The Kherson and Kiev regions will surrender to the Shtundisty, and in the Poltava and Ekaterinoslav regions the Shaloputy are sprouting like mushrooms, and Novorossiia . . . was long ago made into a gathering place of the Molokane and Dukhobory. . . . The city of Nikolaev . . . has become a kind of massive laboratory in which various sects remake and perfect themselves. (Kovalsky 1878)
In August 1878, Kovalsky was executed for armed resistance against the police. In 1881, two student radicals made a pilgrimage to a sect of Sutaevtsy, in the Tver province. Founded in 1874 by Vasilii Sutaev, who argued that holding property was sinful, this small community was adopted by Lev Tolstoy and, later, by the Tolstovian movement, as their spiritual model. Inspired by their fieldwork with the Sutaevtsy, the students founded the "Christian Brotherhood," whose aim was to integrate student activism and peasant sectarianism under a common socialist ideal. When they were arrested, they reported to the police that they learned about this communist sect from a literary journal (Volk 1966: 377). According to one of these inspiring publications, a community of the southern Khlysty integrated a dozen villages in an efficient arrangement, a task that peasant communes usually failed to accomplish. Allegedly, the religious enthusiasm of sectarians helped them create a hierarchical, state-like structure while avoiding authoritarianism (Uimovich-Ponomarev and Ponomarev 1886; Saiapin 1915).
The Russian Luther
The idea of proselytizing among sects was specifically included in the first 1876 program of the revolutionary organization "Land and Liberty." The program recognized "a mass of great and small movements, sects of a religious-revolutionary character, and sometimes, gangs of bandits, who express the active protest of the Russian people." Therefore, the program called for revolutionaries "to merge with already existing People's organizations that have a revolutionary character" (Arkhiv 1932: 56-7). Aleksandr Mikhailov, the most powerful figure in this movement, traveled to the Volga Schismatics. He recalled: "I had to literally become an Old Believer. Those who know Old Believers know what this means. For an educated man, that means to carry out ten thousand Chinese ceremonies" (1906: 163-5). Mikhailov's task among the peaceful, hard-working Spasovtsy (the Savior's people) was to find the connection to the mythical sects of Beguny, but he failed in this project. The young Georgii Plekhanov, the future leader of Russian Marxism, accompanied Mikhailov during this trip. Plekhanov (1925) recalled a public debate in a church between Mikhailov, who was performing as a Schismatic preacher, and two Orthodox priests. Mikhailov stammered but still argued with great force; that, at least, was Plekhanov's view. The subject of debate was the Apocalypse, a relevant theme for Mikhailov, who disguised his revolutionary project under a religious mask, but in this double masquerade also shaped a way to realize his religious craving. Coming back to St. Petersburg in 1878 and joining terrorist activities, Mikhailov continued to prepare himself "for his future role as the Schism's Reformer," as Plekhanov put it. In practice, that meant that Mikhailov and his fellow guerrillas visited the public library to study the literature on the Schism, which mainly followed in Shchapov's footsteps. But they also prepared a sophisticated plan for a terrorist assassination of the tsar.[9]
In March 1881, Mikhailov's group murdered Alexander II, though Mikhailov was arrested several months before his triumph. The assassination created a new situation for the movement. Populists returned from the countryside to the capitals, changing their roles from propagandists to terrorists and their means from ethnographic tourism to armed guerilla warfare. Explosions of external aggression were accompanied by an epidemic of suicides (Paperno 1997). Marxist scholars have attributed this transition, from populism to terrorism, to the class-based disappointment of activists with the peasantry, thus paving the way to the later enchantment with the proletariat. Class analysis, however, has obscured more specific explications of the events (Hardy 1987). The populists' disillusionment with the sectarians provides a more precise explanation of the movement's crisis.
Neglected by historians, this explanation was known to the participants. Having fled from the Russian police to England, Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii explained that the "Going to the People" was a religious rather than political movement. He compared the populist propagandists to the early Christians, their collective journey to the Russian heartland to a "crusade," and their efforts to settle among peasants to "the colonies." When these "colonies" failed, the crusaders became terrorists. Two Jewish activists, Osip Aptekman and Lev Deich, began their political careers as propagandists among the Molokane (Haberer 1995: 102-5). Aptekman later illuminated the intellectual roots of the populist drama:
Many of us, without any impetus from the government, ran without a backward glance from the countryside: the countryside, obviously, was more offensive than the government itself. . . . Shchapov, and then Kelsiev and others, had carelessly let it be known beyond any doubt that the Schism was a hidden reserve force for the Revolution. . . . Many gatherings of young people came together and read verbose essays about Schismatics. (Aptekman 1924: 434-6)
Fascination with texts led to fascination with sects; disillusionment with sects led to violence. Among the most faithful, these acts repeated in cycles. In 1874, the peasants of Chernigov converted Nikolai Tchaikovsky, the organizer of an important group of student radicals in St. Petersburg, to the Khlysty (Lavrov 1974: 1/147). After his return to the capital, Tchaikovsky preached non-violence and tried to transform his group into a religious commune. His friends had already become terrorists, and so Tchaikovsky left for America to join the peaceful Shakers. After some years, he returned to Europe to take part in revolutionary activities. In 1907, he made another trip to the sectarian regions of the Volga and was arrested. In 1918, President Wilson consulted with Tchaikovsky during the Versailles negotiations; the Bolsheviks condemned Tchaikovsky to death in absentia. As his biography aptly demonstrates, Tchaikovsky did not really choose between revolutionary activism and sectarian mysticism, but rather synthesized these two options (Hecht 1947; Etkind 2001b). Though extraordinary, his itinerary was not unique. Viktor Danilov, a nobleman and terrorist from Ukraine, was exiled to Siberia from whence he fled to Europe, but he returned illegally to Russia to undertake numerous pilgrimages to the Khlysty, whom he described in a series of amateurish essays. He was again exiled to Yakutia, where he married a native and called himself an ethnographer. At the start of his fascinating career, Danilov was first arrested in the Caucasus among the Dukhobory (Spirit-Wrestlers) in 1874. At the end of his career, in 1911, the Russian Prime Minister Petr Stolypin consulted with Danilov on his expertise about the Khlysty (Etkind 1998: 641).
In 1898, in a provincial library near Tambov, Viktor Chernov read an old review of Shchapov's work (Subbotin 1867) and was so inspired that he revealed in the local community of Molokane a ready-made clandestine organization with a subversive program (Chernov 1922: 1/302). Having found his way to the people in the library, Chernov then established a new library among the Molokane. On its shelves, books by Shchapov stood next to those by western utopian writers such as Charles Fourier and Edward Bellamy. Working with the Molokane, Chernov found that these people, as well as many others, were ready for "the Russian Luther." He hoped to play this role himself. It was the Russian way of doing politics, Chernov believed, to converge the Revolution with "our native Reformation, which is far too belated" (Chernov 1922: 1/275). The young Chernov was a future celebrity, the founder of the Socialist-Revolutionary party and a leader of the February 1917 Revolution. In his tragic life, he presided over decades of the terrorist politics of the Socialist- Revolutionaries and led this party from victory to victory, until they lost to the even more radical Social Democrats, the future Communists.