Скопцы и Царство Небесное: Скопческий путь к искуплению

by Laura Engelstein, Лора Энгельштейн, Вадим Михайлин (Translator)

Книга известного ученого, профессора истории Йельского университета (США) описывает быт и мировоззрение русской секты, члены которой `сделали сами себя скопцами для Царства Небесного` (От Матфея 19:12). Возникнув в XVIII веке, секта дожила до советского периода, сохраняя свою веру и обряды вопреки упорному преследованию. Работа Энгельштейн вводит читателей в контекст важнейших современных дискуссий о групповой и индивидуальной идентичности, о формировании культурных границ и норм, а также социокультурных последствий их нарушений.

Genres: Religion, History, Nonfiction, Russia, Christianity

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Laura Engelstein is an American historian who specializes in Russian and European history. She served as Henry S. McNeil Professor Emerita of Russian History at Yale University and taught at Cornell University and Princeton University.

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Wherever I have lived, worked, or held a post, supervisors and mates have considered me a model worker, polite to everyone. But that wasn't enough for them to consider me their equal. I suppose it's because they are creators of life and in that respect l am dead, though this is not fair. Plenty of people capable of reproducing humankind have voluntarily refused this great honour. Moreover, I received castration as a child and for a long time had nothing to do with those who did this in their right minds and by religious conviction. [...] Judging by my life, my proper life, I'm a great guy! My exemplary decent behaviour admits me everywhere. What qualities are missing for me to be accepted as human? Better be a drunk, hooligan, roué, drifter, loafer, or malingerer - but not castrated! Nothing is more shameful among humankind. I've felt this on my own hide for 75 years."
- Letter from Nikifor Petrovich Latyshev to Joseph Stalin (December 22, 1938)

The horror TTRPG Delta Green: Countdown describes a cult called The Skoptsy, a group of sadistic Russians exploiting the USA's adoption agencies to acquire vulnerable children for abuse. It's typical of Delta Green's edgy 'ripped-from-the-headlines' tone, and memorably features in the pitch-black exploration of America's inexorable descent into Fascism, God's Teeth, which opens with the players murdering a group of Skoptsy cultists in a cathartic burst of vigilante violence that only serves to initiate an escalating cataclysm of systematic neglect, state brutality, and child exploitation.

As with most of Delta Green's most interesting story ideas, the Skoptsy were a real, and now extinct, group. The Russian Empire discovered them in 1772, just as the regime was bloodily dismembering participants in the Pugachev Revolt. After catching a glimpse of this bewildering group, the state sent successive waves of agents to study the cult, whilst the cult did its best to avoid their gaze.

A century and a half-long game of cat-and-mouse ensued as the state, appalled by what it gradually uncovered, attempted to repress this elusively deviant sect. Once the Tsars fell the Bolsheviks took up their studies. At first they hesitantly admired them as heroic rebels against Orthodox conformity worthy of ethnographic documentation before they became proper atheists like everyone else. After the Skoptsy proved resistant to this, the Bolsheviks gave up on subtlety and had them arrested, liquidated, or otherwise re-educated - not for their religious practices - but for being mildly prosperous peasants that now classified under the unfortunate designation of 'Kulaks'. After all that study, they died anonymously, piled up in pits with countless bodies so distinctively unlike their own.

Why was the Tsarist regime so disgusted by the Skoptsy? Why were the Bolsheviks so ambivalently bemused, then contemptuous of them? Why did a bunch of TTRPG horror writers think it was appropriate to resurrect their ghosts and re-enact their slaughter in a contemporary fable?

Because they practised castration. Adult males chose between the 'lesser seal', which removed the testicles, or the 'greater/royal seal' which took the phallus too, with an iron nail inserted into the abbreviated urethral tract whilst it healed. Meanwhile, women chose between the removal of protruding genital parts, their nipples, or even whole breasts. These practices were conducted on consenting adults, on coerced family members, and on children too young to understand the symbolism.

