Unity in Faith?: Edinoverie, Russian Orthodoxy, and Old Belief, 1800-1918 0253049709, 9780253049704

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UNITY IN FAITH?

UNITY IN FAITH? Edinoverie, Russian Orthodoxy, and Old Belief, 1800 – 1918

k J. M. WHITE

Indi a na Univer sit y Pr ess

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA ­iupress​.­i ndiana​.­edu © 2020 by James White All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-253-04970-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-253-04972-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-253-04971-1 (ebook) 1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii List of Abbreviations  ix Introduction 1

1. Ritual and the Origins of Edinoverie 23



2. Edinoverie Transformed, 1801–1855 52



3. A “Step to Orthodoxy” No More, 1865–1886 71



4. Crisis, Reform, and Revolution, 1905–1918 104



5. Lived Edinoverie, 1825–1917 148

Conclusion: Decline, Disappearance, Reinvention 199 Appendix A: The Rules of Metropolitan Platon, September 27, 1800 217 Appendix B: Replacements for the Rules of Platon, 1917–1918 223 Bibliography 229 Index 263

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

From the sunny terr aces of Florence to the icy streets of Ekaterinburg, from the hustle and bustle of Moscow to the sleepy university town of Tartu, researching and writing this book has taken me on a winding journey across Europe. Along the way, I have had the good fortune to encounter immensely helpful fellow travelers: I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to thank some of them by name. First, I must thank Professor Steve Smith, my supervisor for four years at the European University Institute, for his practical and professional advice. I also thank the members of my PhD examination board for their suggestions and criticisms: Simon Dixon, Boris Kolonitskii, and Irina Paert. I am further obliged to Irina for her support at the University of Tartu, where I have been able to gather some materials on edinoverie and Old Belief in the Baltic. It also behooves me to offer gratitude to the anonymous peer reviewers for their in-depth evaluation of this book and the staff at Indiana University Press for their assistance. Second, I must thank the many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances I have made at Ural Federal University: without them, I would never have been able to make Ekaterinburg my home over the past few years. I have to single out Aleksandr Palkin for helping me come to the Urals in the first place, for the numerous conversations we have had on the subject of edinoverie, and for the many, many occasions he has bailed out this rather hapless Englishman as he navigates life in Russia. Sergei Sokolov and Andrei Keller also deserve mention for their advice, support, and assistance. Third, a great many of my friends from all over the world have either read through various versions of this book or provided invaluable moral support:

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I am especially obliged to Octavie Bellavance, Robrecht Declercq, James Hassell, Graham Hickman, Matthew Powles, Trond Ove Tøllefsen, and Andrea Warnecke. Fourth, this book would not have been possible without the assistance and professionalism of archivists, librarians, and university administrators in Italy, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In Moscow, Father Evgenii Sarancha rendered invaluable assistance in the gathering of valuable materials. Last, but by no means least, I thank my father, Stephen, my mother, Nadine, and my grandmother, Barbara, for all the time, effort, and money they poured into my education and upbringing. This book is for you. This book was written with the financial support of the Russian Science Fund (RNF), project no. 18-18-00216.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

EAA Eesti Ajalooarhiiv GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii GASO Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sverdlovskoi oblasti LVVA Latvijas Valsts vēstures arhīvs NART Natsionalnyi arkhiv respubliki Tatarstana PSZ Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii RGIA Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv TsANO Tsentralnyi arkhiv Nizhegorodskoi oblatsi TsDOOSO Tsentr dokumentatsii obshchestvennykh organizatsii Sverdlovskoi oblasti TsGAUR Tsentralnyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Udmuritskoi respubliki TsIAM Tsentralnyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy

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INTRODUCTION

W h at Is Edinov er i e? On January 12, 2013, a peculiar liturgy was held in the Uspenskii cathedral in the heart of the Moscow Kremlin. The five hundred worshippers who attended to have Metropolitan Iuvenalii (Poiakov) administer the sacraments crossed themselves with two fingers rather than the customary three. The hallelujahs were sung twice rather than thrice. Monophonic chants were performed rather than the usual polyphonic singing with its distinctive baroque elements.1 This was a liturgy performed in the ancient style of the Russian Orthodox Church, and it was the first such divine service seen in the Uspenskii cathedral in over 350 years. In the mid-seventeenth century, the old rituals had been expelled from the churches of Russian Orthodoxy, along with their adherents, the Old Believers. It took until the twentieth century for the Church to go back on its liturgical prohibition, after much blood was spilled and pain caused in its enforcement. The long road the old rites have taken back to acceptability has its beginning in edinoverie. The question of what edinoverie is lies at the heart of this book. There is no easy answer, since many clergymen, Old Believers, government officials, and secular observers provided definitions frequently at variance with each other. Given how alien the term is to the English-speaking world, I offer a provisional definition that can guide the reader through the following discussion. Edinoverie translates approximately as the united faith or unity in faith. It describes a settlement formulated in 1800 whereby Old Believers were allowed to keep their distinctive rituals and elements of parish management on conversion

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to Russian Orthodoxy so long as they conceded the Church’s legitimacy and authority. The settlement was defined by sixteen conditions written principally by Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) of Moscow. Those living according to the rules of Platon were called edinovertsy. By the end of the imperial era in 1917, the edinovertsy probably numbered no more than 350,000 and were scattered in roughly three hundred parishes across the empire.2 The Old Believers were a diverse and diffuse group who rejected liturgical reforms in the 1650s and thus had left the flock of the Russian Orthodox Church. These reforms, introduced by Patriarch Nikon (Minin) and confirmed by the Great Moscow Council of 1666–1667, made several ritual changes: the sign of the cross was to be performed with three fingers rather than two, the name of Jesus was to be spelled slightly differently, people were to proceed around their churches clockwise rather than counterclockwise, and so on. The council anathematized those who refused to accept the changes, and since heresy was a capital crime in early modern Muscovy, the Old Believers found themselves subjected to intensive and violent persecution.3 Since no bishops joined Old Belief, they also lost access to a priesthood that was unquestionably part of the apostolic succession, forcing them to embark on a series of less-thansatisfactory replacements. By offering the Old Believers priests who would serve by the old rites so long as they declared their loyalty to the emperor and the Church, edinoverie offered a solution to this continual problem. It also had the virtue of bringing Old Believers under the direct supervision of the Church and thus the state. As such, edinoverie can be understood as an attempt to instrumentalize Old Believers without legitimizing Old Belief itself, something the Russian Orthodox Church and, to a lesser extent, the confessional imperial state could not countenance. Throughout edinoverie’s existence, it was contested from nearly every conceivable direction. The servitors of the Church, viewing the old ritual with contempt and suspicious of the converts’ motives, maintained a distance between themselves and the edinovertsy. The edinovertsy themselves were routinely dissatisfied with the provisions given to them by Platon and campaigned either for extensive alterations or complete reformulation. Much of the liberal and radical intelligentsia condemned it as a false half measure given in lieu of full toleration: as one character in A. F. Pisemskii’s 1869 novel People of the Forties comments, “Throughout Russia, this edinoverie is only fog and lies for the government’s sake.”4 And the Old Believers relentlessly castigated their former coreligionists as traitors and government stooges. All of these reasons offer an initial explanation as to why edinoverie failed not only to end the schism but also to provide a convincing demonstration of unity in faith.

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Th e Ba l a ncing Act The story of edinoverie is fundamentally one of how four different groups (the edinovertsy, the Church, the state, and the Old Believers), each with different and often conflicting interests, interacted with one another over the course of several centuries in the context of an expanding and modernizing empire. Of central importance is the relationship between church, state, and schism, where religious toleration on the one hand and confession building on the other played central roles. The Russian state was a confessional state: it was officially Orthodox and frequently lent its support to the Church. It was a criminal offense to convert away from Orthodoxy or to encourage others to do so. The supreme power of the autocracy was held to be divinely ordained, a fact clergymen propounded from their pulpits. In other words, the Church offered ideological support to the state, while the government protected the confessional interests of the Church. However, this mutually beneficial relationship was far more complex and contested than it appears at first glance. First, there was the question of the proper relationship between church and state. Since the reforms of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, when the Russian Orthodox patriarch had been replaced with a collegial Holy Synod intrinsically connected to the state system, the Church had lost a substantial degree of its institutional autonomy.5 Repeated infringements of the ecclesiastical domain laid the foundations for conflict between clergymen and the imperial government. As these infringements became more invasive from the first half of the nineteenth century onward, some in the Church began to question whether imperial sponsorship was worth the concomitant loss of autonomy. The subordination of the clergy to state goals reduced their social prestige and moral authority among the flock, contributing to defections to Old Belief, various sectarian groups, or, later, irreligious philosophies and social movements. However, while the Church certainly felt the weight of state interference ever more keenly as the sun set on the Russian Empire, it remained reliant on government support against other faiths. The Church was, therefore, in the paradoxical position of both resenting and demanding a close bond with the state. Second, the Russian Empire was not a religiously homogeneous state. An enormous range of Christians and non-Christians were subjects of the tsar. Even Orthodoxy itself was not unified, divided as it was between several national traditions (Russian, Ukrainian, and Georgian, to name but three).6 How was this heterogeneous mix to be governed? The question becomes especially vexing when we consider the vast territory in question and the deficit

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of sufficiently educated administrative staff. The answer, as Paul Werth has argued, lay in the creation of the “multiconfessional establishment,” a loose and ever-shifting series of arrangements with religious elites whereby toleration and institutionalization were offered in exchange for securing the loyalty and state obligations (tax, conscripts) of the particular people in question.7 This system of management was flexible, allowing for the state to alter the degree of tolerance offered or to switch its support to different groups depending on the demands of a particular context: “In short, toleration was good for empire.”8 However, there was an inherent contradiction between the tolerance of the multiconfessional establishment and the state’s commitment to the Russian Orthodox Church. Shouldn’t an officially Orthodox government ensure that all of its subjects subscribe to the one true faith? Might not religious homogeneity be a surer path to stability than the tolerance of heterogeneity? The state was trapped in a constant dialectical swing between the multiconfessional establishment and a “missionary impulse.”9 Old Belief, which explicitly rejected the authority of the Church and its claim to canonical legitimacy, further complicated this already difficult matter. Unlike the empire’s Buddhists or Muslims, for instance, the Old Believers were ethnically and linguistically Russian: when they proselytized, they tended to do so among the Russian population in both core territories and ethnically fragmented borderlands. They were also numerous: 10–20 percent of the Russian population were Old Believers in 1900.10 Some of them even proposed that the tsar and the government were either the Antichrist or his servants. It was, therefore, difficult to slot the Old Believers into the multiconfessional establishment. However, Old Belief commanded significant human and financial resources that the thinly stretched state could use to its benefit. In addition, the persecution waged for much of the first century of the schism’s existence had not been particularly efficacious: its principal results had been to drive the Old Believers into exile or underground, where the hand of the bureaucracy could no longer reach them. Would not a measure of tolerance allow the state to make better use of these errant subjects and, perhaps, eventually enlighten them with regard to their grievous errors? Between 1667 and 1905, the Russian state could never conclusively make up its mind one way or the other. However, we must not imagine that the policy of the Russian state toward Old Belief was decided unilaterally. The Church constituted a significant pressure group, capable of influencing change or, on occasion, resisting it. Old Belief itself was in constant flux, forever splitting into new concords whose beliefs and institutional arrangements could be more or less congenial for the state. For example, as Thomas Marsden has shown, the formation of the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy,

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an independent Old Believer episcopate, in the Austrian Empire in 1846 raised the specter that Old Belief might become a tool for hostile foreign powers: in consequence, Nicholas I raised the tempo of his persecution of Old Belief.11 Old Believers also possessed a considerable amount of economic clout in the Russian Empire, which they often sought to translate into social acceptability and civic power. As such, they repeatedly tried to gain recognition from the imperial state. Edinoverie was a way that they could gain that recognition, but it came at a dire cost: they had to recognize the legitimacy of the detested “Nikonian” Orthodox Church and the authority of its episcopate. For this reason, edinoverie remained an unpopular route for most Old Believers. Edinoverie, the fourth party with whom we are concerned, was a child of the state’s continually wavering and contested policy. It was born in the late eighteenth century, a period when several tsars, starting with Peter III and ending with Alexander I, decided on a more “enlightened” course toward the Old Believers: if the question of ritual difference was set aside, then the state could bring the Old Believers back under the aegis of the Church and, therefore, back under administrative surveillance. Edinoverie’s character was utterly transformed when Nicholas I launched a harsh policy of repression against the Old Believers, becoming an alternative to prison, exile, or property loss. The relatively favorable stance that Alexander II’s government took in relation to religious freedoms briefly turned edinoverie into a fashionable topic of debate in both ecclesiastical and lay circles: what did it mean to allow more than one ritual compact into the Church? What reforms of edinoverie were required to make it effective in the more liberal environment of the 1860s and 1870s? Then, finally, the conclusive emancipation of Old Belief and its inclusion into the multiconfessional establishment following the Edict of Toleration in 1905 engendered a crisis in edinoverie’s raison d’être: Was it nothing more than an implement of state-backed coercion or did it have some other value for the Church? Could it be a bridge where Old Believers and Orthodox could meet to discuss their views and, perhaps, edge toward mutual reconciliation? Studying edinoverie provides a unique window into the complicated nexus of issues surrounding the Old Believer schism, the state, and the Church. It demonstrates how a missionary idea, rising in the atmosphere of “enlightened absolutism” in the late eighteenth century, was subsequently transformed as the policies of the imperial center changed in reaction to the emergence of new ideas and shifts in the character of Old Belief. But this is not all, for if the purpose of edinoverie was in a state of constant flux, did this not also signify that the meaning of edinoverie for both the edinovertsy and the Church was also perpetually changing?

