Alexey Chernov

Raised on milk Alexey Chernov

The Movement of Spiritual Christians Molokans occupies a separate page in the history of Russian sectarianism, both on the scale of its spread, and on the features of its doctrine and cult practices. About Russian sectarianism, including one of its most common branches, Molokanism, much has been written, and at the same time little. Why is this so? Because to this day a large library of writings by "schismatic scholars" and missionaries of the Orthodox Church, aimed at theological, canonical, church-historical "denunciation of sectarianism", constitute a vast body of literature. These works are tendentious and cannot be the only source for unbiased scholarly research. Certainly, materials collected by expeditions led by A. I. Klibanov in the 1960s do not lose their significance. However, in the synthesizing part, the mentioned studies were based on the principles of atheistic Marxist methodology. The modern socio-cultural context allows a new understanding of the history of religious movements in the USSR. The study of the history and current state of the Spiritual Christian Molokan movement, not from the position of denunciation or atheistic ideology, is still in its infancy.