Khlysts
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Khlysts or Khlysty (Хлысты in Russian), a distorted name, which comes from the word хлыст (khlyst), meaning "a whip"; the original name was a made-up word Христы (Khristy), or Christians), an underground sect in the late 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th century that split off from the Russian Orthodox Church.
It is said to be founded by a peasant Daniil Filippovich (or Filippov) from Kostroma. The Khlysty renounced priesthood, holy books and worshiping the saints. Curiously enough, they allowed their members to attend Orthodox churches. The central idea of Khlystys' ideology was to practise asceticism. Khlysty practised the attainment of divine grace through sin in ecstatic rituals (called радения, or radeniya) that sometimes seem to have turned into mass orgies. Flagellation, on the other hand, was also a frequent practice (it appears that illiterate peasants simply misinterpreted the original name of the sect and changed it to khlysty (whips)).
Secret Khlysty cells existed throughout pre-revolutionary Russia (approx. 40,000 followers); they were most common in the factories of the Perm district. Each cell was normally led by a male and a female leader, who were called the "Christ" and the "Mother of God" respectively.
Grigori Rasputin was reputed to have, at some stage, been a Khlyst, and to have led some sort of secret Khlysty cell among the society ladies of Saint Petersburg.
The number of sectarians dropped drastically in the Soviet times. However, a few secluded Khlysty communities existed in Soviet Russia in Tambov, Kuibyshev, Orenburg and Northern Caucasus and in Soviet Ukraine.