Sobering up the soul of the people: The politics of popular temperance in late Imperial Russia

Russian Review

Volumn 58, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 212-233

  McKee, W Arthur ^a  

^a CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ALCOHOL ABSTINENCE; ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE; ARTICLE; DRINKING BEHAVIOR; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; HISTORY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; PUBLIC HEALTH; RELIGION; SOCIAL CHANGE; USSR;

ALCOHOL DRINKING; ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES; EASTERN ORTHODOXY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; PUBLIC HEALTH; RELIGION; RUSSIA (PRE-1917); SOCIAL CHANGE; TEMPERANCE;

EID: 60949330798     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0036-0341.681999068     Document Type: Article

References (116)

1. A. S. Prugavin, "Brattsy" i trezvenniki: Iz oblasti religioznykh iskanii (Moscow, 1912), 17, 52
2. K. E. Lindeman, ed., Sbornikrecheio trezvennicheskom dvizhenii, proiznesennykh v sobraniiakh Tsentral'nogo Komiteta soiuza 17-go oktiabria v Moskve i Peterburge 5, 6, 13 i 14 maia 1913 g. (Moscow, 1913), 31, 121-25 (hereafter Sbornik)
3. Mark D. Steinberg, "Workers on the Cross: Religious Imagination in the Writings of Russian Workers, 1910-1924," Russian Review 53 (April 1994): 218. A meshchanin was a member of the ill-defined social estate of "townsman" and was generally a lower-class or lower-middle-class artisan or petty trader
4. Sbornik, 4-5, gives this figure for the number of trezvenniki
5. Even clergymen hostile to the movement believed that it numbered at least thirty thousand (Prugavin, "Brattsy," 21-22)
6. For post-1905 attacks on the brattsy see, for example, Pravoslavnyi moskvich, "Moskovskie brattsy," Veche (25 October, 3 and 5 November 1909): 2, 2-3, 2-3, respectively
7. Ivan Tregubov, ed., Otzyvy doktorov ob istseleniiakh, sovershaemykh "brattsem" Ioannom Churikovym (St. Petersburg, 1913)
8. Pragavin, "Brattsy," 41-50
9. Sbornik, 41-42
10. The khlyst sect mortified the flesh ("khlyst" means "whip" in Russian; khlysty often whipped themselves in public) and its leaders reportedly claimed to be "Christs." The Church propagated an apparently false story that the khlysty engaged in sexual rituals. See John S. Curtiss, Church and State in Russia: The Last Years of the Empire, 1900-1917 (New York, 1940)
11. Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, "Moskovskie trezvenniki," Sovremennik, 1913, no. 2:299-315
12. V. M. Skvortsov, "Arest moskovskikh brattsev i missiia," Kolokol (29 March 1911): 1
13. Sbornik, passim
14. Kolokol (12, 13, 16, and 19 June 1912): 3, 2, 1, 1, respectively
15. Sbornik, 96-97
16. Sbornik; Bonch-Bruevich, "Moskovskie trezvenniki." The title sestritsa derives from the Russian word for sister (sestra) and, like bratets, suggests an affectionate respect for the woman who bore it
17. See, for example, the right-wing daily Novoe vremia's angry attack on the Church in Sbornik, 107
18. The Octobrists took their name from Nicholas II's 17 October Manifesto, which granted civil rights and established a legislature
19. Sbornik contains the presentations delivered to these forums
20. Stephen P. Frank, "Confronting the Domestic Other: Rural Popular Culture and its Enemies in Fin-de-Siècle Russia," in Cultures in Flux: Lower-Class Values, Practices, and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Frank and Mark D. Steinberg (Princeton, 1994), 74-107
21. Joan Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 (Berkeley, 1993)
22. On the mutual influence between peasant migrants and the city see Daniel Brower, The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900 (Berkeley, 1990), particularly 75-91
