Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution

Draws on a rich variety of previously untapped archival sources to reconstruct the religious world of the lay people. Focusing on various "centres" of their religious life - the temple, chapels, feasts, icons, and the Virgin Mary - the author follows the religious processes and communal dynamics that lent these centres meaning.

Vera Shevzov has spent ten years researching Orthodoxy as it was lived in the years before the 1917 Revolution. In Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution, she draws on a rich variety of previously untapped archival sources and published works unavailable in the West to reconstruct the religious world of lay people. Shevzov traces the means by which men and women shaped their religious lives in an ecclesiastical system that was often dominated by bureaucrats and monastic bishops. She finds vivid displays of resistance to the official system and equally vivid affirmations of faith. She ultimately questions the notion that the only challenge to Orthodoxy at the end of the ancien regime came from outsiders such as Marxist revolutionaries, atheistic intellectuals, and urban factory workers. Instead, she shows that a different but equally great challenge emerged within the faith community itself.