Religion and Revolution in a Sectarian Family of Late Tsarist Russia

In 1965, after decades of ethnographic research in primary sources first collected by Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, Soviet historian Alexander I. Klibanov concluded that despite its origins in peasant social protest, Russian sectarianism had failed to advance the goals of the Bolshevik revolution. “Darkened” by religion and under the influence of their “bourgeois leaders” and “reactionary” Tolstoyan activists, religious dissidents were content to serve the political and economic interests of the ruling classes. Klibanov’s sweeping pronouncement ran counter to previous, western scholarship, which generally viewed the religious sect as precursor of the political party, and it was specifically rebutted in 1967 by Ethel Dunn, who argued that Klibanov had not proved his conclusion that sectarians were satisfied with tsarism and opposed to revolution. Sergei I. Zhuk further pressed the case against Klibanov’s thesis in his 2004 study of the oppositional discourse of the peasant evangelical movement in southern Russia and the revolutionary activity of proletarian peasants against Ukrainian plantation owners. Soviet ideologists had disowned their “cultural predecessors,” Zhuk claimed. The case study of an exiled sectarian family that we present in this article follows in the footsteps of Dunn, Zhuk, and others to show how the anti-clerical activism of a Bessarabian Stundist, Eremei Cheban (1858–c.1930), fueled the political dissidence of his son, Khariton (1886–1962), who participated in violent anti-tsarist rebellion in the Caucasus during the 1905 Revolution.