‘Religious Sectarianism in the past and present’ is a book by the outstanding Soviet historian of religion and culture Aleksander Ilyich Klibanov (1910-1994); it studies one of the most complicated and debatable phenomenon of Russian religious and social life. The book was a sequel to a whole cycle of research works by the same author, published in 1960-s on various aspects of religious Sectarianism. It was based both on the earlier published written sources, and on the personal meeting of the author with minor groups of Sectarians during his field studies.
Sharing the common Marxist doctrine of his time on the social-economical formations, K. used historical and sociological method of analyzing the subject of his research; he argued that the evolution of the social role of medieval Sectarianism and its forms had depended directly on the ways and speed of developing capitalism and religious Sectarianism had been shaped as a kind of social opposition and a democratic movement, but gradually was driven to bourgeois Protestant churches and communities – so, accepting reactionary role in the social life. The author gave the most attention to the reasons and the form of that transformation of the role of sects in the social life; he analyzed ideological influences at them – and the results of those contaminations.
The book consists of several chapters, the first of which, ‘Religious Sectarianism as a social problem’, was centered at the issue of the input of Russian ‘Socialistic thought’ into studying Russian Sectarianism as a specific social and religious phenomenon. There is also a review of the evolution of Russian Sectarianism in the fourteenth – twentieth centuries, the analyses of its peculiarities, as well as its differences from European Sectarianism, and studying its inner contradictions in the context of social and religious differentiation of the nineteenth century. The author describes the destinies and the contemporary state of Sectarianism in the Soviet Russia from 1920-s till the time of the research.