Whether Kant was thinking about Countess von Keyserlingk, his "ideal of a woman," and Baron von Korf, or whether the romance between the wild invader and the local beauty was taken solely from the Bible, the lesson is astonishingly modern. The greatest troubles come from wars and from war efforts. But if there were no threat of war, says Kant, people would not enjoy even the freedom that they have, because this threat is the only factor that forces rulers to respect freedom. In the current state of culture, he says, perpetual peace cannot be attained. At this stage, war, not peace, facilitates progress. Grass is needful for the ox and freedom is needful for man, and therefore war, the state, and even evil, should exist.
Sects and Revolution
On April 16, 1861, in provincial Kazan, Professor Afanasii Shchapov proffered a theory that would inspire several generations of Russian socialists. An expert in religious history, Shchapov spoke at a requiem service to commemorate the lives of the peasants who were shot by troops at a village meeting, after they questioned the announced Emancipation. Shchapov called these victims "Christs" and presented their genealogy: "In Russia, for the past century and a half . . . among you, peasants - your own Christs have appeared" (Shchapov 1923: 409; Field 1976: 98). Shchapov ended his eulogy by saying that the peasants lost their lives for the cause of "the Soviet of the people." Combining the Christs with the Soviets, this rhetoric was pregnant with meaning. In his academic works as well as in his eulogy, Shchapov proposed the twofold argument, that participants in Russian peasant revolts were usually non-Orthodox in religious matters, and that members of Schismatic groups usually opposed state power. As a historian, Shchapov knew that some of these groups called their leaders Christs. As a prophet, he predicted the Soviet terminology of the Russian future.
Peasant Christs
The Emancipation of serfs was announced in newspapers for those who were literate, and in churches for those who were not. One of many responses was the peasant unrest in Bezdna, in the Kazan province. Surrounded by thousands of peasants, Anton Petrov interpreted the tome containing the Emancipation legislation as if it were the Scriptures. He was literate, or so peasants believed, and he inter-
Figure 16: Afanasii Shchapov in 1872.
Source: Shchapov, Afanasii 1906. Sochineniia. St. Petersburg
preted the sign "%," which was scattered throughout the text, as the Holy Cross, and all the zeroes as symbols of liberation without redemption payments (Krylov 1892: 616). He so agitated the peasants that they refused to disperse even under fire from a military regiment, which killed or wounded several hundred people, including Petrov himself (Field 1976; Freeze 1988). The name of the place where it all happened added to its horror: Bezdna means "abyss."
Although historians are very familiar with these events, they have not elaborated on the explanation that was developed by Shchapov: that Anton Petrov and the peasant crowd were religious dissenters. In speaking about the periodic appearance of peasant "Christs," Shchapov identified Petrov as a leader of the Russian sect Khlysty. These sectarians believed in multiple reincarnations of Jesus Christ; in addition, they believed that Christ visited every worthy member of the community as he or she reached the apogee of religious ecstasy.
They called themselves "Khristy" (Christs), but hostile Orthodox observers distorted it into "Khlysty" (the Whips). The sect entered history with this negative designation, a fate that it shared with such groups as the Shakers and Quakers. The first observer to endow these sectarians with a romantic aura was the Prussian visitor August von Haxthausen. In the 1840s, he found among the Russian sects "the firm and stable organization of these rude masses . . . a remarkably powerful spirit of association, and unparalleled communal institutions" (Haxthausen 1856: 1/254). After describing sectarian manifestations of mystical orgies, self-mutilation, and, most importantly, collective property, Haxthausen introduced his story of the bloody ritual performed by the Khlysty. In this narrative, singing, whirling, and flagellating sectarians cut off the breast of a naked virgin. After her breast had been collectively eaten, the community of sectarians engaged in group intercourse. The young woman with one breast was called Mother of God and became a leader of the community. Her spiritual partner was called Christ. Haxthausen's rhetoric, an accomplishment of romantic orientalism, contained the potential for ambivalent, and even positive, readings. To eat a human breast is certainly barbaric. Still, the ritual empowered a woman to lead her community. As Haxthausen wrote, some French intellectuals "went to Egypt to discover the free woman; had they gone to Russia they would perhaps have returned better satisfied" (Haxthausen 1856: 1/44). The hidden truth of the Russian commune was not only economic and legal, but also spiritual and sexual.
Russian ethnographers trustfully retold the startling story of the eaten breast (Kelsiev 1867; Melnikov-Pechersky 1869). This racy ritual of the Khlysty became a common plotline for many stories whose ambition was to uncover the hidden life of the Russian provinces. Count Vladimir Sollogub, a rich socialite and writer, served in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and inspected the Tver province in 1836. One of his tasks was to investigate the crimes of the local sectarians. In his memoir, he retold the picturesque, Gothic story of the Khlysty ritual service that he himself allegedly saw through a peephole. A Kalmyk guardsman, whose tongue had been cut out by the sectarians, betrayed them and brought Sollogub into the underground temple. Surrounded by a mysterious crowd, an elder led into the dark room "an entirely naked beauty," 16 years of age and "astonishingly handsome." After some "Cabbalistic gestures," the elder and everyone else beat her with a whip until she was nearly dead; at this moment though, the gendarmes arrived and arrested everyone present. Sollogub, who had never had a legal education or practice, led the investigation (1998: 133). Written much later, this memoir was most probably inspired by Haxthausen or some of his Russian readers; there is no doubt that this was a story that men liked to share. One can find similarly pleasant scenes, also from the life of Russian sects, in the major texts of writers as different as Leopold Sacher-Masoch and Maksim Gorky (Etkind 1998). For the radical readers of Haxthausen, the sectarian ritual complemented his discovery of the Russian commune with the striking image of its collective body, identified with God in ecstatic unity.
Cannibalism, flagellation, and group sex among the Khlysty were never confirmed. In actual fact, they practiced a ritual whirling dance that resembled the dances of American Shakers. In ecstasy, they spoke in tongues, made prophecies, and healed the sick. Largely forgotten today, the Khlysty deserve a place among other phenomena of the Eurasian religious tradition (Siniavsky 1991; Etkind 1998; Clay 2001; Zhuk 2004). But as political agents, they were neutral, nonviolent, or just passive. There were only two cases of mass unrest attributed to the Khlysty and related sects. The first of these took place in 1861 when, according to Shchapov, "democratic, purported Christs" organized the rebellion in Bezdna. The second, in 1901, took place in the village of Pavlovki in Kharkov province, when a crowd vandalized the local church and some experts attributed the event to the Khlysty (Gamfield 1990). Though the statistics were notoriously unreliable, by the beginning of the twentieth century estimations of the number of Khlysty were still as high as 100,000 (Klibanov 1982). Many communities split from the Khlysty or simply resembled them; they preferred to call themselves by other, usually exotic names. Many of these movements shared broadly millennial beliefs, which were common to the natives of other colonized regions of the world (Curtin 2000). By identifying with the early Christians in their struggle against the Romans, they articulated their feelings toward modern empires. Most of these "sectarians," as they were officially called in Russia, were illiterate, but there were educated, including self-educated, people among them. To characterize their religious movements as "cargo cults" is entirely wrong. The nineteenth-century history of these communities feature permanent interactions between high and low cultures, which culminated in the synthesis that was achieved by Lev Tolstoy, an admirer and correspondent of several sectarian communities, and his fellow Tolstovians who claimed leadership in the world of sects.