men, in contrast to most early modern European and American cases; as Valerie
Kivelson argues, this might be explained by the tendency to accuse outsiders, and
most people with mobility in Muscovy were men—soldiers, peasants traveling to
market or sent to the city to earn income to pay cash dues back home. Clergy,
with their esoteric knowledge and spiritual authority, were also often accused of
witchcraft. Secular courts litigated accusations of witchcraft as criminal harm, and
punishments ranged fromfines and minor corporal punishment to death according
to the offense.
What early modern Russia lacked was the phenomenon of witch crazes and the
rhetoric of satanic possession as it developed in Europe under the influence of
the Inquisition. Certainly Orthodoxy’s beliefs about witchcraft emanated from
the same early Christian sources, and Russian sources do refer to witches as
influenced by the devil. But the early modern European discourse was highly
sexualized (the witches’“Sabbath”was an orgy with Satan) and personalized
around Satan himself. In Muscovy accused witches were not interrogated with
this concept in mind, nor was possession of magical powers described in this
way until the Military Code of 1715 borrowed the concept of satanic possession
from German and Swedish sources. This generated a few accusations of satanic
activity in the eighteenth century, but interest in witchcraft as a crime faded in
this century of Enlightenment and skepticism. By the time of Catherine II, magic
was treated as fraud in the“Courts of Equity”rather than as a criminal act or
religious deviation.
As for the belief system of the laity, historians have suggested that the concept of
“dual belief”be replaced with a more complex understanding of“lived Orthodoxy.”
Clearly this was a society that Christianity had deeply penetrated, but it took the
form, well into the nineteenth century, of what Gregory Freeze calls“Russian
heterodoxy.”Across regions and across time, practice and belief integrated local
custom into a panoply of diversity that learned churchmen might identify as
deviant or even heretical, but which laymen considered good Christianity. By the
nineteenth century Russia, some scholars argue, could even be called a more
Christian country than its counterparts in post-Reformation Europe, since it lacked
the growing traditions of skepticism and atheism that weakened Christianity’s hold
on society. In Russia, Christianity, howeverflawed from a canonical perspective,
was fervently embraced.
Real progress in what Gregory Freeze calls the“re-christianization” of the
Russian Orthodoxy started in the mid-eighteenth century and continued for at
least a century, as discussed in Chapter 20. Enlightened bishops addressed issues of
parochial education, policing saints’cults, making sermons regular in the liturgy,
standardizing texts, improving parish priests’education, and other familiar issues.
Progress was slow: Elise Wirtschafter argues that not until the 1770s did the
Church really accomplish Nikon’s goal of disseminating standard liturgical books
around the realm. Lacking widespread literacy, means of communication, and lay
education, well into the eighteenth century Orthodox laymen integrated, adapted,
and embraced pagan, folk, or non-canonical behavior and belief in constructing
Christianity.
Varieties of Orthodoxy 261