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Although biblical texts were known in Church Slavonic as early as the ninth century, translation of the Bible into Russian came about only in the nineteenth century. Modern scriptural translation generated major religious and cultural conflict within the Russian Orthodox church. The resulting divisions left church authority particularly vulnerable to political pressures exerted upon it in the twentieth century. Russian Bible Wars illuminates the fundamental issues of authority that have divided modern Russian religious culture. Set within the theoretical debate over secularization, the volume clarifies why the Russian Bible was issued relatively late and amidst great controversy. Stephen Batalden's study traces the development of biblical translation into Russian and of the 'Bible wars' that then occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Russia. The annotated bibliography of the Russian Bible identifies the different editions and their publication history.

... a fascinating read for everyone interested in Russia, religion, and modernity. -- Nadieszda Kizenko In the early 20th century, Baptists were the fastest-growing non-Orthodox religious group among Russians and Ukrainians. Heather J. Coleman traces the development of Baptist evangelical communities through a period of rapid industrialization, war, and revolution, when Russians found themselves asking new questions about religion and its place in modern life. Baptists' faith helped them navigate the problems of dissent, of order and disorder, of modernization and westernization, and of national and social identity in their changing society. Making use of newly available archival material, this important book reveals the ways in which the Baptists' own experiences, and the widespread discussions that they generated, illuminate the emergence of new social and personal identities in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia, the creation of a public sphere and a civic culture, and the role of religious ideas in the modernization process.

Focusing on the roles of Russian Orthodoxy and Islam in constituting, challenging and changing national and ethnic identities in Russia, this study takes Tsarist and Soviet legacies into account, paying special attention to the evolution of the relationship between religious teachings and political institutions through the late 19th and 20th centuries. The volume explicitly discusses and compares the role of Russia's two major religions, Orthodoxy and Islam, in forging identity in the modern era and brings an innovative blend of sociological, historical, linguistic and geographic scholarship to the problem of post-Soviet Russian identity. This comprehensive volume is suitable for courses on post-Soviet politics, Russian studies, religion and political culture. Contents: Religion after Communism: belief, identity, and the Soviet legacy in Russia, Juliet Johnson; Ethno-religious identity in modern Russia: orthodoxy and Islam compared, Marietta Stepaniants; Orthodoxy, ethnicity, and mass Ethnophobias in the late Tsarist era, Liudmila Gatagova; In search of the \"Russian Idea\": a view from inside the Russian Orthodox church, Father Georgii Chistiakov; Tolerance and extremism: Russian ethnicity in the Orthodox discourse of the 1990s, Svetlana Ryzhova; Islam and the emergence of Tatar National identity, Aidar Yuzeev; Islam and the construction of Tatar sociolinguistic identity, Suzanne Wertheim; The Ponticization of Ethnic religious identity in Dagestan, Zagir Arukhov; Modern identities in Russia: a new struggle for the soul?, Juliet Johnson; Index. Juliet Johnson is Associate Professor of Political Science at McGill University, Canada. She has published on topics ranging from post-communist political economy to the politics of Russian national identity formation. Marietta Stepaniants is affiliated with the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences as well as the State University of the Humanities (Moscow). Over her distinguished career, she has published numerous books and scholarly articles. Benjamin Forest is Associate Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College, USA. He has published articles on identity, race and ethnicity, and political representation.

In The American YMCA and Russian Culture, Matthew Lee Miller explores the impact of the philanthropic activities of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) on Russians during the late imperial and early Soviet periods. The YMCA, the largest American service organization, initiated its intense engagement with Russians in 1900. During the First World War, the Association organized assistance for prisoners of war, and after the emigration of many Russians to central and western Europe, founded the YMCA Press and supported the St. Sergius Theological Academy in Paris. Miller demonstrates that the YMCA contributed to the preservation, expansion, and enrichment of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. It therefore played a major role in preserving an important part of pre-revolutionary Russian culture in Western Europe during the Soviet period until the repatriation of this culture following the collapse of the USSR. The research is based on the YMCA’s archival records, Moscow and Paris archives, and memoirs of both Russian and American participants. This is the first comprehensive discussion of an extraordinary period of interaction between American and Russian cultures. It also presents a rare example of fruitful interconfessional cooperation by Protestant and Orthodox Christians.

In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism.Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists.The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.

Thisbook elucidates the complicated relationship between religion and nationalconsciousness in the modern world, shedding light on various cases in Centraland Eastern Europe. Though those analyses, the authors show how religion, far fromdisappearing, strongly impacted on the emerging national consciousness.

Doubly Chosen provides the first detailed study of a unique cultural and religious phenomenon in post-Stalinist Russia—the conversion of thousands of Russian Jewish intellectuals to Orthodox Christianity, first in the 1960s and later in the 1980s. These time periods correspond to the decades before and after the great exodus of Jews from the Soviet Union. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt contends that the choice of baptism into the Church was an act of moral courage in the face of Soviet persecution, motivated by solidarity with the values espoused by Russian Christian dissidents and intellectuals. Oddly, as Kornblatt shows, these converts to Russian Orthodoxy began to experience their Jewishness in a new and positive way. Working primarily from oral interviews conducted in Russia, Israel, and the United States, Kornblatt underscores the conditions of Soviet life that spurred these conversions: the virtual elimination of Judaism as a viable, widely practiced religion; the transformation of Jews from a religious community to an ethnic one; a longing for spiritual values; the role of the Russian Orthodox Church as a symbol of Russian national culture; and the forging of a new Jewish identity within the context of the Soviet dissident movement.

Emily Baran explores why a powerful state singled out Jehovah's Witness farmers for removal from society, arguing that what happened in Bila Tserkva demonstrates both the sheer ambition of state plans for the Sovietization of borderland communities and a minority religious community's enduring resistance to secular, socialist ideals.

The bitter separation of Ukraine's Orthodox churches is a microcosm of its societal strife. From 1917 onward, church leaders failed to agree on the church's mission in the twentieth century. The core issues of dispute were establishing independence from the Russian church and adopting Ukrainian as the language of worship. Decades of polemical exchanges and public statements by leaders of the separated churches contributed to the formation of their distinct identities and sharpened the friction amongst their respective supporters. In The Orthodox Church in Ukraine, Nicholas Denysenko provides a balanced and comprehensive analysis of this history from the early twentieth century to the present. Based on extensive archival research, Denysenko's study examines the dynamics of church and state that complicate attempts to restore an authentic Ukrainian religious identity in the contemporary Orthodox churches. An enhanced understanding of these separate identities and how they were forged could prove to be an important tool for resolving contemporary religious differences and revising ecclesial policies. This important study will be of interest to historians of the church, specialists of former Soviet countries, and general readers interested in the history of the Orthodox Church.

This book examines the rhetorical force of certain key words in the discourses of Russian state, political thought, and literature. It shows how terms for cultured conduct (kul’turnost’), political affection (love, liubov’, joy-radost’ etc.), personhood (lichnost’), truth (pravda) and geographical integrity (tsel’nost’) assumed almost sacral meaning. It considers how these terms took on a life of their own, imposing the designs of the Russian state and defining the hopes of educated society in the process. By exploring the usage of these words in a wide range of texts, Richard Wortman provides glimpses into the ideas and feelings of leading figures and thinkers in Russian history, from Peter the Great to Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Berdiaev, as well as writers like Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, and Fedor Dostoevsky, giving a sense of the intellectual and emotional universe they inhabited. The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History provides both students and scholars with a specific focus through which to approach Russian culture and history. This book is essential reading for students of Russian government, thought, literature and political action.