The Stundists/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V.
PERSECUTION.
In the chapters preceding this we have alluded more than once to the extreme hostility of Church and State to the Stundists. Hostility to anything and anybody that is enlightened and loves freedom is a settled policy in Russia, and has characterised the government of that country for more than three hundred years. Let a movement raise its head, having for its object either the spiritual enlightenment or the temporal benefit of the people, and it is ruthlessly crushed. The fabric of Russian power is an autocracy based on ignorance and superstition; and, therefore, it is the interest of self-preservation that has always prompted the Czar's government to crush anything that would bring enlightenment in its train. Since Peter the Great's days, when the Old Believers were so ruthlessly scourged, burnt, and banished, until the present time, a steady policy of repression has been maintained against dissent from the Orthodox Church. Thousands of the Old Believers were then banished, imprisoned, flogged, tortured; and to-day, after the lapse of nearly 250 years, thousands of Stundists and Baptists, of Molokans and Dukhobortsi, are banished to the remotest corners of the vast empire, and imprisoned and tortured in a variety of ways, only a degree less inhuman than the scourgings and rackings of the Middle Ages. The nations of the West do not seem to be alive to this. They do not seem to realise that they have at their gates a Power more intolerant of religious liberty than was Spain in her worst days, and persecutors as unscrupulous and narrow-minded as Alva and Torquemada. How can they know it? Russia works in secret; her methods are underground, and her victims are voiceless. There is no press in Russia worthy the name to report and denounce each case of persecution as it occurs. The trials of heretics are conducted with closed doors, the public being carefully excluded. Russians themselves do not know a tenth of what is being done. We say that the victims are voiceless. From time to time Russia has tried her hand at persecuting peoples who are not her own—the Lutherans of the Baltic provinces, and the Jews of the south and west; but Germany has jealously watched the progress of events in the former case, hampering, and finally staying the arm of the persecutor; and a powerful European press, and the great financial influence of European Jews have been effectual in checking a vulgar persecution which threatened, at one time, to assume such gigantic proportions. But when Russia turns to her own people she persecutes humble peasants who are friendless, poverty-stricken, ignorant, who in fear and trembling suffer in silence and with dog-like resignation.
It was not until 1877 or 1878 that the Stundists began to feel the weight of persecution. Before that date there had been, of course, numerous instances where preachers had been hauled off to prison on the charge of perverting the Orthodox, and a beginning had been made of those little settlements of banished Protestants which were afterwards to assume such importance; but up till this period no steady and systematic effort had been made to extirpate the heretics, or to make them feel that as a body their disloyalty to the Orthodox Church meant outlawry and ruin, and the loss of every personal right and privilege. The clergy were the instigators of this abominable persecution. From first to last they had never faltered in their ruthless determination to break the power of men who. set at naught their authority, and valued at their true estimation the pretensions which made these ignorant and coarse-living men the sole representatives, of true religion in their land. Unaided, the clergy soon discovered that they were powerless against the growing strength of the Stundists. They saw that village after village became infected by heresy, and that their flocks, hitherto so amenable to their guidance, or so callous, were no longer either docile or indifferent. It could not be tolerated longer. Violent reports of Stundist immorality and blasphemy came pouring in to the bishops and archbishops, and at a conference held in Kief under the presidency of the Metropolitan Platon, and at which the representatives of nine dioceses were present, it was resolved to petition the secular powers to lend their aid in suppressing a movement dangerous alike to Church and to State. In justice to the secular powers, it should be stated that their aid was not willingly given at first. Probably they had not fully gauged the strength of the Protestant movement; more probably they were loth to begin a course of action the end of which could not be foreseen, and which would inevitably give strength to the Protestants, and bestow on all who suffered the enviable reputation and authority of martyrs. In 1878, however, the worldly and the spiritual powers combined their forces, and the persecution began. It began by police raids on certain villages in Kherson and Kief. New Testaments and manuscript hymn-books were confiscated by the hundred, and a large number of meeting-houses were ordered to be closed. The principal leaders were placed under police surveillance, their passports were taken from them, and they were forbidden to leave their own villages. It is impossible in the space at our disposal to enter into the details of this persecution in every one of the thirteen provinces over which the Stundists were distributed; all we can do in this and the following chapter is to notice certain phases of this nineteenth century Inquisition, and to present our readers with a rough outline of the loving methods taken by "Holy" Russia to win back to the fold the sheep who had strayed from the fat pastures of Orthodoxy into the stony and famished byways of Dissent.