23. On the reasons why city dwellers drank more than those in the countryside see David Christian, 'Living Water': Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford, 1990), chap. 3
24. Patricia Herlihy, "Joy of the Rus': Rites and Rituals of Russian Drinking," Russian Review 50 (April 1991): 146-47
25. and my "Taming the Green Serpent: Alcoholism, Autocracy, and Russian Society, 1881-1914" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997), 56-68
26. Simon Dixon, "The Church's Social Role in St. Petersburg, 1880-1914," in Church, Nation and State in Russia and Ukraine, ed. Geoffrey Hosking (London, 1991), 167-92
27. Patricia Herlihy, "Strategies of Sobriety: Temperance movements in Russia, 1880-1914," Woodrow Wilson Center, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies occasional paper, 1990
28. John F. Hutchinson, "Medicine, Morality and Social Policy in Imperial Russia: the early years of the Alcoholism Commission," Histoire Sociale/Social History 7 (November 1974): 202-26
29. idem, "Science, Politics, and the Alcohol Problem in post-1905 Russia," Slavonic and East European Review 58 (April 1980): 232-54
30. George Snow, "Socialism, Alcoholism, and the Russian Working Classes before 1917," in Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History, ed. Susanna Barrows and Robin Room (Berkeley, 1991), 243-64
31. I. Ia. Eliashevich, Pravda o Churikove i churikovtsakh (Leningrad, 1928), 16
32. Sbornik, 41
33. GARF, f. 102 (4-oe deloproizvodstvo), d. 193 (O "brattsakh- trezvennikakh") (1912), ll. 34-38
34. In addition to the materials cited in the above note see Prugavin, "Brattsy," 42-43
35. On Father Ioann of Kronstadt see Nadieszda Kizenko, "Ioann of Kronstadt and the Reception of Sanctity, 1850-1988," Russian Review 57 (July 1998): 325-44
36. Pravoslavnyi moskvich, "Moskovskie brattsy" (3 November 1909): 2
37. Koloskov claimed to have sent a petition in 1903 on behalf of Churikov. See Koloskov's 1910 letter to the Metropolitan of Moscow in Sbornik, 122
38. On Tregubov's observations of the trezvenniki see his report in Sbornik, 93-100
39. Pragavin's "Brattsy" shows at the very least that he helped Churikov get in contact with foreign journalists (p. 70)
40. (Anon.), K voprosu
41. Sbornik, 60-100
42. Sbornik, 93-100
43. Prugavin, "Brattsy," 87-89. Khlystovstvo is the Russian term for the religion of the khlysty
44. Bonch-Bruevich, "Moskovskie trezvenniki," 308
45. Sbornik, 60-92
46. and Sbornik, 96-97
47. The Marxist-turned-Orthodox philosopher Sergei Bulgakov attempted to develop a remarkably similar religiously based work ethic in this period as well. See Bernice Glatzer Rozenthal, "The Search for a Russian Orthodox Work Ethic," in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith D. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West (Princeton, 1991), esp. 61-74
48. Bonch-Bruevich, "Moskovskie trezvenniki," 305-6
49. GARF, f. 102 (2-oe deloproizvodstvo), op. 71, d. 28, ll. 6, 9
50. Sbornik, 10-25
51. Though such ecstatic expressions of faith were uncommon at most Orthodox rituals, they did occur at the mass confessions led by Ioann of Kronstadt (Kizenko, "Ioann of Kronstadt," 332-33)
52. Prugavin, "Brattsy," 17-18, 62
53. Sbornik, 20-22
54. Sbornik, 113
55. For the life histories of the trezvenniki see Bonch-Bruevich, "Moskovskie brattsy," 300-303
56. and Sbornik, 104-5
57. Sbornik, 104-5
58. Bonch-Bruevich, "Moskovskie trezvenniki," 307
59. Sbornik, 19-20, 114-15
60. GARF, f. 102 (4-oe deloproizvodstvo), d. 193, ll. 19-20
61. Sbornik, 52
62. Bonch-Bruevich, "Moskovskie trezvenniki," 303
63. Tellingly, Bonch-Bruevich identifies most of the trezvenniki whose life histories he recounts as "peasants" ("Moskovskie trezvenniki," 300-303)
