As the religious and political thinker Nikolay Berdyaev remarked in 1916, sectarianism was in fact an ‘integral part of the spiritual life of the Russian people’.49 Alongside the vast numbers of Old Believers were many other groups whose sectarian origins in some cases actually pre-dated the Schism. Many were offshoots of the mystical Khristovery (‘Believers in Christ’) or khlysty, as they became known, whose peasant founder was believed to be the Lord of Sabaoth himself.50 These included the Skoptsy (‘self-castrators’), who appeared in the eighteenth century, and the Skakuny (‘jumpers’) who appeared in the nineteenth century. There were also radical schismatics who sought to break all ties with society: the Stranniki (‘wanderers’), Pustynniki (‘hermits’) and Beguny (‘runners’). And then there were a number of ‘ratio-nalist’ and quasi-Protestant sects who were to hold a particular interest for Tolstoy. One group he was later to become deeply involved with were the Dukhobory, a pejorative label which the ‘spirit-wrestlers’ turned to their own advantage by styling themselves as Dukhobortsy (‘wrestlers in the name of the Holy Spirit’). Tolstoy also had deep respect for the Molokany (‘milk-drinkers’), or ‘spiritual Christians’ as they called themselves, a large number of whom lived out in the steppe beyond Samara.
Old Believers and sectarians were granted limited privileges in a decree of 1863, but these were not turned into full civil rights until 1905, when all religious dissenters were finally allowed to practise their faith without fear of persecution. By and large, the adherents of Russian sects came from peasant backgrounds and lived in thinly populated areas on the edges of the empire, either because they had been deported by the government to keep them from contaminating the Orthodox population, or because they had fled to avoid persecution. There was one important exception, and that was the upper-class Protestant evangelists in St Petersburg and Moscow whom Tolstoy satirises towards the end of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy was not the only Russian to want a Church which communicated its message in an intelligible language. A century and a half of the Orthodox Church being part of Russian officialdom had led to apathy and disillusionment amongst the educated classes and when Granville Waldegrave, 3rd Baron Radstock, first travelled as a missionary from London to St Petersburg in 1874, he was greeted with open arms by Russian aristocrats, who welcomed his message of personal salvation through independent Bible study. The New Testament had first been translated from Church Slavonic into modern Russian in 1823, but then suppressed by the Orthodox Church for political reasons. It first became widely available in 1876, and then thousands of copies started to be disseminated as a result of the missionary activities of Baptists and figures such as Lord Radstock. The first complete Bible in Russian followed in 1882.
When Radstock was inevitably banned from Russia in 1878, the ‘Radstokisty’ became ‘Pashkovtsy’. Colonel Vasily Pashkov took over Radstock’s missionary activities until he too was sent into exile abroad in 1884. By that time his Society for the Encouragement of Spiritual and Ethical Reading had already distributed millions of pamphlets amongst the peasants, and caused a mass exodus from the Orthodox Church.51 The religious revival sparked by the conservative and upper-class ‘Pashkovites’ arose partly to counter the rising tide of atheism embraced by the young generation of Russian nihilists who preached the religion of socialism. One tangible result was the capacity attendance at lectures like the one given by Vladimir Solovyov which Tolstoy had gone to.52
Tolstoy was keenly interested in knowing more about Radstock. Indeed, he had met one of his followers and found him very persuasive, but had never met the baron himself. Alexandrine, however, knew him well, and at Tolstoy’s request provided him with full details about Radstock’s activities by letter in March 1876. It all went into Anna Karenina. In May 1877 Alexandrine wrote from Tsarskoye Selo to tell Tolstoy that she had spent the previous evening with the Empress, and that the closing chapters of Part Seven of Anna Karenina had been read aloud to the assembled company. She reported that everyone had laughed heartily at his merciless caricature of Radstock’s followers.53 Tolstoy had little time for aristocratic religious dissenters who became Christian evangelists without changing their privileged (and to his mind corrupt) lifestyles, but peasant sectarians were something else entirely. He must have been aware of the Molokans out in Samara ever since he had first spent time in the steppe, but it was only now that he wanted to meet them and talk to them about their beliefs. Conversations about religion with the Molokans were the highlight of Tolstoy’s stay in Samara in the summer of 1878. The Molokans were apparently so-called because of their refusal to cease the consumption of milk products during the 200 fasting days in the Orthodox calendar, but others argued that they took their name from a river in southern Russia. Like many of the ‘rational’ sects in Russia, the Molokans distinguished themselves from the general peasant population by eschewing alcohol and leading modest, industrious lives.54 They dispensed not only with all rituals (from holding services to crossing themselves), but also with clergy, sacred buildings and artefacts such as icons, engaging instead in independent Bible study.
The Times’ correspondent Donald Mackenzie Wallace, who visited the same area of the steppe beyond Samara where Tolstoy had his estate in the early 1870s, was greatly intrigued by the Molokans, but ascertaining the exact nature of their beliefs through direct questioning proved to be frustratingly difficult. It was only through a lengthy process of innocently comparing the weather and crops in Russia with the weather and crops in Scotland, and then gradually moving on to religion, that he was finally able to make headway during a conversation with one local Molokan peasant. Mackenzie Wallace came to the conclusion that there were strong similarities with the Presbyterian Church:
When the peasant heard that there is a country where the people interpret the Scriptures for themselves, have no bishops, and consider the veneration of Icons as idolatry, he invariably listened with profound attention and when he learned further that in that wonderful country the parishes annually send deputies to an assembly in which all matters pertaining to the Church are freely and publicly discussed, he almost always gave free expression to his astonishment, and I had to answer a whole volley of questions. ‘Where is that country?’ ‘Is is to the east, or the west?’ ‘Is it very far away?’ ‘If our Presbyter could only hear all that!’55
When he was out in the steppe, Mackenzie Wallace also enjoyed the hospitality of the Bashkirs in a kibitka, and his description of the way dinner was prepared and consumed may partly explain why the fastidious Frenchman Jules Montels, who had accompanied Tolstoy’s sons Ilya and Lev on their trip in 1878, did not terribly enjoy his time on the steppe. It was a long way from the bistros of Paris:
A sheep was brought near the door of our tent, and there killed, skinned, cut up into pieces, and put into an immense pot, under which a fire had been kindled. The dinner was not less primitive than the method of preparing it… There were no plates, knives, forks, spoons, or chop-sticks. Guests were expected all to eat out of a common wooden bowl, and to use the instruments with which Nature had provided them… The fare was copious, but not varied – consisting of boiled mutton, without bread or other substitute, and a little salted horse-flesh thrown in as an entrée.56