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Russia's place in the sixteenth-century European Reformation has remained largely an understudied subject in the West. Indeed, most early modern scholarship rarely crosses the Carpathians or Lake Peipus. Similarly, in Russia, scholars have not yet produced a systematic study of Ivan the Terrible's views vis-à-vis the Reformation. This article examines Ivan the Terrible's polemic against Protestantism within the context of the regional eastern European and larger, continental Reformation. For Ivan, Protestants constituted both internal and external threats, posing grave danger to Orthodox doctrine, Russian society, and the safety of Muscovy's borders. Theologically, in the czar's worldview, Protestants were heretics and schismatics par excellence, whose split from apostolic succession endangered not only Roman Catholicism, but the integrity of the Orthodox church as well. Socially, Ivan thought, Protestants championed moral degeneracy, while politically they threatened global and regional security by overwhelming neighboring European states with upheavals and revolt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to look at a specific denomination of the Russian sect of khlysty that emerged in the 1830s and spread its communities all over Russia until 1905. The perspective of longue duree allows to touch on the following three questions: How did the khlysty express religious protest? How far can khlysty as a sect be understood as a community? What elements of their history can shed light on Russian inakomyslie in general? Methodically, the research does not follow the common deprivation approach. The deprivation approach emphasizes the connection of social inequality and religion, stating that religion has a compensating function. Instead, we put emphasis on religious experience as a strategy to cope with social inequality. This research builds on William James s concept of religious experience, on research on the history of sects and religious dissidents / religious deviance in Europe and on Ferdinand Tönnies' concept of Gemeinschaft. Religious experience and feelings are regarded as main contributors to build and maintain sectarian communities. Collective cohesion of religious deviant community life is shown to be driven by the deep and religiously motivated feeling of unease and appears as a form of liberation from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to the views of some historians, prices during the First World War rose faster than wage increases, leading to declining living standards and fueling popular unrest, thus contributing to the 1917 revolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev and the beginnings of Messianism in the Russian Eastern Orthodox Church. Topics include the First World War and Russia, Slavophilism, communism and Christianity, and religion in the Soviet Union. Berdiaev's works entitled "The Origin of Russian Communism" and "The Russian Idea" are considered.

The article discusses the role that Russian historian Anatolii Remnev played in the writing of the regional history of the Russian Empire, or imperial Russia. An overview of Remnev's writing of the history of Siberia in Russia, including in regard to the relationship between Siberia and Russia, is provided.

The popular, stereotype perception of Russian anti-Semitism is marred by a number of misconceptions. It is generally believed that it originated among the peasants, partly as a result of religious bigotry and partly as a reaction against an alleged Jewish exploitation. In actual fact, pogroms almost invariably started in towns and cities, and the main instigators were artisans and merchants and other people who plied the same trade as the Jews, later also professionals such as lawyers. Hence, economic competition rather than exploitation was the most important driving force. This is reflected in the writings of Russian anti-Semites and is also how most contemporary Jews understood their causes behind their ordeals. The Jews could be targeted for persecution because they were a diaspora group and did not enjoy the same protection as the indigenous population. Thus, even though the tsarist regime can be cleared of any suspicion that they deliberately whipped up the pogroms, they contributed to them by failing to give the Jews the same rights as other subjects of the empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Itelmen people of the Kamchatka Peninsula have felt and experienced the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church for over 300 years. Explorers' reports tell us that at the same time that Itelmens rebelled violently against the tsar's representatives, they accepted and appropriated the power of the church. This article examines religiosity in Itelmen history as it is revealed through a critical approach to sources, especially by focusing on Itelmen actions. Missionaries and ethnographers' preconceptions gave shape to their depictions of Itelmen religious beliefs and practices as (1) Christian beliefs, (2) anathema to Christian beliefs, or (3) mere superstitions. In order to speak about Itelmen perceptions, the article focuses primarily on actions taken during this early period of recorded Itelmen history and on the writers who showed an interest in describing how Itelmens thought about religious questions. The article also recounts the little known story of the 1848 Kutkh rebellion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of Russia as a dominant force in Europe from the early nineteenth century onward was characterized by growing tensions between Russians and Poles as seen in the recurring Russian suppression of Polish uprisings. F. H. Duchinski (1817–93) who, like other Polish intellectuals, tried to uncover the root causes of these political tensions, concluded that Russians were neither Slavic nor European, but Asians, and it was this fact alone, he believed, that accounted for the continuing Russian hostility toward the Poles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Studia Historica Brunensia is the property of Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Studia Historica Brunensia is the property of Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discusses the development of racial anthropology during and immediately following World War I, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe. The author comments on the ethnic relations in Austria and Germany at the time and describes the racial concept known as Mongolization directed towards the enemy nation of Russia. She also considers the influence of this and other racial theories on anthropology and intellectual philosophy. The creation of new countries, especially in the Balkan Peninsula, is also examined.

