In 1867 Russian newspapers published the first information about a “strange” evangelical sect among Ukrainian peasants, which journalists called “Stundism” (Shtunda). Every year the Russian reading audience learned more about these “Stundists.” In 1877 a popular Russian newspaper characterized these sectarians as “notable for their enterprise, love for work, persistence and energy in pursuit of their economic goals and tasks, as either workers or manufacturers.” According to this newspaper,

“The Stundists respect work so much that they reject any kind of pleasure, even a slight one, which they consider a waste of time... Although they reject decorations and luxury, Stundists at the same time appreciate everything beneficial to life. For instance, nearly every Stundist (even the poorest one) strives to get a watch and then, with purely German exactness, tries to plan his time and activity according to his watch. Stundists demonstrate the same attitude toward their comfortable and warm clothes. Stundists borrow their clothing styles (jackets, cloth trousers, high boots etc.) from their teachers, Germans, and this imitating of Germans has reached a point of real pedantry...”^[1]

Four years later, the Orthodox Church newspaper of Kherson, expressed it more categorically: “Stundists are those who imitate the Germans in every manifestation of their life...” (emphasis added. – S.Zh.).^[2] In 1893 John Brown, Congregational Minister from Great Britain, confirmed this fact of imitation as well. “Imitating the Germans, with their flourishing little patches of fruit and flower garden,” noted Brown, “he [the Ukrainian Stundist] endeavors to cleanse the yard around his cottage, to extirpate the weeds in his garden, to plant trees for shade, and use, and beauty, to rear some simple flowers that will rejoice the hearts of his children and women-folk. His standard of comparison is not his Russian neighbor, more probably he measures himself with the German colonist.”^[3] It was remarkable that both Russian and foreign contemporaries noted the same fact of imitation among the Stundist peasants, who constructed their distinct identity based on the religious ethos of German Protestants.
At the same time there was also an “identity crisis” among Orthodox peasants in Ukrainian provinces of the late Russian Empire. This crisis led to a formation of new non-Russian and non-Orthodox identities, which challenged traditional interpretations of Russian (both “Great Russian” and “Little Russian” [i.e., Ukrainian]) peasant culture as predominantly Russian Orthodox Christian. For Russian ideologists the worst result of the “imitation of Germans” was to create and maintain, in Ukraine among Ukrainian-speaking peasants, a new cultural identity of “non-Russianness,” which contradicted the myth of the so-called “Little Russian” (Orthodox) religious identity of the Ukrainian population. The “Stundo-Baptists try to imitate Germans not only in faith, but also in dress, in outward appearance, and in the education of their children,” wrote N. Kutepov, one of the missionary Russian Orthodox priests.^[4] Eventually, in 1894 the Russian government declared the Stundists “to be… the most dangerous sect” and prohibited all Stundist meetings.^[5]
Who were these “dangerous Stundists”? How did they challenge traditional conceptualization of Russian empire and nation? How did they use the symbolic construction of boundaries in their process of identification? What did the Stundists develop as their own cultural markers and their own discourse of identity in contrast to traditional Orthodox peasant community? How did these Ukrainian evangelical peasants contribute to the creation of new non-Russian identities in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire? Using various archival materials, contemporary periodicals and memoirs of the peasant evangelicals, I will try to answer some of these questions.

