Inochentism and Russian Orthodoxy ― Narratives of Resistance

This book explores the history and evolution of a controversial new religious movement that emerged in the Russian borderlands of Moldova and Ukraine in the context of the Russian revolutionary period. It centres around the charismatic preaching of Inochentie, a monk of the Orthodox Church, known to his followers as the ’Prophet of Fire’, who inspired an apocalyptic movement that was soon labelled heretical by the Orthodox Church and persecuted as politically subversive by Soviet state authorities. This book charts the emergence and development of Inochentism through the twentieth century based on oral testimonies, folk narratives and previously unstudied secret police and church archival material. Focusing on the role that religious persecution and social marginalization has played in the transformation of this understudied and much vilified group, the author explores a series of counter-narratives that challenge the mainstream historiography of the movement and highlight the significance of the concept of ’liminality’ in relation to the study of new religious movements and Orthodoxy. This book constitutes the first systematic study in the English language of an Eastern European ’home-grown’ religious movement taking a ’grass-roots’ ethnographic approach to the problem of minority religious identities in post-Socialist Eastern Europe.

James A. KapalA3 (MA School of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies, University College London, Ph.D, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) is lecturer in the Study of Religions at University College Cork, Ireland. His research focuses on religious minorities and marginalized communities in Eastern Europe in the 20th century, the politics of folk religion and Orthodox Christianity in the contemporary world. He is co-director of the Marginalized and Endangered Worldviews Study Centre (MEWSC) at University College Cork. His first monograph, Text, Context and Performance: Gagauz Folk Religion in Discourse and Practice (Brill 2011), is an ethnographic study of lived religion and identity amongst Moldova’s Turkish speaking Orthodox Christian minority. He has recently co-edited a volume (with A?va PA3cs and Will Ryan) The Power of Words: Studies of Charms and Charming in Europe (CEU Press 2013).