Irina Paert, a lecturer in history at the University of Wales, Bangor, belongs to the new generation of Russian scholars working at the crossroads of several academic disciplines. Her book Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760-1850 offers an interdisciplinary study of the socio-cultural history of the dissident religious community of Old Believers in imperial Russia. In particular, Paert focuses on the problem of gender and the formation of gender identities within the Old Believer movement. Paert indicates that three major meeting-points of gender and religious studies were significant to her study: gender and religious dissent; religious perceptions of sexuality and its impact on sexual difference; and the impact of religious discourse on the production, change, and interiorization of gender models (P. 7).
The “alternative culture” that came to the surface together with the spiritual riot of Old Believers initiated a reconfiguration of social relations within the community, affecting also the gender identities of its members. Others have argued that Old Believers either challenged or confirmed the traditional gender bias of modern Russian society, but Paert regards it as a more complex problem that cannot have a single cohesive answer. In detail, she explores various social institutions and religious symbols through which the gender identities of Old Believers were formed. There is an attempt to analyze whether they conformed to the conventional vision of the “spiritual” versus “profane” and “public” versus “private” as gendered categories. Considering the Western theological and cultural influences on the Russian Orthodox Church since the mid-seventeenth century, Paert studies how the religious conservatism of the dissenters preserved a unique understanding of masculinity and femininity within the Old Believer community. In particular, the book engages with the role of religious idiom in constructing Old Believer masculinities, focusing on the changing social and rhetoric strategies used by Old Believer men to aver their manhood in the community and household.
In the first chapter of the book, the author examines possible reasons for the sudden yet irrevocable segregation of the Old Believer movement from the official Russian Orthodox Church. She presents a number of the socio-cultural, theological, and political motives that made the dissention possible. The ecclesiastical reform introduced by Patriarch Nikon in the mid-seventeenth century represented a serious shift in the theological views of Russian Orthodoxy. While generally these changes were aimed at making Russian Orthodoxy coherent with existing Greek practices, many believers were not receptive to them. On one hand, the author argues, dissent could be perceived as a class conflict in which the elites refused to accept the religious sentiments of popular piety; on the other, the movement attracted those who “had grievances,” against the state and religious hierarchy. Yet, most of all, the reform suggested a conflict between two cultural modes, represented, in Paert’s mind, by the Western and Eastern Christian traditions (P. 24). She agrees with Crummey’s idea that the Schism embraced “all discontented and dispossessed members of society who opposed ‘everything new and oppressive in Muscovite society,’ including ecclesiastical reforms, Western cultural influence and the tyrannical central state” (P. 25).^[1]
Paert states that the social non-conformity of the Old Believer dissenters affected gender relations in their communities. Specifically, in the priestless Old Believer community, “refutation of the institution of marriage, communal lifestyle and the shift of spiritual power from ordained to non-ordained leaders allowed women to exercise unusual and ambitions roles. Despite their reverence to makers of gender identity, such a traditional hairstyle and dress, the priestless Old Believers promoted a model of gender that was defined by spiritual conversion, not by social conversion” (P. 49). For example, she notes, two models of women’s religious expression, the “heroic rebel” and the “ascetic hermit,” coexisted in Old Believer discourse, providing women with a certain social power.^[2] On the other hand, Old Believer emphasis on the traditional dress code, such as beards for men and modest clothes for women, was not a reassertion of the patriarchal gender model. Rather, it was a form of resistance to the elite culture – their theological, political, and social opponent.
The second chapter is dedicated to the development of the Old Believer movement in the 1760-1840s. Religious toleration, which took place at the time of humanistic influences in the Russian politics and simultaneous secularization of the Russian Orthodox Church, brought relative freedom to Old Believers. Paert in detail analyzes the dynamics of relation between the economic industrialization of Russian society and gender role change within the Old Believer communities. The urban communities, which appeared in the second half of the 18th century, provided new attitudes on sexuality, gender, and social hierarchy within the movement. While outside the city a moderate tendency existed (a shift from celibacy to conventional marriage, from social radicalism to social integration), the new urban lifestyle of other Old Believer groups seriously challenged traditional marriage and kinship, the key institutions for reproducing gender identities in peasant societies. The urban priestless communities insisted on celibacy, an almshouse, chapel and the workplace as key sites in which “conventional gender identities were reconstituted through symbolic practices” (P. 97).
