sects and revolution The Militant Pilgrims
At the same time that the Ministry of Internal Affairs was employing Shchapov for police purposes, the political emigre Vasilii Kelsiev was employing Shchapov's essays for subversive politics. An orientalist by training and a revolutionary by profession, Kelsiev described his reading experience in a mixture of romantic, oriental, and sectarian symbols, including the most salient one - the New Man:
I almost went berserk. My life literally split in two, and I became a new man. . . . It seemed to me while reading that I was entering a supernatural, secret world, the world of Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe or The Thousand and One Nights. Suddenly, in one night, there was revealed to me the Skoptsy (Castrates) with their mystic rites . . . ; the Khlysty with their strange beliefs; . . . the intrigues of the leaders of Old- Believers. . . . Sect followed sect, images passed before me one after the other, as in a magic lantern. (Kelsiev 1941: 285)
In the light of this lantern, Kelsiev directed his revolutionary activities from London to the sectarian communities on the southern Russian frontier. Through them, he hoped to organize the smuggling of arms via Odessa and the distribution of propaganda literature in the Volga region. In 1862, he illegally re-entered Russia with a Turkish passport, presenting himself as an academic researcher on the Russian Schism. Thirty-two individuals were tried in court for having had contact with this self-proclaimed ethnographer. Shchapov, subpoenaed, denied meeting Kelsiev, but there was evidence of earlier correspondence, which resulted in Shchapov's exile to Siberia. In 1863, Kelsiev moved to Constantinople to make contact with the local Schismatics of Russian origin there, who served the Sultan and from time to time took part in military actions against Russia. The Turkish administration appointed Kelsiev "chief and protector of all Russians before the local authorities." Then, Kelsiev once more returned to Russia, surrendered to the police, wrote his "Confession" in prison, earned a pardon, and ended his days in quiet disgrace. The exciting saga of Kelsiev was fully covered in the literature of the time. Before his return to Russia, he served as a prototype of Rakhmetov in Chernyshevsky's novel What is to be Done? After his return, he served as a prototype of Shatov in Dostoevsky's The Possessed (Etkind 2001b: 83). In this novel, a conspiratorial group aims to spread among the people a subversive legend "that would surpass even that of the Skoptsy" (Castrates). The failure of his project leads its fictional participants to a murder and a suicide.
As for Shchapov, he never returned from Siberia, where he is credited for promoting Siberian separatism. Echoing him, the famous anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, declared in 1862 that the Schism was a political protest against the Russian government and that the sects were a resource for the future revolution (Dragomanov 1896: 75). Looking to the Radical Reformation as a model for the Russian revolution, Bakunin said that socialism was the way peasants had led their lives from the beginning of time. He specifically referred to two ethnographic discoveries, the land commune and the Schism, to which he added "bandits." Following Shchapov, Bakunin chose the Beguny (Runners) sect as his favorite idiom of revolution. A splinter group of the Khlysty, the Beguny rejected not only the family, but also the home and any connections whatsoever to the state. They forbade money, printed books, and the use of their own names. The sect was discovered in 1849 on the northern Volga by an expedition of the Ministry of Internal Affairs with Ivan Aksakov as the leading expert. Relying on his evidence, Shchapov claimed that in the sectarian "capital" Sopelki, on the Volga river, the Beguny annually summoned "Federal Land Councils," which gathered "representatives" who came on foot from all over Russia, from the Carpathians to Siberia. The intrepid Beguny and their periodic Soviets were supposed to resolve the irresolvable question of populism: integration between the local communes (1906: 1/505-80).
Reading Shchapov in their adolescence, his best readers put his lessons into practice as adults. In the summer of 1874, the populists fanned out across the villages of Russia. The "Going to the People" movement had begun, "the most genuinely original social movement of modern Russian history" (Billington 1966: 204). In Kiev, Ivan Fesenko gathered around him 15 students, each of whom had to choose a sect according to his taste and then live among them. The sectarians would proselytize the radicals and the radicals would propagandize the sectarians. As a result, their ideas would draw closer to each other and the number of adherents would grow. Using Shchapov's essay of 1862 as a guidebook, most of Fesenko's followers went to the lower reaches of the Volga to locate the Beguny, but none succeeded in finding a single member of the sect. Another group went to the Molokane (the Milk-Drinkers), and several others chose to go to the Shtundisty (the Protestant-like sect influenced by German Mennonites). Fesenko himself went to a southern community of sectarians who whirled like the Khlysty. A participant in these events reported:
As a former seminarian . . . Fesenko spouted quotes and freely interpreted texts. His listeners were amazed . . . his appearance strongly resembled that of a prophet. Towards the end of the session, Fesenko exalted these impressionable sectarians to such a degree that many of them were brought to a state of religious ecstasy. And then something totally improbable happened . . . the sectarians, having surrounded Fesenko in a tight circle, picked him up and started whirling about in ritual manner, joyously exclaiming, "He has come! He is here! He is with us!" (Deich 1923: 220)
Fesenko was ready to take on his new role, but the police would not allow him to be a village Christ for long. Vladimir Bonch- Bruevich, a future Bolshevik leader, claimed that he used the same method. According to his account, the ecstatic community of the Beguny thought that he was the Prophet Elijah, and the bespectacled Bonch-Bruevich, "as a representative of God, participated in their rituals which were accompanied by songs, hopping around, and what was almost an orgy" (Iordanskaia 1994: 208). Dmitrii Rogachev traveled along the Volga region, hiring himself out as a barge hauler. Reading the Psalms to illiterate sectarians, he was able to insert propaganda without their noticing it (Itenberg 1960: 48). In 1874, Katerina Breshko-Breshkovskaia, who was later nicknamed "the grandmother of the Russian Revolution," conducted propaganda work among the Shtundisty. Settling among the sectarians, she studied the Gospels for days, preparing herself for debates. After her first attempt, the leader of the community threatened her with the police, forcing her to flee (Breshkovskaia 1931: 51). More successful was Sofiia Subbotina, who resettled from Switzerland in 1873 to her estate in Kursk province to practice the healing arts and to politicize the local Skoptsy (Field 1987). The terrorist Mikhail Frolenko remembered that "in 1875, while we were spending time with the peaceful Shtundists, nobody even thought about taking up arms" (1932: 2/94). However, like other leaders of the movement, Frolenko became bitterly disillusioned with the sectarians and, as a result, turned to terror tactics. Ivan Kovalsky worked with a sectarian community in southern Russia, but all he succeeded in doing was, in his own words, "convince the elders not to fall down in ecstasy during prayer." Still, he presented his case as if the sects were a united movement and the author their leader: