Unobscured · iHeartPodcasts and Grim & Mild

S4 – Interview 2: Heather Coleman

January 12, 2022·1 hr 48 min·9 clips

A historian finds Bolsheviks anxious about Baptist choirs in 1920s newspapers, uncovering religion's hidden role in early Soviet Russia.

The episode begins with lived religion. Coleman's work looks past courts and palaces toward ordinary Russians and the worlds where they practiced Christianity. The pressure point is social change. Russian Baptists offer one way to see why religious minorities mattered during the rise of the Bolsheviks, especially when few historians had written much about that role. The labels are loaded. Coleman describes a state and church structure that sorted dissenting groups by danger, moral threat, and evangelical energy. Some of that fear was real to the authorities, even when the evidence was shaky. The halisti are treated as dangerous through accusations of self-flagellation and sexual danger. Baptists worry authorities because they proselytize. The church, meanwhile, is uneasy about tolerance. In the 1890s and early 1900s, the Orthodox Church ran internal missions meant to pull ethnic Russian believers back into the state church. Old Believers sit in a separate lane. Coleman notes that they were treated as their own category, apart from the groups called sects. The anxiety is political. If a believer rejected loyalty to the state church, officials could read that as disloyalty to the state itself. The interview then broadens. Coleman is asked to explain Russian Orthodox authority, starting with Peter the Great and the early eighteenth-century reshaping of church and state. It is a huge question. Coleman pauses, gathers herself, and puts Peter's reforms at the center of a reordered bond between imperial power and church structure. The ending turns to empire. Russia, like the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, had to choose between a national project not based on one ethnicity and an ethnic nationalism. It tried both.

As heard by us

A sharp guide to Russian religion as lived faith, imperial policy, and political anxiety.

Unobscured turns from Rasputin's reputation to the religious world that made his story legible. Heather Coleman, a historian of Russian religion, is strongest when she pulls the subject away from palace intrigue and into lived faith: Baptists, Old Believers, Orthodox missions,…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

The surprising reason Russian Baptists were classified among the empire's most dangerous religious sects.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Unobscured