The Sects in the Russian Empire (1833-1917)

• Applicant: Dr. Agnieszka Zaganczyk-Neufeld
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2020 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442920407

The subject of this project is the religious dissent, which expressed itself in the beliefs and practices of daily life within the religious communities of the Molokans and Skoptsy. The religious minorities who were the effects of the expansion of the Russian Empire (Catholics, Jews, Muslims), of migration (Adventists, Mennonites), or a particular local problem (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church) will not be investigated. The subject of the project are sects which separated them from the Russian Orthodox Church. Therefore, the sectarians contested the “inherent” orthodox religiosity of the Russian people. The religious tolerance – other than for the “foreign confessions” – did not apply for them. The period of investigation begins in the first half of the 19th century and follows the development of religious minorities considering social change, that accelerated from 1860ies on (industrialisation, legal reforms, abolition of serfdom, urbanisation). The year 1917 marks the end of the investigation period The October Revolution put the situation of all religious communities in Russia into a new socio-political context. The project emphasises the interaction between social change and religious pluralism. Sects were in conflict twofold with public order: they violated the dogma and claim to authority of the institutional Church. They did not build theological dogmas, primarily, but rather deviant forms of piety with very diverse codes of conduct, which had effect on working and everyday life. Practice of piety of particular sects will be reconstructed and compared as historical phenomena in social and geographic space in order to facilitate understanding of the interrelation between the rise of sects and modernization processes in prerevolutionary Russia. The project considers published and archived sources in Saint Petersburg, Moscow and other regional archives in Russia.The project shall be understood as a social history of the deviant religiosity, and it is methodically based upon the newest theoretical approaches to the deviant Christian religiosity.The goal of the submitted application for the Research Fellowship is the indispensable archival research in the archives of Moscow (The State Archive of the Russian Federation – GARF; The Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents - RGADA), State Archive of Orel Oblast (GAOO), and the House of the Fraternity of Peoples in Yakutsk. The second goal is to establish or to deepen the personal scientific contacts with Russian experts.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: Russia
• Host: Professor Dr. Aleksander Vatlin