Russian Peasant Bride Theft by John Bushnell

Author:John Bushnell [Bushnell, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, General, Europe, Women, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, Research, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781000362039
Google: ZOMUEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-03-15T03:55:43+00:00

Some generalisations

In the 11 districts and 1 township in 6 provinces that I have covered in this chapter, the marital customs of Old Believers (and some Orthodox) clustered around what the inhabitants themselves called abduction and elopement, but those two words each covered a wide variety of practices. Abduction in Tulpan township meant genuine abduction of brides – a minority practice and also a futile one, because it was so easy for abducted brides to walk away from their abductors’ households. In Kargopol district and in a minority of cases in Semenov district, abduction involved acting out the theft of an unwilling bride, while the actual victims were the girls’ fathers. Almost everywhere else, abduction was in fact a sham, acted out by the bride, the groom and the bride’s parents, although the details varied.

Both Kargopol and Shadrinsk cities were sites for mass ritual bride theft (the young women having agreed in advance). That custom is a bit curious, because the transparently public display of waiting to be abducted didn’t fit very well the general purpose of ritual bride theft – to disguise the fact that young women were in fact willing to marry, even in an Orthodox Church, and to mask the willingness of parents to see their daughters married in what the parents knew would be an Orthodox Church (at least in Shadrinsk city; it’s unclear from the sources whether that was always true Kargopol city, but probably). As everyone could see, the girls were inviting abduction, and in Kargopol the public could see that parents were among the spectators, even if they made a show of trying to recapture their daughters. But we only have a glimpse of that custom toward the end of its historical evolution; at its beginning, the performance may have been different. In Shadrinsk, at least, the girls’ parents (apparently) weren’t present for the performance and so couldn’t so easily be associated with the girls’ immediate marriage in an Orthodox Church.

Elopement, too, was usually a sham, undertaken with the consent, at least tacit, of the bride’s parents. That would include much of Shadrinsk district, although in at least one part of Shadrinks there was a custom of working through another of the girl’s relatives when planning an elopement. In most cases, the young women’s parents probably knew what was going to happen and sometimes consented, while still pretending not to know. In Baki (Varnavin district) and at least sometimes in Pudozh district, brides-to-be left home to marry without informing their parents and proceeded directly to an Orthodox Church, after which their parents were informed; it’s likely that many of those parents knew what was about to happen. In Baki, at least, into the 1830s, Spasovite girls were permitted by their covenant to marry in an Orthodox Church, yet they acted as though their parents were opposed. I found too little information about the Uren elopement custom (Varnavin district) to know whether girls who eloped there also concealed (in principle) their elopement plans. Since

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