My first reaction on learning about this was pure horror. I've attended Political Science lectures on how to discuss what was euphemistically referred to as "genital modification" without resorting to knee-jerk condemnations that interfere with your analysis, but the photographs on Wikipedia knocked that sobriety from my head. It was only on reading Arthur's sensitive review of the Delta Green material that I reconsidered my reaction:

I realise the original Skoptsy did that to their own children, but pinning actual child-kidnapping and the like onto them feels uncomfortably like shifting blood libel off Jews and onto a religious group who, now that they are extinct, Glancy seems to feel OK about shamelessly demonising.
- Refereeing and Reflection

I'm intrigued by the threshold where Horror crosses the threshold into tastelessness that touches at a genuine contradiction in an audience's ideology. I had to learn more, and after reading Engelstein's book, my fascination has only grown more ambivalent. Much as the Skoptsy still horrify me, I cannot help but admire their desperately sad struggle to survive against a brutal, changing world that hated and ultimately destroyed them. Crafty, bitter, resilient and lonely Scopets; it is all too sad and strange to pass over in silence!

Engelstein's book is not an easy read. Aside from a handful of literary flourishes, her words are scrupulously dry. She wants to do more than catalogue grotesquery, and to instead analyse how the Skoptsy portrayed themselves, and to contrast that with the rhetorical tropes deployed by the state actors who condemned them. Her sensitivity and restraint, as well as the precision with which she unpicks these competing, and incoherent, rhetorics is well-handled.

That said, the constant lexical and heuristic games Engelstein has to navigate are made more difficult by the fact that the Skoptsy were, by necessity, compulsive perjurers actively trying to sabotage the state's interpretive gaze on their communities. The story therefore jumps about quite a bit, sometimes proceeding thematically, sometimes chronologically, and sometimes diverting to analyse a source that has already been deployed for a hundred pages prior. On top of that, this is as much a book about the discovery of the Skoptsy by the state as it is about the way in which the Skoptsy developed and changed in response to state repression.

The Skoptsy were a folk sect of mystical Orthodox Christianity. Like other 18th century Russian folk movements, they started by a wandering prophet who claimed to secretly be Tsar Paul I (who was probably murdered by his wife, Catherine the Great). Apparently there were Paul I's running around all over the place, and one of these, misreading the Bible's injunction to плодитесь ("be fruitful") as плотитесь ("castrate yourselves"), initiated a new sect based on this activity.

It is hard not to gasp at the gothic intensity of the ensuing ritual. Skoptsy memoirs and legal testimonies linger on dramatic descriptions of grotesque amputations and the exultantly mystical (or tyrannically oppressive) circumstances surrounding them, after which the subject would scream (presumably at the top of their lungs) "CHRIST IS RISEN!", whilst the onlookers ‘cooed like white doves until the break of dawn’.

The end goal was to maintain themselves in a state of purity until the prophet Selivanov [i.e. Paul I] returned from hiding, gathered up his ‘billions’ of ‘children’ and re-ascended to the Imperial Throne over the living and the dead. To this ghoulish, necrocratic empire, the cult promised, "The rulers of the earth would bow down, while missionaries set about converting and castrating the human race."

The appeal of this was complicated, but it is hard to ignore a rank misogyny as the overriding reason: lust was the devil’s trick against men and the penis was "the key to the abyss", which was obviously located within an intimately misfortunate discretion. But this explanation is complicated by the fact that not all of the Skoptsy actually underwent castration, often being content to merely shelter the venerated members bold enough to go through with it. In addition, most Skoptsy married and reproduced before they went under the knife.

The ritual’s extremism therefore seems to have its own entirely non-sexual logic. The Skoptsy claimed that Jesus, despite being Jewish, wasn't actually circumcised - he was castrated instead. And yet, at the same time, they also claimed that the crucifixion was literally a castration, and so when they submitted to the ritual they, for a brief moment, blurred the bounds of time and space to become one with Jesus' agony on the cross. As Engelstein paraphrases it:

Castration was a feat of salvation and also a moment of communion with the divine. It was the Holy Spirit that visited the faithful in their ecstatic worship and presided over the moment of physical exaltation induced by the loss of blood and sudden shock of pain [...] [They] may have concluded that the incarnation was an ongoing process. Such a misreading can hypothetically be connected with some aspects of Byzantine theology and in particular of the Eastern Orthodox mystical tradition, which emphasizes the interdependence of the spiritual and the physical, the transcendent and the contingent. The experience of godliness in everyday life, including a vivid sense of converse with the saints, marked all folk adaptations of Orthodoxy.