* * *

The Ukrainian Stundists were the historical predecessors of different evangelical Christian churches in southern Russia, including Baptists (Stundo-Baptists), Adventists and Pentecostals. From the beginning they were related to the religious awakening of the German and Mennonite colonies in the Ukrainian provinces of Russia. In it, the evangelical movement among the German colonists converged with the religious revival among Orthodox peasants and produced a movement that was referred to as Stundism. Contemporary authors and historians noted this as a remarkable moment in the popular evangelical movement’s development in the Russian Empire.^[6] German-speaking settlers brought Stundism to Russia as a part of the Pietist movement in the Lutheran Church. The word derived from the German “Stunden” (hours). At the beginning of the eighteenth century, members of the German Pietist movement (followers of Philip Jacob Spener) organized meetings in their houses for reading and discussion of the Bible during the special hours (Stunden) after church ceremonies. These Pietists from Wьrttemberg, who were called the Stundist Brothers, brought their new religious experience to the German colonies in the Russian province of Kherson in 1817, where the German colony of Rohrbach became a center of Pietist activity. The Pietist minister Johann Bonnekemper was the pastor of the Lutheran community in Rohrbach and a leader of the new Pietist Stundist movement among local Germans. From 1824 his meetings, known as “the Stundist meetings,” laid a foundation for a broad Pietist movement among the German-speaking settlers of the province.^[7]
This German Pietist movement converged with religious revivals among the members of the Nazareth sect in the German colonies in Bessarabia during the 1840s, and among Mennonites in the provinces of Ekaterinoslav and Tavrida during the 1850s. Along with the Western Baptist influences, which were brought by German missionaries to southern Russia during the late 1860s, these evangelical awakenings among the German and Mennonite colonists laid the foundation for the movement among Ukrainian peasants, who were called “the Ukrainian Stundists” (khokhly-shtundy) by Russian contemporaries.^[8]
When German Baptism influenced Ukrainian Stundism in 1869, it resulted in a division into two parts: 1) Stundo-Baptism, which was more conservative in theology and religious practices and tried to re-produce the institutions of the German Baptist congregations in the Ukrainian countryside; and 2) more radical “New” or “Young” Stundism, which resisted the institutionalization and formalization of the movement and emphasized the unmediated spiritual communication of believers with God and millennial expectations of social justice and equality. The religious radicals made up a majority in Ukraine from the outset. According to the first reports from Kiev province in 1874, members of the radical branch of Ukrainian Stundism made up the overwhelming majority (85%) of detected Stundists there.^[9] Later on, in 1909 the radical Stundists and Maliovantsy were more numerous than the Baptists. Among the 9,300 registered members of evangelical sects who rejected the Baptist ceremonies, there were 3,608 Stundists; 1,687 “evangelical Christians;” 1,553 Maliovantsy; and only 1,787 Baptists. By 1917 the radical evangelicals rather than the Baptists shaped the evangelical movement in the province of Kiev.^[10]
According to symbolic anthropology, the disruption of “sacred symbols” and “cultural landmarks” has always resulted in cultural and ideological disorientation.^[11] This happened during the spread of Stundism in the southern provinces of the Russian Empire. The new religious practices and new cultural identity of the peasant dissidents disoriented not only their Orthodox neighbors, but also the local administration and observant intellectuals. The old cultural identity of the traditional Orthodox peasant of Russian or Ukrainian ethnic origin disappeared in the dissident peasant communities of Shalaputs and Stundists. The image of the peasant dissenter lost the familiar features of the ignorant and obedient Orthodox believer.
Many authors noted the changes in the peasant sectarians’ appearance, behavior and customs by the 1880s. For their Orthodox opponents, the most striking characteristic of the first Stundists was that they were Ukrainian peasants who created a new social identity that was different from the traditional stereotype of the “Little Russian” Orthodox peasant. They spoke Ukrainian (malorossiyskoe narechie in an official interpretation), and were first nicknamed Khokhly-Shtundy or Nemetsko-Khokhlatskaia Shtunda (German-Ukrainian Stunde). (It is worth noting that both official commentators and Russian journalists used the word khokhol (Ukrainian) in their definition of Stundist.^[12]) All observers emphasized the distinctive appearance of these Ukrainian peasant evangelicals, who, unlike Russians, wore only moustaches and not beards, and imitated Germans in dress and manners.^[13]
In 1898 the Russian émigré periodical of Leo Tolstoy’s followers published the original correspondence and journals of Tymophii Zaiats, who had become a Stundist martyr for liberal Russian intellectuals. In 1910 the Bolshevik, socialist-democrat Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich reprinted these journals in his collection of materials on the history of Russian sects. Written in Ukrainian, this document is a unique manifestation of the “Ukrainian nationality” of its author. In his suggestions about his future funeral, Tymophii Zaiats insists on being buried in a simple Ukrainian (khokhol) coffin (domovyna) rather than in a Russian coffin (grob). Throughout the text, the author emphasizes his Ukrainian national identity. He opposes the Ukrainian and the Russian languages and cultures, and links Ukrainian peasant culture to Stundism. He demonstrates the necessity of stating the “Divine truth” in the local native language, reading of the Gospels in Ukrainian, and praying in Ukrainian. He stresses the differences in appearance of Ukrainian and Russian peasants: The “khokhol always shaves his face, while the katsap [Russian] has a beard.”^[14] Other Ukrainian Stundists from the provinces of Kiev and Kherson also demonstrated an awareness of their ethnic difference from the Russian nation.
