The Stundists/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II.
PROGRESS.
We have seen the first beginnings of the Stundist movement in Rohrbach, Osnova, and elsewhere, and two of its greatest leaders, Onishenko and Ratushni, have been introduced to us. These men and their immediate disciples became possessed of an extraordinary desire to travel. As true apostles they desired to spread the light. They tramped from village to village, from townlet to townlet, carrying the message of the Gospel. Peasants in villages far remote from Osnova began to know these itinerating preachers who came to their houses in various guises, generally as pedlars or book-hawkers. The arrival of the travelling evangelist was always an event. A scout had gone before to herald his coming, and from the outlying hamlets peasants flocked to an assigned meeting-place, sometimes a remote cottage, sometimes a sequestered hollow in the steppe. Here the people would learn for the first time in their own language of the wonderful works of God. Those who desired them, bought New Testaments, or rough Russian translations of German hymns in manuscript. In a surprisingly short time the peasants in most districts of the extensive province of Kherson had heard the Gospel preached, and sang with perfect ease queer Russianised versions of "O sacred Head surrounded," "The Lord our God is King," "Lead us, O Father, to the heavenly gates," and other favourites. Ratushni was indefatigable. When not preaching, he was travelling. In his own province, in all large centres of population, he had already established fairly-organised communities—places like Elisabethgrad, Odessa, Nicolaieff, and Kherson, and had engaged the powerful support of selected men as presbyters of groups of villages. Vitriashenko was one of the most energetic of these; other able men of this province, who afterwards occupied prominent positions in the progress and development of Stundism, were Zimbal, Gerasim Balaban, Strigoun, Ivanoff, and last, but not least, Ryaboshapka. These men, and many others, kept in constant touch with the German colonists, and were the means of enlisting the active co-operation of several pious Germans—men who added the necessary Teutonic method and balance to the onward march of the impetuous Little Russians. By degrees, villages in the provinces contiguous to Kherson were visited. The Stundist leaders respected no geographical limits. They and their emissaries travelled into Bessarabia, the Crimea, Ekaterinoslav and Kief, and wherever they went they met with the most extraordinary success. They were received with open arms and with open hearts. Despoiled and emptied of all spiritual life by the perfunctory and often scandalous ministrations of the Orthodox clergy, and hungering after a higher and a fuller life, the simple Russian peasants felt that in the new Evangel, now for the first time heard by them, there was healing, and comfort, and repletion. The gathering communities of Stundists bubbled over with zeal and enthusiasm, and wherever a man was found among them who had any gift of speech, he was giving all his spare time to telling to others, near and at a distance, the wonderful tidings that had brought peace to his own soul.
The emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861 gave a wonderful impetus to the movement we are considering. Prior to the proclamation of this beneficent enactment the peasants were confined to their own villages, and it was with the utmost difficulty that they could move about from place to place. The emancipation in great measure put an end to this restriction, enabling thousands of peasants to wander forth either in search of work or to gratify the extraordinary love of change and adventure inborn in every Little Russian's heart. From Osnova Nicolaievsk, Karlovka, Lubomir, and other villages, an extraordinary movement outwards of peasants seeking work began in 1862 and 1863. Many of these had been already inoculated with the teachings of Balaban, Ratushni, and Zimbal. Supplied with New Testaments, they moved about all over the South, sowing the seed that was afterwards to bring forth so abundantly. They stepped beyond the bounds of the province of Kherson into Kief and Podolia, cementing together the isolated groups of believers already existing there. It was at this time that the valuable services of Ivan Lisotski were enlisted in the cause. Masses of people crowded the meeting-houses; they sang, and prayed, and read the Gospels, and hundreds of families gave in their adhesion to Protestantism. The police were nonplussed; it was all so new, and they were without instructions. The priests were aghast; it was a tide the force of which they were powerless to stem, the depth of which they could not fathom. The higher officials in St. Petersburg and in the governor's chanceries hesitated, loth to begin a persecution which would only invest the Stundist leaders with the aureole of martyrs, and make them sacred in the