“The Red Death” of Kabankin: The Wanderers and Russian Ritual Murder in Late Romanov’s Empire

Abstract

In this article I review the corpus of newspaper materials related to the purported involvement a group of Saratov Old Believers in a ritual murder, which allegedly took place in late 1911. Taking into account the context of other high-profile cases of ritual murder of that time — “Multan’s case” and “Baelis’ case” — the paper considers the specifics of the charges against the ethnic majority to which the suspected ethnic Russian wanderers belonged. The analysis focuses on the discursive transformation of the majority / minority boundaries under the conditions of the nationalizing Russian Empire at the turn of 19th–20th centuries, reflected in the press materials devoted to a specific episode. The religious factor in determining the boundary as “the Self / the Other” turned out to be non-essential — compared to the ethnic factor — when it comes to the Saratov wanderers. Thus, we find evidence for a certain normalization of the wanderers, who begin to be thought of as Russians first — and sectarians second. Their ethnicity, according to the logic of some of the publicists who describe them, endows them with a certain set of qualities — among them the impossibility of committing ritual murder. Without questioning the homogenizing logic of the modern discourse about defining the boundaries of “the Self / the Other” and “norm-deviation”, the article argues that these boundaries, even in the conditions of a nationalizing empire, appeared to be flexible enough to carry out the inclusion of subjects that were outside the conventional norm, thus making the normative area a plastic and constantly changing space. The ambivalent position of the Old Believers (representatives of a dominant ethnic group and, at the same time, a religious minority) was reflected in the press reports on the Saratov incident, forcing journalists and readers to take a fresh look at the limits of majority and minority, and to redefine the place of religious outcasts in this system.