The religious identity of Old Believer dissenters remained an integral part of their social existence and fashioned their understanding of gender, class, and race. Paert thoroughly explores the idea of spiritual equality of Old Believer men and women that developed as a result of their theological convictions. The Theodosian (priestless) community under the leadership of Feodosii Vasil’ev advocated this equality based on their view on equal access to God’s grace for both men and women. Paert indicates that dissenters emphasized the transitory nature of gender, which they considered “secondary to common human nature” (P. 110). In the third part of the book, Paert revises the concept of manliness and the role and significance of women as Old Believers understood them. Manliness (muzhestvo), stoicism, fearlessness, and moral strength were praised in the early Old Believer writings as universal virtues. However, it was noted, women often surpassed men in their heroic deeds (Pp. 111-112). Adopting the theological heritage of early Christianity, Old Believers paid particular attention to the social power of asceticism, celibacy, and virginity. While the practical implementation of the Theodosian ascetic teaching was contradictory – strict asceticism often coexisted with a relatively “relaxed” understanding of sexual freedom among members of the community – it had quite an empowering effect on women, while at the same time maintaining the principles of patriarchy prestige.
The Pomorian community that was institutionalized in the 18th century and derived from Vyg culture differed in its theological vies of human nature and gender. The fourth chapter of the book is dedicated to the discourse of marriage, family, and gender within this group. Even though based on the same sources as the Theodosians in their interpretation of Original Sin and Incarnation, the Pomorians did not discuss gender except in relation to marriage and the family. For them, marriage was a way to harmonize gender relations. In marriage the incomplete male and female natures united to contribute to each other and to fulfill God’s idea of perfection. Yet, to be just, Paert adds that the Pomorians explicitly identified the will (i.e. the ability to make moral choices) with masculinity, reserving the priority of patriarchal values (P. 148). In Paert’s mind, “Pomorian masculinity was constructed against the ‘hypocritical’ sexual asceticism of their religious opponent and sexual laxity of upper classes... Traditional male domination was reaffirmed through the discourse on marital virtues, domesticity, and sexual mastery” (P. 175). The chapter discusses in detail the notions of marriage and masculinity in Pomorian discourse.
The final part of the book summarizes the extent of the chasm that had emerged between the Westernized Russian elites and Old Believer communities in the late 18th to early 19th century. Returning to the traditional patriarchal values, the state particularly targeted those priestless groups that seemed to profess “unconventional” sexual ideology and political views. On the government’s perception of Old Believer customs at the time, Paert writes: “Marriage outside the official church became increasingly associated with illicit sexuality, illegitimacy and child abandonment” (P. 193). “Deinstitutionalized” in their theological and social views, Old Believers were considered dangerous to the structures of the Russian state and official Church, even though at times the individual groups of dissenters ended up with almost identical views to the official ideas on the religious and socio-cultural organization of society. Old Believer renunciation of sexuality and marriage had not replaced the traditional language of kinship: the members of the community related to each other as spiritual fathers and their sons and daughters, or as breadwinners and their dependants. The Theodosian ascetic discourse, Paert sums up – the quintessence of which was the concept of manliness – persisted in the traditional dichotomy of “nature” versus “culture” represented through gender concepts. Simultaneously, the Pomorian ideal of masculinity strengthened marital subordination as a divinely ordained institution, which proves once again, Paert notes, “the remarkable ability of Old Believers to redefine tradition in the challenging world” (P. 236).
Based on a large number of Old Believer manuscripts, Paert’s book provides an exceptional insight in the social life and culture of their communities. Drawing on the findings of Western historians on gender and religion, she initiates a debate on the place of traditional religion in modern Russia and the impact of Old Believer ideas on Russian cultural concepts and social practices. The study explores institutions such as the family, religious community, and ministry to find out whether the dissenting communities reconstituted or challenged traditional gender visions between public and private and between leadership and subordination. With this, she aims to stimulate further research in the field of gender, marriage, and the family in Imperial Russia. Paert demonstrates an excellent knowledge of gender studies, which cannot be complete without the study of masculinity. The book details the main social and linguistic strategies used by Old Believer men to assert their manhood in the community and household, tracing the change in these strategies over time. It also identifies the tensions and conflicts present in the seemingly cohesive patriarchal model of masculinity. The book is highly recommended to scholars and students of Russian history, gender, and religious studies.