SUMMARY:

This article studies the rise and fall of the Red Death legend as a modern media phenomenon during the last decades of the Russian Empire. From the very beginning, Nikonian anti-sectarian propaganda accused Russian Old Believers of fanatically inhumane practices, which translated into the urban legends of human sacrifices practiced by some heterodox religious communities. In the late nineteenth century, one such hitherto marginal legend – about the Old Believers-Wanderers’ allegedly suffocating their coreligionists using a red pillow – came to the fore of Russia’s public opinion under the name of “Red Death.” A small community of radical Old Believers seeking a catacomb existence in isolation from any established social institutions, the Wanderers found themselves at the center of a public scandal. There were several criminal trials and police investigations of Wanderers on charges of ritual murder; local and central newspapers and even academic journals published stories substantiating the legend. However, between the mid-1890s and the early 1910s, the public discourse on the Wanderers underwent a sea change. Sensationalist allegations of ritual murder were increasingly opposed by both left- and right-leaning commentators and experts. In the rapidly nationalizing Russian Empire, in the age of mass politics, the Wanderers were recoded from religious marginals into members of the ethnically Russian majority. Against the backdrop of the Multan case against Udmurts who were allegedly practicing ritual murder and the Jewish blood libel of the Beilis case, the Red Death legend appeared to equate the Wanderers and thus Russians with the ultimate “minorities.” Therefore, modern Russian nationalists, regardless of their political views, prefer to discard the Red Death allegation altogether lest it compromise the claim of ethnic Russians for hegemony as a modern nation.