It is difficult to ascribe to Hasidism sets of distinctive regional characteristics, because Hasidism transcended both communal and national boundaries. Aware of this problem, the authors of this article seek to characterize Hasidism in Russia, while eschewing the essentialist assumption that Hasidism in Russia had a Russian character. The article describes Hasidism in Tsarist Russia from several perspectives. From an internal Jewish perspective, it discusses features of dynasties of hasidic leaders and the courts they lived in. This is followed by a discussion of relations between hasidic centers (the courts) and hasidic peripheries (the local communities). Relations between Hasidism and the Russian administration are also analyzed, as are the various ways in which hasidim in Russia adapted to the challenges of modernity, while hasidic leaders in Galicia and Hungary were usually more hostile towards modernization. Finally, the article describes the consequences of the upheavals of the First World War, Bolshevik Revolution, and the Civil Wars that followed. During these dramatic events and in their aftermath, the majority of the hasidic leaders in Russia moved to other places in Europe, America, and Palestine, and only some of them remained under the Soviet regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a report from a September 19-20, 2013 conference in Leipzig, Germany on the 17th-century history of Russian church politics. Topics of presentations given included the theological legitimacy of the founding of the position of His Holiness Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus', the biography of Russian church-prince Petr Mogila, and the renovation of the New Jerusalem monastery.

The article examines key works by the Russian religious thinkers Ivan Kireevskii and Pavel Florenskii in the context of the challenges posed by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the traditional sacramental-mystical foundations of Russian Orthodox belief. It argues that, in contradistinction to attempts by some Church intellectuals to accommodate Enlightenment ideas and values within traditional Orthodox belief along the lines of the Western religious Enlightenment, others sought to challenge religious rationalism and defend a distinctive concept of Orthodox Enlightenment by drawing on the theology of Orthodox mysticism as articulated in the ascetic literature collected in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of the Philokalia. Kireevskii and Florenskii are seen as the most prominent representatives of this trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study deals with the development of relations between the secular and spiritual power in Russia in the 14th century. It examines the "God of peace"and "holy war" in the Russian Orthodox environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Danubius is the property of Danubius and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Danubius is the property of Danubius and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Danubius is the property of Danubius and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Danubius is the property of Danubius and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Although freedom of conscience and of confession were essential to modernizing Russia and creating a civil society, the tight bonds between church and state complicated efforts to implement such reforms under the autocratic system and the constitutional monarchy that succeeded it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses and compares several Hungarian translations of the Russian novel "Anna Karénine" written by Léon Tolstoï in 1877. The reception and translation of the first Hungarian version, which was based on a German translated version, by Madame R. Hugo Trux in 1887 are discussed. It presents excerpts from a 1919 Russian-to-Hungarian translation by Dezső Ambrozovics. It is suggested that the misunderstandings and translation errors of those first translations could be attributed to Hungarian translators not being knowledgeable enough about the Russian culture. Hungarian writer László Németh and several of his translated versions, including his retranslated version published in 1958, are discussed.

