Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry

John Bushnell

Description

John Bushnell's analysis of previously unstudied church records and provincial archives reveals surprising marriage patterns in Russian peasant villages in the 18th and 19th centuries. For some villages the rate of unmarried women reached as high as 70 percent. The religious group most closely identified with female peasant marriage aversion was the Old Believer Spasovite covenant, and Bushnell argues that some of these women might have had more agency in the decision to marry than more common peasant tradition ordinarily allowed. Bushnell explores the cataclysmic social and economic impacts these decisions had on the villages, sometimes dragging entire households into poverty and ultimate dissolution. In this act of defiance, this group of socially, politically, and economically subordinated peasants went beyond traditional acts of resistance and reaction.

Introduction: What is the Opposite of Eureka?
1. The Moral Economy of Russian Serf Marriage, 1580s-1750s: Serf Marriage Unregulated
2. Nobles Discover Peasant Women's Marriage Aversion
3. The Outer Limits of Female Marriage Aversion: Kuplia Parish in the 18th Century
4. Kuplia Parish, 1830-1850: Separation, Collapse, Resumption of Marriage
5. Spasovites: the Covenant of Despair
6. Baki: Resistance to Marriage on a Forest Frontier
7. Steksovo and Sergei Mikhailovich Golitsyn: Marriage Aversion in a Context of Prosperity
Inconclusion
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Former Soviet Union
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Religión
• 19th century
• URSS
• General officer
• Eastern Europe
• 18th century
• Russia
• Orthodox
• Christianity
• General
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 09 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253030139
• Langue: English

