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Трезвые пути: от истории к современности: Рец. на кн.: Page Herrlinger. Holy Sobriety in Modern Russia: A Faith Healer and His Followers. Ithaca, NY: Northern Illinois University Press, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2023. XV+340 p.
The book by Page Herrlinger constitutes the most comprehensive existing historical research on the movement of Brother Ioann Churikov’s teetotalers (trezvenniki), encompassing the period from the dawn of the community up to our day. Using an extensive array of documents, Herrlinger demonstrates the process of the development of the teetotalers’ identity and proposes some possible explanations for the community’s endurance after both its founder and the Soviet era. The book consistently engages with the key challenges the movement encountered throughout its history while considering the strategies they employed in order to persist as a community. The author discovers both the particular aspects that divided Churikov’s followers and the factors that contributed to the consolidation of the movement. The key goal of the research is to understand Brother Ioann and his followers as evolving moral, spiritual, and religious beings in the specific contexts of modernizing Russia, living in and engaging with the cultures of prerevolutionary Russian Orthodoxy and Soviet socialism. Within the genre of collective biography the book provides a perspective on the history of the movement through the lens of grand narratives while reflecting the impact of these overarching contexts and tendencies within the individual biographies of the teetotalers. This review represents the perspective of an anthropologist studying contemporary teetotalers on historical research into this movement, providing a space for reflection on methodological limitations and advantages, as well as on the different perspectives that emerge from fieldwork or archival study of the same movement.