Colonel V. A. Pashkov and the Late Nineteenth-Century Protestant Movement in Russia, Jan M. Surer, 1999

pent the rest of their lives in exile in Europe, continuing to support the efforts of others in Russia to spread the message they had so enthusiastically embraced. Colonel Pashkov was the most prominent and active member of a group of St. Petersburg aristocrats converted between 1874 and 1878 during the visits to the Russian capital of the English evangelist Lord Radstock. Pashkov and other converts displayed their new-found religious faith in an intensified program of philanthropy among the city's poor and laboring classes. Pashkov himself, along with Counts Korf and A. P. Bobrinsky, also continued to conduct religious meetings after the manner of Lord Radstock once the English lord was barred from Russia in 1878. These meetings, often in Pashkov's own 2 palatial residence, were the scene of an unprecedented mingling of all social classes and prompted .mu.c.h. debate, satire, and criticism in the secular and church press. They also drew the comments of such writers as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Leskov. The highly-placed converts began to spread the new movement to the lower classes by evangelization among the urban poor and on their own provincial estates. The movement and its followers soon came to bear the name of its best-known proponent. Colonel Pashkov himself. At the same time, similar Bible-based movements known as Stundism and Baptism had arisen separately among the peasantry in the southwest of the empire and in the Caucasus under the influence of German colonists and other missionaries. The phenomenon of nonconformity with the established church in Russia was not new; it dated at least from the seventeenth-century schism caused by the liturgical reforms of Nikon. The relatively sudden emergence and rapid growth of these so-called "rationalistic" sects, namely the Pashkovites (or Evangelicals), Stundists, and Baptists, however, was a startlingly new fixture on the Russian religious landscape. With the peasantry in growing numbers meeting on their own to study the Bible and spreading the new teaching themselves, the government took alarm at this threat to the Orthodox Church. Under the new Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, K. P. Pobedonostsev, efforts to stamp out these movements intensified, and a general policy of persecution prevailed until the proclamation of religious tolerance in 3 1905. For Colonel Pashkov, that persecution took the form of banishment soon after he had brought together representatives of the new sectarian movements at a conference in April 1884 in St. Petersburg. Many of the lower-class sectarians suffered worse fates, including imprisonment and exile to Siberia. Yet these sectarian groups did not disappear. They survived the decades of persecution and engaged in renewed activity in the somewhat freer climate between 1905 and the outbreak of war. After another’few years of relative freedom during the early Bolshevik period, they continued to exist