The Skoptsy emerged in Russia in the later eighteenth century from within the Khlysty, an ecstatic Christian movement whose devotional gatherings, radeniya, involved singing, spinning and visionary trance. A wing of the Khlysty milieu came to hold that the passions the Khlysty sought to master through ecstasy could be removed at the root, by cutting away the organs of generation. Its members called the operation the fiery baptism, a second baptism completing the water baptism of infancy and burning away original sin at its physical source.
The sect's central figure was Kondratii Selivanov, a peasant preacher who taught that he was both Christ returned and the murdered Tsar Peter III, hidden from his enemies and biding his time before a final revelation. Around him the Skoptsy built a reading of scripture that took literally what the wider Christian tradition has always read as figure: the sayings in Matthew about cutting off the offending hand or eye, and about those who make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, were read as commands rather than as metaphors for renunciation. Castration, for men, and breast removal or related cutting for some women members, marked entry into the elect, the sealed number who would stand purified at the last judgement.
Membership never worked the way a parish congregation does. Recruitment moved through existing networks, often merchant and peasant households, and the operation itself was performed in secret by members on one another. That secrecy is a large part of why the Russian state treated the Skoptsy as a criminal conspiracy rather than as an ordinary dissenting sect.