AceHistoryDesk – Today in History – On Sunday, September 14, 1938, members of the Russian Molokan Church held religious services in their new church building on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, California. Folklorist Sidney Robertson Cowell recorded the distinctive preaching and singing that characterised the service

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published: Sept.14: 2023: History Today News: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/+PuI36tlDsM7GpOJe

Molokan singing is derived from patterns of Gregorian chants that were sung in the Russian Orthodox Church during the sixteenth century when the Molokans emerged as an ethnically and religiously distinct group. The Russian Molokans, also called “milk drinkers,” were Russian peasants who dissented from the Russian Orthodox Church beginning in the seventeenth century.

In the eighteenth century, the Molokans were identified with a larger peasant movement that protested the practices of Russia’s tsarist government and the role that the Russian Orthodox Church played in that government. The Molokans and other members of the Christian Spiritualist movement questioned whether it was Christian to own property, exploit the labor of others, or treat women as inferior to men. After a series of pitched battles with the government, the Molokans were exiled to the frontier regions of the empire, first to the Ukraine, and later to the Russian Caucasus. Despite the difficulties that they encountered at what was then the far reaches of the Russian Empire, the Molokans prospered. By 1900, they were the largest sect of dissenters from the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Russian Molokan Church

Committed to the importance of exhibiting inner change of heart in daily life and suspicious of the priesthood’s authority, the Molokans are similar in these regards to early Protestants.

Their high regard for music is linked to its power to transform and bring about change. In the United States, their distinctive singing, performed in Russian, became an important way for Molokan immigrants to preserve their Russian ethnic identity.

Between 1901 and 1911, some 3,500 Molokans emigrated from the Russian Caucasus to California in search of both greater religious and economic opportunity. The majority of these immigrants settled in and around Los Angeles. The founders of the San Francisco Molokan community arrived there in October 1906, just six months after the great earthquake had demolished much of the city. They were encouraged, along with many of those displaced by the earthquake, to settle on Potrero Hill.

Learn More

• California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell is a rich collection of American folk music that includes recordings of music from a variety of ethnic, cultural, and language groups. Search on Molokan to hear Cowell’s 1935 recordings of a Molokan service. Browse the collection’s subject index to find more recordings of the rich variety of musical traditions that have become part of American culture.
• Search the Federal Research Division’s Country Studies collection on Ukraine, Caucasus, or Russia to learn more about the regions from which the Molokans immigrated.
• Browse Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip to hear folk music from a different region—the American South.

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