Colonizing Russia's Promised Land

Front matter

Orthodoxy and Community on the Siberian Steppe

AILEEN E: FRIESEN ze 2 2

D IF OTCIESSTE Akmolinsk

Contents

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgments xi

Conclusion 146

Introduction

Before the Bolshevik Revolution altered the trajectory of the Russian Empire, the imperial state engaged in one of its most ambitious projects. By inviting millions of settlers to Siberia, the state sought to transform this agriculturally underdeveloped region into golden wheat fields. After their 1910 trip to Siberia, Prime Minister Petr Stolypin and Aleksandr Krivoshein, whose ministry was active in resettlement, expressed their aspirations for the region under colonization, according to which agricultural settlers would be “the chief driving force” propelling Siberia into a new economic future. Even though the Russian Empire had exerted political control over Siberia for centuries, these men had decided that everything that existed before intensive colonization represented a stagnant past; only settlers could transform the region in a way that the empire’s previous contact had failed to stimulate.’

Filosof Ornatskii, an active priest in the Russian Orthodox social gospel movement, agreed with this assessment of Siberia as a land waiting to be remade under the plough of Russia’s Orthodox peasantry.” In a 1915 sermon soliciting support for building churches in Siberia, he spoke of the “impossibility for many of our brothers to settle down freely within the boundaries of native Russia,” which pushed them beyond the Ural Mountains. In Siberia, Russian Orthodox settlers would engage with the “wide expanse of God’s world.” This movement of Orthodox believers created the opportunity for settlers to “fulfil their destiny ... given to the first man, ‘to cultivate and preserve the earth.” As they worked the soil, harvested the crops, and exploited Siberia’s rich resources, these pioneers simultaneously “serve[d] [themselves] and praise[d] God” through their labour. Agricultural development, however, was only one part of their mission. According to Ornatskii, the construction of Orthodox churches across this land for settlers planted “fortresses of the Orthodox-Russian soul” and the cradle of

“Russian civic-mindedness [grazhdanstvennost’].” Despite the ongoing world war, the full development of Siberia through the movement of Orthodox settlers promised a new chapter in the history of the empire, one that placed Russia on the path toward creating “the Kingdom of God on earth.”

The promise of this land of plenty and opportunity coexisted with another image of Siberia as a forlorn region, a “frightening heart of darkness.”* Stolypin and Krivoshein recorded the many challenges that awaited pioneers in this “harsh and monotonous” environment in which they were forced to engage “in a wearisome struggle with nature.”° Western Siberia had a long-standing reputation as a religiously desolate place where one could travel the seemingly endless plains without encountering a cupola against its expansive skies. After a trip through Siberia, Anatolii Kulomzin, who managed the Siberian Railway Committee, described the region as devoid of “the native landscape so deeply thrilling to the Russian heart — when going up a hill, suddenly seeing in the distant horizon ... a stone church with a tall bell tower.”° For state officials, the absence of parish churches symbolized the problems they confronted as they attempted to integrate Siberia culturally into the empire. Until Siberia resembled European Russia — a landscape defined by Orthodox churches filled with parishioners — the land would remain foreign, foreboding, and untamed. By remaking Siberia through Orthodoxy, its true promise would finally be achieved.

In this book, I examine the vital role performed by the Orthodox Church and faith during the colonization of western Siberia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead of seeking to convert the indigenous population or engaging in the construction of grand churches to project imperial power — both techniques the church and the state had used in the past — secular and religious officials embraced Russian Orthodox settlers as the catalyst that would integrate a region that politically was under Russian authority but which remained culturally separate. To secure the success of this project, Russian state officials and Orthodox Church authorities supported the establishment of Orthodox religious practices in Russian settler communities, as they viewed Russian Orthodoxy as being synonymous with Russian culture. For these officials, Orthodoxy could be used as an anchor of stability for settlers departing from their home communities and as a tool of transformation for making this territory an indivisible part of the empire.

It was not, however, only religious and secular officials who believed in the importance of establishing Orthodox practices in Siberia. Settlers arrived in the region with the expectation that they would have access to the same religious life that they had left behind in their homeland and they looked to secular and religious officials to support them in their efforts to recreate these customs. As settlers formed new villages, they demonstrated not only that Orthodoxy mattered; they also showed a commitment to interpret for themselves the meaning of Orthodoxy in their communities.

Ultimately, this project turned out to be more challenging than the church and state had anticipated. While they agreed that building parishes complete with churches, priests, and schools was necessary to establish functioning communities capable of perpetuating “Russian” cultural values, the process of forming these parishes highlighted the tensions that existed between and among these groups. Religious pluralism, changing social identities, the breakdown of traditional authority in the villages, the ethnic diversity contained under the umbrella of a “Russian identity,” debates over the professionalization of the clerical ranks, and the standardization of religious life - conditions associated with the creation of the modern world — shaped the contours of these new communities in Siberia. Instead of a coherent, unified faith, colonization revealed underlying disagreements among these groups as to what constituted the Russian Orthodox faith and culture they aspired to transplant to Siberia.

Colonization, therefore, forced these groups to define the meaning of Orthodoxy. From the imperial centre a strongly national understanding of Orthodoxy dominated the discourse; this was a bond that stretched across the empire, joining true Russians together. For settlers, the religious practices of their home villages in European Russia, which turned out to be quite different from that of their neighbours in Siberia, continued to hold relevance. Even with the church’s efforts to standardize these practices, the Orthodox faith remained highly localized throughout the empire. For others, especially among certain segments of the clergy, a regional identity grew in response to pressure from the imperial centre, the breakdown of the clerical estate, and the localized Orthodox practices of Siberian villages. Despite the competing definitions of Orthodoxy that colonization illuminated — or perhaps exacerbated — imperial authorities and Russian Orthodox officials forged ahead with the idea of Orthodoxy as representing a unified Russian culture until the end of the imperial empire. While these fractures did not directly cause the empire’s collapse, they raised questions about the efficacy of Orthodoxy as a pillar for Russia’s settler-driven imperial expansion.

Over the last few decades, the scholarship exploring Russia’s engagement with Siberia has grown rapidly, adding new voices to the broader story of the expanding empire. Local and regional treatments of Siberian history have offered new perspectives on knowledge creation, networks, land ownership, political movements, and other themes,’ these works enhance the numerous sweeping portraits that have been published in the past two decades. Such work has shown that over the course of four centuries, the Russian state continuously rediscovered Siberia as the economic, political, social, and cultural circumstances of the empire evolved.’ In many cases, the themes of previous discoveries were repeated, albeit with significant variations: for instance, the seventeenth-century program of Christianizing the land of Siberia identified by Valerie Kivelson, and the messianic nationalism of the nineteenth century described by Mark Bassin, emerged again in the early twentieth century in secular and religious thinking on Siberia.” These ideas, however, were now reinvented to be firmly associated with the movement of millions of Orthodox settlers to the region.

The addition of intensive colonization to the Siberian story mirrored the expansion of other European empires as voluntary migrants moved across the globe during the long nineteenth century." Yet, for the tsarist empire, the post-1890 round of Siberian resettlement coincided with a particularly volatile period in Russian history. Often viewed as a period of “imperial anxieties,” the tsarist regime struggled to establish uniformity in imperial governance over its multi-ethnic and multi-confessional empire. This was also a period of great contradictions, as the case of Siberia illustrates. Although the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway advertised the scientific advancements of the state and the intrepidness of the Russian spirit, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 would reveal the Russian Empire’s inability to back up its projection of power in the region. The loss of the war and the abrupt turn to parliamentary politics with the formation of the State Duma, along with the recognition (albeit imperfect) of individual religious rights in 1905, contributed to the atmosphere of transformation that was already underway. During this period, a number of visions of the empire coalesced and competed to define its future, each one pursuing a different approach to the question of nationality and nationalism." For many of the actors involved in the colonization of Siberia, a shift away from the principle of estates and toward the favouring of Orthodox Russians was discernible.

This shift influenced settler colonialism as the state created new policies and structures that supported settlers in the reproduction of their own society.” The encouragement of Orthodox settlers to the region reflected a change in the state’s perception of this land, which was now to be an oasis of agriculture amenable to the replication of the colonizers’ culture. This involved the direct displacement of indigenous populations as settlers claimed moral and physical ownership over the land and nearby resources, thereby altering the local population’s land use and constraining their access to traditional sources of food and water." The demographic consequences of settler colonialism in Siberia was noticeable: in 1858, the non-indigenous population (Russians and other ethnicities) was over 2 million; by 1911, this number had increased to over 8 million.” Such a change in population altered the economic, political, and cultural contours of Russian rule. In contrast to Central Asia, where demographics and the level of religiosity among the local Muslim population persuaded state officials to pursue a more secular approach to the integration of this territory into the empire, the dominance of Russian Orthodox settlers was embraced in Siberia."

A significant number of these settlers established communities in western Siberia, particularly in the territory of Omsk diocese. This diocese, established in 1895, notably straddled the imaginary line between Siberia and Central Asia as it encompassed part of the Kazakh steppe (the provinces of Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk) and the territory north of Omsk.” A large indigenous population of nomadic Muslim Kazakhs inhabited the steppe provinces, initially outnumbering the Russian population significantly. Upon their arrival, settlers established homes on land owned by the state or rented from the Kazakhs and the Cossacks, the latter group having settled in the region centuries earlier. As the settler population grew, the Russian state reduced the land it had allocated to the Kazakhs, hindering their movement with their herds and creating the conditions for an economic and cultural crisis in this community.”

A number of factors make Omsk diocese an interesting case study. This particular diocese experienced intensive settlement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the Orthodox population almost tripled in less than twenty years, from just over half a million in 1898 to nearly 1.5 million by 1914.” This transformation of the territory of Omsk provides an opportunity to investigate the development of a diocese forged in the complicated environment of colonization. Established western Siberian dioceses like Tobol’sk and Tomsk had time to develop their institutional culture in a gradual, coherent fashion, whereas Omsk diocese had to be built from the ground up during the disruption of colonization.

Despite the Orthodox Church’s special status in imperial Russia, scholarship on its role in the expansion and formation of the empire in the nineteenth century has been sparse. In fact, it has been mainly scholarship exploring the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries that has shown how Orthodoxy served an ideological and institutional function in the expansion of the tsarist empire.” In contrast, the influence of religious minority groups in the imperial borderlands during the nineteenth century has received significantly more attention.” While this scholarship has illuminated important themes, such as the role of missions, conversion, governance through religious toleration, and sectarian colonization in the formation of Russia as a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional empire, the contribution of Russian Orthodox settlers in conjunction with the institutional church in this process has been obscured.”

Such neglect of the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in empire building has hidden its intensive expansion into the imperial periphery, especially in Siberia. The institutional growth of the Orthodox Church intensified during the nineteenth century as it rapidly extended its reach into the region. In the seventeenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church established its first diocese in Tobol’sk; in the eighteenth century, it added two more, with Irkutsk and Orenburg as their capitals. A flurry of activity unfolded in the nineteenth century with 9 dioceses opening across Siberia and Central Asia, beginning with Tomsk in 1834, and ending with the dioceses of Blagoveshchensk in 1899. By the beginning of the twentieth century, 12 dioceses existed, of which 8 had been established in the second half of the nineteenth century.” This institutional expansion was supported by approximately 10,000 clergymen working in the region.”

Like other European powers, the Russian Empire used religion to justify, support, and promote the movement of settlers from the metropole to the imperial periphery. Many in clerical robes and the uniforms of official tsardom shared a similar ideological perspective, which supported this institutional cooperation. A strong belief prevailed in these circles that the planting of Russian culture through churches was necessary to ensure the success of colonization. On the ground, priests regularly relied on a narrative of cultural transformation as they described their work of establishing Orthodox outposts of settlers as glorifying both the motherland and God. Like their British counterparts, Russian Orthodox leaders also understood their work in Siberia as fulfilling the church’s destiny of creating a Christian empire that would renew the world.” Local clergymen savoured their role in this refashioning of the wild pasturelands of nomadic Kazakhs into ploughed fields marked by bell towers and cupolas. This project also incorporated the Russian Orthodox people as a national group. By involving the Orthodox faithful in funding the building of churches, the state and church encouraged parishioners to think beyond their local identities and to envision their faith in an imperial context. Through the creation of an official space for the general public to participate in imagining colonization, the tsarist regime encouraged an expression of national identity rooted in the Orthodox faith.

Under state-led colonization, cooperation deepened between the state and the Orthodox Church in the imperial borderlands.” While tensions still existed, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that Siberian colonization strengthened the lines of communication and collaboration between the church and state under the banner of empire. From the late nineteenth century until the end of the tsarist empire, the building of parishes for settlers was incorporated into the state bureaucratic structure administering and supporting resettlement. For many European empires, religious institutions were a means to stabilize communities in transition and plant the culture of the imperial centre. Within this context, financial and clerical support from the metropole for local parishes shaped the religious practices of settlers, tying the centre and periphery together.” In the Russian case, the Siberian Railway Committee, and later a partnership formed between the Holy Synod and the Resettlement Administration (under the authority of the Main Administration of Land Management and Agriculture — Glavnoe upravlenie zemleustroistva i zemledeliia, or GUZiZ) assisted settlers in establishing the foundations for parish life: churches, schools, and access to clergymen. Especially after 1908, the technocratic approach of the Resettlement Administration aided significantly in the growth of this project. Instead of “the decade of despair” that Jennifer Hedda has identified as characterizing church-state relations in St. Petersburg, the case of Siberia illustrates how the agendas of these institutions were united in the imperial borderland.

This project, however, was one that excluded the many other non-Orthodox faiths that lived in the empire. Unlike the British case, which by the nineteenth century had embraced religious pluralism among Christian believers under the umbrella of an imperial identity, the Russian state supported an identity that assumed membership in the Orthodox Church.” This limited the role available to other religious groups (and other ethnicities) on the imperial periphery. Under this vision, Russian Orthodoxy was tasked with acting as a bulwark against the influence of Islam and sectarianism in Siberia. Russian Baptists and other groups, however, challenged this narrative of a divine marriage between Russianness and Orthodoxy.*’ As the Russian state aspired to a coordinated and well-organized colonization that would showcase the cultural power of the Russian Empire, these alternatives to the Orthodox faith caused great anxiety for religious and secular officials, especially in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution.

It was not only sectarians who destabilized the imperial project in Siberia. Similar to widespread urbanization happening at the same time, colonization caused disruption in the lives of settlers, exposing them to new places, experiences, and ideas without the traditional filters of rural life to soften these changes. Under these conditions, settlers understood the Orthodox Church as one of the primary institutions supporting and perpetuating the traditions of their community, particularly in grounding their youth in the village. Peasant commitment to tradition, while easily overstated, showed through strongly during the process of resettlement. Settlers travelled to Siberia to maintain their rural way of life, an option increasingly less available in European Russia as land hunger threatened agricultural livelihoods.’

Establishing those traditions in Siberia was challenging. Orthodox priests, like their French counterparts working on the American frontier who attempted to transform “the unsettled, unscripted, [into] a settled, scripted, and official Catholic way of life,” encountered a host of issues in their newly built parishes.” Like on the Canadian Prairies, the settlers’ former homelands shaped the ways in which they understood and interacted with their new environment religiously.” Orthodox settlers believed the localized practices they brought to Siberia from their original communities to be the proper way of practising Orthodoxy. This created problems for the relationship between Orthodoxy and a Russian national identity as the diversity of interpretations and practices housed under the banner of Orthodoxy — often exacerbated by social, linguistic, and cultural differences — caused tensions for settlers who were often very attached to their version of the Orthodox faith.

While settlers were invested in Orthodoxy, they showed little concern about Europeanness and Russia’s Great Power status.** As sources written by settlers show, everyday life as defined by work, land, community, family, and faith preoccupied their thoughts more than claims to imperial greatness.” Nonetheless, settlers consistently referred to the territory they had left behind as “Russia,” thereby illustrating that they understood their villages in Siberia as existing outside of their own homeland. And many appeared to embrace the identity of “settler.” They used this term to designate a special relationship between their settler communities and the Russian state. Embedded in this awareness was the idea that they represented outposts of Russian religiosity, even if they did not live up to the expectations of state and church officials."

In general, religion performed a significant role in how clergymen and parishioners created, experienced, and interpreted their new Siberian lives. Recent scholarship has explored the central role of the “lexicon, liturgy, and theology of Russian Orthodoxy” in shaping the discourse on the changing material circumstances and intellectual landscape of modern Russia.” Modern forms of transportation, technology, and communication not only revolutionized everyday life for inhabitants of imperial Russia, but they also transformed religious experiences, contributing to the formation of new personal, regional, and national sacred narratives that were influenced by the forces of centralization, standardization, and perhaps contradictorily, democratization.” In Siberia, Orthodox settlers continued to rely on their faith as a useful lens through which they could understand the changes they were experiencing. Colonization allowed them to take a more active role in defining the practices of worship that satisfied their religiosity, but it also forced them to contemplate their religious practices in the face of the religious diversity that they encountered within Orthodoxy.” Sometimes this contemplation led to a search for spiritual answers from other Christian faiths. For clergymen in Omsk diocese, this changing landscape challenged them to navigate standardization not only within their parish communities, but also within their own ranks, as more men from outside of the clerical estate entered into their profession.

