'The Sin Is on Him, if He Deceives Us': Motivations for Private Almsgiving in Russian Villages at the Turn of the Century

• In Event: Help at All Costs?: State, Community, and Individual Charity in the Late Nineteenth Century Romanov Empire

Abstract

This paper explores the motivations behind private almsgiving in the late Imperial Russian countryside. Contemporary discourse fretted that indiscriminate and naive almsgiving by villagers motivated begging practices that enabled laziness and rewarded fraud. Seeking to complicate widely held assumptions about indiscriminate alms provision motivated by Christian duties, this paper asks if we can discern the ways in which villagers evaluated and prioritised requests for alms. In asking this question, perceptions around hierarchies of need and worthiness among rural communities emerge. These hierarchies can help inform our understandings around the intersecting factors of disability, gender, generation and locality among rural communities at the turn of the twentieth century.

Author

• Sarah Badcock, U of Nottingham (UK)