In their teaching, local Stundists interpreted the Russian Orthodox Church as a political institution that exploited the Ukrainian population of southern Russia. As one Stundist activist explained, “the teaching of the Orthodox priest exists to protect those who have much money, land, property and factories, and at the same time, to keep the Khokhol under control.”^[15] It is noteworthy that some Ukrainian Stundists linked the questions of social justice and class exploitation with ethnicity, portraying the Ukrainian as the oppressed, and the Russian Orthodox priest or Russian landlord as the oppressor. Stundist activists wrote in their memoirs that “Khokhol origin” became a sign of slavery and humiliation for Ukrainian peasants who were treated as slaves (khlopy) by the Russian administration. Eventually, these peasants considered their defection from the Orthodox Church as a rejection of their slavery and humiliation.^[16]
According to radical Stundists, humanity had reached the peak of corruption and dissolution. God gave man bread and other important things for his life, but by trading these things man was selling his conscience, faith, and even other human beings for money. Therefore, God had become angry with humanity and enslaved it. As a result, humanity is currently living in a second Egyptian slavery, created by new Egyptians, i.e. the powerful wealthy people, who rule the world. These Egyptians exploit ordinary poor people and expropriate their work. That was why misery was everywhere: there was bloodshed in wars, violence, robberies, rape, theft, cheating and swindling in every day life. Because of human misdeeds, God imposed punishments on the people of the Earth. God punished people who forgot the faith with wars, diseases, etc.^[17]
It is noteworthy that all radical Stundists, including the Maliovantsy, emphasized the images and ideas of the Book of Exodus. For peasant dissidents the familiar biblical images of Moses, Egyptian slavery, and Canaan became a call for a literal exodus – an escape from oppression and a journey to the promised land. Like many European religious radicals, Ukrainian Stundists followed the “paradigm of the Exodus” in their interpretation of reality and explanation of their mission in this world. As Michael Walzer explains this paradigm, “Wherever people know the Bible, and experience oppression, the Exodus has sustained their spirits and (sometimes) inspired their resistance.”^[18]
The Ukrainian peasants brought their distinctively ethnic characteristics into the evangelical culture of southern Russia. Even the first Stundists who followed their German “teachers,” contributed their own purely Ukrainian cultural features to the evangelical teachings and rituals. They assimilated German cultural elements into their own cultural code. In 1872-1873, Stundists from Kherson province still sang old Lutheran hymns in Russian translation, but had began the process of gradually replacing these hymns with their own Ukrainian versions.^[19] Contemporary scholars, such as the liberal journalist Varvara I. Iasevich-Borodaevskaia, who had studied Ukrainian sects in the provinces of Kiev and Ekaterinoslav during the 1890s, described how the Ukrainian Stundist peasants used Ukrainian folklore, old Cossack songs and melodies for their own religious rituals. She emphasized that during the evolution of Stundism into radical spiritual sects (such as Maliovantsy), Ukrainian sectarians gradually replaced Slavonic, Russian Orthodox and Lutheran texts and melodies with traditional Ukrainian songs.^[20]
The loss of the traditional Orthodox peasant identity among religious dissenters was duly noted by observers. In the 1870s, at the very beginning of evangelical movement Russians, Ukrainians, and other ethnic groups that joined Stundists, replaced their local cultural identity with the new international evangelical culture based on universal notions and images of Reformed Christianity. Stundist activists taught the necessity of unity for all evangelicals, regardless of different ethnic and social origins. Instead of ethnic cultural isolationism, they offered new ideas of solidarity and mutual assistance across nations based on the principle of one faith. Thus, Ivan Draganov, a sixty-three year old Stundist peasant from the province of Kherson, and an ethnic Bulgarian, preached the idea of “evangelical solidarity” among Christians of all nationalities. In 1888 Draganov told his Orthodox neighbors, “Russians and Bulgarians need neither the tsar, nor the government, because everybody is supposed to be the tsar in his own household.”^[21] Besides Germans, Ukrainians and Russians, the local police discovered Greek, Romanian and Jewish evangelicals, who shared similar ideas of solidarity.
