluzhdeniia, Missionerskoe obozrenie, pt. 2 (JulyAugust 1897): 46364.83 Some articles continued to emphasize the importance of a combination of therapeuticsand prophylactics, but they were beginning to cede to more strident voices. See, for example,Besedy v ograzhdenie chad pravoslavnoi Tserkvi, 464.84Vsepoddaneishii otchet ober-prokurora sviateishego sinoda K. Pobedonostseva po vedomstvupravoslavnogo ispovedeniia za 1894 i 1895 gody, 126; and Nikolai Petrovich Kutepov, Kvoprosu o merakh dlia borby s sektantstvom, Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 27 (1894): 436.

85 Vasilii M. Skvortsov, K predstoiashchemu vserossiiskomu missionerskomu sezdu vKazane, Missionerskoe obozrenie, pt. 1(May 1897): 35152.86 Ivanovskii, Obshchie zadachi i kharakter deiatelnosti missionerskogo sezda, 618. Forfurther statements of the need to quarantine the faithful from the contagion of the sectarians,see Nashi shtundisty i nekotorye mery k ograzhdeniiu pravoslavnykh ot sovrashcheniia vshtundu, Drug istiny, no. 40 (1889), 79196; and no. 48 (1889): 94041.

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Spiritual Deviance and Sedition: The Appeal to the Secular ArmThe epidemiological representation of sectarianism and the insistence on theimportance of prophylactics to combat the disease formed part of the Churchsappeal for the intervention of the secular arm to protect the spiritual purity of

the Orthodox population. An 1894 article in Tserkovnyi vestnikargued thatthe church and state authorities had made a terrible mistake in failing to takesteps to prevent the spread of the spiritual contagion of Shtundism: In ourchurch social life there are extremely diseased areas, which have remainedwithout the necessary doctoring, until nally the disease has developed tosuch an extent that it can no longer be obscured from view. Shtundismalready began to infect the southern provinces 25 years ago but has onlybecome the subject of public and administrative attention very recently.87The rector of the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy, Bishop Aleksei (AnempodistIakovlevich Dorodnitsyn), was alarmed over the risks involved in the deploy-ment of therapeutic tacticssuch as pastoral carein the struggle with acontagion such as sectarianism. The prescribed spiritual medicine workedtoo slowly to be an effective means of containing the disease:

We want [the Churchs redemptive inuence on the sectarians] to be aspowerful and fast-acting as a powerful medicine on the human organ-ism. But we should not forget that returning the sectarian to Orthodoxy

means regenerating himthat is, eliminating all the sectarian lies fromhis thoughts and feelings and replacing them with the pure and sacredteaching of the Orthodox Church. This requires a great deal of time andenergy and can usually be accomplished only by means of a slow, gradualrenewal.88

Aleksei contrasted this with the way in which the leaders of sectarianismare able so quickly and so relentlessly to convert Orthodox people to their

sects and, in a short time, make them fanatically devoted to sectarian er-rors. If spiritual cure was far slower in its efcacy than the disease was in itspower to contaminate, isolation and purge of the infected were the only suremethod of containment. In view of this predicament, the bishop went on tolament the lack of coordination and unity in the persecution of the sects bythe secular powers, charging that local governors all too frequently displayedoverbearing subjectivism in their toleration of schismatics.89 In Alekseis

87 A. L., Nachalo pravilnoi borby s opasnoi sektoi, Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 5 (1894): 70;and no. 7 (1894): 102.88 Episkop [Bishop] Aleksei, Religiozno-ratsionalisticheskoe dvizhenie na iuge Rossii vo vtoroipolovine XIX-go stoletiia (Kazan: Tsentralnaia tipograia, 1909), 463.89 Ibid., 464, 466.

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opinion, now the only effective measures [against the sectarians] are policeand administrative-judicial.90

Alekseis call for state intervention was coupled with efforts by manyinuential gures in the Church to stress the intimate relationship between

religious dissent and sedition. As Reginald Zelnik has observed, throne andaltar entered the 1870s in cautious dedication to a useable faith, meant tosafeguard the worker from the twin evils of moral decay and political subver-sion.91 Indeed, the persecution of sectarians, in particular, unied churchand state power, since they were held to represent a profoundly subversiveforce in Russian society.92 In the 1880s, Archimandrite Pavel (Petr IvanovichLednev-Prusskii, 182195) emphasized the centrality of the Orthodox faithto Russian statehood: The Schism seeks with all its power to violate theintegrity of faith in the Russian people; if the Schism were ever to reachthis goal, it would inevitably lead to a weakening of the state.93 In a pam-phlet from 1892, intended for instruction in Orthodox seminaries, EvgeniiAleksandrovich Rakhmanin, a priest from Derpt, argued that the security ofthe state rested heavily on the maintenance of ideological unity. The separa-tion of church and state and the introduction of freedom of religion in Russiawould facilitate the appearance and growth of every kind of sect, school, andparty and would, therefore, naturally permit the entry into the state of cor-rupting elements; it would contribute to the accumulation of dissension inthe state and to internal divisions; it would gradually weaken and underminethe spiritual unity of the state and popular forces which would lead to theweakening and even the corruption [razlozhenie] of the state organism.94

