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Socio-political Accommodation and Religious Decline: The Case of the Molokan Sect in Soviet Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Christel O. Lane
Christel O. Lane
Affiliation:
London School of Economics
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Extract

The Molokan sect, one of the strongest and most influential in prerevolutionary Russia, is today moving towards extinction. This process, however, has not gone equally far in different geographical areas of the Soviet Union. This paper puts forward an assessment of the extent of the sect's decline and attempts to explain both the general decline and its differential rate in different communities. It analyses the sect's development over a long period of time and under radically different socio-political conditions and it tries to systematize the Molokans' changing response to their different social environments, locating the sect in the typology devised by Bryan Wilson. It concludes that the severe decline in membership during the Soviet period is due to the fact that the Molokan sect is no longer an organization through which political dissent can be expressed but has fully adjusted to and affirms the values of Communist society. In the paper it is pointed out that although the sect can be typified in Wilson's terms during its early period, its changed response in Soviet society is not anticipated in Wilson's scheme. Existence in the exceptional social environment of socialist society has called forth an exceptional sectarian response. To illuminate this process we will consider both the Molokans' historical development and their religious belief, as well as their social complexion today.

Type
Traditional Beliefs and Modernizing Change
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 1975 , pp. 221 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1975

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References

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