The William C. Brumfield Photograph
Collection:
From 1987-2000
William C. Brumfield took 1,137 photographic slides (color;
35mm.) for
his
research and teaching as a Professor of Slavic Studies at Tulane
University, New Orleans, Louisiana, and as a lecturer at the School of
Architecture, museums,
and universities in North America and Europe.
Several hundred of the
slides were taken especially for the Library of Congress project
"Meeting
of
Frontiers" on three trips to Russia in 1999 and 2000. The
photographs
document the architecture
of pre-Soviet Russia. Most of the structures are churches, cathedrals,
and monasteries, often shown in multiple views. Structures are
located
in both large cities and small towns from west of the Ural Mountains
eastward through Siberia. ... represented are dwellings,
commercial, and log buildings along with a few views of meadows, lakes,
rivers and trees.
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Three of his photos
(below) in Blagoveshchensk
are definitely Molokan
buildings
— the church [prayer house] and two businesses.
Details of Molokans in Amur, Far East Russia, can be found in History
of
Religious
Sectarianism
in
Russia
(1860s - 1917), by A.I.
Klibanov, (translated) pages 184-199, 205, with statistics in the
Appendix, pages 412-421. Here is an excerpt:
"...precisely in the Amur region,
Molokanism found the freest conditions ... for the structuring of their
life on the basis of the faith, traditions, and social and ethnical
basis to which they adhered. The resettlement of Molokans in the Amur
region began in 1859 ...Molokans and Doukhobors up to the 1880s were
half of the rural population of the Amur region... in 1887..'. it
would not be an exaggeration to call the city of Blogoveshshensk a
Molokan city' . ... [they] conduct large trading operations in
meat and
grain, which unfortunately are monopolized exclusively by them. ...
from
which operations they make large profits. ... 'the Molokans are the
wealthiest class.' ... A special study of private property in
land in
Amur Oblast, conducted in 1910 ...showed that the proportion of
Molokans among landowners was ...about 68%.."
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Photo
by
Brumfield
The right side of the building above (covered by trees) is shown in the
painting below, and the left side
(covered by trees)
is shown in the 2 photos far
right.
Painting by
contemporary Blagoveshchensk
artist Urii Nakonechnyi
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Prayer House
of
the Spiritual Christians (Molokane) (built ~1910)
This is the largest Molokan prayer
house, church
or building, in the
world. Inside are many support
pillars. Capacity is over 1000, the choir was in the 100s.
We don't
know what happened to this
largest Molokan congregation in the world. I'm not sure the building is
still
used for religion. In the Summer of 1999 an anthropologist from
Washington state said she entered the building and saw that Baptists
were worshiping, and a small original sign at the entrance identified
the
builders: "Молитвенный дом духовных христин — молокан" ["Prayer
house of the Spiritual Christian Molokans"]. But a list of
historic buildings in Blagoveshchensk
says it is a "Perfusiology Laboratory (artificial blood circulation),
formerly a Molokan sectarian prayer building" [#55.
Лаборатория
искусственного кровообращения (бывший молитвенный дом молокан
-сектантов)], address: 97
Gorky
Street (ул.
им.
Горького,
97). Maps of the region and city below mark the prayer
home location which can be seen in detail by clicking on the addresses
above, or here
to
see
the
satellite
image
of the Moloan prayer home.
Molokans in San Fransicso have 2 more
photos taken in the 1920s
of the outside and inside, which will be posted if I get images.
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Molokans going to
Sunday prayer meeting ~1910. From: Blagoveshchensk
architecture
1912 postcard titled: Molokan prayer building —
Blagoveshchensk.
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Saiapin Brothers Flour
Mill (built ~1899)
"During the 1880s and especially the 1890s in the cities of the Amur
region , industrial production developed — flour milling, lumbering,
and
the cheese-capitalists. The Molokans Alekseev, Voblikov, and Saiapin had a
flour-milling business, whose equipment cost 132,000 rubles, and their
yearly production in 1896 amounted to 643,030 rubles." [Nearly 500% return on investment (ROI)
per year !] (Klibanov,
page
185).
Only
one
Molokan
from Amur attended the 2nd
International Molokan Convention in Ukriane in 1992 — Saiapin.
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Kositsyn
Store (built ~1902)
After the Russian Revolution, some Kositsyns from Blagoveshchensk fled
from Russia through China. They lived
in Harbin (see map above) for several years with hundreds of other
refugees, many were Molokane and Doukhobors. These Kositsyns then moved
to Sidney,
Australia, where
they established a Molokan church in the 1950s. One Kositsyn was
presbyter, and his brother
(Leo Nick. Kocitzen) later moved to Oakland, California, and joined the
San Francisco Molokan church. In the 1960s Leo was the first American
Molokan to
meet Dr. Stephen P.
Dunn and Ethel Dunn and introduce them to other Molokane. At that
time the Dunns
just started to translate articles about Molokane and Pryguny, they
later
published several books and many articles about American Molokane and
Dukh-i-zhiniki.
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