64. On the "peasantization" of Russian cities in this period see Brower, Russian City
65. Sergei Kravchinskii, The Russian Peasantry (Westport, CT, 1977), 219-35
66. Christine D. Worobec, "Witchcraft Beliefs and Practices in Prerevolutionary Russian and Ukrainian Villages," Russian Review 54 (April 1995): 166, 169-70
67. Eve Levin, "Dvoeverie and Popular Religion," in Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, ed. Stephen K. Batalden (Dekalb, IL, 1993), 31-52
68. idem, "Supplicatory Prayers as a Source for Popular Religious Culture in Muscovite Russia," in Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russian and Ukraine, ed. Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann (Dekalb, IL, 1997), esp. 105
69. Samuel Ramer, "Traditional Healers and Peasant Culture in Russia, 1861-1917," in Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of European Russia, 1800-1921, ed. Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter (Princeton, 1991), 207-32
70. For descriptions of the trezvenniki that emphasize such traits see Sbornik, esp. 60-92, 104-5
71. On the personality type of peasants see Moshe Lewin, "Rural Society in Twentieth-Century Russia," in his The Making of the Soviet System (New York, 1985), esp. 53
72. Max Weber, of course, first outlined the process by which religions that emphasize a legal conception of ethics give rise to societies and individuals that are rational and calculating. See his The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston, 1963), esp. 151-66, 246-74
73. On the ways peasant communities kept control over members who worked in cities, see, in particular, Jeffrey Burds, "The Social Control of Peasant Labor in Russia: The Response of Village Communities to Labor Migration in the Central Industrial Region, 1861-1905" in Peasant Economy, 52-100
74. See, especially, Dave Pretty, "The Saints of the Revolution: Political Activists in 1890s Ivanovo-Voznesensk and the Path of Most Resistance," Slavic Review 54 (Summer 1995): 276-304
75. and Steinberg, "Workers on the Cross."
76. RGIA, f. 796, op. 170, d. 2544a
77. Dixon, "Church's Social Role," 167-92
78. Gregory Freeze, "'Going to the Intelligentsia': The Church and its Urban Mission in Post-Reform Russia," in Between Tsar and People, 215-32
79. A. V. Rozhdestvenskii, "Chto sdelalo pravoslavnoe dukhovenstvo dlia bor'by s narodnym p'ianstvom," Trudy Komissii po voprosu ob alkogolizme (TKA), vol. 5, sec. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1900), 590-611
80. Rozhdestvenskii founded the Alexander Nevsky Temperance Society in St. Petersburg in 1898, which rapidly became the largest temperance society in Russia. He claimed that this society was a branch of the Society for the Spread of Religious and Moral Enlightenment in the Spirit of the Orthodox Church. For more on Rozhdestvenskii and the Orthodox temperance movement see Herlihy, "Strategies of Sobriety."
81. I. Vinogradov, "Sviashchennyi obet trezvosti; ego znachenie v organizatsii obshchestv trezvosti i sredstva k vypolneniiu obeta," Trudy Vserossiiskogo s "ezda prakticheskikh deiatelei po bor'bes alkogolizmom (TSPD), vol. 2 (Petrograd, 1915), 42
82. Father Georgii Bogoslovskii, "O molebnakh i obetakh, kak sredstvakh religioznonravstvennoi bor'by s narodnym p'ianstvom," V bor'be za trezvost' (February-March 1912): 50-61 (this article in particular discusses the significance of inscribing the names in a book)
83. I. M-v, Obshchestvo trezvosti, zhizn'i rabota v nem (St. Petersburg, 1910)
84. RGIA, f. 1242, op. 1, d. 1, ll. 169-170
85. Father Akimov, "Prikhodskaia bor'ba s alkogolizmom," TSPD 2:17-22
86. Dixon, "Church's Social Role"; Herlihy, "Strategies of Sobriety"; I. M-v, Obshchestvo trezvosti