However, during the 1890s, with the rapid spread of evangelical movement among various ethnic groups of southern Russia and Ukraine, major patterns of cultural identification among new sectarians gradually changed. To some extent, these patterns followed a development of what historical sociology calls “a charter group adaptation.” According to this theory, the first groups of settlers (founders, organizers etc.) established the main cultural configurations for the future development of any new social group, using the cultural forms and values they brought with them. As T. H. Breen notes, such groups established the rules for interaction; then they decided what customs they would follow; and lastly they “determined the terms under which newcomers would be incorporated into their societies.”^[22]
According to John Porter, such groups should be regarded as “charter” groups. He explained that “the first ethnic group to come… has the most to say. This group becomes the charter group of the society, and among the many privileges and prerogatives which it retains are decisions about what other groups are to be let in and what they will be permitted to do.”^[23] The charter groups create the original matrix of interaction that will affect inhabitants of the society for generations to come. The ethos of these groups or their “folkways” (“the normative structure of values, customs and meanings”) produce the initial socio-cultural patterns, the subsequent evolution of which creates the contours of the entire social history.^[24]
According to the theory of a charter group adaptation, the process of social development in any new society includes three sequential phases. The first involves the “social simplification” of inherited forms that the “charter” groups brought to the new place. As Jack P. Greene notes, this phase is characterized by “much unsettledness and disorientation,” as new comers, members of charter group, are preoccupied with finding ways to “manipulate their new environments for their own sustenance” and attempting to recreate social forms that resemble those they had left behind. The second phase, “social elaboration,” is characterized by the continuing articulation of social and cultural institutions, structures and values, and by a growing acculturation of new comers to their local social environments, including the cultural forms of charter groups. The last phase, that of “social replication,” is marked by the strong desire of those who join charter groups later on to replicate their charter group’s society in its entirety.^[25]
As it turned out, in the southern (recently colonized) regions of the Russian Empire, the concrete patterns and particular ethnic forms of evangelical culture among various dissident groups depended on the cultural models of the prevailing ethnic group, which played the role of a charter group in the process of cultural dialogue. The charter groups of peasants from central Russia defined the character of the Shalaputs (radical sects of Khristovshchina)^[26], and charter groups of German Pietists and Mennonites influenced the cultural identity of Ukrainian Stundists. In some localities, where a few German Baptists adjusted to the majority of the Ukrainian Stundists, the opposite cultural phenomenon took place. In this case, the prevailing Ukrainian peasant dissidents influenced the German cultural minority. The German evangelicals, who had become a part of the Ukrainian dissident communities, followed the cultural patterns of that charter group. As contemporary observers noted, some German evangelicals “became Russified.” These Germans usually spoke Russian or Ukrainian, wore Russian dress, and built their houses according to the local architectural models.^[27] At the same time, during the 1890s and 1900s, the Ukrainian Stundists from Kiev province (such as the Zaiats), who became the first Stundist charter group in central Ukraine, developed their own cultural identification using their own local Ukrainian cultural forms. They started with the imitation of German culture during their visits to German colonies in southern Ukraine in the 1860s. Twenty years afterwards, these Kievan evangelicals demonstrated an apparently “Ukrainified” version of the original German cultural models. Since these “Russified” (or “Ukrainified”) evangelicals and Ukrainian Stundists had lost the traditional cultural features of Orthodox peasants, they represented a new social and cultural group in the Ukrainian countryside.
