On 1 December 1911, the priest's wife Zinaida Troitskaia was found murdered in the backwoods village of Alajõe in eastern Estland province. This episode charts the scandalous details found by the investigation and asks what they tell us about the private lives of the rural Russian Orthodox clergy.
This episode is based on my article for the website Deep Baltic. This can be found at: https://deepbaltic.com/2023/01/27/murder-most-orthodox-in-estonia-the-death-of-zinaida-troitskaia/
Sources
EAA.1898.1.64
EAA.105.1.11294
EAA.1655.2.2590
EAA.1655.2.2738
EAA.1655.2.2739
EAA.1655.2.161
EAA.1655.2.172
EAA.1898.1.70
EAA.1898.1.11
EAA.1898.1.60
EAA.1898.1.58
EAA.1898.1.11
J. M. White, “Russian Orthodox Monasticism in Riga Diocese, 1881-1917”, Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 62, no. 3-4 (2020), 377-379
Andrei Sõtšov, “Eesti õigeusu piiskopkonna halduskorraldus ja vaimulikkond aastail 1945–1953” (MA thesis: University of Tartu, 2004)
K. Weber, “Religion and Law in the Russian Empire: Lutheran Pastors on Trial, 1860-1917” (PhD dissertation: New York University, 2013)
A. Polunov, “Imperiia, pravoslavie i problema reform v Pribaltike: k istorii religiozno-politicheskii bor’by 1880-kh – pervoi poloviny 1890-kh gg.” In I. Paert, ed., Pravoslavie v Pribaltike: Religiia, politika, obrazovanie, 1840-e – 1930-e gg. (Tartu: Izdatel’stvo Tartuskogo Universiteta, 2018): 207-227
G. Freeze, “Profane Narratives about a Holy Sacrament: Marriage and Divorce in the Late Imperial Russia” in M. D. Steinberg and H. J. Coleman, eds., Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007)
In 1817, Agustín José Pedro del Carmen Domingo de Candelaria de Betancourt y Molina (known in Russian as Avgustin Betankur) surveyed the site of...
In the early nineteenth century, Raffaele Scassi, Genoese gambler and ne'er-do-well, found himself in the newly founded Black Sea port of Odessa. This was...
In this episode, we look at the story of the oddly refined peasant wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, who was claimed by many to be the...