This book relies on a variety of archival and published sources from both the imperial centre and the periphery. In St. Petersburg, the records of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, the office of its chief procurator, the Siberian Railway Committee, and the Resettlement Administration provide the perspectives of both the church and the state in relation to the settler movement. In Moscow, the personal papers of Ioann Vostorgov, a central figure in the resettlement story, offers insight into the breakdown of the clerical estate and the tensions it caused between European Russia and Siberia. Orthodox journals on missionary work illuminate how colonization influenced the missionary activities of the church in the region. Church News provides the perspective of the Holy Synod that oversaw church affairs emanating from the centre. For the local perspective, I worked with the Omsk diocesan consistory papers and the Omsk Diocesan News, a journal that provides in-depth coverage of the issues deemed significant by local clergy. Hidden in all of these sources are the voices of settlers as they engaged with the official structure of church and state, primarily through the form of petitions and published letters.

Chapter 1 explores the shift initiated by colonization for the Russian Orthodox Church as it transitioned from converting local indigenous populations to being preoccupied with the religious needs of Orthodox settlers. Chapter 2 focuses on how the Emperor Alexander III Fund created a space for Orthodox believers to contribute to the colonial effort through financial donations. Chapter 3 explores how the building of parish life unfolded and the challenges and compromises created by the realities of mass migration for settlers, the church, and the state. In Chapter 4, I explore the disruption that colonization brought about for Omsk clergymen as the diocese struggled with recruitment and building unity among a socially and culturally diverse set of men.

Despite the great efforts to accommodate and strengthen the Orthodox faith among settlers, cracks appeared from the outset. Orthodox settlers arrived from all parts of the empire, bringing with them the religious traditions of their home provinces. Using the concept of lived religion, chapter 5 analyses the realities of building community life as religious customs and traditions collided in the parishes of Omsk diocese. Chapter 6 explores how religious pluralism, a controversial and divisive issue in early twentieth-century Russia, influenced the unfolding of settler colonialism.

Woven together, these chapters shed light on the role of the Orthodox faith during the colonization of Siberia. They show how the economic and cultural dislocation instigated by migration did not lead to the secularization of rural communities. However, even though church, state, and settlers alike demonstrated a deep commitment to planting Orthodoxy in Siberia, colonization forced these different groups to define the meaning of Orthodoxy. The case of Omsk diocese shows the competing definitions, not readily apparent in rural European Russia, that colonization brought to the surface.

Chapter One

In 1895, the bishop of Omsk and Semipalatinsk, Grigorii (Poletaev), arrived in Omsk to find himself without an episcopal residence. Thankfully it was late May and not January, when the cold Siberian winter air might have reduced the bishop’s spirits. Finding a suitable place to live was only the first of many challenges that this sixty-four-year-old faced in his new diocese. In many respects, his former diocese of Turkestan and Tashkent had prepared Grigorii for the trials of pastoring in Omsk. Both dioceses faced many of the same issues: a shortage of priests, an absence of churches, an underdeveloped ecclesiastical educational system, meagre diocesan financial funds, and the presence of a large indigenous Muslim population. At least some of these similarities must have been apparent during his stopover in Semipalatinsk, a town across the border from the Chinese Empire that had started as a Russian fort along the Siberian line and had since grown into a centre of trade and commerce. As Bishop Grigorii passed through, nine mosques announced the religious identity of the town.!