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R it ua l a n d Confe ssion: Qu e stions of R eligious I dentit y The vector of study suggested above is state-centered, indicating that the evolution of edinoverie owed a great deal to government policies decided in St. Petersburg. This is certainly the case, but it is very far from the whole story. The relationship between edinoverie and the Church is just as important and, indeed, consumes much of the subsequent narrative. The principal question here is why did the Church, from the central authorities to the clergy and missionaries on the ground, continually subject edinoverie to a significant level of hostility and suspicion? How and why did this attitude evolve? What did it feel like to be the object of this sustained contempt and how did it shape edinoverie’s institutions and notions of identity? These questions are distinct from, although connected to, the questions we raised above and, therefore, require a substantially different approach. Here, we must consider the meaning of religious ritual, especially in terms of its consequences for confessional identity. The question of ritual and identity has not been well studied in the case of Russian Orthodoxy in the imperial era, although several scholars have considered rites in the context of community building or in relation to the enchanted world of the peasantry.12 Thus, I take my primary direction from the body of literature surrounding the Protestant and Catholic reformations in early modern Europe. Historians have argued that, as the differences and competition sharpened between Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic confessions in various parts of Europe, certain rituals took on greater importance as signifiers of denominational belonging: furthermore, the need to propagate these rituals and ensure that they were performed and understood in correspondence with the guiding doctrines of each confession contributed to the development of more extensive church bureaucracies.13 Thus, rituals played an important role in processes of confession building, helping churches sharply delineate their flocks from competitors and extend their moral and bureaucratic surveillance: rituals became confessionalized. Conversely, periods when religious coexistence was championed saw a decline in the relative importance of ritual and their classification as adiaphora, things indifferent. While there were several periods in the sixteenth century when the concept of adiaphora was applied to ritual issues in an attempt to quell confessional division,14 it assumed a crucial importance, at least in the spheres of high theology and state administration, after the Thirty Years’ War. Neither Catholicism nor Protestantism had been unambiguously victorious despite all the devastation unleashed, and so some monarchs began to seek a

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degree of confessional reconciliation for the sake of civil peace: adiaphora were a necessary theological component of this policy.15 This is not to say that rituals ceased to be sharp dividing lines between various confessional identities, especially among the majority of lay believers. Rather, it is to suggest that there was a shift in rarefied intellectual circles in terms of the relative value of rituals and their meaning. At least theoretically, rituals themselves were not grounds for religious division: in other words, the link between ritual and doctrine, between external action and internal belief, was severed. It is not my intent to suggest that there is a one-to-one equivalency between so-called “confessionalization” in Western Europe and the way in which ritual’s importance was heightened in late Muscovite and early imperial Russia.16 What I would like to suggest is that there are certain parallels in the question of rituals and their institutionalization that can prove instructive when we consider the Russian Orthodox Church and the schism with the Old Believers. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, the Church began to strengthen its institutions: as Georg Michels and Alfons Brüning have shown, it frequently did so in order to combat Old Belief and spread the recently reformed rituals among the clergy and general population: “Major impulses in this reform period came from confrontation and adaption processes: from the struggle with the Old Believer’s [sic] separatism on the one hand, and from the incorporation of the metropolitanate of Kiev and Left Bank Ukraine, finally accomplished in 1686, on the other.”17 This necessarily heightened the significance of ritual as a marker both of one’s belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church and of one’s adherence to the Church’s doctrinal truth and legitimacy. The rituals of the schism were thus portrayed in the blackest of colors: they were not simply wrong but signifiers of Arianism, the first and most despised schism in the history of the established Christian Church.18 However, with the acceptance of the pre-Nikonian rituals required for the creation of edinoverie, the Church could no longer stipulate that they were symbols of heresy. Nor could they argue that the reformed rites were the only possible signifiers of doctrinal rectitude and belonging to the Orthodox confession. The ritual border of the Orthodox confession thus entered into flux, and the ability of external action to represent internal belief was compromised. However, two important caveats must be made at this early point. First, we must note that the process was incomplete: much of the Church continued to regard the old ritual as imperfect or even quasi-heretical as late as 1917. Indeed, it was only in 1971 that the Church unquestionably acknowledged the full legitimacy of the old rituals. Second, it is necessary to consider that the initial acceptance of the old ritual was made rather unwillingly in the face of state

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pressure: as Catherine the Great and her immediate successors rolled out greater toleration to the Old Believers in the hope of instrumentalizing them, the Church was required to find a way of translating this policy into theological terms and helping the state achieve its goals while also maintaining its own interests and prerogatives intact. These two factors, confessional anxiety about the old rituals and the need to react to state demands, shaped church policy toward edinoverie for much of the latter’s existence. From one perspective, the leaders of the Church were anxious about letting the old ritual and its adherents into the Orthodox confession for fear of creating an Old Believer fifth column. The rules of Metropolitan Platon, edinoverie’s foundational document, took a contradictory approach to this problem. The 1800 settlement sought to assimilate the edinovertsy into mainstream Orthodoxy by “enlightening” away their “prejudiced” attitude toward the Nikonian rituals, but it also isolated them from the rest of the Orthodox flock, quarantining their potentially “infectious” schismatic rites with a series of administratively distinct institutions and proscriptions. However, the goal of assimilation fundamentally contradicted why edinoverie would be attractive to the Old Believers (that they could practice the old rituals in a legal way) and gave polemicists sufficient ground to argue that edinoverie was nothing more than a “trap” to destroy the old rites: meanwhile, the isolation of edinoverie served to incubate the old rites through their institutionalization while also perpetuating a sense of religious difference between the edinovertsy and the Orthodox. From another perspective, the state compelled the Church not only to allow the old ritual but also to create a firm display of unity in order to make edinoverie seem like a genuine and attractive option to potential Old Believer converts. However, government policies made this difficult for the Church to realize. The reign of Nicholas I saw edinoverie used as, in the words of one Russian historian, a “mechanism of state coercion.”19 Old Believers were either directly or indirectly forced into edinoverie in huge numbers. This changed the character of the movement. Before the 1830s, its impact had been limited; under Nicholas, edinoverie not only became much larger but also was more directly incorporated into a system of persecution, a fact that pushed it into crisis once this system was dismantled. No less problematic was the fact that Nicholas’s actions basically justified ecclesiastical suspicions of edinoverie: it was now certain that there were many among the edinovertsy whose loyalty to the Church was at best dubious. As such, there was hardly any will to remove the safeguards that Platon had imposed. Therefore, it took until the 1880s before the Synod made steps to resolve this basic problem: they decided to move away from both isolation and assimilation

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and toward integration, the idea that the edinovertsy should be integrated as much as possible into the Orthodox confession while still being permitted to use their old rituals. However, at this point it was too late: the course of edinoverie’s development had been determined by the dynamic between assimilation and isolation inherent in the rules of Platon. By the time the Synod was ready to more or less wholeheartedly embrace edinoverie, some among the edinovertsy were beginning to agitate for greater levels of autonomy in order to protect their distinctive ritual order from the allegedly assimilative tendencies of the bishops and their subordinates. They seized upon the chaos following the 1905 revolution to launch a comprehensive reform scheme, one that had as its goal the creation of a much more independent and united edinoverie. This brings us to the question of edinoverie identity: did such a thing ever exist? In chapter 5, I consider the social and institutional life of the edinovertsy, examining precisely how the dynamics inherent in the rules of Metropolitan Platon and some other state policies served to isolate edinoverie from the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church. The evidence considered suggests that nothing like a distinct edinoverie identity evolved before the end of the nineteenth century; even then, it was largely limited to a few small circles that formed around reformist edinoverie clergy and was generally contested. While the edinovertsy were on the receiving end of a great deal of hostility from the Old Believers, the massive conversion campaigns launched by Nicholas I ensured that much of the movement was populated by those whose defection to edinoverie was motivated more by government pressure than by conviction. Thus, many continued to act in ways that suggest that they maintained a greater affinity with their roots than with their new home in the Church. However, if we move from the level of actual identities on the ground toward the notions of identity being developed in central church bodies, we discover that edinoverie had a greater impact. Now that ritual form had no clear connection with confessional identity, the Church had to find a new way to clearly distinguish itself from the Old Believers, a process that began in earnest in the 1870s. However, this also meant redefining what Old Belief was from an Orthodox perspective. Secular and church intellectuals thus began to turn toward the idea that it was the attitude toward rituals, and not the rituals themselves, that set apart the Orthodox from the Old Believers. The Orthodox, through the acceptance of edinoverie, were obviously “ritually tolerant”: they understood rituals as adiaphora (srednoe delo in Russian, “a middling matter”). The Old Believers, on the other hand, could no longer be condemned as Monoph­ ysite heretics on account of their rituals, as the Church had done in the first half of the eighteenth century: instead, they were castigated for being

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“ritually intolerant.” They, it was alleged, did not understand the true meaning of rites since they held them to be immutable and thus akin to dogmas. This allowed for a whole range of epithets to be applied to the Old Believers: they were “fanatical,” “unenlightened,” “uneducated,” or adherents of “ritual worship” (obriadoverie). On the level of theology and central policy, edinoverie caused a gradual shift in the definition of Orthodox identity and a concomitant reevaluation of Old Belief. There was one further consequence of this shift: it helped contribute to the rehabilitation of Old Belief both in secular society and in certain circles of the Church as the nineteenth century drew to its close. Changing views on the preNikonian rite combined with growing criticisms of the Petrine Synodal order and a significant degree of intelligentsia sympathy for the persecuted “schismatics” to produce a new vision of Old Belief whereby it began to be conceptualized as an organically and authentically Russian form of belief, uncorrupted by the Western and secular influences ushered in by Peter the Great and his descendants.20 Some leading edinovertsy, most notably Father Simeon Shleev, championed such a vision from an ecclesiastical perspective: joined by important clergymen like Archbishop Antonii (Khrapovitskii) and Bishop Andrei (Ukhtomskii), this image of Old Belief was used to criticize and condemn the Synodal Church, especially as its prestige began to dramatically dwindle in the last decade of the imperial regime. This incorporation of Old Belief into neotraditionalist Russian nationalism is an enduring legacy: today, the same narrative is being used by Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right political theorist.21

R it ua l a n d Au thor it y Stephen Batalden has remarked that “the capacity of the post-Petrine church and state to identify and label ‘heresy,’ as in the case of the Old Believer communities, was an indication that . . . prescriptive, hierarchical authority continued to be embedded in modern Russian religious culture.”22 The toleration and legitimization of the old rites not only posed problems for the question of identity but also for the Church’s authority. Ritual functioned as a tool of the Church’s authority for demarcating the boundaries between Orthodoxy and heterodoxy, defining who was and who was not a member of the true faith. This became clear in the reign of Emperor Paul, whose desire to realize edinoverie regardless of the reluctance of senior hierarchs threatened the ability of the Church to define who became a member of the Orthodox confession and on what terms. This recurred in the early 1820s, when Alexander I almost made edinoverie redundant by nearly including Old Belief in the multiconfessional

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establishment. In other words, the desire of the state to utilize edinoverie and the legitimization of the old rite as a means for bringing Old Belief under official oversight encroached on the Church’s authority to define the membership of the Orthodox confession. The shape that edinoverie took in 1800 owes much to the fact that the hierarch responsible for its creation resented the emperor forcing his hand. Given the justifiable distrust most Russian Orthodox clergymen felt toward edinoverie and its members, the leading personages in the Church were often hypersensitive about maintaining and extending its authority over the edinovertsy. This authority was both ritual and bureaucratic. The one new rite that the edinovertsy had to accept was the 1721 litany of thanks, which made explicit mention of both the Holy Synod and the diocesan bishop: acceptance of this prayer was a litmus test of loyalty, while omitting or altering it brought intense scrutiny and punitive actions. There were constant clashes over this liturgical formality because it pitted “pure” adherence to the old rite as a marker of identity against the Synod’s need to incorporate edinoverie into a hierarchical model of authority. This can be seen in other sources of tension. The rules of 1800 and subsequent legislation underlined that the edinovertsy had both the right to elect their own priests and the right to be directly under the aegis of the diocesan bishop: these measures were supposed to entice Old Believers by offering a limited degree of communal autonomy. However, these rules were often violated: elections were ignored and consistories were called in to manage the edinovertsy. In many cases, this was not, as early twentieth-century critics claimed, an example of prejudice against the edinovertsy: rather, bishops sought to ensure that their authority was safeguarded through the extension of bureaucratic mechanisms and the selection of priests more amenable to oversight. This made sense given that the clergy were simultaneously the most important and the most vulnerable mechanism for control and supervision that the prelates had over the edinovertsy. Edinoverie priests, like their Orthodox counterparts, had to ensure their flock took the legally obligatory sacraments while also abiding by the rules of Platon and reporting any backsliding into the schism. At the same time, however, the lack of salaries and clerical election made them vulnerable to parish discontent. As middlemen between the bishop and the community, they sat at the hearts of confrontations between ecclesiastical authority and communal self-assertion, often suffering as a result. This is not, however, simply a story of two diametrically opposed forces colliding again and again until one or the other emerged victorious. The leading institutions of the Church were well aware that caution and delicacy were

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required when extending their authority over the edinovertsy: abrogating too many guaranteed rights or imposing too strict a regime would drive those who had already converted out of the Church while also putting off any Old Believers who might consider conversion in the future. Negotiations could be held and deals forged. This reflects Vera Shevzov’s concern to eliminate the traditional distinction between “popular” and “official” religion by focusing on the ways in which the laity and the Church brokered compromises between theological strictures on one hand and communal practices on the other.23 However, the impression one gets from prolonged study of edinoverie is that the organs of church power were not particularly pragmatic: even in the early twentieth century, there were plenty of cases where consistories hove closely to the letter of the law regardless of the backlash threatened, although by this point the Synod adopted a more flexible approach. Ultimately, confessional anxiety about the motives of the edinovertsy compelled a rather inflexible course of action. The question in which the clash between ecclesiastical authority and communal autonomy can be seen most sharply was the matter of edinoverie bishops. From the very first requests for unity in faith at the end of the eighteenth century, the edinovertsy strove to attain a edinoverie bishop or bishops. Quite how such a bishop would be connected to existing church institutions and the edinoverie flock was heatedly debated, with numerous solutions being proposed. For the edinovertsy, the desire to have a bishop was rooted in several concerns, among which was the possession of some degree of autonomy from Orthodox bishops. However, the disinclination of the episcopate to sacrifice control and authority over the edinovertsy was only sharpened by deep confessional anxieties regarding the unknowable consequences of such a move. A perennial problem for the Old Believers was the lack of legitimate bishops. This threatened the extinction of the Old Believer priesthood: no bishops meant no one could ordain new priests. The most successful subsequent attempt to get prelates, the creation of the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy in 1846, was marred by doubts over its canonical rectitude. What would happen, then, if edinoverie bishops defected to the schism? Old Belief would be immeasurably strengthened and edinoverie itself undercut. This worry was constantly in the foreground when edinoverie bishops were discussed. However, numerous prelates also saw pragmatic advantages in the creation of edinoverie bishops and so supported the notion on several occasions. A compromise was finally reached in 1918, when the Local Church Council provided for the establishment of edinoverie suffragan bishops: this gave the edinovertsy a mark of legitimacy and their own episcopal leadership

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while also ensuring that these new prelates were firmly under the thumb of the Orthodox diocesan bishop.

Th e Significa nce of Edinov er i e Irina Paert’s verdict on edinoverie, that it was “a marginal and controversial phenomenon,”24 is certainly true if we consider it only from the perspective of numbers: roughly three hundred parishes by 1917 is not an impressive record for over a century of effort. Nor is it inspiring that edinoverie was just as contested in 1917 as it was in 1800, having produced intractable problems that left it unable to inspire unity in faith in many cases. However, the very fact that it was so controversial should inspire us to go beyond the initial impressions given by statistics. From the very moment of its conception, edinoverie touched on deeply problematic issues relating to confessional identity, the meaning of rites in Russian Orthodoxy, the nature of tolerance in imperial Russia, and the operation of authority in religious culture. Perhaps even more fundamental, it reveals a story about how a modernizing empire sought to instrumentalize a schismatic movement deeply opposed by the official state church. Offering the Old Believers a place inside the Church was basically a way to utilize their energies in support of the empire while avoiding giving them an official institution akin to the Lutheran consistory in Petersburg or the Muslim muftiate in Ufa. Such a solution would have inevitably raised the hackles of the Russian Orthodox Church, and justly so given that it would have legitimized groups whose basic theological stance was determined by their rejection of the Church. This is what distinguishes this study from other accounts of religious diversity in the Russian Empire.25 First, Old Belief’s fundamental opposition to the Church made it difficult to fully include it in the multiconfessional establishment until discourses of freedom of conscience and a cultural rehabilitation of Old Belief had gained considerable momentum. Second, the story of edinoverie necessarily involved the Church from the very beginning, which allowed it to thoroughly impress its demands and designs on the phenomenon. This is not the case for institutions in the empire given to non-Orthodox faiths: the Church was certainly an interested party and an important lobby, but these establishments did not lie under the jurisdiction of the Synod and the episcopate. The study of edinoverie, therefore, offers the scholar the rather unique opportunity to see an instance of instrumentalization that lies directly under the purview of the Church: to a large extent, edinoverie’s history is about how this confessional body dealt with the conundrum of extending tolerance to a detested rival whose very existence was judged to be a threat to the Orthodox faith.

