The Stundists/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
CLOSING UP THE RANKS.
From 1873 to 1880 the onward progress of the movement we have called Stundism was extraordinary : hut it was confined within certain well-defined geographical limits. As soon as it reached the furthest bounds of the provinces inhabited by the Little Russians, and touched the territory of the Great Russians, it received a check. The stolid, phlegmatic, and somewhat stupid Great Russian evinced little or no sympathy with the Protestant tenets, and held stubbornly to his orthodoxy, while hundreds of thousands of the imaginative and sympathetic peasants of the Ukraine and the Southern steppes were in a ferment of religious enthusiasm. A curious contrast might be drawn between this state of affairs in Russia and the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Then it was the imaginative and æsthetic nations of Europe,—Italians, Spaniards, and South Germans, who offered a stubborn resistance to the doctrines of Luther and Calvin. It was the heavy, slow-thinking nations of the North,—Germans and Scandinavians, who were the strength of the Protestant movement of three hundred years ago.
It will be useful, therefore, if we endeavour to mark out with greater precision the limits which Stundism reached in 1875, limits beyond which it did not appreciably advance during the next eighteen years, or until the present time. Beginning in the West in central Poland about the fifty-third parallel of latitude, and following a straight line eastwards, we pass through Chernigov, the capital of the province of the saute name. Thence in a north-easterly direction we pass through the important town of Orel. From Orel, a line drawn south-east will pass through Voronej to Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan on the lower Volga. South of this boundary line live the Stundists; those north of the line being only isolated individuals. Stundism, therefore, is strictly a South Russian movement, confined in great measure to the Little Russians.
We have seen that in 1870 the adherents of Stundism were numbered at 70,000. The Russian press now began to occupy itself a good deal with the wonderful progress of the Stundists in Kief, Poltava and Kherson during the next five years. One writer went so far as to put their number in 1877 at 300,000. We think, however, that a juster estimate would be 200,000. If we allow, on one hand, for a slower rate of growth since 1877, and on the other for defection, and the results of persecution, we think we are well within the truth when we place the number of Stundists at the present time at 250,000. It is a difficult matter to state with any degree of exactness the number living in each province, but for the purposes of this short sketch we have had special inquiries made, and the following table sets forth the result of these investigations, and may be accepted as fairly accurate:
| Province | Number of Stundists |
| Astrakhan | 2,000 |
| Bessarabia | 20,000 |
| Caucasia (Trans and Cis) | 9,000 |
| Chernigov | 2,000 |
| Don Cossack Country | 10,000 |
| Ekaterinoslav | 15,000 |
| Kharkov | 8,000 |
| Kherson | 50,000 |
| Kief | 80,000 |
| Kursk | 5,000 |
| Orel | 2,000 |
| Podolia | 8,000 |
| Poland (Russian) | 4,000 |
| Poltava | 10,000 |
| Taurida and Crimea | 15,000 |
| Volga Valley | 7,000 |
| Volhynia | 5,000 |
It was in the beginning of the seventies, when their numbers were about 100,000, that the Stundist leaders, and notably Balaban, Ratushni, and Ryaboshapka of Kherson, and Lisotski, Zybulski, and Kapustinski of Kief, endeavoured to give some sort of shape, some sort of elementary organisation, to the great movement of opinion now so rapidly increasing around them. Pastor Bonekemper's level sense was here of inestimable advantage to them. He recommended the division of the field into presbyteries, over each of which the brethren were to elect, or otherwise appoint, their own presbyter. If the presbytery were large, the presbyter was to be assisted by a deacon or deacons. He further advised the periodical assembling of the presbyters and deacons in council or synod; the systematic visitation of remote villages where the cause was weak; the establishment of a common fund for the relief of sick and aged brethren, and the partial support of presbyters who should incur loss by travelling about on mission work during seedtime or harvest. It was also suggested that lists should be made, and regularly revised, of the church members. These were the principal recommendations made by Bonekemper and the Stundist leaders to their people. It was unanimously felt that some such steps were absolutely necessary if the movement was to be kept in hand, and prevented from drifting into chaos. But the difficulties to be encountered were enormous, and it was not until after superhuman efforts had been made, chiefly by Ryaboshapka, Ratushni, and Strigoun, that their attempts at organisation took shape, and some rough system was infused into the movement. Dangers now began to thicken around the leaders. Their footsteps were dogged from place to place; scores of times they were in gaol for longer or shorter periods; as soon as their object was known to priests and police, steps were at once taken to counteract their action. Newly-appointed presbyters and deacons would be moved about from place to place by "administrative" order of the local authorities, not permitted to settle for any time in any one district. The lists containing the names of the brethren were frequently seized by the police, and with these in their possession the authorities at any moment could put their hands on any one they suspected, and accuse him or her of defection from the Orthodox Church. Scores of Stundists were put in gaol for no other reason save that their names were on these lists. But notwithstanding every effort made to repress Stundism, notwithstanding the continuous thwarting of the plans of its leaders, the wonderful peasant revolt grew and strengthened all through the years before 1880; and from the confusion and disorder into which they were plunged, both by their own ignorance and by the hostility of the government, there slowly emerged a fairly organised and cohesive Church, its parts well in touch one with another, all of them acting together in tolerable unison. We hear of no rivalries among the leaders. Although, as was to be expected, shades and divergences of view crept in, although the brethren in Bessarabia, for instance, could not see eye to eye with those in Kief and Kherson, they never dreamed of withholding their sympathies from one another, or of rejecting the ministrations of those who, differing from them in non-essentials, yet held the grand cardinal doctrines of their common Protestant faith.
