Molokan News -- "The Spirit Wrestlers" by Philip Marsden

NEW BOOK: Philip Marsden's "The Spirit Wrestlers"

BOOK REVIEW: Searching for Old Believers and Beliefs

by Julie A. Corwin -- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty -- 7 April 1999

In the tiny village of Prokovka along the Azov Sea, a group of Old Believers led by a young priest, Father Gyorgi, built a large and ornate church with no money and no experience with construction--let alone masonry. Money had a way of just turning up; sometimes suppliers would say, 'if it's for a church, then you can have it for free.' And know-how, like funds, seemed to appear most often after long bouts of prayer. Church members did not know how to construct the cupolas so that the inside rim remained a true circle. Finally, they devised a method that a visiting architect later told them that had first been invented by early Byzantine masons.

With a rimless burgundy velvet cap, long black clerical robes, unshorn beard and hair, Father Gyorgii looks as if he were from another century, but he is in important ways very much a man of his time. Ordained around the time that former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, he took advantage of that period's loosening of controls on religious expression. Father Gyorgii is just one of dozens of residents of Russia's rural regions in Philip Marsden's "The Spirit Wrestlers" (London: Flamingo, 1999) who seem to belong to different centuries at the same time. In the book's first chapter, Marsden buys a one-way train ticket to Rostov-on-the-Don with the goal of finding modern adherants to old ways, be they religious, such as the Doukhobors (spirit-wrestlers) and the Molokans (milk-drinkers) or military, such as the Cossacks.

The picture that emerges of these isolated pockets in Russia's north Caucausus is of an otherworldly place where the past is almost a living part of the present. In one scene in the book, Ivan Vasilievich, who had been collecting cement in his truck moments before, returns to read aloud the carefully preserved letter of a long-dead relative describing the funeral in 1863 of Kuzma, a performer of miracles in the Molokan sect. The Molokans, who were dispatched from the Tambov Oblast more than 150 years ago by Tsar Nicholas I, to the then even more obscure reaches of the Russian empire, such as Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, found their way back to Russia in time to be persecuted by Stalin. The "milk" of the "milk-drinkers" refers to the "milk" of the holy word of the Bible -- for them, nothing else, not priests, icons, the cross, the virgin, or the church is worthy of veneration. At their peak in the nineteenth century, the sect attracted more than one million followers. According to Marsden, one branch of Molokans in the 1820s that had pooled their belongings and resources, first coined the term Communists. (NOTE: I doubt this last statement about "coining ... Communists". Most likely, I suspect, the Molokan elders Marsden interviewed have confused their own history. I refer readers to Klibanov who documents a distinct division of Molokans called the "Communalists", and a strong communal leader, Popoff. Most Molokan who immigranted to America attenpted to creat "communes", but not nearly as successfully as the Doukhobors in Canada, who had better planning, leadership and workers.)

The Doukhobors emerged sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, and, like the Molokans, have no use for priests and icons, believing that the inner light of goodness resides in all persons and priests and such only get in the way. At one point, Tolstoy, who greatly admired them for their dogged resistance to military conscription, wrote to Swedish newspapers to recommend that they, and not he, be awarded the Nobel Prize. In this decade, the handful of them remaining celebrate services in an old movie theater in the city of Rostov and in a few isolated villages in the Rostov and Tambov Oblasts. In one of these small towns, Maria Mikhailovna is the lone Doukhobor to have survived from the purges. She returned after seven years in a labor camp to a crumbling town where now only every third house is standing and the rest is occupied by leafy tangles of honeysuckle and lilac.

Marsden is the author of three other books, which if they are anything like "The Spirit Wrestlers," have been grouped under the rubric travel as much by default as anything else. True, the book is structured as a narrative of a journey through a region by an outsider. But this is no ordinary travelers' guide with tips about where to stay and what to eat. Marsden does most of his traveling by bus with little more than the first name of an Old Believer here or a Doukhobor there. Sometimes he just has the name of a village, no map, certainly no driver and no interpreter and presumably not much luggage. This is also not the typical journalist's adventure among peoples more primitive than himself/herself. If Marsden is worried about where he is staying that night or frustrated by a series of leads that don't work out, the reader doesn't find out. Marsden himself assumes a low-profile--as if he mainly wants to act a medium to relay the voices of the peoples he encounters. If this was his aim, he certainly succeeds. The voices of such disparate characters as Father Gyorgi, Ivan Vasillievich, and Maria Mikhailovna all emerge distinctly. Settings he renders with a few well-chosen details in descriptions that manage to be both lyrical and precise. More admirable still is how he artfully distills hundreds of years of complex history of these groups and weaves them into the narrative's main flow.

For those readers more interested in where rural Russia is going than where it has been, Father Gyorgi's tale is perhaps not only the most memorable in the book but also the most significant. Politically savvy, he seems to "have the greatness of those blessed with perfect historical timing." Equally important, he can adapt the message of the Old Believers depending on his audience. He tells the "youngish," unsophisticated Sasha that "it's not the rules that are important but the obeying of them" and the development of personal discipline. "If you can keep up with the small rules, then when the bigger questions come it will be easier to make the right choice," he advises. Later, he is equally at home at a local television station, whose head he has befriended. He alone seems to have attracted new believers to one of the old faiths.

Compiled by Julie A. Corwin (JAC). Regular contributors are Jan Cleave (JC), Liz Fuller (LF), and Paul Goble (PG).

Found in the Russian Federation Report:
a survey of the developments in the regions outside of Moscow
prepared by the staff of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
7 April 1999, Volume 1, Number 6

posted at << http://search.rferl.org/russianreport/1999/04/6-070499.html >>