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the sign of the cross, and did not follow the Orthodox calendar of fasting. Dissidents from Ostrikovo communicated with the Germans and Mennonites who lived in the colony close to the villages of Tokmak, and participated in their church rituals as early as the 1850s. According to the priest’s report, this society, ‘known as the Shalaputs’, had begun to grow in October 1862.38 The local priests and the village elder (starosta) visited the colonist Klassen from the German colony of Liebenau, who was prominent among the Germans and Mennonites. He first reported to the local administration about the revival of the Shalaput sect in the Berdiansk district. Klassen told them that the sectarians often visited German meetings of worship. At the same time, he noted that the Russian dissidents played the guitar and sang psalms during their own meetings of worship, which he had visited at the beginning of December 1862.39 In a conversation with priests who visited their religious meetings of worship, the peasants explained that they had met exclusively for reading and discussing the Gospels, and had no need of clergy ‘because they [the peasants] had learned the Divine Truth by now’.40 This revival of the Shalaputs demonstrated the new, more Western features of the Christian Reformation. Tavrida Shalaputs used the Western editions of the Bible and other religious books for their reading and discussion. What was more unusual, they sang their religious hymns accompanied by guitar during their meetings of worship. As the governor of Tavrida reported, by 1862 this sect had spread to such German colonies as Rudnerweide, and the dissidents themselves began to throw their icons away and stopped attending Orthodox ceremonies in local churches. The leader of the sect was the state peasant Damian Vasetskii, ‘who played the role of the priest among them.’ When the police arrested him, he confessed that he ‘maintained friendly relations with the true Christians’ from the German and Mennonite colonies. During his arrest, they confiscated a copy of the New Testament, printed in London, and a piece of paper with the text of ‘some prayer to someone called the Shepherd’.41 It turned out that both the book and the prayer came from the German colony. It is remarkable that purely Russian dissidents, influenced by the Khlyst/Skoptsy traditions of the Russian Orthodox Reformation, initiated a cultural dialogue with representatives of the Western Protestantism and incorporated elements of Western Protestant culture into their theology and rituals. On 9 April 1863, the bishop of Tavrida wrote to the Holy Synod that the Shalaputs still met nightly in their houses, sang the psalms, and sometimes visited the Mennonites and participated in their services. The church authorities worried particularly that these ‘literate’ dissidents had become friendly with the Mennonites and the Molokans. As one Church official observed, ‘They began to read the books of the New Testament, which they bought in the market, and they visited each other in their houses, bringing these books with them’. All of them could read. 38 39 40 41
RGIA, f.796, op. 143, d. 602, l.1–1ob. Ibid., l.2–2ob. Ibid., l.3. Ibid., l.5–5ob.