87. Widely differing estimates of the number of Orthodox temperance societies before 1900 can be found in D. G. Bulgakovskii, "Rol' pravoslavnogo dukhovenststva v bor'be s narodnym p'ianstvom," TKA 5:2:560
88. and Rozhdestvenskii, "Chto sdelalo," 609-11
89. See RGIA, f. 1242, op. 1, d. 1, 11. 169-70, for the numbers of societies after 1905
90. For a larger post-1905 estimate see Herlihy, "Strategies of Sobriety," 9
91. Although this explanation for sectarian sobriety is obviously speculative, it is loosely based on the explanation that alcohol researchers have given for the sobriety of Jews from the Russian Empire. See Charles R. Snyder, "Culture and Jewish Sobriety: The Ingroup-Outgroup Factor," in Society, Culture, and Drinking Patterns, ed. David J. Pittman and Charles R. Snyder (New York, 1962), 188-225
92. On Old Believer attitudes toward alcohol see Roy R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (Dekalb, IL, 1995), 111-14
93. Protocols of the subcommittee on finding means of struggle with drunkenness with the aid of the clergy, comment by V. M. Skvortsov (editor of Missionerskoe obozrenie), TKA 10:1 (St. Petersburg, 1909), 749-50
94. Dixon, "Church's Social Role," 179
95. Bulgakovskii, "Rol' pravoslavnogo dukhovenstva," 560-61
96. N. Rozanov, "Deiatel'nost' dukhovenstva v bor'be s narodnym p'ianstvom (istoricheskii ocherk)," V bor'be za trezvost' (January 1911): 64
97. GARF, f. 102 (2-oe deloproizvodstvo), op. 54, d. 118
98. (O vospreshchenii St. Peterburgskomu i Graivoronskomu obshchestvam trezvosti, dal'neishego izdaniia broshiur, "V zashchitu trezvosti i sveta"), l. 18
99. Anatolii I. Faresov, Narod bez vodki (Putevye ocherki) (Petrograd, 1916), 98-105
100. Sbornik, 93-95
101. Prugavin also notes that the St. Petersburg missionary council declined to proclaim Churikov a heretic in 1910. Such qualified support by Church leaders of a tribune of popular religiosity was not without precedent. The Church tolerated Ioann of Kronstadt's "unorthodox" practices as well (Kizenko, "Ioann of Kronstadt," 340-41)
102. D. A. Koptev and S. M. Latyshev, eds., Ugolovnoe ulozhenie (stat'i, vvedenyia v deistvie) (St. Petersburg, 1912), 487, 622-27
103. V. I. Iasevich-Borodaevskaia, Bor'ba za veru: Istoriko-bytovye ocherki i obzor zakonodatel'stva po staroobriadchestvu i sektanstvu v ego posledovatel'nom razvitii c prilozheniem statei zakona i vysochaishikh ukuzov (St. Petersburg, 1912), 31-47
104. I thank Heather Coleman for making available to me her unpublished paper, "Definitions of Heresy: The Fourth Missionary Congress and the Problem of Cultural Power after 1905 in Russia" (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1994), which discusses the Church's dilemmas in this period. See also Curtiss, Church and State
105. Sbornik, 96
106. On the Octobrists' attitude toward drunkenness see Hutchinson, "Science, Politics"; and McKee, "Taming ," chaps. 9, 11
107. On Russian educated society's growing interest in erotic literature after the Revolution of 1905 see Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 369-91
108. See Sbornik, 102, for Vladimirov's views
109. As reprinted in Vestnik trezvosti, no. 222 (June 1913): 27
110. In 1910, S. Kondrashkin, a writer for the Kadet newspaper Rech', also noted that Churikov's sermons were far superior to the cultural activities of educated society (Prugavin, "Brattsy," 33)
111. Sbornik, 15-16
112. On Russian doctors' prescriptions for alcoholism see Hutchinson, "Medicine, Morality"; McKee, "Taming," chaps. 5-7, 10
113. and Snow, "Socialism, Alcoholism."
114. "Chto takoe vnushenie?" Gipnoz, Vnushenie, Telepatiia (Moscow, 1994), 93 (article first published in 1904)
115. McKee, "Taming," chaps. 6, 9
116. Tregubov, Otzyvy doktorov, 7-8