ABSTRACT
This chapter examines historical usages of the term poluvertsy (Half-Believers) in the borderlands of the Baltic provinces during the second half of the nineteenth century. A term to designate populations perceived as ethnolinguistically or confessionally “in-between,” it was applied to two distinct communities: Orthodox Estonian-speaking Setos in Pskov province influenced by Russian culture, and Russian-speaking converts to Lutheranism in Estland province, who were becoming increasingly Estonianized. The chapter traces how the word poluvertsy evolved from an ethnographic classification to a marker of religious hybridity and, eventually, an emerging self-identification. It situates these shifts in meaning within broader debates about national indifference, hybridity, and identity formation in the Romanov Empire’s western borderlands.
