From the Baltic to the Black Sea, the First World War's eastern front massacred men by the thousand. Father Dimitrii Smirnov, along with hundreds of other religious officials, tried to offer spiritual solace to the fighting and the dying, all while suffering hardships himself and witnessing the horrors of modern warfare. Father Dimitrii's experiences were made all the more arduous by the fact that he was an Old Believer, a religious group that had only recently been granted full legal standing.
Further reading: James M. White: ‘Battling for Legitimacy: Russian Old Believer Priests in the First World War,’ First World War Studies, vol. 7, no. 2-3 (2017), 93-113.
E. M. Iukhimenko, “Pis’ma staroobriadcheskogo sviashchennika Dimitriia Smirnova s Russko-iaponskoi voiny 1904-1905 gg.” in Starobriadchestvo Sibiri i Dal’nego Vostoka. Materialy chetvertoi mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii 14-17 sentiabria 2004 goda g. Vladivostok (Vladivostok, 2004), 46-59.
The 1804/1818 song collection of Kirsha Danilov introduced the Russian reading public, in many ways for the first time, to the people's immensely rich...
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...
Everyone in the late Russian Empire was in agreement: the country had a vodka problem. But what were its causes and how should it...
