This book explores the religious lives of Orthodox Christians in Russia before the revolution. It examines how Orthodox communal identity was fostered and sustained through the spaces, places, times, and images around which believers ordered their religious lives. It looks at debates between ecclesiastical officials. It argues that the challenge to Orthodoxy not only came from outsiders such as Marxists revolutionaries, but also from the faith community itself.
This chapter examines the fate of the Russian Orthodox Church—as an institution and community—during Russia’s years of revolution, from the reign of Nicholas II through the 1917 February Revolution and subsequent Bolshevik coup. It argues that Orthodoxy’s legal status as a ‘primary and predominant’ faith, and the state ascription of the ‘Russian people’ to Orthodoxy from birth under imperial rule, were in large part responsible for Orthodoxy’s institutional turmoil during these years. Further, the chapter challenges the use of the term ‘secularization’ with respect to the Bolshevik regime’s anti-religious policies. In the span of weeks, the Bolshevik regime not only homogenized Orthodoxy into the mix of ‘traditional faiths’—all pinpointed for eradication—but also relegated Orthodoxy to the position of least desired and most hazardous within that mix. Accordingly, this work argues that, from any observant believer’s perspective, Bolshevik efforts to cultivate the New Soviet Person—which included initiatives targeting the disestablishment, denigration of ‘liquidation’ of religious leaders, and the nationalization, destruction, and museumification of sacred objects, as well as widespread ‘re-education’ in ‘scientific materialism’—are better understood as a form of ‘internal’, spiritual colonization, and a qualitatively new chapter of Russia’s history.
VERA SHEVZO VERA SHEVZO VERA SHEVZO VERA SHEVZO VERA SHEVZOV V V V VIn 1912 the priest Ioann Paryshev from the Siberian diocese of Eniseisk posed the following question in a letter to the Holy Synod: How does one distinguish between "common" and "special" (that is, miracle-working) icons? 1 Although seeming only to request a definition of "the miraculous," Paryshev's query was closely tied to the question of who had the prerogative to distinguish between "common" and "miracle-working" icons. Thus it touched on a set of issues which members of the Orthodox establishment in Russia had been heatedly debating for the previous decade: the definition of the community called "the Church," and the roles and functions of its members, especially the laity. 2 Ultimately, Paryshev's question concerned issues of authority-lay and hierarchical, individual and communal-in matters concerning "the holy." This article examines Russia's culture of icon veneration as an arena in which these difficult issues of authority surfaced in the critical decades preceding Russia's 1917 revolutions. It traces the role that common believers played in shaping this culture of icon veneration, and the manner in which that culture, in turn, empowered them in an ecclesial community whose institutional structure did not lend them much credence. 3 In particular,
This article examines the explosive reaction to 'Punk Prayer' as a religious act. It argues that the power of the performance as iconoclash resulted from the fact that it tapped, resonated with and disturbed Russia's Orthodox culture through its appropriation of Orthodox sound, space and symbols -namely, the image of Mary, the Mother of God. The perceived position of its performers as insiders or outsiders to Orthodoxy, the evaluation of the sincerity of Punk Prayer as prayer and the paradoxical role that gender played in shaping these perceptions contributed to the tumultuous response.
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