The loss of a traditional Orthodox peasant identity experienced by dissenters was related, in part, to the economic problems of the post-Emancipation Russian and Ukrainian countryside. The impoverished, dispossessed peasants, who migrated to other localities in search of work, were hardly able to preserve their traditional social identity. These landless peasants lost their connections with their communities as well as Orthodox congregations. According to Orthodox scholars, this process of dispossession in the Ukrainian countryside was conducive to the loss of Ukrainian national identity among impoverished peasants. One of the Orthodox analysts of the new dissident movements among the Ukrainian peasants, P. Petrushevskii, noted that wealthy Ukrainian peasants with land and prosperous households were more conservative in matters of culture and language. They tried to protect their Ukrainian language and national customs from Russian cultural influences. At the same time, he wrote, the Ukrainian “landless peasant was more cosmopolitan and open to outside cultural and religious influences.” He continues, “the impoverished people, such as the landless peasants, do not value their native language and native songs; they try to speak Russian (po-moskovski), instead of the Ukrainian language; and they imitate all fashions and songs of their non-Ukrainian neighbors, including Russians, Germans and Jews.”^[28] During the 1890s Russian and Ukrainian journalists noted that poor Ukrainian peasants were ready to replace Ukrainian folk songs with Russian popular songs, mostly with songs about Russian soldiers. In their view the rural Ukrainian population was losing its Ukrainian national character. The Ukrainian peasants preferred songs, manners, fashions and diet, which came from the Russified city dwellers. Ukrainian intellectuals complained about the loss of Ukrainian identity among Ukrainian peasants and the ways in which these peasants borrowed from the cultures of Russians, Germans and Jews.^[29]
Foreign cultural influences among the impoverished portion of rural population in the Ukrainian countryside had become the main topic of various reports from the local police and Orthodox clergy as well. All these reports noted that an overwhelming majority among the first dissident activists were the poorest peasants in the Ukrainian villages. In building their new identity, these peasants (some of whom were landless) began by rejecting those cultural elements they associated with humiliation and suffering. In effect, the peasants denied their former existence. The Maliovantsy, who stopped performing their agricultural work, explained to an Orthodox missionary, “we hate our peasant work and this land because we are tired of our hard labor on it.”^[30] Thus, they rejected their national attire, their lifestyle, and their traditional religion. All the Stundist activists attracted the attention of observers by their urban dress. They wore the jackets of city dwellers, changing even their peasant coats according to European fashion.^[31]
Eventually, peasants realized that the roots of their misery were related to their social status as landless rural inhabitants. Searching for jobs, moving to big Russian-speaking industrial cities and German evangelical communities, these peasants experienced various new cultural influences. During their adjustment, they compared their earlier peasant status with the new cultural roles they encountered and gradually appropriated those new cultural elements, associating them with a better and more comfortable life.
In many cases, these peasants completely rejected the basic elements of their traditional status, including Orthodox Christianity. They distanced themselves from their Orthodox neighbors. In fact, radical Ukrainian Stundists began publicly calling themselves “a separate nation” as early as the 1890s. In 1894, they refused to join Russian Orthodox peasants in the ceremony of an oath for loyalty of the new tsar, Nicholas II. The leader of the Stundists from the village of Pomoshnaia (Elizavetgrad district), Konstantin Kudelia, explained to the local administration the reason for refusing. According to him, the local Ukrainian evangelicals considered themselves a separate nation. Kudelia told the local priest that other nationalities of the Russian Empire, including the Jews, Tartars, Poles, took the oath for loyalty according to their own religious principles, separately from the Orthodox Russians. “We do not deny the oath of loyalty,” Kudelia said, “What we demand is the right to take this oath separately from the Russian Orthodox people because we constitute a separate nation, whose principle of existence is based on the Holy Gospels.”^[32] It is noteworthy that other religious dissidents, such as Molokans and Dukhobors, also requested a separate special oath according to their religious beliefs. Yet only the radical Stundists insisted on legal recognition as a “separate nation.” The Ukrainian Stundists became the first Slavic evangelical group that asked the Russian administration to acknowledge their special social and religious status. In fact, the Stundist assertion about their status of a “separate nation” calls to mind the main demand of the Western Radical Reformation whose representatives had “insisted on the separation of their own churches from the national or territorial state.”^[33]