The article discusses imperial Russian policy regarding foreign Buddhism clergy from Mongolia and Tibet from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Other topics include the religious bureaucracy led by religious leader Khambo Lama in Eastern Siberia, political aspects of Russian support for domestic Buddhist clergy among the Buryat-Mongol tribes, and the relation of Buddhists in the Trans-Baikalia area to Buddhists living in China's Qing empire. Russian government regulation of Buddhist monasteries is addressed.

The essay discusses the state-guaranteed Freedom of Conscience right granted by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia as part of the October 17, 1905 Manifesto. This right of freedom of religious practice was implemented through the Department of Religious Affairs of the Foreign Confessions, part of the Interior Ministry and broadly extended the civil right to all citizens unless it competed with criminal laws or hindered the state order.

The essay considers the history of religious toleration in Russia from 1520 to 1825, comparing and contrasting it to toleration in Western Europe, paying particular attention to the Enlightenment. Some of the topics considered include the nature of religious toleration as a freedom granted to specific ethnic or religious minorities, secularism, the role of church and state, and philosophers Baruch de Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, and John Locke.

The article discusses the development of the concept of sobstvennost' (private property) in Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Using the methodology of Begriffsgeschichte (history of concepts), the author analyzes a variety of historical sources, including legal documents, dictionaries and encyclopedias, and literary texts, and traces the occurrence and semantics of terms describing the idea of property. She challenges a dominant theme in the historiography of imperial Russia that posits that a late and incomplete development of concepts such as property compared to Western Europe accounts for Russian economic backwardness and political authoritarianism.

Ancient Times and Their Many Stories, Russian Apocrypha and Religious Polk Songs at the intersection of Ancient Cultures. The Kiev-centred Old Russian State converted to Christianity in 988- 989. The conversion of eastern Slays did not happen in a moment however; rather it took place gradually and was the effect of a long and complex process of development. Christianity started to take root in Kiev Rus well before the 10th century. It is known that at the beginning of his reign Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich I was dedicated to Pagan creed and even cried reforming it in order to consolidate the unity of his state. Christianization, the so called `state christening' was confined to towns first, as testified in a 1lth century report by Ilarion, the first Russian speaking Metropolitan of Kiev: `The sound of the apostolic trumpet and the Gospel filled all the towns...' The population of villages became intrinsically and spiritually truly Christian only later, in the 15th -17th centuries. The Pagan-Christian religious syncretism of the period is often called `double faith', which is not the best term to describe a spirit and consciousness in the process of Christianization. In the name of its elastic mission strategy the clergy had significant initiatives contributing to Pagan-Christian syncretism. This unique consciousness and spirituality created its own ideal of beauty and determined the characteristic features of the culture of Russia before the Mongol invasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses views of the Arab-Ottoman world presented in travel accounts of Christian Russian pilgrims to the Holy Land during the modern era, from the 16th to 18th centuries. Topics discussed include views of the Middle East held by the common Russian people during this time, the accounts of Russian pilgrims to the Middle East, and the influence of these reports on Russian public opinion and understanding of the Middle East during this period, and the influence of the architecture of the Holy Land and Jerusalem on Russian architecture and city planning.

This article examines the socioeconomic aspects of the evolution of the Cossack community within the Russian Empire from the 16th to 20th centuries. The author details the history of the Cossacks from the 16th century and traces the changes which altered/disrupted their traditional socioeconomic order from the 17th century forward. Noted is the unique relationship the Cossacks had in tsarist Russia, a system which rewarded their military service according to social position and unit service with state land grants from which they could earn a living. Noted, too, is the impact of the Enfranchisement Act of 1861 and subsequent Russian legislation which strengthened the position of the Cossacks vis–à–vis migrants/peasants to their lands--factors that led to the Cossacks supporting the White Army in the Russian Civil War and which contributed to their eventual liquidation in 1918-1920.

