The Khlysty or Flagellants, a word which seems to be a corruption of 'Khristy' or 'Christs', for the members of this sect did not practise flagellation. The sect originated in the central black earth region, apparently in the late seventeenth century. Its central idea held that Christ reincarnated himself by entering living individuals who thereby became 'Christs'; upon their death the spirit passed on to others. Many groups were formed under the inspiration of peasants seized by the spirits who would wander from village to village gathering followers. Meetings were held to the accompaniment of singing and dancing which often degenerated into mass hysterics. The Khlysty occasionally engaged in sexual orgies. They opposed marriage and engaged in free intercourse which they called 'Christ's love'. Persecuted for their activities they operated in great secrecy.
The minuscule sect ofSkoptsy (from the word skopets meaning eunuch) were a late eighteenth-century offshoot from the Khlysty. They maintained that woman with her beauty was the main obstacle to salvation and to resist her temptations they castrated themselves.
The Dukhobortsy or 'Fighters for the Spirit' emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century, also probably from the Khlysty. Their theology was vague. They taught that human souls had been created before corporal bodies. Some, having sinned before the creation of the world, were punished by being cast into the material world without recollection of what had gone on before. All rituals and all institutions are. the products of original sin. The Dukhobors also believed in Christ 'entering'
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the souls of living people. Aided by Leo Tolstoy, they migrated early in the twentieth century to Canada where they have distinguished themselves by spectacular acts of civil disobedience.
The Molokane (Milk-drinkers) were a moderate sect, identified by the practice of drinking milk and its products on fast days.
The Stundists emerged in the nineteenth century and spread after the Emancipation. They formed circles to study the bible. Baptism, which is probably the most dynamic sectarian movement in contemporary Russia, is its outgrowth. In the second half of the nineteenth century Stundism and Baptism made some converts among the educated in Moscow and St Petersburg.
All of these and many of the minor related sects have in common opposition to the state and the established church. The political views of their members can best be defined as Christian Anarchist. As such, and because they would not obey the official church, they suffered harsh persecution in the first century following the Schism. Under the tolerant reign of Catherine 11 the state left them alone, but under Nicholas 1 the harassment resumed, military expeditions being sent out to destroy sectarian strongholds, especially those of the more radical sects. Nevertheless, dissent kept on gaining adherents. Statistics of Russian dissenters are notoriously unreliable because the imperial government falsified census figures bearing on them by a factor of anywhere from five to thirty, so as to minimize defections from the official church. The 1897 census listed only 2 million Old Believers and Sectarians, but there are reasons to believe that their actual number then was closer to 20 million. Scholarly estimates place the number of dissenters at 9-10 million in the 1860s, between 12 to 15 million in the 1880s, and around 25 million in 1917, of whom 19 million were Old Believers and 6 million Sectarians.* l These figures indicate that the dissenting churches more than held their own in terms of over-all population growth.
The Schism was a disaster for the Russian Orthodox church, robbing it of its most dedicated adherents and placing it more than ever at the state's mercy. 'After Nikon, Russia no longer had a church: it had a religion of state. From there to state religion it required but one step. The state religion was instituted by that power which in 1917 succeeded the imperial.'12 Although in large measure integrated into the state apparatus and subservient to the crown, until Peter the Great the Russian Church still preserved its institutional identity and some semblance of autonomy. The Byzantine principle of 'harmony', restated by the great synod of 1666, retained its theoretical validity. The church was an entity different from the state, with its patriarch, its administrative, judiciary and fiscal
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offices, and its properties whose inhabitants it taxed and judged. It was Peter who did away with this semi-autonomous status; he abolished the patriarchate, transformed its offices into branches of the secular administration, lifted its judiciary immunities, and, perhaps most importantly, confiscated its incomes. After Peter's reign, the Russian church became just another branch of the civil administration. The coup de grace was dealt a victim so drained of all vitality that it hardly twitched; there were no protests, only silent submission. No church in Christendom allowed itself to be secularized as graciously as the Russian.
Peter heartily disliked the Orthodox church, especially its Great Russian branch; he much preferred the Ukrainian and especially the Protestant clergy. It troubled him that by virtue of privileges granted them in the Dark Ages tens of thousands of clergymen escaped taxes and service obligations, and at the same time devoured a good portion of the country's wealth in the form of labour services and rents. To him they were a lot of parasites. His animus towards the church was exacerbated by its support of his son Alexis with whom he was on bad terms. He was thus predisposed to cut the Orthodox church down to size in any event. What made it urgent to do so were fiscal considerations, so decisive in all of his reforms. On his accession the church remained rich, notwithstanding repeated injunctions against its making additional acquisitions of land. The custom of making provision for the church in one's will remained strongly ingrained among the service class; indeed, the tsars themselves continued making generous gifts to their favourite monasteries after they had decreed such practices illegal for ordinary landlords. Because of the rapid expansion of Russia, the percentage of the nation's wealth owned by the clergy diminished, but in absolute numbers it remained formidable: at Peter's accession they controlled an estimated 750,000 peasants out of a total of 12-13 million.
Peter began as early as 1696 to tamper with the right of the parish and monastic clergy freely to dispose of the incomes from church properties. Four years later, following the death of Patriarch Adrian, he decided to take advantage of the vacancy to abolish the whole separate church administration. Instead of appointing Adrian's successor, he selected a locum tenens, a learned but spineless Ukrainian divine. The actual authority over the church's properties and other worldly responsibilities he entrusted to a Monastery Prikaz, which he charged with administering, judging and taxing the inhabitants of ecclesiastical votchiny. Ecclesiastical properties were not actually secularized but they were incorporated to such an extent into the general administrative structure of the state that when it came, half a century later, secularization appeared a mere formality. After 1701 the principle was established -though like every other government policy it was irregularly enforced -