The Ukrainian Stundo-Baptists considered themselves part of the European evangelical community. As members of this community they sometimes sought protection from persecution by petitioning foreign rulers. In 1891 Stundist peasants from the Odessa district decided to write to the German Emperor asking him to protect them from persecution by the Russian administration. They collected money and selected an activist for the trip to Berlin to submit their petition.^[34] All observers noted that the Stundists were different “ethnographically” from their Orthodox peasant neighbors.^[35] In their cultural protest, the Stundists preferred to associate with German colonists or city dwellers rather than with their Orthodox peasant neighbors. “The German colonists live much better than the Orthodox peasants,” Stundists told the Orthodox missionary, “therefore we prefer to live like the Germans and that is why we join the German nation.”^[36] They cut off all relations with the Orthodox peasant community, which they associated with “heavy drinking, corruption, theft, violence, adultery and sloth.” They used the model of the German colonists’ lifestyle to construct their new social identity. A police officer from Alexandria district (the province of Kherson) noted in 1884, that following this model, the local Ukrainian peasants, who had joined the Stundist sect eight years ago, had become wealthy enough to buy a huge piece of land in the province of Stavropol’ and established their own agricultural colony there.^[37]
The Stundists changed the symbolic elements of everyday life. They put their instruments and tools in the so-called “red corner” (the sacred honorable position) of the peasant house instead of Orthodox icons, and in doing so demonstrated their rationality. They placed the Bible (and a text of the New Testament, in particular) in the important central position in their home, usually on a decorated linen napkin in the center of the desk where everybody had easy access to it. One correspondent of the Orthodox newspaper described his impressions after his first visit to Levko Lieber, the Stundist preacher in the village of Luchina in Skvira district (the province of Kiev): “On a wall where peasants usually keep the sacred icons, I saw various carpenter’s tools: a saw, planes and other instruments. Different religious books were left on the table and apparently were read with great respect.” The author was surprised when he found all the pages in the Stundist’s Bible covered with Levko’s dense handwriting, comments on the content of the biblical text.^[38]
Stundist communities changed the lifestyle of their villages and offered new priorities to their Orthodox neighbors. In some localities they eradicated hard drinking and introduced a new culture of reading. Before 1878 in the village of Liubomirka (the province of Kherson), a center of Ukrainian Stundism, there were two taverns (kabak) where peasants spent all their free time drinking vodka and smoking tobacco. After 1878 the local peasants who joined the Stundist community (“more than a half of the village households belonged to the sect”), stopped visiting the taverns and petitioned the local administration to close them. As a result of this initiative, the taverns were closed. After this, using the money they had saved because of the closing of the taverns, the Stundists bought a fire-engine for their village. Moreover, the Stundist community collected 100 roubles every year to buy books for the local school. The Liubomirka Stundists sent their children to this school and supplied the school and teachers with everything they needed. According to one journalist, who visited Liubomirka in 1880, the school library was one of the best he had ever seen in the Ukrainian countryside. The library collection included not only religious literature approved by the Orthodox censorship, but also books on history, nature, geography and science. Because of the Stundist support, the school had good modern equipment, furniture, and maps. Indeed, the entire lifestyle of the Liubomirka peasants changed. Their behavior became more rational; they read newspapers and tried to introduce in their everyday life the innovations they had learned about.^[39]
All observers noted the new work ethic among the dissident peasants, who were honest and kept their promises. They had fewer holidays and worked more than their Orthodox neighbors. Their achievements in agriculture were more impressive than that of their Orthodox counterparts. They became prosperous farmers. Part of their success resulted from their temperance campaign (the normal Orthodox peasant spent more than one third of his budget on vodka).^[40] During the public trial of the Kherson Stundists in 1878, all their Orthodox neighbors praised their lifestyle. One Orthodox witness told the court that the Stundist peasants “lead virtuous lives, they do not steal and do not drink alcohol.” Another Orthodox peasant explained to the judge that it was impossible “to find bad people” among the Stundists. “I can say only good things about them,” he continued, “There are neither thieves nor drunkards among them. Moreover, anybody who was alcoholic or criminal after joining the sect would be transformed into a virtuous person.”^[41]