The article discusses ethnic relations within Turkey, with particular focus given to the political struggles of the Kurds, Turkey's second largest ethnic group following the Turks, and other ethnic minorities such as the Laz. The author explains that while the Kurds actively engage in ethnonationalism, as evidenced by political parties such as the People's Labour Party (HEP) and the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, PKKK), smaller minority groups like the Laz do not. Instead, according to the author, the Laz engage in cultural preservation and promotion that do not directly challenge the Turkish government. It is argued that mistreatment by of the Laz by the Russian Empire instilled a sense of loyalty to the Ottoman Empire/Turkey in them.

The article discusses the Russian diplomacy in the Nagorno-Karabakh settlement between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Topics mentioned include the background of the Nagorno-Karabakh talks, the positions of parties in conflict despite 19 years of talks, and the Madrid Principles presented by the Minsk group to the parties.

Nicholas II's view of himself as a divinely appointed tsar clashed with the changing political needs of early twentieth-century Russia and the ambiguous position of the Church as subordinate to the state administration. The resulting distrust between the tsar and the church hierarchy and between the hierarchs and the people further alienated the tsar from his subjects in the years leading up to the revolution of 1905. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of children in Russian gentry families, arguing against the view that parent-child dynamics were distant from the 18th century till the middle of the 19th century. Other topics include gender roles within the family, the notion of increased permissiveness by parents, and the contention that egalitarian ideals impacted family life. Also noted are portrayals of parents in Russian autobiographies and memoirs from the period, the use of corporal punishment, and the use of textual evidence in family history.

The article has been written as an essay open to discussion. Several cultural conflicts between national and religious ideological patterns in Mediaeval and modern Russian and Soviet history have been observed. The author believes that universal Christian values must have an unconditional priority in comparison to patriotic, national, and governmental goals. Christianity - as a part of the state services, combined with nationalistic and romantic ideas, was used, as the author puts forward, to bring Russian society to catastrophic consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, Anna Fishzon explores how the phenomena of celebrity culture and early sound recording contributed to notions of authentic selfhood in late imperial Russia. Public discussions about celebrities like the Bol'shoi Theater bass Fedor Shaliapin helped forge understandings of sincerity and spoke to contemporary concerns regarding the relationship between fame and artifice, the public persona and the inner self. Fishzon suggests that the emergent recording industry penetrated and altered everyday emotional experience, the arena of work, and the organization of leisure, linking gramophonic discourses to celebrity culture and its rhetoric of authenticity and sincerity. In part because Russian audio magazines and gramophone manufacturers heavily promoted celebrity opera recordings, sonic fidelity was equated with the capacity of the recorded voice to convey "sincerity," understood, in turn, as the announcement of ardent feelings. Fan letters to Shaliapin and Ivan Ershov document these new sensibilities regarding self, authenticity, desire, and emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although legitimately associated with a crisis of faith and the rapid spread of atheistic-socialism, the revolutionary period 1905-1918 in St. Petersburg/Petrograd can and should also be understood as one of unprecedented religious experimentation and spiritual growth, even among the working classes. Rejecting overly simplistic notions of “secularization” and de-Christianization, this article offers a necessarily fluid and pluralistic portrait of Petersburg religious culture, the contours of which were shaped by tensions between rural and urban practices, popular and official institutions, and competing notions of the sacred and the profane in the city’s increasingly diverse marketplace of beliefs. It examines the new and varied demands that working-class believers voiced with respect to the role of the Orthodox faith and Church in their lives and investigates urban Orthodoxy as it was “lived,” including changes and continuities in religious practice, sacramental life, icon worship, and pilgrimage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the institutional religious life of the Jews of late imperial Kiev. Jewish residence in Kiev was restricted by the state, and Jewish life was governed by a complex web of government regulations. Drawing on archival documents such as petitions submitted to the government by groups of working-class Kiev Jews, the author’s research investigates the strategies that Jews employed to establish synagogues and other religious institutions and the various challenges that they faced in doing so. It also places this history within the larger context of organized religion in the Russian Empire by drawing comparisons to parallel phenomena among various Christian denominations in the empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ancient tale of Joseph, son of Jacob, and Zulaykha was a "best seller" on the Silk Road from Russia to China. Before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Tatars, a Turkic-speaking people living in the middle Volga, used this tale to propagate Islam among the animistic and Eastern Orthodox Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples. Tatars drew upon this famous tale to address the internal communal fractures caused by Russian colonization, which opened the doors to Eastern Christianity, a far stronger competitor than the local indigenous religions. While scholars have shown interest in the tale's literary value and linguistic history, there has been no effort to investigate its readership. Yet the story of Joseph and Zulaykha as presented in popular poems and religious books empowered both men and women on the Volga frontier to refashion their religious and national identities. Today proponents of national revival call for the reappropriation of such tales to restore boundaries between Tatars and Russians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an examination of the academic career of Russian scientist and poet Mikhail Lomonosov and explores the significance of education in Russia following the reign of tsar Peter the Great. It discusses the social status that was established by an individual who was able to use education to better themselves. The article draws on the writing to Lomonosov in an effort to understand how he used his writing to work around established social norms regarding the Russian social hierarchy and become an elite in Russian society.