Observers offered more hostile explanations. The Bolsheviks usually psychologised it as a coercive practice designed to traumatise members and prevent them from leaving the community. At other times, however, they historicised the Skoptsy, viewing them as pitiable victims of history that needed to stop re-traumatising new generations with the burdens of a broken past:

"It goes without saying that Soviet Power can under no circumstances allow perversions to be performed... by religious fanatics convinced that by mutilating people, and especially children, they will build God's kingdom on earth. Mutilation is mutilation, and it accomplishes nothing. That's my opinion. I understand the historical origins of this sect, I understand the situation of all of you who suffered under Nicholas I and II, Alexander III, II, and I. Doing what you did to yourselves you were often escaping terrible material conditions and through your ecstasy achieved the highest feelings. But now times are different, and if each can treat himself as he likes, he cannot do the same to underage children. This was not permitted before and cannot be permitted now."
- Letter from Bonch-Bruevich to Latyshev (December 1929)

The Tsarists, less self-assured, found themselves instinctively repulsed but unable to articulate precisely why. Hilariously, Tsar Alexander I attempted to simply debate them by authorising an 1819 tract repudiating their ideas on doctrinal grounds, as castration removed the believer's ability to practice moral agency in the suppression of their lust. But because the Skoptsy ideas were derived from the Orthodox faith that underpinned the state, this tract followed the contours of Skoptsy thought, leading the hierarch, Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow, to complain that it sympathised with the notions it was trying to refute! Tsar Alexander was against heavy punishment, remarking that "By their ignorant and harmful behaviour they have harmed themselves enough already." At one point he tried to humiliate Skoptsy via forced processions in their villages, but the officials overseeing these events could never be entirely sure whether the dutifully jeering crowds weren't themselves secret Skoptsy pulling the wool over the bureaucrats' eyes.

Alexander II, leading a more militant autocracy bolstered by new scientific and legal authorities, initiated a more disciplined persecution that culminated in the systematic exiling of Skoptsy to Siberia, where they were repeatedly exempted from the reprieves granted to other exiles. However, since the courts created exemptions for those castrated against their will, this prompted an entire generation of Skoptsy to game the system with blackly comical and outlandish perjuries about how they'd lost their testicles to that Hot Fuzz gag about having tripped and fell on their own sheers.

Furthermore, the courts themselves struggled to articulate exactly why self-castration should be a crime at all. Sure, it was repulsive, but legal arguments tended towards the circular, decrying the Scoptsy as "enemies of humankind, moral perverts, and violators of religious and civil law." At last, an enterprising physician by the name of Pelikan assembled a convoluted psychological model in which, to become a loyal subject of the state, individuals needed to be capable of lust so that they could start a family:

"Once he embarks on sexual life: the first instinctive call of love also inspires [men] with the urge to noble action, great deeds, and devotion to the fatherland. The young man castrated before puberty knows none of this: he remains indifferent to his environment, lacking the smallest germ of noble aspiration, sense of duty, or civic obligation… The onset of puberty does not bring family happiness; manly courage and lofty dreams are alien; rather, he acquires the vices of persons with limited vision and crude morality: egoism, cunning, perfidy, and greed."
- Pelikan, Sudebno-mcditsinskic

This idea that the Skoptsy were uniquely greedy, money-grubbing entrepreneurs on account of their dicklessness is a persistent, and deeply bizarre theme throughout the text. By the late 1800s, high-profile Skoptsy trials focused on affluent practitioners began a circulation of stereotypes normally reserved for anti-Semitic propaganda. Indeed, the comparison with Jews was often made, equivocating between circumcision and castration to 'Other' them as two sides of a similarly prolific coin.

Strangely, many Skoptsy came to internalise this reputation, dealing in metals, taking up money lending, and establishing their own businesses, including one of the first Russian photography studios. Increasing state repression prompted Skoptsy practitioners to abandon secrecy and start selectively disclosing information about themselves through publications, photographs, and letters to famous writers (including Tolstoy) in order to manage their reputation. Drawing on existing negative tropes, they reframed themselves as entrepreneurial hard workers resented for their successes. Once the Bolsheviks came to power, however, these tropes were resurrected in a class war framework to punish them as 'Kulaks' oppressing their neighbours.