Ecclesiastical journals often asserted the existence of an explicit causalrelationship between the decline of religious faith and the commission of

90 Ibid., 45657.

91 Reginald E. Zelnik, To the Unaccustomed Eye: Religion and Irreligion in the Experienceof St. Petersburg Workers in the 1870s, Russian History16, 24 (1989): 305.92 Aleksandr Etkinds studies of the links between the sectarians and the revolutionary partiesin late imperial Russia have revealed that the proximity of the two was indeed not a gment ofthe ecclesiastical imagination. Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin and Trotskii, and VladimirBonch-Bruevich in particular, saw the oppositionist stance of many sects to the tsarist regimeas a potentially important source of sedition and revolutionary support. Bonch-Bruevichregarded the sectarians as the most progressive element in the peasantry. At the Second Congressof the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party in 1903, sectarianism was characterized as

one of the democratic currents directed against the existing order, and party members wereencouraged to turn their attention to working with the sectarians. See Aleksandr Etkind,Khlyst: Sekty, literatura, i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998), 635.93 Arkhimandrit (Archimandrite) Pavel, Kratkie izvestiia o sushchestvuiushchikh v raskole sektakh(Moscow: Bratstvo Sv. Petra Mitropolita, 1888), 84.94 Evgenii A. Rakhmanin, Khristianskie razmyshleniia (Derpt: Shnakenburg, 1892), 1415.

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political crimes. In the immediate wake of the assassination of AlexanderII, RDSPpublished an article on Our Social Diseases, which argued thatcontemporary Russian education sought exclusively to develop the rationalcapacities of the young while neglecting their moral development: the very

word conscience is now rarely used. It went on: This decline in thoughtand conscience explains how falsehoods have been spreading so vigorously oflate, falsehoods that are distorting all healthy urges, gnawing at all the vitalforces of the social organism.95

After the assassination, the ecclesiastical press began to emphasize theconsequences of the spread of sectarianism for state security. One RDSPar-ticle, Enemies of the Mother of God and of Tsarism, insisted that socialismand sectarianism were enemies of both church and state.96 Bishop Meletii(Mikhail Kozmich Iakimov, 18351900) of Riazan (18961900) arguedthat sectarianism was a chronic disease of the state organism [zastarelaiabolezn gosudarstvennogo organizma], which required treatment with power-ful remedies.97 Bishop Aleksei afrmed that the source of political terrorismwas to be found in the rise of religious dissent: Nowadays it is no secret thatthe root of the evilthe revolutionary propagandais hidden in religiousunbelief. This is the source of everything disgraceful and criminal in the ac-tions and thoughts of man.98 Skvortsov, too, argued that the struggle withsectarianism had the gravest possible ramications for the state. Pointing toa mass of evidence that demonstrated the sectarian erosion of the traditionalreligious values of the Russian people, he argued that this created a fertilebreeding group for the development of seditious ideas; atheism and social-ism conveniently masquerade as forms of religious-sectarian freethink-ing. He expressed concern that the anarchist contagion might strike in thesectarian populations of Russia.99

The Churchs two principal arguments concerning the dangers of religiousdeviance were thus conjoined. On one hand, sectarianism was a highly conta-

95 Nashi obshchestvennye nedugi, RDSP, no. 16 (April 1881): 41415.96 Vragi bogomateri i russkogo tsarstva, RDSP, no. 19 (May 1898): 2529.97 Episkop Meletii, Iz perezhitogo, Missionerskoe obozrenie, pt. 1 (August 1897): 635.98 Episkop Aleksei, Religiozno-ratsionalisticheskoe dvizhenie, 425.99 Vasilii M. Skvortsov, O tserkovno-obshchestvennom i gosudarstvennom znacheniimissionerstva, Missionerskoe obozrenie, pt. 1 (August 1897): 628, 630. It is also worth noting

that such a unication of state and church interests was not conned to the arguments of theecclesiastical authorities. In his study of rural criminality and justice in post-emancipationRussia, Stephen Frank has observed: the laws under which [sectarians] stood charged stemmeddirectly from the Churchs continued authority to dene deviance, superstition, and someforms of criminal behavior. Within this realm of popular religious faith and deviation, Churchand state power remained inseparable (Stephen L. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conict, and Justicein Rural Russia, 18561914[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999], 186). Although

