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Worobec, Christine D. Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in 
Imperial Russia. DeKalb, Il.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. 
Notes. Bibliography. Index. xv+288. Paper. ISBN 0-87580-598-1.  
$38.00 (cloth) $23.00 (paper). 

 
Several years after its appearance in 2001, Worobec’s monograph 

still remains a solid multidisciplinary study on a problem that Russian 
authorities, both Church and secular, have struggled with for centuries. 
Klikushi, or shriekers, were mostly women who believed they were 
victims of black magic, possessed by evil beings who made them 
convulse, shriek in non-human voices, and do other abnormal things in 
the presence of holy objects. Klikushestvo was a widespread 
phenomenon and at times mass epidemics occurred. The author study is 
wide-ranging.  She looks at the perception of the phenomenon of  
klikushestvo among various strata of Russian society, as well as the 
culture of klikushestvo itself over the span of several centuries, from the 
16-17th centuries when it became commonplace till the 1930s when it 
was repressed – but not rooted out – by Soviet policies. Worobec builds 
her arguments on 260 individual cases of klikushi and 80 published cases 
of witchcraft in the countryside.  These are drawn from religious, 
psychiatric, legal, and ethnographic sources. A captivating picture 
emerges of the Russian peasantry, the Orthodox Church, and civil 
authorities and the interrelations between all three. 

Chapter One, State and Church Perspectives, describes how the 
Church and the state joined forces against all forms of superstitions for 
the sake of the State's advancement.  In the 18th century this impacted 
klikushestvo in the form of imperial decrees and Senate decisions. 
Klikushestvo was, on the one hand, persecuted by civil authorities as a 
crime while, on the other, the Church defended it as a true spiritual 
illness, as real as miraculous healings. Although secular commissions 
helped to investigate both miraculous healings and epidemics of 
possession, the Church could not accept their materialistic view of the 
impossibility of such phenomena and emphasized the devil’s dangerous 
role in a secular society. While initially men as well as women were 
known to become klikushi, demon possession was gradually feminized 
and sexualized.  

Chapter Two, Peasant Views, presents how the mostly uneducated 
peasant masses in the empire subscribed to the idea of klikushi and 
believed in hexing by witches and in the contagious nature of possession. 
The author portrays the liminal status of those who were possessed and 

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explains why klikushi were almost not known in the Ukrainian setting. 
The author also investigates the close relationship between klikushestvo 
and witchcraft beliefs and practices, arguing that a possessed was the 
“counterimage to the rural witch and sorcerer” (p. 66). In this chapter the 
reader also learns how klikushi tried to rid themselves of possession by 
traveling to holy places and by submitting to exorcism rituals.  

Chapter Three, Literary and Ethnographic Portrayals, is an analysis 
of how intellectuals perceived klikushestvo and witchcraft beliefs. 
Russian writers and composers like Dostoevsky, Gogol, Leskov, Tolstoy, 
and Mussorgskii and ethnographers like Pryzhov, and many others 
formed the public attitude towards the phenomenon through their artistic 
and scholarly works. Despite holding varying attitudes towards 
Orthodoxy and institutionalized religion, these men were very 
sympathetic to the possessed and blamed serfdom and the patriarchal 
brutality of the village for its existence. The romanticized images they 
produced elevated peasant women in the eyes of educated society and 
presented klikushi as a metaphor of sorts for suffering Mother Russia. 

Chapter Four, Psychiatric Diagnosis, provides a complicated picture 
of how Russian psychiatrists, from the middle of the 19th century 
onwards, tried to solve the problem of klikushestvo.  Armed with 
positivism and medical knowledge, they viewed klikushestvo as a symbol 
of Russian backwardness and they vigorously sought to civilize the 
peasantry.  Their goal was to first explain etiology of the phenomenon 
and then to root it out. Linking klikushestvo first to mental illness, then to 
somnambulism, hysteria, and sexual pathology, Russian psychiatrists like 
Bekhterev, Iakobii, Krainskii, Suponev and others supported or rejected 
various medical theories.  While their medical opinions differed, they 
invariably contested the Church’s claim to klikushestvo as its privileged 
field of expertise.  

Chapter Five, Sorting Through Multiple Realities, is a conclusion 
showing how the history of views on the phenomenon of klikushestvo 
finally led to seeing it as a sociocultural drama with its own actors and 
audience. Each party in this drama gained something from its enactment 
and thus contributed to its persistence. The author explains why certain 
contemporary diagnoses would not fit the phenomenon, which existed in 
a specific cultural and religious context, and which remains an enigma 
for the rational mind. 

In her book, Worobec beautifully describes the history of 
klikushestvo viewing it as a battlefield where different agents – the 
Church, state courts, and medical specialists – sought to gain power over 



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(chiefly) peasant female bodies and minds and to make them ‘normal’ 
and obedient. The author’s feministic approach is understandable but 
misogyny seems to be a too strong contemporary notion applied to the 
context where Church itself preached subordinate position of women and 
where any deviant person would be feared and punished by both men and 
women. Despite the fascinating analysis and wealth of data in the 
Possessed, the reader unfortunately does not hear the subaltern voices of 
the klikushi themselves: the author mostly makes assumptions and 
conclusions on their behalf.  

Worobec points out that klikushestvo was a Russian phenomenon 
unknown in Ukraine. She suggests though that it was not absent in 
Ukraine.  Rather, nationalistically oriented Ukrainian ethnographers kept 
silent about such cases in an attempt to perpetuate a myth of spiritual 
health of the Ukrainians, contrasting it to Russian ill health (p. 68). She 
then draws her examples of witchcraft beliefs and practices from rich 
Ukrainian ethnographic sources. My own research on Ukrainian beliefs 
about death and the afterlife shows that ethnographers did not whitewash 
their data.  Ukrainian ethnographic sources contain numerous case 
studies of adultery, homicide, infanticide, and incest. While clearly 
separating Ukrainian and Russian contexts, the author, however, 
provides Russian transliteration of Ukrainian personal and place names: 
Khar’kov (p.89), Vladimir Hnatiuk (p. 93); Kievan churches (p. 131).  

Finally, the author mentions that klikushestvo is by no means a 
phenomenon of the past: it still exists in today’s Russia. That being the 
case, it is not clear then why the author stops at the 1930s. Yet maybe 
linking the past to the present of this captivating phenomenon is just a 
matter of time… 

 
Svitlana P. Kukharenko 
University of Alberta  
Edmonton 
Alberta 
Canada 

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