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This, in turn, allows the book to contribute to ongoing debates surrounding the nature of the Church in late imperial Russia and its connection to the state. The historiography of recent years has abandoned the long-standing idea that the Church was nothing more than a “handmaiden of the state,” a defunct institution that ignored its moral duties in favor of slavish devotion to its imperial master.26 This research has revealed a much more vital organization: innovative in the face of the new conditions created by rapid modernization, the Church did seek to improve the level of pastoral care it offered, even if it was constantly hampered by the state, which always sought to place its own interests first.27 Others have sounded a more cautious note, remarking that the Synod itself was conflicted when it came to lay initiative: while seeking to instill piety in the people, it was frequently afraid that lay activism might flow over its defined banks and, potentially, run amok. My study of edinoverie offers a further qualification. When it came to resolving the centuries-old schism that had placed a substantial minority of the Russian people beyond its walls, the Church was certainly not innovative and retained until the very end the desire that the state squash the problem out of existence. At every juncture in edinoverie’s history, the Synod was reluctant to do very much to solve the problems that beset the movement: on the rare occasions that it was moved to action, it was in response to external stimuli from either the state or developments in the world of Old Belief. Reactivity rather than proactivity was the rule. I do concede, however, that the state had made it difficult for the Church to do otherwise. Edinoverie was an imposition from the very beginning: Platon (Levshin) and other hierarchs of the late eighteenth-century church resisted it when they could. Further state policies made Platon’s desire to isolate the edinovertsy seem sagacious. And one cannot condemn Platon for lacking the ability to accurately prophesy the conditions the Church would find itself in a century later. Nonetheless, this cannot disguise the fact that the Synod did very little with the limited freedom of maneuver it did possess and was a zealous partner in the Nicholaevan persecution that made the further incorporation of edinoverie into the Orthodox confession an unattractive prospect. A further argument for edinoverie’s significance is its relevance in modern Russia. From 2000, edinoverie has been revived by the Russian Orthodox Church following its near-complete elimination in the religious persecutions of the 1920s and 1930s, with new parishes being established in the former territories of the Soviet Union and the United States: Patriarch Kirill himself has taken a leading role. This has provoked comment from Russian nationalists

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like Dugin, who see edinoverie as a potential vector for restoring a national religiosity to the Church, thus vaccinating society at large against the noxious influences of both Western culture and materialistic secularism. The modern Russian-language historiography bears witness to this new interest. Church historians are seeking to sanctify edinoverie’s past in order to justify its present resurrection, while right-wing ideologists are happy to romanticize it: as such, both groups are actively ignoring those facts and potential interpretations that do not satisfy their preestablished conceptions. The most widely available secular monograph (penned and published by the historians Olga Pavlova and Radislav Kaurkin)28 cannot serve as an antidote to the abuse of edinoverie’s past, marred as it is by numerous factual errors, a bizarre and unhelpful periodization, and conclusions entirely unsupported by the evidence they themselves cite. Thankfully, a new generation of Russian historians is amending this situation. Especially worthy of note is Aleksandr Palkin’s recent monograph. While this is an excellent book, it does have some notable caesuras, the most fundamental of which is that the narrative ends in 1900: as I show, the events between 1905 and 1918 are of foremost significance when it comes to understanding edinoverie’s overall development.29 Meanwhile, the edinovertsy themselves are contributing to ongoing debates about their past and present: Father Evgenii Sarancha of the Mikhailovskaia sloboda parish (Moscow) in particular has undertaken sterling work through his church’s newsletter and the publication of valuable printed and archival documents.30 Notwithstanding these recent developments, the time is ripe for a holistic scholarly approach, one that first distances itself from the explicitly polemical legacy of the works produced in the imperial period31 and second takes advantage of the historical literature surrounding Russian Orthodoxy in particular and European Christianity in general. Such may help reveal that the modern ideological obfuscation of aspects of edinoverie’s story disguises important lessons for those who would seek to use it for their own ends. Finally, edinoverie offers new insights into the history of Old Belief. Typically, both Russian and Western historians working on Old Belief have either ignored edinoverie or reduced it to a footnote. For those working in the Soviet Union, Old Belief was a relatively politically acceptable research topic since it could be framed as a socioeconomic movement that arose in resistance to the feudal strictures imposed by the Muscovite autocracy and its ideological supporters in the Church: this slotted in with a radical intelligentsia tradition of seeing the Old Believers as allies against the tsarist government.32 It was

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also quite easy to romanticize the Old Believers as positive figures engaged in a centuries-long principled struggle in the defense of Russian traditions. The same cannot be said of the edinovertsy: their distinctly unromantic decision to reach accommodation with the state and the Church was also a politically incorrect decision as far as Marxist-Leninist ideology was concerned. With regard to the English-language literature,33 most have accepted edinoverie’s marginality as the final word on the subject and thus have failed to investigate it further. Edinoverie barely makes an appearance in important works by Robert Crummey, Roy Robson, Irina Paert, Douglas Rogers, and John Bushnell.34 More attention has been given to the phenomenon by Thomas Marsden and Peter Thomas De Simone, but the former considers it within a brief time period (the 1840s and early 1850s) and the latter on a purely local basis (its manifestation in Moscow, where relatively few parishes were located): equally, their primary source research on edinoverie is quite limited.35 This book makes the case that it is rather shortsighted to ignore edinoverie and the possible vantage point it offers on Old Belief. The source documentation (both printed and archival) on edinoverie is substantially larger (and easier to find) than that available for Old Belief. Unlike their former coreligionists, the edinovertsy were directly supervised by the Church and so produced a considerable paper trail: equally, they were not prohibited from publishing books or journal articles. The value of this material for the study of Old Belief is not lessened by the fact that the edinovertsy reached an accommodation with church and state: many continued to self-identify as Old Believers throughout the period under discussion, not least because they maintained important aspects of Old Believer religious and communal life.

Ter m inology Since terminology was a sensitive matter in the debates I examine, I must qualify and explain my usage. With regard to my main subject, I always refer to it as edinoverie, to its adherents as edinovertsy, and to individual believers as either edinoverets (masculine) or edinoverka (feminine).36 It should be noted that the word “edinoverie” was not always used. Between 1784 and 1800, the terms soglasie (concord), soedinenie (union), soglasniki, and soedinentsy were standard. Orthodox writers also used the description “the edinoverie church” (edinovercheskaia tserkov), but this could provoke dissent among those who detested the idea that edinoverie represented a distinct church. The label Orthodox Old Belief (pravoslavnoe staroobriadchestvo) became popular among some edinovertsy in the late nineteenth century, but it was deeply contentious

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because it signified agreement with the reform project that emerged in 1905: the term also suggested that the Orthodox were “new believers” (novoobriadtsy), undermining the alleged antiquity of the Nikonian ritual compact. This is a key point in theological terms, wherein Orthodoxy is identified as a Christian faith with an unbroken connection to the early Church. To challenge the age of rituals was to challenge one’s connection with the canons. Clergymen and edinovertsy also used a number of terms to distinguish Orthodoxy from edinoverie. Often used was obshchee pravoslavie, meaning “common” or “general Orthodoxy.” Other terms were velikorossiskoe pravoslavie (Great Russian Orthodoxy) or gospodstvuiushchaia tserkov (the predominant church or, more loosely, the official church). This latter label did on occasion cause upset among Russian Orthodox clergymen when applied by edinovertsy since it implied an official and bureaucratic understanding of the Church. “Old Belief ” is the commonly accepted English translation for the term staroobriadchestvo. Literally translated, the word means old ritualism, a sign of how fundamental rite was for characterizing the schism. We must also be aware that Old Belief describes an extremely diverse phenomenon. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Old Believers had divided into two basic groups, the priestly (popovtsy) and the priestless (bespopovtsy). By the time of the Russian Revolution, there were an astounding number of concords under the general term Old Belief, each with their own particular practices and religious convictions. Perhaps the only points that united them were their general opposition to the Russian Orthodox Church and their preference for elements of the preNikonian liturgy and texts. Thus, when I use the term Old Belief, I do so in the most general of ways and am aware that it does not do justice to the full complexity of the movement. The Church unrelentingly referred to Old Belief as the “schism” (raskol) and its adherents as “schismatics” (raskolniki): the state did the same, at least until 1905. The edinovertsy also sometimes referred to it as “schismatic Old Belief ” (raskolnichestvuiushchee staroobriadchestvo): here, the doctrinal unity of edinoverie with the Church was used to distinguish it from the schismatic wielders of the old rites. A final term I must deal with is conversion. There were limitations throughout the period regarding the right of the Orthodox to join edinoverie. Those in favor of such prohibitions would refer directly to “conversion” (perekhod, obrashchenie, and their attendant verbs) and sometimes even “apostasy” (otpadenie) when describing the efforts of the Orthodox to become edinovertsy. Those who saw no reason to impose limits between Orthodoxy and edinoverie, considering both a single confession, used the neutral word perechislenie, meaning enumeration or transfer. The reader should be aware that, when I use the terms

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conversion or transfer, these were deeply contested descriptions that reflected opposing viewpoints.

Struct u r e of th e Book This book is structured chronologically. Chapter 1 follows the process whereby the meaning of ritual was reevaluated in Russian Orthodoxy, one of the basic preconditions for edinoverie’s establishment: it opens in 1551 with the Stoglav Council, where the Russian Church made one of its first recorded pronouncements on the meaning of ritual. Also discussed are the other changes that had to occur for edinoverie to be realized: the failure of the Old Believers to attain access to the apostolic succession and the emergence of toleration from Catherine the Great’s government. Once all these conditions were in place, the first efforts to implement edinoverie occurred: this culminated with the rules of Metropolitan Platon in 1800. Chapter 2 briefly considers the conditions after 1800 before moving onto the vitally important reign of Nicholas I. The persecution launched against Old Belief in this period fundamentally altered both edinoverie’s character and its ultimate destiny. Chapter 3 considers edinoverie from the 1860s to the mid-1880s, when it was the subject of considerable intellectual dispute. By the end of this period, the Synod made the first substantial changes to the rules of Platon and began to embark on a new policy of integrating the edinovertsy more closely into the Orthodox confession. Chapter 4 discusses how edinoverie fared following the Edict of Toleration in 1905 and pays special attention to the reform plans of Simeon Shleev, a zealous edinoverie priest whose dynamic plans for change were stymied as the Church shifted toward the right and Rasputin achieved ascendancy. To conclude, I look at the debates in the Church Council of 1917–1918, where the rules of Platon were finally replaced with a new settlement. Chapter 5 departs from this chronological and centralized perspective to try and provide some provisional answers on questions of edinoverie identity. Included is a review of the fundamental institutions that shaped edinoverie during its existence, seeking to understand how the rules of Metropolitan Platon actually worked in practice and shaped relations between edinovertsy, the Orthodox laity, and the church administration. In the book’s conclusion, I examine the decline and virtual disappearance of edinoverie in the 1920s and 1930s as the Church withered under the assault of the Soviet government. It ends by examining edinoverie’s reinvention in modern Russia, where I show that the new edinoverie is reintroducing the same problems of ritual, confession, and authority that dogged it and the Church throughout the imperial period.

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Note s 1. “Bozhestvennaia liturgiia drevnerusskim chinom sovershena v Uspenskom sobore Moskovskogo Kremlia,” M ­­ ospat​.­r u, accessed February 26, 2018, ­­https://​­mospat​.­r u​/­r u​/­2013​/­01​/­12​/­news78937. 2. For how I have arrived at these numbers, see chapter 5. 3. For a discussion of heresy and its punishment in seventeenth-century Russia, see N. S. Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 344–355. 4. A. F. Pisemskii, “Liudi sorokovykh godov” in Sobranie sochinenii v deviati tomakh, 9 vols. (Moscow: Pravda, 1956), 5:263. 5. For the Petrine reforms of the Church, see J. Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great (London: Macmillan, 1977). 6. For the problems of Georgian Orthodoxy in the Russian Empire, see P. Werth, “Georgian Autocephaly and the Ethnic Fragmentation of Orthodoxy,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 23 (2003): 74–100. 7. For the multiconfessional establishment, see P. Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For other perspectives on how Russia managed its religious minorities, see R. D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 8. Werth, Tsar’s Foreign Faiths, 38. 9. Ibid., 45. 10. For the vexed matter of Old Believer statistics, see I. Paert, “‘Two or Twenty Million?’ The Languages of Official Statistics and Religious Dissent in Imperial Russia,” Ab Imperio 3 (2006): 75–98. 11. T. Marsden, The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia: Bibikov’s System for the Old Believers, 1841–1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 33–56. 12. For the best examples, see A. Jersild, “Faith, Custom, and Ritual in the Borderlands: Orthodoxy, Islam, and the ‘Small Peoples’ of the Middle Volga and the North Caucasus,” Russian Review 59, no. 4 (2000): 512–529; C. J. Chulos, Converging Worlds: Religion and Community in Peasant Russia, 1861–1917 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); V. A. Kivelson and R. H. Greene, eds., Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). One should also consult D. Martin’s recent discussion of the relationship of Old Believers to political rituals of loyalty, such as oaths and the award of medals: D. A. Martin, “Loyal to God: Old Believers, Oaths and Orders,” History and Anthropology 28, no. 4 (2017): 477–496.

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13. For key works, see H. Schilling, Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: Brill, 1992); S. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997); B. Nischan, Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); E. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 14. L. D. Peterson, “Johann Pfeffinger’s Treatises of 1550 in Defense of Adiaphora: ‘High Church’ Lutheranism and Confessionalization in Albertine Saxony” in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honour and Memory of Bodo Nischan, ed. J. M. Headley, H. J. Hillerbrand, and A. K. Papalas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 91–106. 15. For a particular example, see I. Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 16. While the confessionalization paradigm has been applied to Russia, some scholars argue that we should be cautious: see A. Brüning, “Confessionalization in the Slavia Orthodoxa (Belorussia, Ukraine, Russia)? Potential and Limits of a Western Historiographical Concept,” in Religion and the Conceptual Boundary in Central and Eastern Europe: Encounters of Faiths, ed. T. Bremer (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 66–120. It is worth noting, however, that many of the opponents of confessionalization’s application to contexts beyond the German lands tend to regard the concept not as a toolbox for analyzing interesting parallels in the religious developments of diverse states but rather as a rigid and unbendable framework. 17. A. Brüning, “Social Discipline among the Russian Orthodox Parish Clergy (17th–18th Century): Normative Ideals and the Practice of Parish Life,” Cahiers du monde russe 58, no. 3 (2017): 309. For G. B. Michels’s argument, see At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Michels has recently suggested that Old Belief itself also underwent processes of confession building: see G. B. Michels, “From Persecuted Minority to Confessional Church: Some Thoughts on the Near Extinction and Ultimate Survival of Old Belief (1650s–1730s),” CanadianAmerican Slavic Studies 49, no. 2–3 (2015): 322–337. 18. For discussion of the Old Believer sign of the cross as a signifier of the “Armenian heresy,” see B. A. Uspenskii, Krestnoe znamenie i sakralnoe prostranstvo: Pochemu pravoslavnye krestiatsia sprava nalevo a katoliki—sleva napravo? (Moscow: Iaziki slavianskoi kultury, 2004), 111–114. 19. A. Palkin, “Edinoverie v kontse 1820-kh—1850-e gody: Mekhanizmy gosudarstvennogo prinuzhdeniia i protivostoianie staroverov,” Quaestio Rossica 3 (2014): 87–106.

