Radeniye

The Russian sectarians who practised radeniye did not call their congregations churches. They called them ships, each with a helmsman at its head, and the metaphor ran through their language for themselves. A ship met at night in a private house, sang hymns of its own composition rather than the Orthodox office, and then moved: circling, whirling on the spot, leaping, sometimes with a cloth or a switch in the hand, for a long time and at increasing speed.

What the movement was for was prophecy. The tradition held that the Holy Spirit descends on people who have prepared themselves, and that the descent shows itself in speech, so a participant who reached the state would begin to speak and be heard as speaking for the Spirit. The theology behind that is a radical one: these groups held that Christ could be reincarnate in a living person, and their leaders were addressed in those terms by their followers. That claim, far more than the dancing, is what made them intolerable to the Orthodox Church and the imperial state.

The Skoptsy split from the Khlysty over castration. Where the older movement demanded sexual renunciation, the Skoptsy held that the renunciation should be physical and permanent, and they practised it. They kept the assembly and the movement they had inherited. Both groups were prosecuted continuously, and the Skoptsy in particular were the object of judicial investigation for a century and a half, which is why so much of the surviving evidence about their worship sits in court files.

Nearly everything written about radeniye before the twentieth century was written by people trying to stop it. Investigators, prosecutors, missionary priests and journalists produced the descriptions, and they produced them for a purpose. The literature accordingly carries a heavy freight of accusation, most persistently the charge that the assemblies ended in sexual license, which was levelled at the Khlysty for two hundred years and repeated as fact in a great deal of writing that is otherwise sober.

Laura Engelstein's work on the Skoptsy, which reads the imperial judicial archive against itself, makes the methodological point plainly: a confession extracted under investigation, in a system that already knew what it expected to find, is evidence about the investigation as much as about the sect. Some of the reported detail is corroborated by the sectarians' own hymns and letters, and some of it is not corroborated by anything.

So the honest description is narrower than the colourful one. That these groups met in secret, sang their own hymns, moved ecstatically in a circle, and prophesied is well attested from multiple directions including their own writings. The lurid additions are not. The atlas describes the practice at the level the evidence supports and names the limitation rather than reproducing a two century old accusation as though the passage of time had settled it. Both movements were effectively extinguished under Soviet rule, and no continuing community practises radeniye today.