The article presents an examination of the early 18th-century memoir published by Russian Prince Boris Ivanovich Kurakin titled "Vita del Principe Boris Koribut-Kourakin del familii de polioni et litoania." The article explores what can be learned from the autobiography about early 18th century Russian life, the reforms that took place under the court of Peter the Great, early 18th-century Russian literary practices and Russian self-fashioning. The article traces the history of the text and discusses Kurakin's health, attitude and relationship with the tsar.

The first train line connecting St. Petersburg with western Europe opened in 1862, providing the occasion for Fedor Dostoevskii and Nikolai Leskov to take positions in regard to train travel, cultural traffic, and Russia's insertion into modernity. Anne Dwyer's analysis of Dostoevskii's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions and Leskov's "From a Travel Diary" reveals an essential paradox. While Leskov is eager to foster the railroad, he switches hats with ease and offers pragmatic performances of an imperial identity based on his competency in the languages of the borderlands. In contrast, the nationalist Dostoevskii fulminates against train travel yet explores the ways in which modernity's onset changes human experience and literary possibilities. Their bifurcated yet equally ambivalent responses to modernity as emblematized by the railroad illuminate the diversity of attempts to articulate a Russian identity in relationship both to Russia's own people (s) and to western Europe in the modern age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will argue that in late 1800s Russian Pan-Orthodox and Pan-Slav activists portrayed their Balkan co-religionists and co-ethnics as both the same as and different from the Russians. By bridging the class divisions of Russian society, this kind of propaganda contributed to the making of a Russian national identity centred on the self-image of powerful virile crusaders for the only true form of Christianity and saviours of the emasculated and feminized Slavs from cruel foreign domination. These attitudes precluded the formation of a horizontal community and help explain the high-handed policies leading to the break between Russian liberators and 'ungrateful' Bulgarians in the aftermath of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877-8. The article will also relate Russian Pan-Orthodoxy and Pan-Slavism to the larger phenomenon of irredentism to encourage similar explorations along this new avenue of research in that field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of maps in the construction of national territories has already received much attention from scholars; however, the discussion has mostly centred around the creation of political boundaries in emerging regions or states. Ethnic cartography, on the other hand, remains little studied, despite the fact that it also produced powerful symbolic meanings, advanced science and became a tool for various political ideologies. This article introduces the role that the mapping of ethnic territories played in political discourse in nineteenth-century Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religions are playing an ever more prominent role in the public sphere in the world today, and it hardly seems productive to examine religion-state relations from the traditional liberal standpoint of idealising the state's non-intervention in religious matters. In this article we examine the relations between Islam and the state in Turkey, Russia/the Soviet Union and China, using the concept of the 'confessional state'. A confessional state tries to use not only its dominant religion but also minority religions of all kinds to mobilise wider groups of the population. In confessional states the relations between the state and bodies of clergy are federative, not master-subordinate. The core of the Ottoman confessional state was the millet system, while the seyhulislam managed the Muslim majority. The Russian Empire copied the seyhulislam and created the Muftiate. Neither the Qing Empire nor the Republic of China built a nationwide system of Muslim administration, so the People's Republic of China architected it from scratch, on the basis of its own communist idea of the 'united front'. These confessional states were seriously damaged by Ataturk's secularism in Turkey, communist atheism in the Soviet Union and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China. Later, leaders of these countries realised that secularism and communism could not monopolise the spiritual market of faith, and desperately needed to mobilise the nation, even with the help of traditional religion. They did not try to reintroduce confessional states on the lines of those which had historically existed, but tried to use religious congregations to mobilise the wider strata of the population. In this attempt, the three countries faced different challenges: Turkey suffers from the confessional homogeneity of the state; postcommunist Russia lacks a nationwide Muslim administration; and in China the Muslims do not have an autonomous clerical hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lives and works of two previously unknown writers associated with the Old Belief and peasant unrest in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries come to light through a search for old books and manuscripts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid dissemination of the "Gazette" of 1731, originally from Ukraine, demonstrates the lure of apocalyptic prophesies for eighteenth-century Russian soldiers, townspeople, and peasants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study of the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church focusing on the changes it went through politically and theologically as national Orthodox Churches gained independence in many of the Slavic countries. The author questions the applicability of the major theological doctrines of the Orthodox Christianity such as the Symphony, the Counciliarity and the Autocephaly in the modern context. Other topics such the Orthodox respect and use of the native language, the relations with the political leaders of the sovereign state are also discussed. Finally an overview of the history Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire is proposed.