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20. As Marsden points out, the idea that Old Belief as authentically Russian had its roots among intellectuals in the 1830s and 1840s: Marsden, Crisis of Religious Toleration, 22–23. For its further development, see E. Krevsky, “Defining the Schism: Images and Interpretations of the Old Belief in Late Nineteenth-Century Russian Discourse” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2002). 21. A. Dugin, “Staroobriadchestvo i edinoverie,” M ­­ edevrzia​.­org, accessed April 8, 2016, ­­http://​­med​.­org​.­r u​/­a rticle​/­1326. 22. S. K. Batalden, Russian Bible Wars: Modern Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3. 23. V. Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 24. I. Paert, Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760–1850 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 61. 25. Werth himself admits that he does not focus on “native” Russian dissenters because of lack of space and time. Werth, Tsar’s Foreign Faiths, 8. 26. For the first major blow struck against this notion, see G. L. Freeze, “Handmaiden of the State? The Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia Reconsidered,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36, no. 1 (1985): 82–102. 27. This literature is now too vast to list here: one can find summaries in G. L. Freeze, “Russian Orthodoxy: Church, People and Politics in Imperial Russia,” in The Cambridge History of Russia 3 vols., ed. D. Lieven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2:284–305; S. Dixon, “The Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia, 1721–1917,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, 9 vols., ed. M. Angold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 5:325–347. 28. R. V. Kaurkin and O. A. Pavlova, Edinoverie v Rossii: Ot zarozhdeniia idei do nachala XX veka (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2011). 29. A. S. Palkin, Edinoverie v seredine XVIII—nachale XX veka: Obshcherossiiskii kontekst i regionalnaia spetsifika (Ekaterinburg: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo universiteta, 2016). 30. For his reprints of the minutes of the first, second, and third national edinoverie congresses, see Trudy pervogo vserossiiskogo sezda pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev (edinovertsev), ed. E. Sarancha and N. Kuzin (Moscow: Edinovercheskoe obshchestvo khrama Arkhangela Mikhaila sela Mikhailovskaia sloboda, 2012); Trudy II i III vserossiiskikh sezdov pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev (edinovertsev), ed. E. Sarancha (Moscow: Edinovercheskoe obshchestvo khrama Arkhangela Mikhaila sela Mikhailovskaia sloboda, 2018). 31. Note the fact that the two edinoverie authors who have enjoyed modern reprints, Simeon Shleev and Ioann Verkhovskii, were also two of the most explicitly polemical writers of the imperial era, since both were unabashedly

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championing political projects that necessarily disregarded or discredited alternative viewpoints: see Simon (Shleev), Edinoverie v svoem vnutrennem razvitii (Moscow: Medium, 2004); I. T. Verkhovskii, Trudy, ed. T. G. Sidash (St. Petersburg: Quadrivium, 2014). 32. P. Call, Vasily L. Kelsiev: An Encounter between the Russian Revolutionaries and the Old Believers (Belmont: Nordland, 1979). 33. The same is true for the literature in German: see E. Maeder, Altgläubige zwischen Aufbruch und Apokalypse: Religion, Verwaltung und Wirtschaft in einem Ostsibirischen Dorf (1900–1930er Jahre) (Zurich: Chronos, 2008) and H. Schmidt, Glaubenstoleranz und Schisma im Russlandischen Imperium: Die Staatliche Politik gegenuber den Altglaubigen in Livland, 1850–1906 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016). 34. R. Crummey, Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694–1855 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970); R. Crummey, Old Believers in a Changing World (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011); R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995); I. Paert, Old Believers; D. Rogers, The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); J. Bushnell, Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry: Spasovite Old Believers in the 18th–19th Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). 35. Marsden, Crisis of Religious Toleration; P. T. De Simone, The Old Believers in Imperial Russia: Oppression, Opportunism and Religious Identity in Tsarist Moscow (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018). 36. “Edinovertsy” is also commonly used to describe non-Russian Orthodox Christians (Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, etc.). In such a context, the term is best translated as “those of the same faith.”

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RITUAL AND THE ORIGINS OF EDINOVERIE

Introduction In December 1798, Ivan Ivanovich Milov, merchant and purveyor of silks to the imperial court, applied to Gavriil (Petrov), the metropolitan of St. Petersburg, to join the Russian Orthodox Church while also being permitted to perform the Old Believer liturgy. Simultaneously, he successfully petitioned for the conversion of the Old Believer chapel in his home into a church and the provision of a priest. On June 29, 1799, the new church was blessed in the name of St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker, thus becoming the Nikolskaia church, although its parishioners knew it more informally as Milovskaia in honor of its founder. With this act, Milov and Gavriil established the first edinoverie parish in St. Petersburg.1 Just over a year later, Emperor Paul attended a service at the church and invited the parishioners to join a service in the chapel of the imperial court. Courtiers and converts prayed together, the latter using their pre-Nikonian ritual. Paul accepted a two-fingered blessing from the priest and later donated a bell and a cross to the church.2 Paul timed his visit with a good deal of precision. Less than a month earlier, on October 27, 1800, he had signed an edict that established edinoverie as a permanent fixture of the Russian Orthodox Church and set down a series of conditions to which Old Believers had to agree if their applications to join were to be accepted. Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) of Moscow was responsible for this new edict, which he had formulated in response to a request from a group of priestly Old Believers within his diocese. The sixteen conditions and two supplementary opinions (“the rules of Metropolitan Platon”) formed the basis for edinoverie’s existence until their replacement in 1918. Paul’s visit and subsequent

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generosity to the new Petersburg parish were his stamp of approval on the new arrangement, a move intended to symbolically affirm close connections between the throne, the Church, and the new flock of repentant “schismatics.” However, the neat symbolism of Paul’s beneficence hides a more complex story. Since the reign of Catherine the Great, the Russian state had embarked on a general policy of religious toleration3 and, in doing so, had backed the creation of edinoverie as a way to bring the Old Believers under closer surveillance and mobilize them for ambitious resettlement projects in southern Russia.4 Edinoverie was a way to instrumentalize Old Believers without legitimizing Old Belief itself: this was more amenable to the Church and to the state’s ideological definition of itself as a defender of Orthodoxy. Nonetheless, the ideas behind edinoverie were deeply problematic for Russian Orthodoxy, which had spent the past century defining itself against Old Belief. As in Western Europe during and immediately after the Reformation, ritual was a crucial way in which the Russian Orthodox Church distinguished its confession from other religious groups. It functioned as a clear-cut sign of who belonged to the flock and who did not.5 Allowing Old Believers to enter into the Church while keeping their old rites meant also allowing two forms of ritual, thus damaging the role ritual played in signifying religious identity. Being closely connected to the state, leading clergymen had little choice but to justify the new policy of unity in theological terms. They did this by denuding ritual of its former dogmatic importance, transforming it into a matter of secondary significance. However, when it came to realizing this theoretical commitment in practice, leading clergymen proved reluctant to act, concerned about relinquishing the ritual markers that helped denote, define, and control Orthodoxy. This chapter explores how Orthodox confessional identity and toleration interacted to form the 1800 settlement that created edinoverie. In doing so, it is necessary to examine how attitudes to ritual changed in the late eighteenth century to make edinoverie possible in the first place. The ultimate result of this interplay between ritual, confession, and tolerance was a deeply problematic edict riddled with paradoxes that plagued edinoverie throughout its existence. This chapter also provides insight into a telling instance of church-state relations in Russia and how changing attitudes to the schism in the state challenged the Church’s policies.

R it ua l a n d Dogm a In Western and Central Europe, the Reformation initially helped increase the importance of rituals through their association with denominational identity:

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“Much like the Lutherans, the Reformed thus had come to see church rituals as a means, first, to delineate themselves from other denominations and, second, to build greater confessional loyalty and cohesion.”6 A rite was a physical emblem of confessional belonging.7 However, the stalemate of the Thirty Years’ War led to a need for confessional coexistence. Theologians and statesmen began to consign ritual to the category of adiaphora or matters indifferent. In this way, ritual behavior was no longer necessarily considered a marker of religious orthodoxy and thus there was no need for religious groups to fight over it.8 Ritual came to be disconnected from religious belief and internal conviction. As Edward Muir states, “Although the number of rituals has not declined, their status in society and their ability to present the sacred have been radically demoted as a consequence of the ritual disputes of the early modern period.”9 In Russia, the idea of reducing the significance of ritual did not make any inroads until the last third of the eighteenth century. In 1551, the Stoglav Council made a telling proscription on the matter of making the sign of the cross when blessing one’s self and others: “If anyone does not bestow a blessing with two fingers the way Christ did, or does not make the sign of the cross [on himself] with two fingers, the Holy Fathers have said that he will be anathematized.”10 Consequently, if an individual failed to perform the ritual correctly, then they were subject to anathema and cast out from the Church. One form of ritual was, therefore, directly connected to doctrinal orthodoxy while anything else amounted to nothing other than a form of heresy. Indeed, this was not simply a connection between categories but a conflation wherein ritual and dogma were held to be indistinguishable from one another. Ritual was religious truth and vice versa. Dogmas, the sacred inheritance of the Gospels, ecumenical councils, and the Church Fathers, were immutable. Change was heretical, a deviation from the divinely ordained order. Holding ritual to be synonymous with dogma meant that any alterations to ritual forms were dangerous and destructive. Also, in conflating ritual with dogma, the Church made ritual deviance into an issue of its authority. To control and define ritual was to control and define dogma and thus the very bases of the Orthodox faith. This granted ritual a tremendous exclusionary power to define who was within its flock. In this sense, it became a way of distinguishing correct Orthodoxy from deviations and heresies. It could integrate the flock into a single, relatively homogeneous body while firmly excluding those who sought to challenge the authority of the Church. It should be emphasized that the Russian Orthodox Church did not necessarily inherit this understanding of ritual from Orthodoxy itself. Some of the Church Fathers did distinguish between rite and dogma. Under such an

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understanding, the Ecumenical Church has always allowed its autocephalous branches freedom to determine their own ritual compacts. Neither of these traditions was dead in the seventeenth century, as a 1655 letter from Patriarch Paisos of Constantinople to Patriarch Nikon demonstrates. The Greek told Nikon that rite was not the equivalent of dogma and, therefore, he should be cautious that liturgical reform did not cause a breach in church peace.11 However, it would appear that such a conception was present neither in the Stoglav Council nor in Nikon’s thinking: Paisos’s sage advice was ignored. It was only with the revival of patristic scholarship in the mid-nineteenth century that older Orthodox traditions began to filter through, helping provoke the debates on ritual freedom in the 1870s that I examine in chapter 3. Dogma and ritual remained conflated until the 1760s, at least as far as the Church itself was concerned. What changed in the mid-seventeenth century was not attitude to ritual but rather the form of ritual conflated with dogma. Patriarch Nikon and his advisers came to the conclusion that the two-fingered sign of the cross and various other liturgical rites had departed from the Greek originals. If rituals were dogma and dogma was unchanging, then the Russians had clearly deviated not only in ritual terms but in a dogmatic sense as well. Nikon, backed by Patriarch Macarios III of Antioch and Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, launched a campaign to eradicate the Russian “innovations” and restore the pristine rituals (and, therefore, the presence of dogmatic truth). This meant changing the spelling of some words (i.e., the name of Jesus Christ), altering the number of fingers used in the sign of the cross from two to three, and other changes to the liturgical order.12 The most important consequence of this process was a series of anathemas imposed first by Macarios in 1656 and then by the Great Moscow Council in 1666–1667.13 These anathematized the two-fingered sign of the cross and other old rites, thus excluding their adherents from the Church and creating the Old Believer schism. The Stoglav Council was also anathematized for having legitimized the “deviations” from Greek practice. The problem was not that the leading Old Believers and the Church were divided in their attitude toward ritual. Rather, it was that both held the same attitude centered on the conflation between ritual and the immutability of dogma. The difference between the two groups lay only in which set of rituals they subjected to that conflation. The confusion of ritual and dogma on the Orthodox side is clear from a letter sent from Macarios to Nikon in 1656: “Who from the Christians does not make the sign of the cross by the tradition of the Eastern Church, which from the beginning to this day has kept the faith, is a heretic . . . and by virtue of this is excommunicated from the Father, the Son, and the Holy

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Spirit and is anathematised: confession of the truth is disclosed by their hands.”14 From this point on, the Russian Orthodox Church strenuously asserted the link between ritual and dogma. On May 15, 1722, the new Holy Synod declared in point eleven of a regulation on converting the “schismatics” that “whosoever forms the sign of the cross with two fingers and not three is ascribed to the schism, regardless of obedience to the Church and taking all church sacraments and whether they do so out of harmful sophistry or out of ignorance or stubbornness.”15 It was irrelevant if a person using the two-fingered sign of the cross considered himself loyal to the Church and completed all of his religious duties: the ritual he used still made him an enemy of the Church and outside its fold. Thus, the conflation between ritual and dogma was made absolute, overriding even matters of internal conviction. If someone made the sign of the cross with two fingers, then they had violated the immutable dogmas and had left the aegis of the Church. Ritual, through its conflation with dogma, had become a defining tenet of Orthodoxy. As such, it was to be imposed on the Russian population. If persuasion failed, then force would have to suffice. The late seventeenth-century episcopate had few qualms about utilizing troops and severely punishing recalcitrant parishioners to push the new liturgical compact onto their flocks.16 It should be clear why ritual was of importance for the delineation of an Orthodox confessional identity against the schism. One form of rite indicated orthodoxy and the other heterodoxy. However, confession building requires more than just ritual reform. It needs a creed, the extension of the administrative apparatus of the Church, a focus on clerical education, and the spread of treatises attacking other creeds while defining one’s own. In terms of a creed, Orthodoxy possessed one in the form of Petr (Mohyla’s) 1640 Orthodox Confes­ sion of Faith, a document whereby he “developed a distinctive confession of faith and theological system for the Orthodox church that echoed the eloquence and sophistication of the leading confessional treatises of the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches.”17 Mohyla also published a short catechism in the same year that was intended to spread his creed to the general population. His actions were very much provoked by the threat of the Uniate Church, the existence of which required a firmer definition of what Orthodoxy was. The ritual changes of 1666–1667 were closely connected with the gradual tightening of administrative links (such as an increase in the number of dioceses) and reform of the education of the parish clergy.18 As priests were seen as potential opponents of the Nikonian rituals, the Great Moscow Council prescribed visitations to ensure clerics not only were enacting the liturgical

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changes but also were behaving in a manner that befitted their priestly rank.19 Didactic pamphlets began to be printed in Moscow that “combined admonitions about proper Christian behaviour with instructions about the correct use of the new liturgies.”20 The schism provoked the Church into reforms that sought to extend its control over the belief, behavior, and actions of not just the clergy but also the laity. However, the Church initially lacked the administrative reach to thoroughly discipline the confession: Michels notes that it was only by the beginning of the eighteenth century that the new rituals had replaced the old in most Orthodox churches.21 The bureaucratic clout required only came with the reforms between 1740 and 1800 that provided new systems of control in the dioceses (such as consistories and clerical deans) and a seminary system designed to improve the quality of the clergy. Gregory Freeze has termed this as “an organizational revolution.”22 The Church published a variety of polemics against Old Belief and its rituals. The most famous were St. Dimitrii of Rostov’s Investigation of the Schismatic Faith and Bishop Pitirim of Nizhnii Novogord’s Sling (Prashchitsa), both from the early eighteenth century.23 They reinforced the conflation of dogma and ritual by furthering the association of the old rite with heresy and called for the repression of Old Belief.24 At the same time, they set out the basic tenets of Russian Orthodoxy, further spreading the creed created by Mohyla. Most important, quotations from these works found their way into the Psalter and the Hours, books of fundamental importance for both the liturgy and religious teaching. Thus, the spread of the creed among the populace was accompanied by an emphasis on the ritual distinction between Orthodoxy and the schism. The fact that the Church continued to print these works and the offending phrases was both an annoyance to the edinovertsy and a boon to the Old Believers, who used them to demonstrate that the edinovertsy had not really been accepted into Orthodoxy. It took until 1886, however, for the Synod to issue an explanation that these and similar statements were the opinions of private individuals from a time long past and not the official opinion of the Church: similarly, it was only in the 1860s that Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) launched a project to edit the Psalter and the Hours.25 Although his predecessors had also been involved in utilizing the Church to extend their control over the population, Peter the Great upped the tempo. He “saw religion as a means of disciplining rational and industrious subjects,” an attitude that explains why he heaped administrative duties onto the clergy and also bureaucratized the highest level of the Church by abolishing the patriarchate and replacing it with the collegiate Synod.26 Peter also detested how superstition prevented the emergence of rationality in Russia.