The final internalised trope was undeath. The symbolism here is obvious, and I couldn't help echoing it with my remark about a ghoulish necrocracy several paragraphs ago. A state official named Nadezhdin decried the Skoptsy for their "yellowish cast" that constituted "a special type that when fully developed turns them into the walking dead, inspiring repulsion and horror." Even a progressive writer like Kel'siev, whilst trying to rebuff the demonising rhetoric about the community he visited, couldn't help himself:

"Their faces are completely bloodless, pale and dead. This is not the pallor of an old man or invalid, not even that of a corpse - this is the absence of something under the skin. Their skin is somehow differently attached to the muscles: it is thinner and more mobile, as if wanting to crawl away... When you shake their hands, the skin feels soft, flaccid and cold... Nothing about them shines: not their skin, nor their eyes; even their hair lacks sheen - everything is lifeless.
-Kel'siev, "Sviatorusskie dvoevcry"

Even the Skoptsy spokesperson, Latyshev, concurred that "The Skopets is a corpse among the living, a living being among the corpses." Yet Latyshev’s acquiescence to this trope is hard not to read outside of his conflicted personal feelings to the sect. As a non-consensual castrated youth he initially rejected his parents’ faith before returning to the fold in later life. Keenly aware of the darker sides of his culture, he acknowledged that "There are some Skoptsy, especially the young, who regret being Scoptsy and do everything, including cosmetics and massage, to change their appearance not to resemble Skoptsy” and that for some the castration was an “empty sign” forced on them.

And yet he still came to affirm his faith, befriending an ambivalent Bolshevik ethnographer, Bonch-Bruevich, to whom he provided documents, poems, and anecdotes about his people in a decades-long correspondence to ensure their place in the historical archives.

The Skoptsy began as an oral culture ruled by secrecy: it developed into a semi-literate one dedicated to self-depiction and photographic documentation. I personally find it quite upsetting that the dominant images on the Scoptsy Wikipedia page are the non-consensual, humiliating nude-photographs of raw mutilation taken by Bolshevik propagandists, and not the rather charming proto-Instagram feed of carefully arranged and fashion-conscious photographs that the Scoptsy produced of themselves. Their enemies, by leaning into the grotesque, dominate popular pictographic representations of their memory; the quieter dignity of their self-representation is buried and forgotten.

Regardless, because it originated from an illiterate culture, the Skoptsy dismissed the sanctity of scripture: they had no use for literalism when they had survived through euphemism. Their mental landscape was one of immanent mysticism; they declared that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” and condemned the “black book” of Scripture in favour of the “white book” of spiritual prophecy. At one point, the Skoptsy writer, Men'shenin, sent Bonch-Bruevich a sacred Skoptsy poem and invited him to edit it to make it more literary! Skoptsy poetry (endearingly tawdry and obsessed with puns as it was), was not something they felt precious about.

From this we must conclude that, despite (or because of?) the extreme nature of their central ritual this was a religion united by vibes, not dogma.

But consider that vibe: the pure egoism of it. Taking the knife in hand, immiserating oneself in a blast of unfathomable agony: warm lap; crimson clotting white linen; sharp-blurred tears; a shine in the ether: Christ at Golgolta, weeping and screaming, alone. No, alone no longer: you are there, bleeding with him, in him, your bodies overlaid, the flock of fellow lambs cooing like doves on the hill nearby. A limit experience to God himself: Hellraiser meets Martyrs on the back of doggerel puns and adrenaline. “God is risen!” you cry, everyone cries, and your life is forever focused onto the pinprick that is this one true moment of agony, purity, and unity with the divine.

May we never tire of the human soul that can think such things and, with conviction, pursue such strange extremes!

[Mathew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engelstein's book is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive look at the Skoptsy that exists in the English language. She does an excellent job of providing a balanced, nuanced look at the sect that doesn't just focus on the lurid details of castration (though there's plenty of that). Much of the book is translated primary source documents that are fascinating to read. Most importantly, Engelstein treats the Skoptsy as sincere believers, and even though much of their beliefs were inconsistent and strange she portrays them as sincere and thoughtful. Such a solid treatment of religious believers can be hard to find, especially for a group as strange as the Skoptsy.

