Невыносимость подполья. Коллективное самоубийство староверов-странников в межвоенной Вятке

In the first half of the 1930s in the Vyatka region about 60 Old Believers-Wanderers, mostly women, committed suicide, no longer wanting to live in a world overrun by the Antichrist. The initiator of the wave of voluntary deaths was the local preacher, Khristofor Ivanovich. It is easy to write off these episodes as an actualization of traditional Old Believers’ religiously-motivated suicides or as a reaction to the excesses of Stalinist religious policies. However, as will be shown in the article, the Vyatka Wanderers were neither persistent escapist radicals nor uncompromising dissidents in their dealings with the Soviet authorities. My hypothesis is that this grim practice became possible not because the Wanderers were consistent underground millenarians, but because, squeezed into the catacombs by Stalin’s social and religious policies, they found themselves unable to maintain this unprecedented (for them) regime of existence.