The denial of their Orthodox Ukrainian identity was so evident among the Ukrainian Stundists, that Orthodox authors called them anti-Ukrainian:

“The Stundists removed all elements of Little Russian [Ukrainian] folk culture from their life. They changed their morals, customs, character and songs. Even their language changed – it became a strange mixture of Ukrainian, German, Polish and literary Russian. Stundists suppressed any expression of the folk culture – Ukrainian songs, dances, customs and dress. There is no sound of a folk song or sign of traditional Ukrainian folk rituals in the localities where Stundists live. It looks as if the Stundists aspire to become a separate nation, distinct from their Orthodox peasant neighbors.”^[42]

The denial of their peasant past and their traditional Orthodox peasant identity became the main component of the “Stundist reformation” in the Ukrainian countryside. Stundists changed more than just their lifestyle. Stundist activists also turned to other professions, preferring any non-peasant trade (ne-muzhitskoe remeslo). Some became craftsmen or shopkeepers. In all localities where Stundists played significant role, these changes of profession were a common phenomenon. Even those Stundist peasants who stayed in their villages changed their image. To contemporaries they looked more like European farmers than Russian Orthodox peasants.^[43]
This radical denial of the Orthodox peasant identity reached a peak among the millennial zealots of Kondrat Maliovannyi during the 1890s. Kondrat Maliovannyi, a peasant wheelwright from the town of Tarashcha, became the leader of a new religious movement among Orthodox and evangelical (“Stundist”) Ukrainian peasants in the province of Kiev. This movement, called the Maliovantsy, reflected the peasants’ disappointment not only with the formalism of Orthodox Church but also with “institutionalization” of Stundo-Baptism in the 1880s. In its theology, rituals and consequent effects, this movement was reminiscent of British Quakerism during the middle of the seventeenth century. During 1888 Maliovannyi experienced hallucinations. He felt his body emitting sweet exotic smells and losing its weight. He also claimed that his body was flying in the air. After each prayer he experienced a terrible trembling. He explained these hallucinations by the presence of the Holy Spirit in his body. Maliovannyi declared that all these manifestations of the Holy Spirit were signs of the Second Coming of Christ and the approaching end of the world.^[44]
As a result of his hallucinatory experiences, in 1889 Maliovannyi quit the Baptist congregation and established a congregation in his own house. Four families of the Tarashcha Baptists joined him, and during one ecstatic session in his house on October 15, 1889 they declared him the new Messiah, the Savior of the World, Jesus Christ.^[45] As one adherent described this event in a letter to P. Biriukov, in October 1889, Maliovannyi invited to his house all those who wished to “glorify the Lord to join him in his fasting and praying:”

“They prayed without a break, she wrote, for two days. Suddenly on the evening of the second day the Divine Glory arrived, and the martyr Kondrat trembled in all his body under the influence of the Holy Ghost. And then he spoke in different language and started to sing very loudly: “Do you hear the Voice of God, Who is singing in the garden, He is singing with new voice because the eternal spring is coming.” After this singing one sister, Martha, kneeled down, embraced Kondrat’s legs and cried: “Surely, you are the true Christ, the Savior of the world!” Kondrat meekly raised her from the floor and said: “Do not do this, but bow and glorify God, Who created the Heaven and the Earth.” But she continued to cry louder and louder: “It is true that you are our Savior, Jesus Christ!” Then the body of another brother, Savelii, shook tremendously. Savelii trembled with great excitement because of the presence of the Holy Spirit among them and he shouted: “Yes, you are our Savior Jesus Christ!” And all who were in the house cried the same and were influenced by the descent of the Holy Ghost.”^[46]
This news attracted other Stundo-Baptists to Maliovannyi’s house and the number of his followers began to grow. As his adherents explained in their petition to the Russian tsar in 1901, they worshipped him from the very moment of “his Transfiguration” in October 1889 as “the Incarnation of the Word of God, which gave [them] spiritual life and served as the Living Book of the New Testament.”^[47] Beginning in 1890, meetings were held every day in Maliovannyi’s house. Usually they began with the singing of religious hymns. This was followed by ecstatic prayer that reached a peak when the participants began to tremble and shake. They would then begin to cry hysterically, pronouncing a strange combination of sounds; some of them jumping, others clapping their hands and dancing. The followers of Maliovannyi explained that they were under the influence of the Holy Spirit. They interpreted their enthusiasm as spiritual preparation for the oncoming Millennium, because Jesus Christ, Kondrat Maliovannyi, had already arrived.
