The State and Religious Heterodoxy in Russia (from 1880 to the Beginning of the 1890s)

After the Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, which profoundly changed the whole tenor of Russian life, the government found itself facing unexpected obstacles, "underwater shoals," each of which seriously tested the effectiveness of the state administration. How the government tried to solve economic, social, and political problems is well known, but few studies have addressed the clashes between the authorities and non-Orthodox religions that disturbed Russian society in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In the second half of the century, contemporaries noted with surprise that in Russia, which had hardly any experience with the Reformation, significant Protestant groups were appearing. Usually, these groups emerged in areas where capitalism was most intensely developed: Novorossiia, the non-black soil region, and the entry to the Caucasus. The spirit of these movements—rationalism, an emphasis on personal initiative, and rewards for entrepreneurship—was deeply linked with changes in postreform Russian society. The most notable of these currents was Stundism (from the German Stunde, meaning "hour"), which emerged at the end of the 1860s in Kherson and Kiev provinces. The model for the first Stundists were sectarians in the German colonies, who gathered at particular "hours" for prayer. By the middle of the 1880s Stundism had spread to Volyn, Podol'sk, Ekaterinoslavl, Chemigov, Taurida, Poltava, Bessarabia, Minsk, and Mogilev provinces. In the Kherson region alone there were about three thousand Stundists, and there were about two thousand in Kiev Province (1). Peasants in the Kherson region told the police "that the main reason for converting to the Stunde sect was … a desire to withdraw from a society in which all kinds of corrupting vices prevailed, such as drunkenness, rowdy behavior, thievery, and laziness. When they joined the religious sect they broke off all ties with their former associates and entered a new life which gave them material sufficiency" (2). The views of the Stundists were not socialist, but at times they manifested impulses toward equality for all and community property.