My only complaint is that the book repeats itself, and a few times I felt like I was re-reading something that had already been covered.

[Christopher Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is certainly conversant with her subject but I found the book rather repetitious. There's only so much one can say about the cult, their practices,and the persecutions they suffered under various regimes over 200 years. The documentation and extracts from personal stories are impressive but the book did not completely satisfy my curiosity about these God-fearing if misguided peoples, a curiosity that stemmed from a mention in a biography of Peter the Great. The single biggest question that I did not find an answer to was "Why?" I read intensively for about a hundred pages and skimmed the rest.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I initially picked up this book and looked at the photos of the Skoptsy's self mutilation. I then sat down to browse the book at greater depth. I didn't read it cover to cover (read: I read perhaps one or two chapters) but I really enjoyed Laura's tone in talking about a group of people that were perhaps greatly misunderstood. Engelstein made a beautiful comment that I have never forgotten, “we must not cast the shadow of our own distress on the story of the Skoptsy. Their physical suffering was something they willingly embraced.”

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty fascinating look at a pretty fascinating sect, contextualising both the Skoptsy themselves and nonfiction writing about the Skoptsy in their times and places. If you’re not into reading about religious trials this probably isn’t the book for you, but if you, like me, read more about heresy trials than is probably good for you, it’s a good read. Also a fairly fascinating look at how the rhetoric of antisemitism was used to demonise Christian outgroups through implicit (or explicit) comparison to Jews in the Russian Empire and in the 1930s Soviet Union.

[Emil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now I know it's impossible to write a history book without letting your own personal editorializing and embellishments slip in, but at the very least you could try to do it less. Makes one wish they could just read the source material.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

you ever love God so much you chop off your dick and balls?

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that’s good to read before going on a first date with a woman, preferably a blind date. That way, when over dinner she asks, “You reading anything interesting?” you can honestly answer in the affirmative. “Yes, in fact I am. I am reading about the Skoptsy, a heretical sect of Christian dissenters who castrated themselves in hopes of achieving liberation from earthly appetites. Men who merely cut off their testicles were called receivers of the ‘Minor Seal,’ while those who cut off their penises were recipients of the main or ‘Major Seal.’ Would you like to have a glass of wine before dinner? I’m thinking maybe a merlot.”
The book has other things to recommend it, aside from its utility as an icebreaker when trying to impress members of the fairer sex. It is a well-researched and balanced account of a religious movement that, while extreme when viewed from the outside, is also undeniably fascinating. It is also one of which I was totally ignorant before reading the book, and one I feel fairly well-informed about having now read it. And considering it is only a shade over two-hundred pages, that is no small achievement.
Part of that has to be put down to Laura Engelstein, the rare academic who can rummage through mountains of archival material to find the most essential bits. No doubt she strained her eyes and got more than a few papercuts, but we owe her for doing yeowoman’s work. Not only that, but she fashions these piecemeal parts together into not just a work of scholarship, but a compelling story. The picture that emerges of the Skoptsky is a complex one, and it was received by the Russian people in the 19th and early 20th century with mixed reactions. Some admired their fanatical devotion, while others considered them bizarre cultists and—like the Jews consigned to the Pale Settlement—avaricious and hostile to the general peasantry. Because the Skoptsy were without issue, they tended to have a lot of extra disposable income. And because they weren’t chasing women or carousing in pubs, they had a lot of time to invest said-money. Thus, they were both admired for their thrift and prosperity but also envied and distrusted for what some perceived as their cunning.
Regardless of their general alienations and isolation—sometimes literally imposed via exile courtesy of Tsarist edict—the Skoptsy’s fortunes rose and fell with the rest of their countrymen. They endured the harsh dictates of their rulers and suffered through the early years of communism. When famine claimed the land, many of their number starved. And of course since they were not fruitful and did not multiply, it was only a matter of time until their numbers dwindled, and their movement died. Maybe there are a few left out there, or even an entire sleeper cell of Skoptsy, waiting to convert others to their castrated ranks?
Perish the thought.
Recommended. With photos.