From Semipalatinsk, Bishop Grigorii travelled by steamship along the Irtysh River to Omsk — a trip that took five days. By May, the ice covering the river had already cracked and floated north toward the Arctic, opening the steamship lanes between the two towns. Omsk welcomed its first bishop with the sound of ringing church bells. Despite this religious gesture, Omsk hardly had a storied spiritual, or even cultural, history. A decade earlier, the American explorer George Kennan had captured the stark functionality of Omsk as a place where “the largest building is a military academy and the most picturesque building a police station; in which there is neither a newspaper nor a public library.”? After Grigorii arrived, the title of most picturesque building would soon belong to the Cathedral of the Assumption, a colourful, five-domed Orthodox church inspired by the fanciful design of the

Church of the Spilt Blood in St. Petersburg. Even with this architectural connection to the imperial capital, the tell-tale signs of Omsk’s transitional state could be seen everywhere, particularly in the bustling railway station filled with weary settlers from European Russia passing through to unknown destinations.

The arrival of the bishop represented an opportunity to spread Russian culture across the endless steppe. In conversations leading up to the formation of the diocese, the task of missionizing the local Muslim population occupied a position of importance on the agenda of church leaders. The Orthodox Church believed that nomadic Kazakhs were Muslim in name only and therefore a fertile field for the spread of Christianity. However, the flood of Orthodox settlers appearing at the railway station had made another option possible: the Christianization of the land instantaneously through demographic transformation. The conversion of the local indigenous population, while still considered an admirable and noble pursuit, now occupied a secondary position to the primary purpose of the diocese: attending to the religious needs of the Russian settlers who now called Siberia home. The appearance of these settlers altered the priorities of local diocesan officials and offered activists in the Orthodox Church a new cause to trumpet.

People of the Steppe

Russia’s political engagement with Siberia began in the sixteenth century as the wealthy and well-connected Stroganov family tasked Ermak Timofeevich and his band of Cossack mercenaries to explore the rich resources, particularly furs, of Siberia. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the state established the first section of the Siberian line, a string of forts along the Irtysh River: Omsk (1716), Semipalatinsk (1718), Ust-Kamenogorsk (1719), and Pavlodar (1720).? Cossacks, groups of peasant-soldiers who provided military service for the tsarist regime in exchange for privileges, constructed and lived in these forts, from which they assumed the task of safeguarding Russian economic interests against the Kalmyks, who regularly staged incursions into this territory. Until 1809, the Bashkir Cossacks, who were Muslim, constituted a section of the Cossack guard serving to protect the empire. Eventually, the state replaced the Bashkir Cossacks with the Siberian Cossack Host, composed mainly of Orthodox Christians but still including a small number of Muslims.’ Cossacks were, in essence, the first “Russian” settlers in the region as the state granted them large tracts of lands in perpetuity to encourage them to develop agricultural communities." By the early twentieth century, Cossack communities continued to make up a distinctive portion of the parishioners in Omsk diocese.

Despite the presence of Cossacks, Russia primarily explored and exploited Siberia, instead of subduing it through intensive colonization.

In addition to the Cossacks, exiles — both criminal and political — composed a significant portion of the non-indigenous population. By 1744, Russia ceased to rely on the death penalty, thereby solidifying Siberia’s purpose as the primary site in the empire for the banishment of criminals and those imperial subjects that the state deemed politically suspect.’ In the nineteenth century, the tsarist regime used Siberia as a dumping ground for groups like the Decembrists and members of the Petrashevsky Circle - most famously Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who spent time in an Omsk prison during his exile. Although the state stopped shipping criminals to Siberia in the early twentieth century, political offenders still received this punishment, with Bolshevik luminaries such as Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin serving sentences in the region.®

The local population also grew, in part, through the exile and exodus of religious dissenters and sectarians from European Russia. Persecuted for refusing to accept the changes initiated by Patriarch Nikon in the second half of the seventeenth century, Old Believers fled to Siberia, where they could practise what they viewed as authentic Orthodoxy out of the state’s reach. This established a large population of Siberian Old Believers who lived, worked, and prayed in their own communities. In the territory that would become Omsk diocese, many Old Believers chose to live off the beaten track — for instance, near the Altai Mountains.’ Beginning in the eighteenth and extending into the nineteenth century, the state exiled apostates from the Orthodox Church, banishing members of so-called heretical groups such as the Skoptsy and Doukhobors to the region. On the one hand, state officials viewed dissenter and sectarian settlers as exemplifying strong “colonizing abilities” such as “industriousness, thrift, and sobriety.” Yet, they also characterized the presence of these groups as dangerous to Orthodoxy in the region.” As long as Russian Orthodox settlement remained underdeveloped, this contradiction existed without causing much concern.