Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760-1850

Irina Paert. Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760-1850. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. xi, 257 pp.This excellent book explores questions of gender, sexuality, marriage, and family among priestless Old Believers (especially Theodosians and Pomorians of Moscow) in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Russia. Interest in gender and sexuality in Russian history has been, with a few notable exceptions, relatively (and regrettably) scarce. Meticulously researched, intricately argued, and clearly written (albeit with perhaps a little too much repetition), Paert's study makes an original and exciting contribution that begins redress these lacunae. It also adds growing field of history (both as lived faith and as state/Synod policies); inserts new life into study of early nineteenth-century Russia, which has also suffered a relative neglect; and opens new vistas on study of Russian urban life.Through an examination of such topics as celibacy/virginity, asceticism, and marriage, Paert strives explore the gender aspects of Christian religion in a non-Western context, in particular religious perceptions of sexuality and its on sexual difference and impact of discourse on production, change, and interiorization of gender models (pp. 6-7). Marshalling an impressive discussion of comparative and methodological material from other European and Christian contexts, Paert illuminates important differences between gender systems in western and central Europe and those that developed in post-Petrine Russia, especially enduring influence of Eastern Christianity. Rightly, Paert does not confine her study of gender solely women, but also explores masculinity and manliness.Paert opens with an excellent overview of genesis and early history of Old Belief, focusing particularly on dilemma posed sacrament of marriage by absence of priests ordained according old rites and millenarian expectations of schismatics. Priestless Old Believers championed celibacy, asceticism, and communality as appropriate ways of life in age of antichrist. In process, they transformed gender hierarchies, allowing both men and women to locate their social selves outside traditional markers of identity, such as marriage, motherhood and fatherhood (p. 232). Religious dissent and sexual asceticism offered women certain forms of empowerment-the possibility for income, within community and in dealings with social superiors, and both physical and social movement-through a break with traditional restrictions that family, community, and experiences of repeated pregnancy and childrearing imposed upon women. Men, for their part, found that celibacy and alternate family structures relieved [them] from burden of supporting a family and paying social dues (p. 232).In exploring early history of schism, Paert underscores prominence of both women and question of gender, arguing that the presence of a theological debate in which women played an important role is a suppressed story of Old Belief (p. 30). In period of active struggle against church, Old Believers held up notion of manliness (muzhestvo, andreid) as an ideal for both men and women. Women who stood up for their beliefs-whether in rebellion, withstanding arrest and torture, self-immolation, renunciation of motherhood, or escape borderlands-were considered have left female weakness behind and took on manly wisdom, as Awakum declared (p. 29). Paert goes further: Women's participation in opposition was, in fact, an assertion of female spiritual authority (p. 29). Indeed, Old Belief had special appeal for women because it affirmed women's spiritual equality and right of women baptize, lead services, read Psalter, and lead other women in their lives. …

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