Perhaps a more serious division in the ranks of the Protestants was made by the appearance of Baptist preachers among them. Stundism as we know it now is composed of two great divisions, one adhering to infant, the other to adult baptism. By far the greater number, probably more than two-thirds, are adherents of the doctrine of infant baptism. We first hear of Russian Baptists in connection with this movement as early as 1865. They were the spiritual children of the German Baptists Pritzkau, Wieler, and others. These first converts were insignificant men, who played no part of any prominence in the future history of the movement; but it was not long before others of greater importance joined the Baptists, attracted, doubtless, by their greater strictness of rule, and their more hostile and militant attitude towards the Orthodox Church. Foremost among these were Balaban of Kherson, and Kapustinski of Kief. Others who joined and greatly influenced them were Zimbal of Karlovka, and Trophim Khlistoun—men of saintly lives, who prayed in quiet, and whose lives were sermons not made with words. Khlistoun was, however, not always quiet. When he chose he was a most powerful speaker, and between 1870 and 1875 did some useful evangelistic work all over the South of Russia. Those who have heard him preach speak of his great oratorical powers, of how he swayed his hearers to passion or to prayer, to thanksgiving or to revolt, to the loftiest heights of spiritual ecstasy or to lowest depths of humiliation.[1] There can be little doubt that the Baptist movement was a distinct advantage to Stundism. It did much to make the ordinary Russian Protestant more vertebrate. Until the Baptist set his face sternly against the Orthodox Church, and all its corruptions and defilements, the Stundist was satisfied to steer diplomatically between his new and his old faith. Afraid of giving offence and of consequent trouble, lie adopted a line of action and a mental attitude—outward conformity to Orthodoxy and inward contempt for it—which, was suicidal, destructive of all true spiritual progress. The Baptists rebelled, and it is to their rectitude on this point that the present lofty position of Stundism is due. To German Baptists like Wieler, Pritzkau, Bekker, and Onken, of Hamburg, the Stundists are deeply indebted, for, in addition to purifying them from the taint of dissimulation, they were instrumental in no small degree in putting the stronger and sterner elements of the movement into a thoroughly orderly position. The Baptist wing of the Stundists is undoubtedly the best organised and equipped. But if the German Baptists were at first so friendly and sympathetic, it is a matter of deep regret that latterly, when the storm and stress of persecution has beaten alike upon both sections of the Russian brethren, the Germans have held themselves studiously aloof. Secure in their own rights to worship God in their own way, they have proved themselves lacking in sympathy for their Russian co-religionists. We trust that they will no longer incur this reproach, and that they will now exert themselves to obtain for their Russian brethren what they enjoy for themselves. They are a powerful body, and their apparent callousness during the recent, persecutions is hardly to their credit.
- ↑ A few months ago, Khlistoun was banished to a remote and inhospitable part of the Caucasus, where he has suffered great hardships and poverty. Kapustinski was banished nearly five years ago, and is now only a wreck of the man he was when he roused the peasants of Kief to their revolt against the formalism and slavery of the Russian Church.