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In  the eighteenth century, “the Church launched a full-scale campaign to reshape popular Orthodoxy.”27 Peter himself was relatively tolerant of Old Belief and granted it a degree of legality. His main interest was that the Old Believers pay the double poll tax and be useful to his state. Empress Anna strictly enforced these provisions and extended conscription to the Old Believers.28 Both rulers still wanted to end the schism, but they conceded that force only drove zealous Old Believers into exile: therefore, use should be made of those who absolutely would not convert. This pragmatic attitude saw the emergence of a couple of abortive and short-lived attempts to allow the old rites in Orthodox churches among Cossacks in Astrakhan and the southern Urals in the 1730s and 1740s: the aim was to better secure the loyalty of valuable military personnel and monitor them. However, as Aleksandr Palkin remarks, “the scale of the authorities’ compromises in relation to Old Belief was not comparable to the scale of their repressive and punitive policies.”29 Thus, Russia saw the beginnings of a project of Orthodox confession building over the course of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: the enforcement of ritual distinction, the formulation of a creed, a new focus on clerical education, and the creation of administrative mechanisms to enforce control of priests and laity. The state also sought to use religion as a means for social disciplining and often relied on force to attack Old Belief and other religious groups in the name of uniting all under the Church. While Freeze is correct to suggest is that the Church’s efforts before 1818 were motivated not by fear of Old Belief but by an enlightenment preoccupation with eradicating superstition and educating the population,30 this view also neglects some key points. First, it is necessary to see confession building as beginning not in 1750 but rather in the 1660s. As Michels puts it, “Peter I merely continued, and possibly intensified, a trend that had already emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century.”31 Certainly, the motivations changed under the influence of both Peter I and Catherine II but there can be no doubting that the first four or five decades of the process were pushed by fear of the schism and the need to enforce liturgical reform. Second, one needs to account for the ritual dimension. Confessions are formed not just by institutions and the expansion of control but also by formalizing and spreading a distinctive ritual. In the case of Orthodoxy, the Nikonian rites defined the confession precisely in juxtaposition to the schism. Finally, anxieties about the spread of Old Belief most definitely shaped the Church’s attitude to edinoverie. Fear of the spread of the schism among the Orthodox flock led to a reluctance to establish it. The short reign of Peter III marked the beginning of a new relationship between the state and Old Belief. In a decree of January 29, 1762, he declared

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a review of the existing legislation on the schism and vowed to end coercion against it.32 After deposing her unfortunate spouse, Catherine the Great continued with his policies. While “Old Belief was not recognised as a distinct religious group, due to the relaxation of religious constraints, Old Believer communities enjoyed certain freedoms and privileges,” which included the foundation of large centers in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, the most famous being the Rogozhskoe and Preobrazhenskoe cemeteries.33 Catherine’s religious policies were the beginnings of the multiconfessional establishment, whereby various faiths and religious groups were placed on a hierarchy of privileges and limitations designed to act as a mechanism for social control and to guarantee stability on peripheries populated by Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Buddhists.34 Granting Old Believers certain freedoms brought them out from hiding and into the public gaze, meaning they could be subject to a greater degree of surveillance and mobilization. This was particularly the case with edicts designed to lure Old Believers back from their exile abroad and a 1785 regulation that allowed Old Believers to be elected to civil positions.35 Some church hierarchs, cognizant of the need for a change, led “a revolution in views on the old rituals and relations to them.”36 Signs of this shift in mentality were already present in 1762, when Metropolitan Dimitrii (Sechenov) and Bishop Gedeon (Krinovskii) declared that the Old Believers could keep their rituals “if, in everything else and especially in the dogmas of faith, they promise to abide in the Holy Greco-Russian Church, do not keep or introduce any of the heresies anathematised by the ecumenical and local councils, and never insult those who use rituals different from their own.”37 In 1764, Catherine abolished the 1722 Synodal edict that had established an unequivocal relationship between ritual and confessional adherence.38 These early indications of a new attitude toward ritual in the Russian Ortho­ dox Church bore fruit with the publication of Platon (Levshin’s) Exhortation to the Schismatics in 1766 and its distribution to every parish in the empire in 1769.39 Platon’s argument was that the Orthodox and the Old Believers essentially believed in the same things: “You [Old Believers] worshipfully believe in the one God of the Holy Trinity, as do we: you confess Our Lord Jesus Christ, the savior of the world, as do we: you piously honor the Holy Gospels and the holy ecumenical and local councils for the rules of faith, as do we.”40 He then conducted an exhaustive exercise in comparing the liturgical differences that existed between Orthodoxy and Old Belief in order to demonstrate why these distinct rituals did not alter the fact that the two groups believed and confessed a single holy truth. As there was no dogmatic difference between Orthodoxy

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and Old Belief but only a ritual one, there should be no barrier to the latter using the pre-Nikonian rituals in the Church itself.41 None of this meant that Platon thought the schism should continue to exist: rather that “his approach to those who have left the church is to extend to them the love that, based on Christ’s words, unites all Orthodox Christians.”42 Equally, Platon doubted the value of persecution, which he argued only fanned the flame of Old Believer fanaticism and obduracy: talking about the seventeenth-century assault on Old Belief, in 1810 he noted, “they [the authorities] should have dealt with the schismatics with some reasonable forbearance.”43 A significant consequence of the abolition of the conflation between ritual and dogma was that the Church reflected more on internal, individual belief without necessarily considering external behavior. The most important thing now was that the Old Believer converts confirmed that they believed in the legitimacy of the Church and its teachings rather than externally conformed in ritual behavior. This reevaluation of ritual meant a swing in focus toward internal religious conviction, being concerned with beliefs, and a movement away from policing external action. This marks the continuation of a process noted by Paul Bushkovitch in the seventeenth century, whereby a shift toward sermonizing represented a “move toward individual religious life, for in a very direct way they tell the individual to be personally a good Christian, not merely a participant in liturgy and ritual or an outside admirer of the monks.”44 That Platon, an adept preacher, should be a leader in this individualization of religious faith is, therefore, not surprising, especially since he and others “sought to encourage more cognitive forms of religious belief and practice.”45 One should also not underestimate the influence of certain Protestant (particularly Pietist) texts, where the interiority of religious conviction and salvation was prized far above ritual, on this generation of Russian Orthodox bishops.46 By the end of the 1760s, at least some influential members of the Church had concluded that ritual was not the same thing as dogma. The two were distinct and, therefore, a difference in ritual did not preclude church unity. The change owed most to the shift in state policy inaugurated by Peter III and continued by Catherine. The close relationship between church and state meant that the Russian Orthodox prelates had little choice but to go along with the new enlightened attitude toward the schism. Platon himself was the court preacher and tutor to Tsarevich Paul. He was, therefore, one of the empress’s most important ideologists. The Exhortation to the Schismatics was designed to make Catherine’s policy of tolerance more palatable to the Russian Orthodox Church and to translate the meaning of her beneficent measures into theological and liturgical terms.47

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We must be cautious not to exaggerate the extent of this move. It absolutely did not mean indifference to ritual. Nor was it a carte blanche for absolute freedom of choice in ritual matters. Platon and other hierarchs stopped short of holding the old rituals to be equally legitimate to the Nikonian ones. The ritual reevaluation only meant at this point in time that these two sets of rituals could be permitted. It was not an argument for ritual freedom or even ritual equality.

U nit y in Fa ith By the end of the 1760s, two of the necessary preconditions for the emergence of edinoverie had fallen into place: a tolerant government policy toward Old Belief and the Church’s translation of that policy into theological terms. However, there was one more prerequisite required, the willingness of the Old Believers themselves to accept some kind of union with the Church. During the last decades of the seventeenth century, the Old Believers had to deal with the problem of priests. The generation of clergy who had joined the schism when it began was dying off. As no bishops had defected from the official Church, there was no opportunity to canonically ordain replacements. The Old Believers faced being cut off from the apostolic succession and the sacraments. Divergent views on how to handle this crisis split the fledgling movement into the priestly and the priestless concords. The former relied on Orthodox clergy who, after their ordination, fled the Church. The latter declared that since Nikon’s reforms amounted to nothing less than the fall of the Third Rome and the triumph of the Antichrist, the priesthood was effectively defunct and would not be reestablished until the second coming of Christ.48 In the meantime, some of their lay leaders performed certain sacraments (penance and baptism), a practice they legitimized by referring to those canonical rules that authorized a layman to administer rites in cases of emergency. Neither solution was perfect. The fugitive priests had often fled not because of any principled opposition to the Church but because their behavior had been poor enough to warrant disciplinary measures. The priestless had to deal with those sections of the sacred writings that emphasized the role of bishops and priests in gaining access to salvation. As a result, Old Believers from both broad groups began searching for an acceptable priesthood, dispatching embassies to Georgia, the Balkans, and the patriarchates of the east in the hope that bishops there could be persuaded to ordain a new hierarchy. On occasion, they came close to succeeding but were thwarted by the fact that most such churches were financially and diplomatically dependent on the Russian tsar.49 One such ambassador for the schism

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was Nikodim of Starodub, a priestly abbot. He underwent trips to Georgia in 1768 and then to the east in 1779 and 1781 in the hope of finding a pliant prelate to realize his plans.50 However, he enjoyed no success. His final failure spurred him to investigate the possibility of some kind of reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Church. In July 1781, Nikodim entered into negotiations with Baron P. A. Rumiantsev, Metropolitan Gavriil of St. Petersburg, and Prince Grigorii Potemkin, the empress’s morganatic spouse and the most influential potentate of the Russian Empire. Nikodim told them that he and over a thousand coreligionists wanted “to have among us the divinely established episcopal rank” and, therefore, were willing to come under the aegis of the Russian Orthodox Church.51 Equally, he wrote that he also wanted to see the abolition of “the anathemas and condemnations placed on the ancient Russian church customs” so that “many thousands of souls, upon feeling such mercy, will be prepared to place themselves under the entirely perfect (vsesovershennoe) administration of a bishop.”52 Despite threats to his person from other Old Believers, Nikodim persisted and was able to present a petition in September 1783.53 On March 11, 1784, after a year of further negotiation, Catherine dispatched an order to Gavriil, informing him that he was to tell the bishops of Mogilev and Slaviansk to dispatch priests who would perform the liturgy and sacraments by the old ritual.54 Nikodim arrived home on April 2 but died just over a month later, apparently worn out by his exertions. After his demise, the project stalled. Potemkin made resettlement to Novorossiia a condition for receiving priests: “Those who desire to settle in the lands of the Tauride region, on the left bank of the Dnieper River . . . will receive priests from the bishop of Tauride who are subordinate to him and who will always use their customary ritual and church order.”55 However, the Old Believers remained in Starodub. Only at the end of 1787 did the situation change when Metropolitan Gavriil received a petition that prophesized dire consequences if priests were not dispatched: the Petersburg prelate hastily sent a cleric to Starodub, finally realizing the union initiated by Nikodim. Potemkin’s interest in edinoverie shows that the Russian government’s attitude toward Old Belief was motivated not so much by some abstract principle of religious toleration but by the practical benefits they expected to accrue from drawing the Old Believers either back from exile or out of hiding. Toleration was expected not only to support the stability of the Russian state and improve surveillance of the population but also to strengthen and develop the new southern border zone. Reconciliation of Old Belief with the Church was to aid in the mobilization of the populace.

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Another union was being realized near Elizavetgrad (modern Kropyvnytski) in 1780. Archbishop Nikephoros (Theotokis), a well-educated Greek prelate, had received a request from the Old Believers of Znamenka for priests to perform according to the old ritual.56 Nikephoros, a great fan of Platon’s Exhortation to the Schismatics, agreed and promptly sent a clergyman to perform the sacraments. He himself went to bless their new church.57 This was much to the chagrin of Gavriil and Platon since Nikephoros did not bother to inform them until after the fact. Their annoyance was evident given that it took Gavriil over a year to respond, doing so only on December 18, 1781. The Synod, Gavriil fumed at the Greek, “wants to rescind your instruction; but so as not to cause new trouble we are silent, hoping that you will attempt to bring them [the Old Believers] to a more healthy understanding so that they fully settle down and will agree with the Orthodox Church in everything.”58 Platon doubted the sincerity of the converts and, moreover, stated “that to allow them to use the old books and rituals, I fear nothing else from this than great temptation for others.” Platon’s concern was that allowing insincere converts into the Church would only lead to greater apostasy at a later date. If the Old Believers truly wanted to join the Church, then “let them join so that there are no differences between us and them.”59 Confessional anxieties, in the form of fear of temptation and defection, were shaping the response to edinoverie. Bruess is right to suggest that part of the problem was related to authority: “Theotokis undertook to accommodate the Old Believers without first seeking the permission of the Synod, while the Synod itself was directly responsible for the Starodub affair without the agency of an archbishop or bishop.”60 However, the fact that both Platon and Gavriil were reluctant to allow old rite liturgies in Orthodox churches requires some explanation, especially since Platon consistently refused to take advantage of such opportunities. He was cold toward Nikodim’s scheme and would accept it only after the abbot made concessions to demonstrate that his conversion was genuine.61 Nor did he react any more favorably to a request for unity in faith from the Don Cossacks in the 1790s. Here, Platon was even more forthright. In a letter to Mefodii (Smirnov), the bishop of Voronezh, he proclaimed: “What they ask for cannot be permitted without heavy sorrow and temptation for others. My thought is that you do not present this to the Synod. Let them petition if they want: our business is to reject this mad and lawless request—I have repeatedly done so. I have never allowed our priests to perform any church service among the schismatics by their so-called old rituals and books because this is impossible to do without prejudice to our holy ritual, books, and the authority of the Church.”62 When the Cossack administration reviewed the situation and concluded that the

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request should not be met, Platon was thoroughly happy with the result. He would be able to show this to the Moscow Old Believers and get them “to shut up” about obtaining priests from the Church. Platon rejected the idea that the pre-Nikonian rituals could be allowed within the Church, fearing that doing so would “tempt” members of the Orthodox flock and would damage the reputation of the Nikonian rites. These statements were the answers of a confession builder, someone who defined the Orthodox flock by its ritual behavior and sought to police that line vigilantly. His actions were motivated by a fear for the integrity of the confession: accepting insincere converts might threaten the spread of the schism and thus apostasy. It is notable that at this time Platon was launching a spate of confession-building policies that sought to strengthen the Russian Orthodox Church’s administrative reach. In his diocese of Moscow, he created the position of deans to strengthen the control of the hierarchy over the clergy and promulgated the first consistory regulation. Perhaps most important, his reforms of seminary education began to transform the clergy from the dispensers of sacraments into educators and preachers who sought to regulate the moral health of their flocks.63 This was the beginning of the “professionalization” of the pastorate, or their transformation into agents of surveillance and discipline for both state and Church.64 Platon would hardly have been keen to undermine Orthodoxy and its ritual by taking on insincere converts while he was struggling to strengthen the confession through institutional reform. However, he did not have a free hand in the matter. Already the state had shown its willingness to take the initiative from the Church when it discerned some utility in edinoverie. Potemkin’s role in both projects was significant: Nikodim declared that “without him our business could not have happened and nothing would have been done for us.”65 The instance in Znamenka in 1780 shows much the same point. Archbishop Nikeforos, when he read Gavriil and Platon’s intemperate response to his initiative, subtly informed both prelates that he was in contact with Potemkin, thus threatening them with the anger of Russia’s most senior statesman.66 The Church was confronted with the prospect of losing control over who could and could not be admitted into the flock of Christ. However, Catherine’s interest was too sporadic to be much of a threat, and the experience with the Chernigov (Chernihiv) converts seems to have soured any further interest Potemkin had in the matter. It was only with the accession of Emperor Paul in 1796 that the problem became far more serious for the Church. Paul “took an even more open approach toward the Old Belief than his mother, making the integration of the Old Rite into the Russian Orthodox

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Church one of his prime interests,”67 and so the specter loomed once again that the Church would lose control over the situation.68 The Synod tried to preempt the emperor’s intervention with an edict from March 4, 1798, that would allow individual bishops to negotiate with Old Believers in their dioceses and form edinoverie communities that bore the explicit imprint of the Church’s interests.69 It was to no avail. On June 3, 1799, Paul instructed Amvrosii (Podobedov) of Kazan to take personal charge over a group of Muscovite Old Believers whom Platon had repeatedly refused to admit into communion with the Church. The reason for the rejections was that their petition made reference to the creation of an Old Believer ecclesiastical consistory (dukhovnoe pravlenie).70 Had Paul acceded to this particular request (which he did not), Old Belief would have achieved a place in the empire’s multiconfessional establishment akin to that possessed by some other non-Orthodox religions, firmly legalizing them in the eyes of the state.71 The matter ended in farce. Amvrosii and the Old Believers could not come to agreement on how to conduct prayers for the imperial family (a recurring problem in edinoverie parishes), and so Paul was forced to rescind his instructions only two months later, leaving the bishop to rapidly recover any compromising correspondence.72 Platon now knew that the Church had to take matters into its own hands. Therefore, he decided to create a edinoverie community in Moscow on the basis of a more moderate petition he had received from a rival group of Old Believers in September 1799, submitting to the Synod a set of conditions for accepting these converts. Even now he proved hesitant. Between the first hearing of the conditions on February 28, 1800, and the second on August 24, the metropolitan twice expressed concerns to Amvrosii, arguing it would be best to reject the conditions outright until the Synod had more “freedom” to discuss the matter.73 Despite this, the Synod was prepared to act and passed Platon’s rules on August 24, 1800. At this point, the settlement, meant to apply only to Moscow, was created under the 1798 edict. Once again, the specter of secular interference prompted a change in course. In September, the “extreme” group of Old Believers whom Paul had admitted into edinoverie in 1799 petitioned him to complain about Amvrosii and ask that the original instruction be fulfilled. Amvrosii made a remarkable suggestion in the defense of his actions. He requested that the diocesan settlement between Platon and the “moderate” Old Believers be turned into a general model for edinoverie.74 Paul agreed and, on October 27, 1800, promulgated two edicts, one creating a edinoverie community in Moscow and the other proclaiming the points of Platon as an empire-wide template. It is evident that this was a

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hasty move on the Church’s part. There had been no mention of the idea of transforming the Moscow agreement into a general settlement before September 1800. However, given the possibility of further intervention that might once again allow suspect converts into the Church, the hierarchs acted to push through a moderate scheme that bore the impress of the confession’s interests.