Extrait

RUSSIAN PEASANT WOMEN WHO REFUSED TO MARRY
Map 0.1 North-Central European Russia, Case Study Sites. Contains information from OpenStreetMap, which is made available at https://www.openstreetmap.org under the Open Database License (ODbL). Modified by Kelsey Rydland, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
RUSSIAN PEASANT WOMEN WHO REFUSED TO MARRY
SPASOVITE OLD BELIEVERS IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES
JOHN BUSHNELL
I NDIANA U NIVERSITY P RESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by John Bushnell
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02965-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02996-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03013-9 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Introduction: What Is the Opposite of Eureka?
1 The Moral Economy of Russian Serf Marriage, 1580s-1750s: Serf Marriage Unregulated
2 Nobles Discover Peasant Women s Marriage Aversion
3 The Outer Limits of Female Marriage Aversion: Kuplia Parish in the Eighteenth Century
4 Kuplia Parish, 1830-50: Demographic Crisis and the Resumption of Marriage
5 Spasovites: The Covenant of Despair
6 Baki: Resistance to Marriage on a Forest Frontier
7 Steksovo and Sergei Mikhailovich Golitsyn: Marriage Aversion in a Context of Prosperity
Inconclusion
Bibliography
Index
ABBREVIATIONS
GAIaO
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Iaroslavskoi oblasti
GAKO
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Kostromskoi oblasti
GANO No. 3
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Nizhegorodskoi oblasti No. 3
GARO
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Riazanskoi oblasti
GAVO
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Vladimirskoi oblasti
GIM OPI
Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii muzei, Otdel pis mennykh istochnikov
IaGIAM
Iaroslavskii gosudarstvennyi istoriko-arkhitekturnyi muzei
LP
Lieven Papers, British Library
PSS
Polnoe sobranie sochinenii
PSZ
Polnoe sobranie zakonov
RGB OR
Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka, Otdel rukopisei
RGADA
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov
TsANO
Tsentral nyi arkhiv Nizhegorodskoi oblasti
TsIAM
Tsentral nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy
RUSSIAN PEASANT WOMEN WHO REFUSED TO MARRY
I NTRODUCTION : W HAT I S THE O PPOSITE OF E UREKA?
T his study of Russian peasant women who would not marry emerged from two simultaneous, wholly unanticipated discoveries that raised a tangle of questions I could not answer. The discoveries came in a set of confession registers-household lists of parishioners who had and had not made the annual confession required of all Orthodox Russians. These particular registers were from Kuplia parish, a cluster of villages near the very small city of Gorokhovets in eastern Vladimir province. One discovery was demographic: in some of those villages in the late eighteenth century, a very high proportion of adult women never married. It is not uncommon to find one or two unmarried adult women in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Russian village, but it is just as likely that every single adult woman had married. The consensus among Russian historians and ethnographers is that Russian peasants practiced close to universal marriage. In Kuplia parish that was extravagantly not so. As of 1795, 44 percent of women twenty-five and over in the village of Sluchkovo had never married. Even that figure grossly understates the resistance of Sluchkovo women to marriage; tax census returns reveal that, of all the women born in the village who turned twenty-five between 1763 and 1795, fully 70 percent never married. The overwhelming majority of Sluchkovo wives had been imported from other villages by Sluchkovo men, almost all of whom married. Further investigation revealed that while Sluchkovo women almost certainly refused to marry at a higher rate than women in other villages in the area, a 20 to 40 percent rate of abstention among women native to their villages was common in that part of the Gorokhovets district in the late eighteenth century. Nothing that I had ever learned about Russian peasant marriage, or Russian peasant culture, anticipated or explained what I had discovered about marriage in Kuplia parish.
The same confession registers told me who the non-marrying women were: members of the Old Believer Spasovite covenant. That was a surprise on two counts. In the first place, Spasovites did not forbid marriage; indeed, they were notorious among Old Believers for marrying in Orthodox churches. In the second place, I had never before seen a confession register in which the priest identified the Old Believers in his parish by covenant. Many confession registers identify Old Believers (or, as the Orthodox Church called them, schismatics) generically. Priests provided that identification to explain why particular parishioners had skipped confession. In Kuplia parish, priests named Old Believer covenants from sometime before 1830 down to at least 1850. They were not required to do so, but the example of the first priest who named covenants was taken up by his successors. The Kuplia confession registers may not be unique in that way, but then again, they may be. That I had ordered volumes of confession registers that contained the Kuplia registers rather than confession registers from another section of the Gorokhovets district was a stroke of luck. Spasovites were notoriously difficult to identify, even at the time, because they masqueraded as Orthodox. They were baptized in the church, married in the church, and, before marrying, they confessed and took communion in the church. Parish priests generally listed them among the Orthodox. In Kuplia parish, however, Spasovites revealed their confessional identity to the local priest.
That the Old Believer women in Sluchkovo who did not marry were Spasovites added to the mystery rather than solving it. Spasovites were among the many Russians who rejected the textual and ritual reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon (elevated 1652, abandoned office 1658, deposed 1667) and formally endorsed by a church council in Moscow in 1666. Those reforms caused turmoil in the Russian church. Opponents considered each and every one of them a heresy, the post-Nikonian Orthodox Church heretical, and in consequence the end times under way and the Antichrist perhaps already stalking the world. Unfortunately for the anti-reformists, while priests and monks were among their most important early leaders, no bishop joined. Because only bishops could ordain priests, when the last priest who had been ordained prior to Nikon s patriarchy died, the world would be-according to the most stringent, or logically consistent, Old Believers-bereft of priesthood, hence also without anyone to perform most of the sacraments. The exceptions were baptism and confession, both of which could, according to old rules of the Orthodox Church, be administered by laymen in an emergency, for instance, when no priest was available. These priestless Old Believers, as they were called, explicitly rejected marriage, there being no non-heretical priests to officiate. More pragmatic Old Believers accepted runaway Orthodox priests who abjured the Nikonian heresy and were ritually redeemed by anointment with myrrh. They came to be known as priested Old Believers, and they play almost no part in this story.
Spasovites had emerged as a distinct priestless covenant in the late seventeenth century and in some ways were more radical than other priestless covenants. They asserted that without priests, none of the sacraments, not even baptism and confession, could be administered; that God had withdrawn his grace from the world; and that there was no longer anything Christians could to do to work toward their own salvation. Down to at least 1730, they explicitly banned marriage. By the late eighteenth century, however, they had sharply revised their teaching on marriage: Spasovites could marry in Orthodox churches, and Orthodox priests could baptize their children. Because the Orthodox Church required a couple who were to be married to confess and take communion, Spasovite couples acted out those sacraments, too. 1 Spasovites continued to deny that Orthodox marriage, baptism, confession, and communion were actually sacraments, but evidently they did not believe-as most other Old Believers did-that they endangered their immortal souls when they accepted these non-sacraments from heretical (i.e., Orthodox) priests. Since priests considered anyone who accepted Orthodox sacraments to be Orthodox, they routinely recorded undeclared Spasovites as Orthodox in the confession registers.
There are very few sources on eighteenth-century Spasovites, and none of them (none from the nineteenth century, either) explain why Spasovites decided to permit marriage in Orthodox churches. Yet in this respect, Spasovites did not differ greatly from most other priestless covenants, which likewise gradually made their peace with marriage during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because they could not retain a large lay following if they rigorously enforced a ban. Priestless covenants that continued to reject marriage lost members to marrying covenants, and in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some covenants splintered over the issue of marriage. The Spasovites acceptance of marriage during the eighteenth century, in other words, was part of a broader trend among the priestless. The