After 1890 this movement spread all over the province of Kiev. Hundreds of local peasants from neighboring villages came to see the new prophet. The local clergy and the Baptist ministers complained to the police about his preaching and the pilgrimage of his followers to his house in Tarashcha. After his imprisonment in February 1890, Maliovannyi was examined by a psychiatrist and diagnosed as mentally ill. Ivan Sikorskii, a professor of psychiatry at Kiev University, described Maliovannyi’s disease as “mental dysfunction in the form of initial delirious madness of the religious character (Paranoia religiosa chronica).”^[48] The local administration was worried by the movement’s rapid growth after 1892. In Vasil’kov district all the Stundists had joined the Maliovantsy movement by 1899. The Maliovantsy stopped working and spent their time praying and preparing for the Millennium. In some localities, whole villages made collective preparations for the end of the world and the Last Judgment. On winter nights they moved to frozen lakes, where they washed themselves and their children in the cold water. Afterwards they stayed in the snow on their knees, praying to God to save them. In May 1892 the governor of Kiev sent a special medical commission to examine the participants in this movement. Professor Sikorskii who headed this commission described it as a “psychotic epidemic.”^[49] According to his portrayal of the movement in 1892, the peasant followers of Maliovannyi stopped working and celebrated the life of leisure because Maliovannyi had led them out of the “Egypt of labor and slavery.” They had changed their dress and their lifestyle to emphasize their new non-peasant identity. Their olfactory hallucinations also belonged to their new cultural identity. They denied the traditional smells of their peasant existence (e.g., the smells of sweat or cattle’s dung). Instead they chose the aroma of the elite, and they associated the Holy Spirit with the perfume they smelled on their landlords. Thus, the peasant dissenters expressed symbolically their cultural protest against their social status.^[50]
In their expectation of the Millennium of Jesus Christ, the Maliovantsy stopped working and changed their diet, dress and hairstyle. They replaced all peasant aspects of their everyday life with practices that they had associated with an urban middle-class existence. They wore the fashionable dress of city residence. They used decorations, perfumes and make-up, which were unusual for Ukrainian peasants. Rather than following a peasant diet, they ate more sweets, candies and chocolate, and they drank tea and “other non-peasant beverages.” They changed their manner of speaking, trying to avoid peasant words and imitate the language of the literate elite.^[51] Members of investigating committee discovered in May of 1892 that followers of Maliovannyi had expensive food in their houses and were dressed in fashionable European dresses. A community of the Maliovantsy paid a large sum of 140 rubles to Jewish merchants for a set of expensive clothes for their community. As Vasilii Skvortsov, one of the members of the investigating committee, noted, “The dissidents threw away their national costumes as peasant emblems of their former slavery and labor; their new dresses served as the symbols of their anticipated new forms of the better social life and of their expected privileged position in the kingdom of their “Redeemer,” which will be established for them here on the Earth rather than in the Heaven.”^[52]

* * *

The Ukrainian Stundists, including their radical sects such as Maliovantsy, symbolically rejected their former Orthodox peasant identity, trying to create a new evangelical identity of “separate nation,” which played a unifying role among the different ethnic groups vis-а-vis Orthodox peasant identity of late imperial Russia. At the same time, during a process of cultural dialogue with the evangelical charter groups of Germans and Mennonites, the Ukrainian evangelicals used the available forms of local Ukrainian culture for their own cultural identification. As a result, during the spread of evangelical movement into central Ukraine, far from place of German influences, these Ukrainian evangelical peasants developed their own “Ukrainified” version of the “international evangelical culture.”^[53]
According to some contemporaries, the new evangelical culture was an agent of modernization and unification of the local cultures in the Ukrainian countryside.^[54] To the Russian clergy and local administration, however, the evangelical culture looked like a radical threat to the Orthodox peasant tradition. The new non-Orthodox identities among the rural population of Ukrainian provinces symbolized the formation of a new culture, which united various local peasant cultures in a broad evangelical movement. On the other hand, by rejecting the Russian Orthodox identity, this movement undermined the ideological foundations of the Russian political system, and created a “cultural confusion” and unusual dynamic identity formation in the Ukrainian countryside, all of which coincided with the rise of the millennial expectations among local peasants. Declarations of “cultural separation,” emphasis on significant differences between Russian culture as “a culture of exploiters” and Ukrainian peasant culture as “a culture of exploited,” incorporation of elements of Western European culture and identification of Stundism with German Protestant Christianity threatened to destroy the traditional ideological (and political) unity of Russians and Ukrainians and their Christian Orthodox basis for the entire Russian civilization. Therefore, for the Russian administration, the very idea of the Ukrainian Stundists as a “separate nation” was a real threat, which was the “unmaking the Russian Orthodox civilization.”^[55] And this threat came not from the Ukrainian intellectual elite but from the traditionally loyal and obedient peasant population of Ukraine.