Th e Ru l e s of Pl aton How did Platon balance confessional concerns with the requirement to bring the old rite into the Church? In the settlement he issued for this purpose, there were sixteen rules with two additional opinions attached.75 Each rule was based on the request of the Moscow Old Believers and Platon’s subsequent commentary. The commentary itself was often laconic, sometimes limiting itself to the single word “agreed.” The rules of Platon represented a comprehensive package aimed at defining the contours of edinoverie. In doing so, they necessarily helped outline the shapes of the Orthodox flock and Old Belief. To analyze them, I subdivide the rules into categories relating to ritual, confession, and administration. The consequences of the Church’s changed attitude toward ritual were brushed up against in the very first rule. Here, the Old Believers requested that the anathemas placed on the old rites in 1656 and 1666–1667 be removed. This pointed to an abiding problem for the Church. What was to be done with the anathemas on ritual when the connection between ritual and dogma had been dissolved? Platon announced that he would “remove the anathemas previously placed on them [the Old Believers]”: he stated that each individual convert to the Church would go before a bishop or a priest and have a short prayer said over to remove the anathema. Here was a fundamental misunderstanding. The Old Believers wanted the Church as a body to retract the anathemas placed on the rituals, while Platon desired only to remove the anathemas from each convert individually. The anathemas in general would remain in force. This provision marks the beginning of a process whereby the Russian Orthodox Church rewrote the history of the anathemas. They began to extend their new attitude toward ritual back into the past and claimed that the mid-­ seventeenth century councils had never conflated dogma with ritual. The councils thus had not anathematized the rituals themselves. Instead, they had anathematized those people who used the old rites to signify rebellion against the Church’s authority. In other words, clergymen like Platon had begun to reinterpret the anathemas as mechanisms for policing internal belief alone rather than for enforcing external ritual behavior and internal belief, belief

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and behavior being conflated into a single category. Therefore, Platon’s commentary was not a concession. There was no need to relieve the old rituals of an anathema that had never been placed upon them. This, combined with the emphasis on individual absolution, was designed to avoid having to abolish the anathemas entirely since they were still valued as a way of defining the flock against the schism. If the Church abolished the anathemas, it would have conceded that it had been the guilty party in creating the schism and so had waged a century and a half of persecution wrongly: hence Platon’s insistence that “the Church was justified in placing [the anathemas].” The problem of ritual was brought up again in rule three. The Old Believers asked that Platon and the Holy Synod allow the new edinoverie clergy to perform church services and the sacraments according to the books printed in the reigns of the first five patriarchs (i.e., those before Patriarch Nikon). Platon granted this, but his reasons for doing so might have caused the Old Believers to wince: “In the books they use there is error, not in the essential dogmas of the faith but in the words and rituals.” This was a conclusive statement of both the ritual reevaluation and its limits. Rituals and dogmas were two separate things, and it was dogma that was by far the more important. However, Platon’s use of the word “error” is telling. Just because he allowed the usage of the old rituals did not mean he thought they were of equal value or even harmless. Thus, one strategy to ensure that the Nikonian rituals remained intact as markers of the Orthodox confession was to argue that the schismatic rites were somehow inferior. But, as Ivan Aksakov stated in an 1881 essay, how could the Church allow its bishops, priests, and flock to use anything mistaken?76 Rule four guaranteed to the Old Believers that Orthodox bishops would bless their churches and antimensia by the old books while rule eight made it possible for prelates to bless new priests with the two-fingered sign of the cross. Therefore, bishops, in particular, were exposed to rituals that the rules themselves declared to be erroneous. Platon provided a partial solution to this problem in his second attached opinion, where he expressed “the good hope that with time God will enlighten those who join and that they will come to agree that in nothing will they be different from the Church.” In other words, the usage of the mistaken rituals was considered to be a temporary concession that would fade once the converts lost their “schismatic” tendencies. This in turn implied that edinoverie was not fully Orthodox and thus gave rise to the notorious phrase that it was just a “step to Orthodoxy” (stupen k pravoslaviiu). This opinion both provided comfort to those queasy about using the old rites and argued that the incorrect attitude toward ritual on the part of the converts would gradually erode. However, it

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was a severe misunderstanding of the value the edinovertsy and the Old Believers placed on rituals. Equally, the other rules contradicted this aim since they created institutions that would protect the old rites rather than weaken them. The second opinion, when combined with rules one and three, marked the extent to which Platon was willing to apply the Church’s reevaluation of ritual in practice. All in all, they painted a conception of edinoverie as a mechanism whereby Old Believers would be gradually assimilated into the Orthodox faith. However, this seemingly contradicted not only the logical consequences of the new attitude to ritual but also the very purpose and lure of edinoverie. Its power lay precisely in the fact that it legitimized the usage of the old rituals. In other words, the rules supported the continued existence of the pre-Nikonian rites while also hoping for their eventual destruction. The contradiction between confession building and attitude to ritual was at the root of this problem. In rule fifteen, the Old Believers suggested that prayers to the imperial family were to be conducted according to the Synodal form. This was a concession on their part since the more extreme Old Believers who had turned to Paul in 1799 had wanted to use only the formulation presented in the old books. Rule sixteen declared that neither the new converts nor the Orthodox were to insult each other’s rituals or books since these matters did not relate to “the essence of faith.” Both pronouncements show that the parties were willing to offer concessions to the other in the name of unity. The edinovertsy conceded the use of a new ritual in their churches while the Russian Orthodox Church could no longer insult or demean the old rituals. However, the rules themselves said the old rituals were erroneous and the Church did nothing to disown the offensive polemical tracts of the eighteenth century, many of which continued to be printed. The administrative terms outlined in the 1800 settlement were another way in which the assimilative dimension of edinoverie was fundamentally undermined. Rule two confirmed that the edinoverie parishioners had the right to elect their own priests, who would then be confirmed by the bishop. This was a notable concession since the practice of clerical election was dying off in the Russian Orthodox Church itself.77 Rule two also stated that the fugitive priests used by the priestly could not be forgiven their previous crime of desertion and so should not be elected. Platon evidently hoped to prevent the edinovertsy from electing their former clerical leaders, thus reducing the chance that edinoverie would be used only as a facade to mask continued adherence to Old Belief. In practice, however, this part of the rule was ignored, especially during Nicholas I’s campaign against Old Belief. Since converts often insisted on the election of their former priests, both the secular and the

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ecclesiastical administrations judged it best to concede this, albeit reluctantly, in order to procure conversion and establish edinoverie. The sixth rule placed the edinoverie clergy directly under the control of the diocesan bishop, thereby preventing the intervention of the consistory. It also mandated bishops should have a special secretary to deal with edinoverie affairs: this was only realized in 1845 with the creation of edinoverie deans. Rule twelve confirmed that clergy suspected of committing crimes also fell under the direct jurisdiction of the bishop himself. These commitments essentially established an administrative distinction between edinoverie and Orthodoxy that was to turn the edinoverie parishes into incubators for feelings of denominational difference. The assimilative character of edinoverie was also in conflict with the confessional rules that created borders between the edinovertsy and Orthodox believers. Rules five and eleven were the foundation stones on which these confessional dividing lines were built, as they gave further cause to considering edinoverie as something less than fully Orthodox. In rule five, the Old Believers requested of Platon that the new edinoverie clergy not be compelled to attend common services in Orthodox churches but that such services might be held in edinoverie temples. Equally, Old Believers should not be forced to go to services with “those who mark themselves with the three fingers, [have] shaven beards, and others who have disagreements with the old customs.” Finally, they asked that even Old Believers who were ascribed as Orthodox be allowed to join the “Old Believer church.” This related to an essential problem. Some Old Believers took Orthodox sacraments in order to evade detection: in this way, they were recorded in the Church’s confessional registers as Orthodox. However, despite being administratively considered Orthodox, they were Old Believers by conscience and so might desire access to edinoverie. In reply, Platon argued that the matter of attending common services should be left to the “good judgment” of the priests and bishops involved. However, Platon forbade anyone who was noted as Orthodox from joining (prisoedineniia) edinoverie. The only exception was if the individual concerned had never taken the sacraments in an Orthodox church. Rule eleven furthered the prohibition. Here the Muscovite petitioners asked that “if any son of the Greco-Russian Church desires to be administered the holy sacraments by an Old Believer priest, such is not forbidden. Equally, if an Old Believer desires to be administered the Holy Sacrament in the Greek Church, this is not forbidden.” Platon denied the request, stating that Orthodox believers could only turn to edinoverie clergy for the sacraments in “extreme need and in fatal cases,” when an Orthodox priest could not be found. While Platon was evidently happy for the edinovertsy to join Orthodoxy and take

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sacraments from Orthodox clergy, he did not extend the same right to the Church’s preexisting flock. This was because free movement from the new to the old rituals was, in the scheme of the rules, a step backward, a movement away from perfect rituals to erroneous ones. In confessional terms, it was a movement away from Orthodoxy. The argument that edinoverie was some sort of quasi-schismatic phenomenon was thereby strengthened while any attempt to assert the unity of both groups was undermined. Platon here was evidently motivated by the same feeling of confessional anxiety that had led him to oppose the creation of edinoverie communities throughout the 1780s and 1790s, fearing that the new edinovertsy would use their position within the Church to tempt and convert members of the Orthodox flock. This turned edinoverie into a quarantine zone on the limits of Orthodoxy’s confessional boundary with the schism. A person stayed there until they were “purified” of their commitment to the pre-Nikonian rites; only then could they safely be admitted to the Church itself. No Orthodox person could be allowed to enter the quarantine zone lest they become “infected” by the “schismatic” old rites. The idea of “infection” is conveyed in rule nine, where the Old Believers asked for particular permission to use the two-fingered sign of the cross: Platon agreed, but noted that in this matter bishops had to be sure to protect “others from temptation.” In other words, there was a concern that exposure to the old rite posed a risk to Orthodox believers. These rules revealed the basic fault line in Platon’s thinking. On the one hand, there was an intellectual commitment to the idea of unity in dogma underwritten by the changed view on ritual, but, on the other, there was a confessional mentality that valued a single distinct ritual as a tool of denominational formation and feared the influence of another religious group. Assimilation and isolation were thus both implanted with the rules. It was hoped that the edinovertsy could be assimilated into Orthodoxy proper, but walls had to be erected that kept the new converts at arm’s length. Furthermore, rule five’s prohibition against anyone ascribed to Orthodoxy joining edinoverie proved to be particularly difficult; this was because many Old Believers later developed, in response to the illegalization of Old Believer marriage in the 1830s, a strategy of using the sacraments of the Russian Orthodox Church to legitimize both their marriages and their children while remaining part of the schism.78 Ultimately, this was a clash of understandings of religious identity. The metropolitan’s embargo on the Orthodox converting to edinoverie contained within it a bureaucratic understanding of Russian Orthodox identity rooted in the jottings of the confessional registers. What determined Orthodox faith was not one’s convictions but rather one’s

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administrative ascription to a particular group. This clashed with the understanding of religious conviction expressed by the Old Believers whereby one’s ritual choice, rooted in the demands of conscience, was the determinant of identity. A person might very well be ascribed to Russian Orthodoxy but they neither felt so in their hearts nor wanted to signify so with their fingers. What was present in the rules was a confessional understanding of religion whereby “religion in its public aspect was primarily a matter for political and social elites to settle for the benefit of those under their jurisdiction.” This opposed a “voluntarist” concept where “public forms of religion are treated as the consequences of the conscientious choices of individual believers.”79 Ironically, Platon himself had created the situation whereby this clash could occur by allowing the existence of edinoverie. “A central issue in the transition to a new religious settlement,” J. Cox argues, “was the significance of freedom to make conscientious choices.”80 Edinoverie proffered to the Old Believers a conscientious choice in what form of ritual they wanted to use upon their conversion. Did they want to use the old rites and be part of edinoverie or convert directly to the Russian Orthodox Church and adhere to the Nikonian rituals? The idea of choice according to “conscience” (sovest) was frequently reiterated by some of the rules, which made clear that at least priests and bishops had the option to determine which ritual they used.81 However, in terms of the average believer, the choice extended only to converts. Everyone else had to abide by a confessional understanding of Orthodox identity prescribed by confessional registers primarily used as a method of social surveillance and discipline. The problem lay deep within Platon’s own thoughts. His focus on individual faith and internal convictions, a key part of what had enabled a shift in the understanding of rituals, posed the question of the freedom of an individual to follow their conscience. However, he remained a hierarch of the Church, committed to defending its interests and the strength of its flock, even if some degree of coercion were required to do so. The creation of edinoverie and its embodiment in the rules was an icon of a contradiction between conscience and confession. It is no wonder that historians have come to different conclusions about the rules. N. Lysogorskii, a biographer of Platon, quoted Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) as saying that it would have been impossible to give more to the new edinovertsy.82 Kaurkin and Pavlova, two modern historians, have echoed this sentiment: “Edinoverie was the only possible compromise for the resolution of the sesquicentennial opposition between Old Belief, state and Orthodoxy.”83 Others have been more circumspect and even hostile. Simeon Shleev, a thoroughly biased commentator intricately involved in polemics over edinoverie

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reform in the early twentieth century, conceded that Platon’s suspicion of the Old Believers was “basically understandable.”84 However, he castigated the rules because “nowhere is the difference between edinoverie and Orthodoxy so emphasized as in these resolutions.”85 For him, they embodied the inferior position of edinoverie, a permanent reminder that real unity in faith had not been achieved. Both perspectives have something to recommend them. Platon was an eighteenth-century Russian Orthodox clergyman with a profound dedication to confession building. While he showed an extraordinary ability to adapt Enlightenment ideals to Orthodox theology, it was the latter that predominated his thinking.86 His attitude to the rites of the schism reflects this perfectly. He was willing to argue for a dissociation of ritual and dogma on an intellectual level, but he remained entirely wary both of the value of the Old Believers’ rituals and of their intentions, an attitude deriving from his confessionalizing mentality. Given this, Platon’s establishment of edinoverie was always going to be reluctant and would always seek to safeguard the perceived interests of the Church before surrendering to the abstract principle of unity based on a changed perspective regarding rite. Pressured by the state, a lack of time, and the intrigues of rival parties of Moscow Old Believers, Platon forged an agreement that put the Orthodox confession first. However, the rules could not fulfill an assimilative purpose. They could not bring the edinovertsy and the Orthodox closer together. The former, in particular, would always be reminded of the inferiority of their position and of the Church’s ambiguous relation to their prized old rituals. The settlement itself completely undermined the hope that the edinovertsy would abandon their rituals because it created, through the establishment of confessional boundaries and peculiar administrative relationships, a way for the old ritual to be maintained rather than undercut. Taken collectively, the rules of Metropolitan Platon were a quagmire of contradictions: they sought to both assimilate and separate the edinovertsy from the Orthodox confession; they reflected a commitment to ritual choice, and thus a limited concession to the importance of conscience in determining religious practice, but yet also firmly stood by a confessional understanding of religion and identity where the choice of the individual had to be limited to protect the interests of the Church; and they embodied the new view on ritual but also set firm limitations on its application to a real situation. These three contradictions set off historical dynamics that were to determine edinoverie’s existence and its relationship to the Church until at least 1918. Numerous attempts to resolve them after 1864 posed deep problems because the dynamics

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worked themselves into the reality of religious life. They embodied the fundamental paradox of toleration and confession building when the former began to question the paramount importance that the latter placed on ritual.

