The Cross Between Hammer and Sickle: Russian Orthodox Christians in the United States, 1908-1928

Sarkisian, Aram Gregory

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-en5e-m445

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The Cross Between Hammer and Sickle: Russian Orthodox Christians in the United States, 1908-1928

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At the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian Orthodox Church established a dense network of social and material aid for thousands of migrants who travelled from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires to find work in the United States. The church’s growth followed the path of Progressive Era industrialization, with Orthodox churches cropping up in the shadows of America’s foundries, factories, and mines. In what clergy called American Orthodox Rus’ (amerikanskaia pravoslavnaia rus’), Orthodox believers were encouraged to engage with the social and political aspects of life in the United States while retaining their cultural, linguistic, and most importantly, spiritual ties to an idealized vision of Holy Orthodox Russia. With the Russian Revolutions of 1917, however, American Orthodox Rus’ dramatically changed. Overlapping financial and administrative crises brought the Russian Church’s North American Archdiocese to the brink of collapse. This study explores how American Orthodox Rus’ transformed from a church of evangelistic mission and immigrant aid to that of self-preservation, probing the ways the bonds of mutual aid and spiritual uplift were recast in an age of uncertainty. It argues that rather than turning inward to the church itself, believers engaged with a variety of external elements—civil courts, federal surveillance infrastructures, and the assimilationist language of the United States’ Progressive Era, amongst others—to restore order to American Orthodox Rus’, and in turn, develop new ways of thinking about being Orthodox in the modern world.

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