Insight into our own beginnings

Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 Sergei Zhuk. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 457 pages.

I must confess to having had a very personal reason for wanting to read Russia’s Lost Reformation by Sergei Zhuk, which attempts to tell the story of “peasants, millennialism and radical [Christian] sects in southern Russia and Ukraine” between 1830 and 1917.

I’ve been interested for years in the religious ferment out of which the Mennonite Brethren emerged. I’ve wanted to know more about the connections between them and the Ukrainians who became evangelicals. This was piqued for me when Ukrainian historian Oksana Beznosova told a gathering of scholars in Khortitza in 1999 that Friedensfeld, the Mennonite Brethren village in which my grandfather was church elder, had been one of the most active communities in witness to the surrounding Ukrainian peasants.

Zhuk’s major work provides a marvellous insight into the movements that began mostly as a reaction to the corruption and decay within the Orthodox Church and ultimately became drivers for social reform, economic enterprise and, of course, various forms of spiritual renewal.

In Zhuk’s mind, the proximity to people from western Europe – colonists such as the Mennonite and Lutheran Germans – who had been part of a renewal of the church in Europe, helps explain why so many of the renewal movements were centred in southern Russia. As peasants came to work for Mennonites, they got to see faith lived in a new way and were attracted to it. To illustrate: the very first elder in Mennonite Brethren history, Heinrich Huebert, had a young girl who worked for them by the name of Priska, who was among the very first to be baptized by Mennonite Brethren. Even though cruelly treated by her own family, she left an indelible witness among both Mennonites and her Ukrainian community.

Zhuk goes back to groups during the 1830s and 1840s that were essentially people who had no intention of leaving the Orthodox Church but were looking for ways to get past the corruption and abuse in the church and toward genuine holiness. The names given to them suggest the paths they took: they were called Shalaputs (wrong way people), and among them were those called Khlysty (Christ believers who flogged themselves) or Skoptsy (the castrated). Others who belonged generally to reformers within the Orthodox were the Molokans (milk drinkers) and the Doukhobors.

They were followed by people who came under the general label of Stundists (from the German word for hour), people who were affected by Pietist influences and drawn into Bible study “hours.” Much of this had its beginnings in the 1840s–60s, the same period that Mennonite Brethren had their beginnings. In these cases, writes Zhuk, the renewal resembled greatly the renewal that Pietism brought to churches of western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, or going back even further, to the reformation that came through the radical reformers of the 15th century.

A final stage was the influence of the earlier Shalaput and the later Stundist movements on one another which saw some move toward very bizarre expressions (with extremes of behaviour and belief, leaders claiming to be Christ, women offering themselves up sexually to prophets to birth a new Christ, etc.) while others became so unlike a typical community that they were dubbed “Germans” – dressing differently, forming mutually supportive marriages and healthy church communities, cultivating a new work ethic, rejecting alcohol use, and in many cases, arguing for a new social order. Some led the way in child care and development of better schools.

Zhuk writes about the attempts to rein them in during Tsarist times and the suppression of their history by the Soviets, so that the knowledge of this history had been largely lost. But the existence of millions of evangelicals in Russia after the fall of communism, he says, is witness to what had been planted earlier. Some have estimated that all Russia may have had as many as 20 million religious dissidents at the time of the 1917 Revolution. That would, of course, include many who were something other than evangelical Christians.

This stimulating study also reflects how much still needs to be done. How the influences moved is often unclear, as is the language the dissidents used. One has a feeling that Zhuk himself may not be sure what the sectarians meant when they called themselves “children of God” or “Christs.” How significant were some of the groups within the larger population? We get a sense of the clash of ideas and the movement toward greater engagement with social conditions in pre-Revolutionary Russia, but it’s hard to know how important some of these were. We are told that there was an overlap between the centres of greatest religious dissidence and later revolutionary activity. How much real carry-over was there? It’s still unclear.

However, for anyone interested in gaining a sense of the religious ferment in Ukraine where Mennonites were centred and Mennonite Brethren had their beginning, this book opens up large new areas of insight. It is full of new and important information, never brought together this comprehensively before.

Harold Jantz of Winnipeg is a former editor of the MB Herald.