Conclusion The new view on ritual in the late eighteenth century marks a departure from previous church thought. The earlier attitude that conflated rite and dogma came under question. However, it had its limits. Ultimately, even Platon, the foremost advocate of this changed perception, proved reluctant to realize it in practice. The problem was that the new perspective on ritual clashed with a century-long project of confession building. Confession building, both in Russia and in Europe, necessarily accentuated the value of ritual as a means for constructing denominational identity and also as a way of shaping and control­ ling the behavior of the faithful. The basic core of the new view on ritual contradicted this by demoting the relative importance of rites in order to promote grounds for religious reconciliation. At its heart was the idea that ritual might be a matter for individual choice based on the demands of conscience. Since ritual did not affect dogma, why shouldn’t it be a matter of individual preference? This suggestion flew in the face of a confessional attitude whereby the Church had to assert control over rite for the purposes of forging a distinct denomination. Understanding this contradiction helps us explain Platon’s paradoxical actions. One of the most interesting lessons from the foundation of edinoverie lies in the role played by the relationship between the Church and the state. In the 1760s, the Russian government embarked on a new policy of toleration toward Old Belief. While it did not afford the schism a place within the multiconfessional establishment of the Russian Empire, it did offer numerous freedoms and privileges. This attitude was self-interested, as Potemkin and others demonstrated. Not only did the state hope to bring the Old Believers under their surveillance but also it hoped to mobilize them as settlers in scarcely populated borderlands. This coincided with the emergence of church intellectuals dedicated to trans­ lating the Enlightenment ideas propounded by Catherine the Great and her court into theological terms. The dovetailing of both trends led to a reevaluation whereby the Russian Orthodox Church began to downplay the significance of ritual so as to suggest some degree of reconciliation between themselves and the Old Believers was possible. Some of the Old Believers seized upon this opportunity to resolve the fundamental problem of a legitimate priesthood, an asset lost as a consequence of their eschatological and ecclesial theologies.

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From this, it should be clear why edinoverie proved difficult to realize in practice. Although all three parties had come to support the possibility of unity, they did so for their own particular reasons that were difficult to reconcile. Potemkin, along with Catherine, backed the idea of edinoverie out of raison d’état. This collided with the concerns of Nikodim and his successors, who were more interested in receiving an unquestionably legitimate source of sacramental grace and state recognition. The Church, too, proved to be an equivocal partner, generally seeking to maintain its own control over who could and could not be admitted into the ecclesia. Intellectual support for a union based on the reevaluation of ritual was contradicted by confessional anxiety about the possibility that insincere edinovertsy could both damage the rituals of the Church and spread apostasy in the flock. The result was a series of stops and starts that were not concluded even with the promulgation of a Synodal edict in 1798. It took the personal interference of Emperor Paul himself to bring the vacillation to a conclusion. His intervention in favor of Old Believers whom Platon and others deemed to be extreme and undesirable forced the Church to act rapidly in order to keep edinoverie and the terms of conversion within its own domain. Seizing on a fairly moderate set of proposals, Platon was able to cement into place a settlement that reflected directly the desire of the Church to protect the flock from the potentially questionable motives of the new edinovertsy. The settlement of 1800 is an example of the eighteenth-century relationship between church and state discussed by Gregory Freeze, whereby “for lack of interest or time, the civil government accorded routine operational autonomy to the Church; when state and Church interests diverged, however, that parallelism gave rise to direct conflict and competition.”87 The struggle in this case was not about the Church seeking even a moderate change in the Synodal structure forged in 1721 by Peter the Great or the state seeking the complete subordination of the Church. Rather it was a contest over jurisdiction. The schism had been both a civil and an ecclesiastical issue since its emergence. For the state, it was an issue of trying to expand its control over a section of the populace that had escaped its limited tools for surveillance and fiscal extraction; for the Church, it was a matter of doctrinal truth and ecclesial authority. In the period between 1667 and 1762, the Orthodox hierarchy and the Russian government had largely agreed on how to deal with the schism. Pressure was the preferred method. However, the emergence of a more tolerant approach at court caused a divergence between the two. Both sought to make unity in faith suit their own interests and designs. This parting of ways proved difficult to resolve because it posed a fundamental question: How, in a country where

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the Church was so closely connected with the state, could the former reconcile itself to existing in a multiconfessional empire that the latter was determined to stabilize and manage through a system of religious toleration? And how could confession building be combined with a new perspective on ritual and toleration more generally? Many questions remained unresolved. What was to be done with the anathemas? Was the aim of the settlement to assimilate the edinovertsy into the Russian Orthodox Church, or was it designed to separate them into a quarantine zone? If the aim was assimilation, then how was this to be achieved? These queries proved hotly contested points in the subsequent century. Each time they were discussed, the basic and most fundamental contradictions contained with Platon’s settlement came to the fore. Assimilation was opposed to separation; confession was counterpoised to conscience; and ritual tolerance placed against ritual exclusivity. These were the three fault lines running deep through the rules and the Moscow metropolitan’s own thinking. Underlying it all was a suspicion of the motives of the converts and anxiety for the Russian Orthodox confession.

Note s 1. V. V. Nilskii, Istoriko-statisticheskoe opisanie stolichnykh edinovercheskikh tserkvei: Nikolskoi, chto v Zakharevskoi ultise, izvestnoi pod imenem Milovskoi, i Nikolskoi, chto v Nikolaevskoi ulitse (St. Petersburg: G. Shparvart, 1880), 9–11. 2. I. N. Lapotnikov, “Imperator Pavel i staroobriadtsy,” Russkaia starina, no. 22 (1878): 173–176. 3. Toleration certainly did not extend to the Uniates as Russia expanded into Ukraine and Poland. See L. Wolff, “The Uniate Church and the Partitions of Poland: Religious Survival in an Age of Enlightened Absolutism,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 26, no. 1–4 (2002–2003): 153–255, and B. Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church: Uniate and Orthodox Conflict in 18th-Century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia (DeKalb, ILL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). 4. P. Pera, “Edinoverie. Storia di un tentativo di integrazione dei vecchi credenti all’interno dell’ortodossia,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 20, no. 2 (1984): 295. 5. For the case of ritual and Protestant identity, see B. Nischan, Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 142–158. 6. Nischan, Lutherans, 148. 7. For baptism and its connections with Lutheran identity, see M. J. Halvorson, “Theology, Ritual, and Confessionalization: The Making and

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Meaning of Lutheran Baptism in Reformation Germany, 1520–1816” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2001). 8. For adiaphora and ritual in the Reformation, see L. D. Peterson, “Johann Pfeffinger’s Treatises of 1550 in Defense of Adiaphora: ‘High Church’ Lutheranism and Confessionalization in Albertine Saxony,” in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honour and Memory of Bodo Nischan, ed. J. M. Headley, H. J. Hillerbrand, and A. K. Papalas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 91–106, and I. Hunter, The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 122–123. 9. E. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 295. 10. Quoted in J. E. Kollmann, “The Moscow Stoglav (‘Hundred Chapters’) Church Council of 1551” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1978), 298. 11. P. Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual and Reform: Liturgical Reforms of Nikon in the Seventeenth Century (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990), 55–59. 12. For a full description, see Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual and Reform, 127–218. 13. See Skrizhal: Akty soborov 1654, 1655, 1656 godov (St. Petersburg: Svoe izdatelstvo, 2013) and Deianiia Moskovskikh soborov 1666–1667 gg. (Moscow: Izd. Bratstva sv. Petra mitropolita, 1881). 14. Quoted in “Ob otmene kliatv na starye obriady: Doklad mitropolita Leningradskogo i Novgorodskogo Nikodima (Rotova) na pomestnom sobore 31 maia 1971 goda,” Zhurnal Moskovskoi patriarkhii, no. 6 (1971): 64. 15. PSZ, vol. 6, no. 4009. Interestingly, Peter the Great wrote a missive to the Synod at roughly the same time requesting that they write a straightforward instructional book on the Orthodox faith: Peter’s description introduces a clear hierarchical distinction between dogmas and rituals. See J. Cracraft, “The Petrine Church Reform Revisited,” in Thresholds into the Orthodox Commonwealth: Essays in Honor of Theofanis G. Stavrou, ed. L. J. Frary (Bloomington: Slavica, 2017), 97–98. 16. G. Michels, “Ruling without Mercy: Seventeenth-Century Russian Bishops and Their Officials,” Kritika 4, no. 3 (2003): 531–533. 17. Skinner, The Western Front, 30. 18. For the reform of the parish clergy in this period, see A. Brüning, “Social Discipline among the Russian Orthodox Parish Clergy (17th–18th Century): Normative Ideals and the Practice of Parish Life,” Cahiers du monde russe 58, no. 3 (2017): 303–340. 19. G. B. Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in SeventeenthCentury Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 164–171. 20. Michels, At War with the Church, 166. 21. Ibid., 187.

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22. G. L. Freeze, The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 77. 23. Dimitrii (Tuptalo), Rozysk o raskolnicheskoi brynskoi vere (Moscow: Sinodalnaia tipografiia, 1824); Pitirim, Prashchitsa (Moscow: Sinodalnaia tipografiia, 1752). 24. Simon (Shleev), Edinoverie v svoem vnutrennem razvitii (Moscow: Medium, 2004), 17–18. 25. “Neskolko predvaritelnykh slov k ‘iziasneniiu’ smysla i znacheniia poritsatelnykh otzyvov o imenuemykh starykh obriadakh,” Bratskoe slovo, no. 8 (1886): 583–588. For Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov’s) project, see Savva (Tikhomirov), Sobranie mnenii i otzvyvov Filareta, mitropolita Moskovskogo i Kolomenskogo, po uchebnym i tserkovno-gosudarstvennym voprosam, 5 vols. (Moscow: Sinodalnaia tipogafiia, 1886), 5:789–790; RGIA, f. 832, op. 1, d. 81, ll. 82–87ob. 26. Dixon, “Russian Orthodox Church,” 326. 27. G. L. Freeze, “Russian Orthodoxy: Church, People, and Politics in Imperial Russia,” in Cambridge History of Russia, 3 vols., ed. D. Lieven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2:297. For the links between superstition and confession building in the early eighteenth century, see A. S. Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religii v Rossii, 1700–1740 gg. (Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2000) and E. B. Smilianskaia, Volshebniki. Bogokhulniki. Eretiki. Narodnaia religioznost i “dukhovnye prestupleniia” v Rossii XVIII v. (Moscow: Lomonosov, 2003). For Russian superstition generally, see S. Dixon, “Superstition in Imperial Russia,” Past and Present 199 (suppl. 3) (2008): 207–222. 28. R. O. Crummey, Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694–1855 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 159–161. 29. A. S. Palkin, Edinoverie v seredine XVIII—nachale XX veka: Obscherossiiskii kontekst i regionalnaia spetsifika (Ekaterinburg: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo universiteta, 2016), 44. 30. G. L. Freeze, “Rechristianization of Russia: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750–1850,” Studia Slavica Finlandensia 6 (1990): 107. 31. Michels, At War with the Church, 227. 32. I. Paert, Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760–1850 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 59. 33. Paert, Old Believers, 61. 34. P. Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 1. 35. For the right to return, see PSZ, vol. 16, no. 11725. For civil positions, see PSZ, vol. 22, no. 16238. 36. Simon, Edinoverie v svoem, 20.

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37. Quoted in R. V. Kaurkin and O. A. Pavlova, Edinoverie v Rossii: Ot zarozhdeniia idei do nachala XX veka (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2011), 46–47. 38. PSZ, vol. 16, no. 12067. 39. Kaurkin and Pavlova, Edinoverie v Rossii, 49. 40. Platon (Levshin), “Uveshchanie k raskolnikam” in Pouchitelnye slova, 20 vols. (Moscow: F. Gippius, 1779–1806), 6:32. 41. Platon, “Uveshchanie k raskolnikam,” 6:33–34. 42. E. K. Wirtschafter, Religion and Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia: The Teachings of Metropolitan Platon (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013), 53. 43. Quoted in O. A. Tsapina, “The Image of the Quaker and Critique of Enthusiasm in Early Modern Russia,” Russian History 24, no. 3 (1997): 267–268n51. 44. P. Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 9. 45. Wirtschafter, Religion and Enlightenment, 61. 46. See, for instance, A. V. Ivanov, “The Impact of Protestant Spirituality in Catherinian Russia: The Works of St. Tikhon of Zadonsk,” Vivliofika: E-Journal of Eighteenth-Century Russian Studies 5 (2017): 40–72. 47. Wirtschafter, Religion and Enlightenment, 133. 48. Crummey, Old Believers, 23. 49. In 1712 and 1731, the metropolitans of Jerusalem and Jassy, respectively, agreed to the request but later reneged. Nevertheless, the hope did not die: for the last such attempt, in 1892, see L. A. Gerd, Konstantinopol i Peterburg: Tserkovnaia politika Rossii na pravoslavnom Vostoke (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), 417–437. 50. Pera, “Edinoverie,” 298–300. 51. T. Verkhovskii, Iskanie staroobriadtsami v XVIII veke zakonnogo arkhiereistva (St. Petersburg: V. Golovin, 1868), 6. 52. T. Verkhovskii, Iskanie, 8. 53. “Many of the townsmen did not yield to the exhortations of Nikodim and some from the simple people were so enraged that they wanted to murder the monk with his supporters.” Simon, Edinoverie v svoem, 29. 54. PSZ, vol. 22, no. 16239. 55. T. Verkhovskii, Iskanie, 39. 56. Nikephoros was working on a basis already established by Eugenios (Voulgaris). For a biography of the latter, see S. K. Batalden, Catherine II’s Greek Prelate: Eugenios Voulgaris in Russia, 1771–1806 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 57. G. L. Bruess, Religion, Identity and Empire: A Greek Archbishop in the Russia of Catherine the Great (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 147. 58. “Kem i kak polozheno nachalo edinoveriiu v Russkoi tserkvi,” Bratskoe slovo 2 (1892), 124.

