Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

dates and accounts of battles are accurate. In each scene the reader finds a Pashkovite comforting those who have lost a loved one, serving the wounded in a military hospital, or in the midst of a battlefield, coinciding with the actual activities of the Pashkovites at that time.** Certain scenes in the novel appear to be based on the ministries of Dr Karl von Mayer, who led fifty to sixty women volunteers to establish field hospitals near Shipka Pass and Pleven (Plevna) in the Balkans, locations of major battles. As well as serving the wounded, the volunteers worked with prisoners of war, distributing 23,000 copies of the Scriptures before the war's end.* Misunderstood Philanthropy The generosity and selflessness of the Pashkovites, while well intentioned, was not without problems. Some people exploited Pashkovite gener- osity, and rumours spread that Pashkov was “buying” followers at so many roubles per head.* A 1904 article in the Orthodox Missionerskoe obozrenie [Missionary Review] claimed that two different types of people attended Pashkov's meetings: those seeking connections and those seeking handouts.“ Some even suggested that Pashkov was victim of a peculiar *! Dalton, “Recent Evangelical Movements in Russia’, p. 110. *? Ada von Krusenstjerna, Im Kreuz hoffe und siege ich, 7th edn (Giessen: Brunnen Taschen- buch, 1962), pp. 85-86. *> [Elizabeth Ward de Charriére], Serge Batourine: Scénes des Temps Actuels en Russe (Paris, 1879, 1882). See also Edmund Heier, Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy 1860-1900, Radstockism and Pashkovism (The Hague: Martinus Nijnoff, 1970), pp. 77-78. “* Religious Tract Society, No. 5, 1877, pp. 123-124; cited in McCarthy, Religious Conflict and Social Order, p. 106. His daughter Jenny de Mayer established similar field hospitals in Manchuria in 1900 during China's Boxer Rebellion. * Stead, Truth About Russia, pp. 360-361. According to Stead, there were rumours that Pashkov paid cabmen three roubles to listen to his talk, and that he paid peasants as much as they would have earned from sunrise to sunset. * S. Glebov, “Polkovnik Pashkov’, Missionerskoe obozrenie (January 1904), p. 84. 65 type of blackmail, choosing a path of virtue to dispense with his wealth. ' Yet a more serious accusation was that Pashkov and others were using their wealth as a “fearsome and purely demonic” means to “seduce” the poor into joining their sect.*” Pobedonostsev claimed that Pashkov required those he served to listen to preaching, and various Orthodox reports indicated that Pashkov refused to assist those remaining in the Orthodox Church. According to an 1896 report, when peasants in the village of Aleksandrovka requested wood from his forests to build an Orthodox Church, Pashkov refused them. Another report indicated that when an Orthodox woman turned to Pashkov for financial help after her home burned down, Pashkov scolded her: “You got what you deserved... That's