From 1878 to 1882 the police raiding continued, but it had no effect in the desired direction. Deprived of their New Testaments and hymn-books, the Stundists quietly procured others; prevented from meeting for worship in their cottages they went out to the open steppe. If the old presbyters and deacons could not leave their localities for the purpose of confirming the more remote and weaker churches, other presbyters were ordained who could. There was no dismay, no faltering. And the authorities soon recognised this. A blagotchin, or rural dean, writing in 1881, said: "We must sorrowfully confess that, notwithstanding the earnest attempts made by the Church to wean these schismatics from their errors, notwithstanding admonition and prayerful entreaty, notwithstanding the gentle and paternal pressure of the worldly powers, they continue in their stiff-necked course, and evince no desire to be reconciled to us." The "gentle and paternal pressure" is delicious. After 1882 stronger measures were adopted. The ispravniki, or local commissaries of police—men generally of a common and rough type, whose tyrannical methods are proverbial—were empowered to levy arbitrary fines on peasants who continued to attend Stundist meetings after a warning to absent themselves. The fines were not to exceed twenty roubles, but twenty roubles is as much to an impoverished Russian peasant as £20 would be to an English agricultural labourer. The ispravniki were further empowered to distrain should the fine not be paid. Thereupon began a most iniquitous series of proceedings. Dressed in their little brief authority, these tyrants played such fantastic tricks that misery and ruin were brought to hundreds of happy homes. All through the winters of 1882 and 1883 it was quite a common thing to see in the villages auctions of the effects of Stundists—their bedding, clothes, and sticks of furniture being sold to liquidate these scandalous fines. We have before us a list of the Stundists fined and imprisoned in the one village of Nerubalsk. During the space of eighteen months, twelve families here were fined the incredible sum of two thousand six hundred roubles, equivalent in our currency to £260. One man, more than usually obstinate in his views, was fined altogether over seven hundred roubles. His name is Khariton Konotop, and he and all his brethren, rather than pay these iniquitous fines, went to prison, and had their effects sold by the police. The deeds done in Nerubalsk were only a sample of the proceedings in scores of other villages where Stundists lived. But the clergy were not yet satisfied. Another highly-placed minister of religion, writing to the Kief Ecclesiastical Consistory in 1883, states that these acts of the local authority cannot cope with the evil, and that until the "great powers" (meaning the Holy Synod and the provincial governors) take decisive action, there can be no hope for any mitigation of the evils of Stundism. "It is a national evil, this Stundism," he writes; "it is destructive of our best and holiest institutions; it aims its shafts at the State as well as at the Church; it seeks to bring about anarchy and Nihilism, and it is therefore the paramount duty of provincial governors to leave no stone unturned in their efforts to purify our beloved fatherland from the stain of these dangerous disturbers of society." The bishops took precisely this view, and either in 1883 or 1884 they petitioned the Holy Synod to move provincial governors to more drastic measures, and especially to use for this purpose the power vested in them of "administrative process." Every governor of a province in Russia has the power to get rid of persons living within his jurisdiction, who in his sole opinion are suspected of designs against the peace of the province. No trial at law is necessary. The governor can transport either to Siberia or the Caucasus any persons who are considered troublesome, but against whom the evidence is not sufficiently strong to allow of a trial by jury. This is the dread administrative process. Some of the governors, and to their credit it must be said, were not at all eager to exercise this despotic power; others, notably the governor of Kief, made themselves conspicuous by their arbitrary use, or, rather, abuse, of it.
We now enter on the period of systematic effort to get rid of the Stundist leaders. In the following chapter we hope to give some examples of what has been done in different parts of the country by these Inquisitors of the nineteenth century. We shall have some strange tales to tell.