eyes of their followers. It is interesting to read the contemporary reports of the local clergy. One of these worthies wrote to Archbishop Dimitri, of Kherson, that certain of his flock had ceased attendance at church, murmured at paying the church dues, met together to read strange books, and were leading immoral lives. In 1865 the priest of Osnova demanded powers to deal with the growing force of the "heretics" who met in Michael Ratushni's house to read the Gospels and sing "extraordinary verses." He could do nothing with them, he reported, for they declared that they did not believe in pastors. "The meetings still continue," he wrote later, "but I can find no fault with their treatment of the icons, as each family has its icon in the proper place, and shows the proper reverence to it." It may be gathered from this that the early Stundists did not at first altogether break with the rites of the Greek Church. Icon worship, the use of the sign of the Cross, yearly confessions, were still outwardly observed, although no one knew better than the revolted peasants that all these things were idolatrous, and that adhesion to their use was dissimulation and humiliating to themselves. Some of the reports from the village priests, men altogether ignorant of the true inwardness of what was going on, are amusing, as well as instructive. One Orthodox divine is shocked that twice a week the schismatics drink only milk, a statement altogether devoid of foundation; another states that these Stundists call one another "brother" and "sister," even when not related by blood; a third is disgusted that every one in their meetings sings—women as well as men. Much indignation is expended on the fact that the Stundists have no respect for the 103 holy days of the Church, and that, instead of enjoying themselves at the village drink shops and spending their evenings in dancing, as became Orthodox peasants, the Stundists ploughed their fields and threshed out their corn on these days, and spent their evenings reading, or teaching their children to read. It was remarked, even as early as 1867, that as soon as a peasant became affected with the new spirit that was abroad, his first thought was to learn to read. Probably at the time of which we are speaking not five per cent, of the Russian peasants could read and write. It may be safely said, however, that even then, not one Stundist in a hundred was ignorant of reading and writing. It was this desire for enlightenment that came in for so much suspicion and dislike from the village popes. They felt that their power, already waning, would altogether vanish before the fresh, healthful spirit of inquiry, as soon as their so-long-deluded flocks began to ask themselves whether the things that are are the things that ought to be. Our chief sources of information on what happened during the sixties and seventies are derived from these reports of the clergy. Of course, we must read between the lines, making all due allowance for the bitterness and bigotry of the writers. We gather, however, the positive information that in 1867, the number of dissenters in Kherson was rapidly increasing, and that open alarm was expressed by the authorities at the power and progress of the Stundist movement. In a moment of panic the arrest of Ratushni and his brother was ordered. Their incarceration was of short duration, but it was the first of a long and increasing series of abominable acts against these harmless and inoffensive men.
And now steps on the scene one of the most remarkable figures concerned in shaping and organising the great revolt. Karl Bonekemper was the son of the Pastor Bonekemper, about whose work in Rohrbach we have already some information. He had commenced life intending to devote himself to a mercantile career in Russia, but as he grew older ambition led him to seek his fortunes in America. At Smyrna he embarked for New York. In a great storm at sea he felt his mind led towards heavenly things, and determined that on his arrival in the New World he would devote himself to the service of his Master. This he faithfully carried out. After careful training in an American theological school he entered on ministerial work in a small town in the State of Pennsylvania, and remained there some years, receiving instruction and gaining experience. But hearing that his father's health was breaking, young Bonekemper altered his plans, and decided to return to Russia. His father died before he reached Rohrbach, and when he at length arrived it was as his father's successor in the pastorate. Pastor Karl was a man of different calibre to his father. The gentleness of both men was remarkable, but the son was consumed with zeal, eager, brilliant and accomplished. He was a master of the Russian language, a skilful physician, and thoroughly understood his fellow-man. This was the man who now assumed the leadership of Stundism, the man to whom, before all others, the early strength and flow of the movement is due.