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gious epidemic, originating in the psychopathologies of its diseased leaders. Itspower to infect was so potent that state-directed prophylactics, the quarantin-ing and incarceration of the sick, were the only effective means of combat-ing the spread of the disease. On the other hand, sectarianism posed a threat

not merely to the purity of the Orthodox faith but also to the security of theRussian state. Religious and state subversion were both symptoms of the samediseased and criminal deviance that threatened to overwhelm the nation. Thesecular languages of medicine and the social sciences were thus being deployedby the church authorities in a bid to summon the secular arm of the state in theprosecution of the Churchs war against the sectarians. Of course, such a large-scale quarantining of dissenters in the form of internal exile and imprisonmentnever took place, although the Church did continue to make such appeals evenafter the granting of religious freedoms in the wake of the 1905 Revolution.100

At the same time, the Churchs vigorous deployment of the languagesof medicine and social science illustrated the degree to which these secular

legal prosecution of sectarians subsided signicantly after 1861, several heresies continuedto be vigorously investigated and prosecuted. These were, above all, mystical sects like theKhlysty(Flagellants), Molokane(Milk Drinkers), and Skoptsy(Castrators), whose teachings andpractices not only challenged established Orthodoxy but seemed to scorn all accepted normsof marital and sexual relations. See Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom:

A Russian Folktale(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 5154, 7071, 9193.But Nicholas B. Breyfogle has argued that the sympathy for sectarians in government circlesactually increased after their loyal and useful involvement in the states military campaigns inthe Crimea (185356) and the Russo-Turkish War (187778): following their resettlementto Transcaucasia, the sectarian-settlers began to fulll many of the needs and goals of thetsarist empire-building project in the region, not least of which was in the military arena.The categorization of religious dissenters as political liabilities and untrustworthy subjects wasjoined by a positive estimation of them as model Russian colonists (Nicholas B. Breyfogle,Caught in the Crossre? Russian Sectarians in the Caucasian Theater of War, 185356 and187778, Kritika 2, 4 [2001]: 742). Such newfound appreciation of the sectarians only served

further to dismay the Church.100 Gerhard Simon has noted that from late 1905 onwards the Orthodox periodicals andnewspapers published a large number of articles on socialism. In addition, discussion eveningswere held in many metropolitan parishes, and the Holy Synod sent out synodal missionariesto counter the spread of socialist ideas in working-class suburbs (Gerhard Simon, Church,State, and Society, in Russia Enters the Twentieth Century, 18941917, ed. Erwin Oberlnderet al. [London: Temple Smith, 1971], 216). The dangers of revolutionary socialism formed thefocal point of interest for Orthodox publicists at the turn of the 20th century, from DirectorGeneral V. K. Sabler (who wrote a two-volume treatise on the subject) down to the contributors

to the provincial ecclesiastical press. Socialism was also the main item on the agenda of theFourth Missionary Congress, which was held in Kiev in 1908. The Holy Synod introduceda special course, The History and Unmasking of Socialism, into the curriculum of the 4Russian Orthodox ecclesiastical academies and the 55 seminaries. See John S. Curtiss, Churchand State in Russia: The Last Years of the Empire, 19001917(New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1940), 319; Johannes Chrysostomus, Die russische Orthodoxie angesichts derzeitgenssischen sozialen Strmungen am Vorabend der Revolution von 1917, Ostkirchliche

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languages did not serve to demystify the religious language of faith. On thecontrary, they provided a renewed impetus for the interrogation of individualspiritual or ideological health as the sine qua non of a secure social order. Thus,on the eve of an avowedly atheist revolution, the medical and social sciences

in Russia were being hijacked as vehicles for the advancement of an Orthodoxreligious worldview. Indeed, it is tempting to argue that in its appropriationof the language and concepts of modern science, the Church anticipatedRussias subsequent guardian of spiritual purity, the Bolshevik Party.

Prerevolutionary Religiosity and Soviet Communism:Continuity or Causality?The early years of the Soviet regime certainly witnessed the resurgence of an

obsession with the vulnerabilities of collective ideological health and a re-newed representation of dissent as pathological and a dangerous contagion.101To cite one example of such representation, On Checki

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