The path-breaking historian of Russian radicalism, Franco Venturi, claimed that those activists who famously "went to the People" in the 1870s were guided, "above all," by the ethnographers (1982: 270). Being different from urbane society and unknown to it, the people (as Russian peasants were called) were intelligible only through the lens of the exoticizing "science" of ethnography. An amalgam of socialist activism and lay ethnography, the populist movement saw the peasantry as silent, dispossessed, obscure, exotic, virtuous - in short, different. Whatever the people did or thought was known to the intelligentsia through authors who were themselves part of that same intelligentsia (Frierson 1993; Offord 2010). The colonial past, argued Gayatri Spivak, is incommunicable. The subaltern does not speak; when he or she speaks to us, her speech is not authentic, and her language is already contaminated by western meanings. To put it in postcolonial terms, the people were the subaltern. The emerging Russian science of ethnography confronted the same paradox in the nineteenth century that the scholars of subalternity in India noted in the twentieth century (Prakash 1994; Spivak 1994). Dominant discourses presented the superstitious peasant as a figure beyond the realm of reason, outside the authorized categories of rationality and progress. However, these discourses claimed that this subaltern figure was knowable and actually known; he was believed to be reachable and transparent for the specialized methods of scholarship. This paradox proved to be fruitful for several fields of Russian scholarship, from ethnography to history to literary studies. Its internationally acclaimed achievements developed as offspring of the studies of sectarian and peasant folk life. Vladimir Propp's structuralist analysis of folk tales has become famous. It is less known that Viktor Shklovsky's formalist theory of estrangement started with his analysis of the songs of the Khlysty (Etkind 1998: 153).
The Politicization of the Schism
The requiem in Kazan was arguably the first public commemoration of victims of the Russian monarchy. Church authorities wanted to incarcerate Shchapov in a monastery, but Alexander II considered him a layperson and instead ordered his arrest. In February 1862, on the first anniversary of the emancipation of the serfs, the Tsar pardoned Shchapov. In a sensational turn of events, the disgraced professor was then appointed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. His new position was in the "Committee for Schismatics, Skoptsy and other Especially Dangerous Sects," which was responsible for dealing with religious dissidents by the means of police. Shchapov held this position for a few months until, in another sensational development, the Minister of Internal Affairs dismissed him. The Minister of Enlightenment proposed sending him to eastern Siberia for ethnographic studies, but instead Alexander II sent him into exile there under police surveillance.
Shchapov's short governmental service radicalized his thought. In a series of essays published in populist journals, he reappraised the whole variety of Russian sectarian experience, providing it with a new combination of nationalistic and utopian meanings. Describing an exceptionally rich range of cases, Shchapov saw a common element in all of them: anti-governmental protest. He blurred the traditional distinction between "Old-Believers" and "sectarians," which favored Old-Believers as the lesser evil, though nobody could clearly explicate their difference. He disregarded those Schismatics, and there were many, who were solely concerned with eternal salvation and who turned their backs upon the political world. To be sure, there was a great variety of beliefs and modes of behavior among different creeds of non-Orthodox Russians.[8] Still, according to the formulations of Shchapov, all Russian sectarians and Old-Believers disguised social protest under religious masks, uniting themselves into the "democratic party of the Schismatics" (1906: 1/451-505). Shchapov's collection of Russian sects followed along with the better-known achievements of Russian ethnography, such as Vladimir Dal's dictionary of the Russian language, the surveys of peasant rites and mores organized by Nikolai Nadezhdin, the collection of historical legends by Pavel Rybnikov, and the collection of fairytales by Alexander Afanasiev. Ethnography, "the science of the people," became an instrument of national self-fashioning (Slezkine 1994; Gellner 1998). Alluding to the pure virtues and mystical practices of the people, ethnography demonstrated their spectacular difference from the life of cynical, commercialized, urban civilization.
External and internal factors cooperated in the nineteenth-century discovery of Russian sects. They were constructed as uniquely Russian, whereas the terms and genres of this discursive formation were predominantly European. Frequent dialogue with western travelers, hungry for social wonders and oriental exotica, played a defining role in the burgeoning discourse about Russian sects. For many decades, European authors like August von Haxthausen, Alexander Dumas- pere, William H. Dixon, Leopold Sacher-Masoch, and Rene Fulop- Miller referred to Russian sects while projecting onto Russia their favorite ideas, such as deep spirituality, free eroticism, love of suffering, and collective property. Russian intellectuals knew too well that these curiosities were absent in their own circles. In order to give an affirmative response to the western projections, they produced imaginary constructions of their own. The sectarians were real but inaccessible to the profane gaze, which provided experts with an excellent chance to manipulate the political vision of their readers.
In the rich history of Russian ethnography of sectarian movements, we observe the three stages that Miroslav Hroch (1985) described in his classical study of East European nationalisms. First, scholars produce and disseminate knowledge about minority groups. Second, activists seek to access and employ these groups for the project of the future nation, which would be radically different from the existing one. Third, a mass movement is formed, which shapes itself into a different form from the one projected by early enthusiasts. At the crucial second stage, lay ethnographers used two strategies to radicalize their debate about Russian sects. They emphasized sectarian eccentricities by appropriating Orthodox missionaries' accusations against them, changing the tone of these narratives from the hostile to the romanticized and even the utopian. As an aspect of this modernizing effort, they used comparisons between Russian and American sects, such as Shakers, Mormons, and the Bible Communists (for details, see Etkind 2001b). Lay ethnographers also conflated different religious groups, thereby producing mammoth numbers that encompassed total statistics rather than specific numbers for individual sects. In 1861, a proclamation estimated the number of "Russian sectarians who do not honor the Tsar" at nine million (Shelgunov and Mikhailov 1958: 96). In 1867, a political emigre, Nikolai Ogarev, wrote that "almost half of our population" are Schismatics (1952: 773). In 1924, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich wrote in the newspaper Pravda that 35 million, "no less than one-third of the population of the country," are "sectarians and Old-Believers." What was decisive was the combination of the inflated statistics, which included all of these variegated groups, and the vivid descriptions of radical communities that were purposefully taken for typical portraits of all of them.