Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas
Im Auftrag des Instituts für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung Regensburg
herausgegeben von Martin Schulze Wessel und Dietmar Neutatz
Ausgabe: 61 (2013), 1, S. 139-140
Verfasst von: Georg Michels
Douglas Rogers: The Old Faith and the Russian Land. A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2009. XVII, 338 S., Abb., Tab., Ktn. ISBN: 978-0-8014-7520-7.
This ambitious volume started out as an anthropological study of Old Belief in the post-Soviet era. The author, who is an anthropologist, spent about a year (2000‒2001) in the town of Sepych in the Perm region and recorded “hundreds of semiformal interviews, unanticipated interactions, and chance encounters” (p. 23). These materials “form the backbone of this work” (p. 23). However, Rogers states that he followed the advice of Russian historians of Old Belief, most importantly of Irina V. Pozdeeva, to contextualize recent developments in Sepych within the town’s tercentenary history. This advice would have served the author well if he had limited himself to a historical overview of one or two chapters. Instead, he devoted more than two-thirds of his volume to the Muscovite, Imperial Russian and Soviet past.
Rogers’ central concern is to investigate how Old Believers “sought to fashion ethical lives across three centuries of precipitous transformations” (p. XI). The study is guided by anthropological concepts such as “moralizing discourses,” “materials of ethics,” “moral communities,” “ethical regimes,” and “ethical repertories” (p. 15‒19). These concepts are superimposed upon the past without much attention to the historical record. The author himself notices, “that a good deal of historical detail is lost” (p. 110), but insists that “lived practices … [can be] more easily glimpsed in the kind of field work I carried out than they are in archives” (p. 31).
Not surprisingly, given this approach, the author’s use of primary sources is limited to a bare minimum. The entire seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are viewed through the prism of a handful of Old Believer manuscripts and the prescriptive ideas of their authors. For example, when describing a post-1861 schism among the town’s Priestless Old Believers, Rogers focuses almost exclusively on two polemic narratives codified by the opposing schismatic camps. How this conflict emerged against the backdrop of peasant emancipation and changing economic conditions is of little interest to the author. He claims that the court records, statistics, nineteenth-century ethnographers’ questionnaires (!), and administrative records of landowning families, which have been examined by other scholars (e. g., Stephen Frank, Steven Hoch), would not have been useful for his analysis, because the pair of Priestless texts “offers uncommon – if not unique – glimpses into the ethical world and struggles of a Russian peasant community after emancipation” (p. 73). However, Rogers discusses only rhetorical tropes about money, labor, gender, and family without examining how these tropes actually functioned in the everyday lives of Old Believer peasants.
The Soviet period – the revolutionary period is left out completely by the author – is painted in very broad strokes. Experiences such as the Civil War, Dekulakization, and Stalinist terror, which had a widespread impact on society, are dismissed with a few paragraphs. The horror of the past, the author suggests, is “only a fraction of the many ways in which the residents … combined elements of a much older ethical repertoire with new possibilities in their attempts to fashion ethical lives ...” (p. 110). To prove this point, Rogers essentially ignores NKVD files, Old Believer sinodiki (obituaries), and other sources that reveal a story of violence, fear, and repression, preferring instead to focus his attention on newspapers, propaganda films, and oral histories (the latter often recorded from the mouths of former officials such as the chairman of the collective farm “Lenin’s Path”). As a result, the Soviet period appears in a rather idyllic light.
Readers learn very little about “efforts to regulate and eliminate Old Belief” (p. 149), but rather about “practices characteristic of the ethical regime of socialism” (p. 145). Such practices included collectivization, “material’nye incentives” (129), labor-days, secularization, and the various “wealth-in-people networks on which the socialist sense of belonging to a moral community rested” (p. 138). One gets the impression that the Soviet regime was benign and that Old Believers somehow accommodated themselves. Apparently taking Soviet propaganda at face value, Rogers barely mentions the fact that Old Belief was driven into the underground during this period and somehow managed to survive persecution.
Rogers’ treatment of the post-communist era is similarly reductionist. He favors the perspectives of the powerful, such as Andrei Petrovich, the director of the privatized state farm and the town’s khoziain (boss), whom he cites again and again. When Andrei Petrovich made a deal with the Belokrinitsy Church in Moscow – probably after being bribed with a good deal of money – to build a Priestist (!) church in the historically Priestless town, Rogers views this arbitrary action as benevolent. He explains that the director was “interested in building society, working for townspeople, and creating a moral community” (p. 251‒252). But did people struggling below the poverty line actually have a choice when told by the town’s boss that they should join the new church? One wishes the author had paid more attention to popular opposition against Andrei Petrovich as well as to Old Belief survival strategies such as deception and fake conversion. Again, Rogers fails to explore the actual experiences of a religious group that survived three centuries by appearing to adjust to the external world while adhering to their faith in secret.
Thus Rogers repeatedly sugarcoats grim social, economic, and institutional realities in rural Russia’s past and present. His examination of historical sources remains extremely superficial while his theoretical claims (about ethics and moral community) are merely asserted, often repeated, and not supported by much evidence. The author would have been well advised to pay more attention to the current state of research on Old Belief rather than to ignore or reject it outright. Much of Western scholarship, for example, he deems “not … particularly well suited to [his] approach” (p. 30). Rogers clearly favors ideas of moral community promulgated by a handful of leaders – ranging from pre-revolutionary community elders to post-Soviet bosses – but fails to explore to what extent ordinary Old Believers actually assimilated these ideas.
Zitierweise: Georg Michels über: Douglas Rogers: The Old Faith and the Russian Land. A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2009. XVII. ISBN: 978-0-8014-7520-7, http://www.oei-dokumente.de/JGO/Rez/Michels_Rogers_Old_Faith.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)
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