Spiritual Christians

Reigning with Christ for a Thousand Years: Two Prophets of Russian Millennialism

The article explores the crossroads of two surviving groups of “old Russian sectarianism” — Molokan Jumpers and JehovistsIl’intsy — for whom the anticipation of the millennial kingdom on earth was a central doctrinal tenet. Researchers in the past, as well as modern scholars of religion, usually have not paid attention to the connection between the two movements, which was at one time quite substantial both in the doctrinal and the practical sense.

New Israel and Red October: A Movement of Russian Religious Dissent at the Turn of Epochs

The article is devoted to the analysis of the circumstances under which the New Israel group of Russian Spiritual Christians repatriated from Uruguay to Soviet Russia in the 1920s. New Israelites were the largest of all overseas “sectarian” groups that responded to the Soviet authorities’ call to return to the country and take part in creating collective agricultural enterprises. The co‑operative enterprise established by that religious community on the territory of the present day Rostov Region endured for a few years.

«We Express Our Full Readiness to Help the Soviet Power...» A Short Experience of Integration of the Russian «Spiritual Christians» into the Socialist Economy of the 1920s

The article examines the history of a short‑lived cooperation between the Soviet power and the communities of the Russian Spiritual Christians (dukhovnye khristiane), such as Dukhobors, Molokans, and New Israelites. After the revolution and during the 1920s, the communities of these Christian sects created a type of economic associations that formally could correspond to the Bolsheviks’ economic policies. The Bolsheviks considered these communities as their allies, believing that they could become agents of socialist economic forms in the agriculture.