Ivan the Terrible loved hunting but between 1548 and 1564 he seems not to have indulged his favorite pastime. An anonymous English account written 1556-1558 says that Ivan had given hunting up for religious reasons. Three Russian texts written between 1550 and 1563, an entry in the Nikon Chronicle for 1556-1557 which praises Ivan for abstaining from hunting to become a true pastor of his flock, the Domostroi, a book of household management, and two vitae in the Stepennaia kniga tsarskogo rodosloviia (Book of Degrees of Imperial Genealogy), contain diatribes against the cruelty and immorality of hunting. These texts echo a minority anti-hunting tradition in medieval and early modern Europe. As in Europe hunting continued unabated, but in Muscovy it is possible that the anti-hunting animus of these texts inspired at least one temporary convert, Ivan the Terrible himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an overview of one of the fields of religiosity that have so far remained outside the main scope of scholarly research on postcommunist societies. In the West heterodox religiosity, the most common form of which is constituted by so called 'esoteric' world views, has already been studied for several decades, since it has been able to manifest itself more or less freely through specialised media, books and events organised by its engaged practitioners. In Russia in communist times, however, it had to keep silent so as to avoid persecution by the government. It was not until the regime change in 1991 that heterodox religiosity was suddenly free to spread widely and quickly. Now that time has passed and the situation stabilised somewhat, it is interesting to look back at how this kind of religiosity evolved in Russia during the last century and especially during the challenging transition years. The article examines the situation today with the use of selected results from a recent representative population survey. These results suggest that at the moment heterodox forms of religiosity are at least as widely spread among Russians as traditional ones, if not even more widely. This evidence might provide interesting input for further development of theoretical knowledge on religious transformations in modern societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance is examined specifically of the coin and, more generally, of money, in the religious thought of Vasilii Rozanov. First, there is Rozanov's rejection of the Orthodox ideal of poverty, which is based on his interpretation of the religious role of the family and the obligation placed on men to support their household. Then, the focus is on Rozanov's numismatics; the importance of the coin for Rozanov as a historical artefact, and also the metaphysical function of the coin in connecting him to ancient civilizations, and resurrecting pre-Christian values in the modern world. These two dimensions of finance are reconciled by demonstrating that, for Rozanov, the physical and metaphysical properties of money are linked in a complex system of exchange that helps humanity maintain its links with the Creation. Rozanov also establishes a clear link between the coin, the word, and the reproductive body, a dynamic that is threatened specifically by Jesus Christ. In addition, Rozanov's thought is examined in the context of Russian Orthodoxy and religious philosophy over the religious value of money and the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]