Easter Procession in the District of Kursk is an oil on canvas painting by the Russian realist painter and sculptor Ilya Repin (1844–1930). Completed between 1880 and 1883, the work shows a seething, huddled mass attending the annual religious procession to the Korennaya monastery in southern Russia, founded in 1612 after an apparition of the Virgin Mary. The procession is led through a dusty landscape by robed, Ortodox priests who hold religious icons, festoons and banners over their heads.^[1] Behind them follow beggars and cripples, alongside police and military officers.

Easter Procession is representative of Repin's style from the period, in that it first appears to be a scene from everyday life in Russia. In fact, it pointedly shows people from a range of social strata united and moving collectively towards their destination at Korennaya. As a painter in the late Tzarist period, Repin was preoccupied by ideas of class, and often worked in an immense, monumental scale which he saw as befitting his subject matter. By showing each social class working alongside one another, Repin implies that all the people of Russia share responsibility for their, and their country's, faith.

The writer Richard Brettell summarised the painting as "a sort of summa of Russian society, diverse members of which move uneasily but restlessly together down a dusty path through a naked landscape towards a future that cannot be seen even by the painter."^[2] Critic Christian Brinton saw a mixture of "fat, gold-robed priests, stupid peasants, wretched cripples, cruel mouthed officials, and inflated rural dignitaries".^[1] Repin's target, in fact, is the privileged members of the procession, whom he depicts as uncaring and indifferent to their struggling fellow travelers. The disenfranchised members of Russian society are represented by, amongst others, two crippled serfs in the left foreground, who are allowed to stand before military officers riding on horseback.

• Our Lady of Kursk

• Bolton, Roy. Russia & Europe in the Nineteenth Century. Sphinx Books, 1999. ISBN 1-9072-0002-9
• Sternin, Grigory. Ilya Efimovitch Repin: Painter of Russian History. USSR, 1995. ISBN 0-5690-8846-1