The Skoptsy of Russia

In eighteenth-century Russia, the official Orthodox Church was surrounded by a world of dissent. Old Believers rejected the liturgical reforms of the 1650s, and in the villages small circles of “spiritual Christians” sought God directly, without priests. The best known were the Khlysty, who met at night to sing, whirl and prophesy, and who believed that Christ could become incarnate again in living men and women. Their own name was “people of God”; the name Khlysty, probably a distortion of “Christs”, came from outsiders.

Out of this milieu came the Skoptsy. In 1772 investigators in Oryol province, south of Moscow, uncovered a group of peasants who had gone beyond Khlyst asceticism, and about sixty people were arrested. The leading figure who escaped was a peasant named Kondratii Selivanov. He preached for a time in the neighbouring province of Tula, was caught in 1775, flogged and exiled to Siberia. A note on terms: scholars often prefer “new religious movement” to the word “cult”, which is a contested and often pejorative label; for the Skoptsy, Russian sources and historians alike speak of a sect.

Selivanov taught that the Khlysty had failed because they could not master the flesh. In his view, sin had entered the world through sexual desire, and true salvation required removing its source. His followers came to revere him as Christ returned to earth, and, in a twist drawn from popular legend, as Peter III, the emperor overthrown by his wife Catherine in 1762. Many peasants believed that Peter had survived and would return; the rebel Emelian Pugachev had already used the same legend in 1773–1775.

The Skoptsy organised themselves in congregations called “ships”, each led by a prophet or prophetess. Meetings were held at night in private houses, behind closed shutters. Members dressed in white, sang hymns that told of Selivanov’s sufferings and return, and whirled until they entered states of ecstasy in which, they believed, the Holy Spirit spoke through them. A text known as the Strady, or “Sufferings”, presented as Selivanov’s own account, circulated among followers as a sacred story.

At the centre of the faith was the rite outsiders found most shocking: ritual castration and mutilation, performed on both men and women. Members called it the “seal” and saw it as a return to the angelic state of Adam and Eve before the Fall. Not every believer received it. Many lived as members for years, or for life, observing the sect’s other rules, and historians note that its practice varied by place and generation.

Daily life was austere. The Skoptsy renounced marriage, alcohol, tobacco, meat and swearing. Many outwardly remained Orthodox, attended church and kept their beliefs hidden. Their discipline and thrift helped some become remarkably prosperous. In St Petersburg, Moscow and provincial towns, Skoptsy merchants, money-changers and jewellers built fortunes, and their wealth supported poorer members and new converts. Their enemies accused them of using money to win recruits, while the sect itself saw prosperity as a sign of God’s favour.

The movement’s social make-up changed over time. In its first decades it drew mainly on peasants of central Russia, including serfs and soldiers. By the nineteenth century it also included townspeople, traders and some members of the merchant elite, and in the capital it attracted occasional interest from officials and aristocrats curious about Selivanov. Officials noted that men far outnumbered women among those registered, though historians caution that this may reflect who came to the attention of the police as much as who belonged.

Selivanov’s life took an extraordinary turn in 1797. Brought back from Siberia under circumstances that remain unclear, he was questioned by the new emperor, Paul I, and confined to the Obukhov asylum in St Petersburg. Released in 1802 under Alexander I, he lived for nearly twenty years in the houses of wealthy followers in the capital, where believers, and some curious members of high society, came to see him. In 1820, as concern about the sect grew, the government sent him to the Monastery of St Euthymius at Suzdal, where he died in 1832, reportedly aged around a hundred.

Under Nicholas I the state hardened its approach. After investigations in the 1840s, including a major report by the scholar Nikolai Nadezhdin, Skoptsy faced exile to Siberia and the Caucasus, and from the 1860s communities of exiles grew up around Yakutsk in eastern Siberia. Others fled abroad, especially to Romania, where they settled in Bucharest, Iași and the Dobruja; the writer I. L. Caragiale described the Skoptsy cab drivers of Bucharest. An official survey of 1866 counted 5,444 members, with men far outnumbering women, though secrecy makes all figures uncertain.

After the revolution of 1917, some Bolsheviks briefly saw the sectarians as allies against the Orthodox Church. The tolerance did not last. Under Stalin, the Skoptsy were recast as wealthy exploiters. A Leningrad community of 158 people was arrested in 1927, and trials in Leningrad, Saratov and Moscow in 1929–1931 convicted members of causing bodily harm and counter-revolutionary activity. Organised life ended there. Unconfirmed reports from the 1970s spoke of small groups of elderly survivors in central Russia, but none is known today.

For nineteenth-century Russians, the Skoptsy became a byword for religious extremism. Novelists, doctors and lawyers wrote about them, and their trials drew crowds. Officials saw them as a threat to the family and the state; physicians studied them as a medical puzzle; populists sometimes admired their self-discipline and mutual aid. Fyodor Dostoevsky and other writers drew on their image in fiction.

Modern historians, above all Laura Engelstein, read the Skoptsy differently. They see a movement that took seriously ideas found throughout Christian history, such as the praise of virginity and the hope of a restored paradise, and pushed them to a literal extreme. The sect also reflected the hard realities of peasant life, the appeal of a community that promised spiritual equality, and the deep popular hope that a righteous tsar would one day return.

The Skoptsy remain a reminder of how much variety lay beneath the surface of imperial Russia’s official religion. Their story is told today through police files, court records and the sect’s own hymns, which reveal believers who saw themselves not as victims or criminals but as the last faithful remnant waiting for the kingdom of heaven.