Books: Sects war

The Spirit-Wrestlers: a Russian journey

by Philip Marsden

HarperCollins, pounds 17.99

My grandma Fanny was 15 when she attended her last political meeting in Russia. Cossacks burst in and beat people with swords and clubs as they tried to escape. The women were whipped. Fanny returned home in shock, the bloody remnants of her coat stuck to her skin like a bandage. It could only be peeled off slowly, leaving behind an indelible memory that she passed on to my father and then to me.

The descendants of my grandmother's attackers are still mired in violence. But they have changed from being the perpetrators of violence to, more often than not, the victims. The leaping cut-throats who inhabited my childhood imagination died long ago in mass migrations, village burnings, labour camps and the Great Famine. In their place are a haunted people struggling to survive the Russian climate and Soviet history.

The Spirit-Wrestlers is Philip Marsden's third journey to the southern reaches of the former Soviet Union, after The Crossing Place and The Bronski House. This time he tells the story of the Caucasus, the region between the Black and Caspian Seas. It is a rough, mysterious country, home not only to semi-nascent Cossack communities but to some of Russia's oldest, most persecuted Christian sects: the Old Believers who make the sign of the cross with two, not three, fingers, the Milk Drinkers or Molokans, who believe that the word of God comes through the milk of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit-Wrestlers or Doukhobors, who rejected the Orthodox Church in the 19th century and practise a radical Christian individualism.

Many of these sects had been deposited there as punishment or were refugees. But now they know only the grassy steppes and birch forests of the Caucasus. The Spirit-Wrestlers is part travelogue, part record of a unique way of life. Even if these peoples do survive into the next millennium with their customs and religion intact, modernising forces will swallow up their past. It is all the more extraordinary, then, that Marsden has so movingly captured these communities in a series of exquisitely drawn word pictures. His encounters sing with a lyric intensity, whether it is the lament of a Georgian prince, or the religious monologues of the Sheikh of Sheikhs who keeps the shrine of the Yezidis.

Marsden writes with a love and respect for his subjects that is neither sentimental nor naive. He approaches them with the clarity of a historian and the pity of a tragic dramatist, aware that many of them, like the Cossacks, have a darker side. The Spirit-Wrestlers is an account of what remains of their fading light.