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59. N. V. Lysogorskii, Moskovskii mitropolit Platon Levshin kak protivoraskolnichii deiatel (Rostov on Don: A. I. Ter-Abramian, 1905), 466. 60. Bruess, Religion, Identity and Empire, 154. 61. Pera, “Edinoverie,” 307. 62. Lysogorskii, Moskovskii mitropolit Platon Levshin, 315. 63. For a description of these major reforms, see K. A. Papmehl, Metropolitan Platon of Moscow (Petr Levshin, 1737–1812): Enlightened Prelate, Scholar, and Educator (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1983), 55–66. 64. Freeze, “Russian Orthodoxy,” 292. 65. T. Verkhovskii, Iskanie, 27. 66. “Kem i kak polozheno,” 125–126. 67. P. T. De Simone, “An Old Believer ‘Holy Moscow’ in Imperial Russia: Community and Identity in the History of the Rogozhskoe Cemetery Old Believers, 1771–1917” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2012), 86. 68. For Paul’s interest in Old Belief, see G. P. Stankevich, “. . . Obrashchenie serdets chelovecheskikh delo Bozhe est (Ukaz sviateishego sinoda ot 22 marta 1800 g: popytka izmeneniia gosudarstvennoi politiki po otnosheniiu k staroobriadtsam),” Staroobriadchestvo: Istoriia, Kultura, Sovremennost 11 (2006): 33–36. 69. PSZ, vol. 25, no. 18428. 70. Lysogorskii, Moskovskii mitropolit Platon Levshin, 326. 71. Ibid., 325. 72. Ibid., 336. 73. Ibid., 390–391. 74. Ibid., 391–404. 75. See Appendix A for the rules of Metropolitan Platon. The following quotations of the rules are taken from my translation. 76. I. S. Aksakov, “Po povodu opredeleniia sv. sinoda o dopolnenii nekotorykh punktov v pravilakh edinoveriia,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii I. S. Aksakova, 7 vols. (Moscow: M. G. Volchaninov, 1886–1887), 4:182. 77. G. L. Freeze, The Parish Clergy in 19th-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 29. 78. I. Paert, “Regulating Old Believer Marriages: Ritual, Legality, and Conversion in Nicholas I’s Russia,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (2004): 571. 79. J. Cox, “Religion and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Freedom and Religion in the Nineteenth Century, ed. R. Helmstadter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 339. 80. Cox, “Religion and Imperial Power,” 339. 81. For instance, in rule nine, bishops were granted the right to follow their consciences as to whether they used the two-fingered sign of the cross when blessing edinovertsy.

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82. Lysogorskii, Moskovskii mitropolit Platon Levshin, 388. 83. Kaurkin and Pavlova, Edinoverie v Rossii, 93. 84. S. Shleev, Edinoverie v svoem vnutrennem razvitii (V raziasnenie ego malorasprostranennosti sredi staroobriadtsev) (St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipografiia, 1910), 73. 85. Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev (edinovertsev) (St. Petersburg, 1912), 62. 86. Wirtschafter, Religion and Enlightenment. 87. Freeze, Russian Levites, 16.

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k

EDINOVERIE TRANSFORMED, 1801–1855

Introduction On March 30, 1840, the keys to the priestly Troitskaia chapel in Nizhnii Tagil were handed over to the local gendarme in the name of the tsar and the governor of Perm.1 This marked a victory for the Orthodox mission and local edinovertsy, both of whom had been striving to gain possession of the temple for several years.2 The chapel was the heart of the schism in the area, the central castle to which all the other temples were “border fortresses.”3 The Old Believers reacted to news of the transfer with unmitigated rage: “Furiously driving away the sentry who guarded the doors of the chapel, they ripped off the seal but still could not succeed in breaking down the door.” The police tried to calm the situation by arresting the rowdiest of the mob. However, the crowd did not disperse. When news came later in the evening that the edinovertsy were to begin praying, the Old Believers cried out to the Virgin to open the doors: when Mary proved ineffective, an iron crowbar was applied instead. The occupation of the chapel began, with the doors being locked and the windows sealed. Negotiations to end it proved futile. Finally, the order came from St. Petersburg “to cleanse the chapel of the mutineers and leave it in the instruction of the [edinoverie] priest.”4 The police brought a fire engine and shot water through an upper window, drenching those inside. As they pushed into the building, women assaulted them with copper crosses: “Many bled.” Even when the main room was taken, some holdouts barricaded themselves in the baptismal aisle with a wall built from icons. If the hope was that the gendarmes would not dare assault such a holy barrier, they

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were mistaken. The police succeeded in driving the remainder out. On May 18, “the edinoverie priest raised a cross on the Holy Troitskaia church—a symbol of the victory of truth and peace over the error and tumult of the schism.”5 The seizure of the Troitskaia chapel is but one instance of persecution against Old Belief during the reign of Nicholas I. This was the point at which church and state launched a joint campaign to end religious dissidence in the empire, when “the distinction between investigating civil crimes and investigating matters of faith broke down.”6 In 1833, Nicholas and his education minister Sergei Uvarov declared the guiding principle of the government to be “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality.” In the name of the first part of this trinity, Old Believers, Uniates, and other sectarian denominations found themselves subjected to ever-increasing levels of pressure to convert to the official faith.7 Edinoverie was incorporated fully into the campaign of coercion, functioning as the carrot to the stick of property seizure, imprisonment, and exile. In the process, it was transformed. Not only did its numbers skyrocket but also it was made thoroughly dependent on policies of religious intolerance. This was a remarkable change of fortune. In the first quarter century of its existence, edinoverie faced redundancy as Alexander I was completely indifferent to its propagation. Although there was a turn away from the toleration of his grandmother after 1815, the commitment to allowing legal Old Believer priests remained, hampering edinoverie’s appeal. Nor did the Church show much passion for spreading unity in faith. It remained inured in the same confessional anxiety that had made Platon so reluctant to realize edinoverie in the first place. However, church-state relations shifted under Nicholas I. More issues were taken out of the Church’s hands and dealt with by the high-level bureaucratic committees that were Nicholas’s typical modus operandi.

Ir r el e va nce When studying the course of religious toleration between 1801 and 1855, historians have traditionally pinpointed the break with Catherinian leniency in 1815. The remaining decade of Alexander’s rule and the entirety of that of his successor are seen as a continuum of repression, albeit one that was hindered by a theoretical commitment to toleration.8 Thomas Marsden has recently complicated this vision by arguing that “the turn against toleration under Alexander I has, however, been exaggerated and it was during the reign of Nicholas that fundamental shifts, which have so far been overlooked, occurred.”9 He has emphasized that toleration remained a “fundamental notion” until the end

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of the 1840s, when changes in the Old Believer world provoked a shift toward religious persecution. Indeed, in the last five years of his reign, Alexander did in fact try to subordinate Old Believer “converts” to secular officials, thus taking another step toward including the schism in the multiconfessional establishment. Equally, one must note that Nicholas’s religious campaigns were principally directed against those groups that either existed outside or were insecurely placed within the multiconfessional establishment: the sectarians, Uniates, and Old Believers. Consequently, in the reign of Alexander, edinoverie confronted redundancy while in the reign of Nicholas it took on unprecedented importance. Alexander I stated that his policy toward religious dissent was the following: “The general rule that I have undertaken in errors of these kinds . . . is not to make any coercion of conscience and not to investigate the internal confession of faith: but also not to allow any external sign of apostasy from the Church and to strictly prohibit any temptation, not as a kind of heresy but as a violation of the general commonweal and order.”10 Thus, he remained committed to the policies of Catherine II. Utility to the state was of primary importance. Old Belief had to be drawn out of seclusion so that it could be subjected to greater degrees of surveillance and control. Equally, the Old Believers needed to be denuded of their “ignorance” and “fanaticism” if they were to serve as productive and loyal members of society. For the priestly concords, this meant easing their ability to obtain clerics. In 1803, Alexander allowed some Old Believers in Nizhnii Novgorod to obtain a clergyman from Irgiz and informed the governor-general of Ukraine not to exile the priests of the beglopopovtsy. Doing so “could further embitter the schismatics in their superstition and deprive them of the means to baptise [children] and bury the dead. We should tolerate them, looking at them through our fingers, so to speak, without however giving them explicit patronage.”11 In terms of the priestless, Alexander transferred the Preobrazhenskoe cemetery in Moscow to police control and gave it a firm legal basis in 1809.12 However, the Church was becoming progressively more concerned by the tolerant approach of the government. Both Dixon and Freeze have identified the reign of Alexander I as the point when fear of the schism and other religious groups became the Church’s primary motivation for further confession building (rather than the need to fight superstition and “Christianise” the population that had fueled it for much of the eighteenth century).13 This was connected with the daunting growth of Old Belief during Catherine’s reign as the number of its adherents had massively increased (although this was undoubtedly as much a product of Old Believers coming out of hiding as it was of apostasy away from the Church).14 The administrative and educational reforms that had

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been in gestation for over a century were almost complete by the beginning of Alexander’s reign. They were topped in the years 1808–1814 by a comprehensive reorganization of church schooling that would finally produce the kind of clergy required to enforce church discipline.15 The doctrinal, institutional, and liturgical reforms undertaken since the 1660s had given shape to a distinctive and combative Orthodox confession, capable of taking the fight to Old Belief. However, it awaited a state that did not believe in “limiting the church’s authority and deemphasizing its confessional exclusivity.”16 After 1815, the views of the state and the Church began to converge. The Preobrazhenskoe cemetery lost its legal status and its leader Sergei Gnusin was imprisoned in 1822.17 When the governor of Saratov asked what he should do about the appearance of a new priestly chapel, he was told by the Committee of Ministers to destroy the new building while leaving the old ones intact.18 However, in 1822, a law was passed that allowed the beglopopovtsy to continue receiving priests so long as they had no criminal records.19 While Paert holds that this measure was “very limited” in its scope,20 it continued to offer hope to the Old Believers that they could gain priests without conversion to edinoverie and subordination to the Synod. A secret government commission founded in 1820 to formulate policy on Old Belief went a step further. In 1821, it considered the application of a Ekaterinburg Old Believer to obtain a priest from the Russian Orthodox Church. Rather than recommend edinoverie, the commission proposed a plan to have Orthodox priests “renounce” the Church and then be sent by provincial governors to the Old Believers. Once there, they would act as secret missionaries who would gradually draw the Old Believers into the Church: “In effect, the committee had taken the unprecedented step of including the government in the internal affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church: its authority over its own priests and monks would now be exercised by the provincial government with the advice of the local bishop.”21 Metropolitan Serafim (Glagolevskii) of St. Petersburg put all of his energies into defeating the idea, protesting to the tsar that it would be impractical and uncanonical, confirming that the schism was legitimate in the eyes of the government.22 The scheme was foiled, but it is fortunate that the metropolitan did not know how far Alexander was willing to go. In a visit to Ekaterinburg in 1824, the emperor met with the petitioner who had started the process and suggested to him that the best solution would be to get an Orthodox bishop to join Old Belief.23 Both this recommendation and the proposal for secret missionaries imply that while Alexander was considering active interference in the internal affairs of the schism in order to provoke conversion, he wanted to

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do so by abrogating the Church’s control over its own clergy and bishops. No less than this, he completely ignored the Church’s own plan for bringing the Old Believers under the aegis of miter and crown, edinoverie. Had secret missionaries been deployed or a bishop dispatched to Ekaterinburg, then edinoverie would have faced redundancy. Both schemes amounted to a replacement for edinoverie under the full control of the secular provincial administration and the beginning of Old Belief ’s incorporation into the multiconfessional establishment. It is no wonder, then, that edinoverie barely grew at all, with only twentyeight parishes founded by 1827.24 The committee’s recommendation and Alexander’s proposal in Ekaterinburg imply that the emperor and his leading advisers were not content with Platon’s solution to the Old Believer problem, perhaps because it reflected too many of the Church’s confessional anxieties to be a truly effective means for drawing in converts. This indifference is reflected in the fact that virtually no legislation was passed on the subject of edinoverie between 1800 and 1825. Indifference to edinoverie also emerged from the side of the Church. While one or two prelates took personal interest in the development of edinoverie in their dioceses, the Synod itself showed no inclination to hasten its spread.25 An 1802 response to some potential converts made it clear that all applications would be thoroughly vetted for “their true recognition of the holiness, authority, fidelity and firmness of the confession of the Greco-Russian Church and with unfeigned penitence about their former errors.”26 Shleev later argued that the Synod considered any attempt to negotiate with the rules of Platon a sign of insincerity.27 Diocesan prelates were even less flexible in their approach. An 1822 attempt to obtain a edinoverie priest in Cheliabinsk to support edinovertsy three hundred versts (three hundred and twenty kilometres) distant from their church was rejected because “there are parish churches and Orthodox priests adjacent.”28 An effort by four hundred Old Believers in the town of Belev (Tula province) to form a edinoverie parish in 1807 was rejected “because all the noted parishioners, although calling themselves Old Believers, are marked in the confession registers given by the parish priest as attending confession and thus are among the Orthodox.”29 With Old Belief now looming ever stronger, the Church felt no inclination to dismantle the quarantine zone imposed by Platon to prevent converts from tempting the Orthodox to the schism. The edinovertsy were so few in number that their concerns were hardly pressing. Edinoverie thus faced obsolescence almost immediately after it was founded. Especially before 1815, the atmosphere of toleration meant the Old Believers faced minimal interference from the government and also had fairly free access

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to clergy. The secret commission showed that the state evidently believed that edinoverie was not fit for purpose. Indeed, so inadequate had it proven that the commission and the tsar considered removing the business of converting the schism from the Church’s hands entirely. The Church, too, saw no need to act further. As the motives behind confession building shifted more firmly to antagonism with the schism, it was hardly necessary to push a settlement that compromised the ritual distinction between the two groups. The clash between church and state in the secret committee was a sign of the future. The state was willing to be a participant in missionary activities, but it thought the best way of doing so was to trespass on the Church’s prerogatives.

Br e a k ing Old Beli ef Nicholas I’s three decades of rule fundamentally transformed the fate of Orthodoxy, Old Belief, and edinoverie. The Church found in the emperor a willing partner in the repression of its religious enemies but at the same time it was more strictly subordinated to the whims of secular officials. The Old Believers came under sustained attack. Property was confiscated, church buildings closed, and leaders imprisoned or sent into exile.30 However, priestly Old Belief received a new leadership structure in the form of the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy, founded in Bukovina in 1846. Edinoverie parishes dramatically increased from 28 in 1827 to 178 by 1856.31 Many of these were based on the riches seized from the Old Believers: books, icons, antimensia, chapels, and monasteries were placed into their keeping.32 Edinoverie’s incorporation into coercive tactics caused several long-term problems. In terms of the relationship between church and state, Nicholas’s reign marked a departure from eighteenth-century precedents. The Petrine Church had largely been able to keep control of its jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical domain. The ober procurators of the Synod had not been chiefs of the institution but rather were the tsar’s watchdogs. The power balance under Alexander began to shift as the government intruded more and more on matters that had once been seen as purely belonging to the Church. At first, Nicholas I attempted to allow the Church to maintain its own initiative. However, when its implementation of reform proved too slow and ineffectual, Nicholas took the step of removing the matter from the Synod’s control and placing it under the jurisdiction of one of the informal bureaucratic commissions of which he was so fond: “The Synod became primarily a consultative and supervisory organ, a passive board of trustees, not the collegial command center envisioned by Peter the Great, formulating policy and overseeing its implementation.”33

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Baron Nikolai Protasov, Nicholas’s ober procurator from 1836, was something like a secular director of the Synod. The bureaucratic subordination of the Church to the state was never total but the interference of the secular government in traditional church matters began to provoke discontent with the Synodal system in the decades after Nicholas’s demise.34 While the Church lost autonomy under Nicholas, it also gained the support of the state in the suppression of religious dissent. Unlike his immediate predecessors, Nicholas did not see toleration as the surest way of bringing cloistered dissenters under the gaze of the state. Their subordination to the Church was the most effective means of surveillance and control, hence Nicholas’s elevation of Orthodoxy to a central component of his ruling ideology in 1833. Opposition to the Church was henceforth disloyalty to the state. As he told Old Believers in Dobrianka in May 1845 when they presented him with bread and salt in a traditional act of submission: “I do not want your bread and salt, you are not my loyal subjects! You don’t go to the church of God to pray.” Their chapel was nothing more than “a coven of outlaws: your priests are deserters, violators of oaths, traitors to their duties.”35 For Nicholas, the interests of state and church coincided. The Church feared apostasy and wanted forcible action against the schism while the state desired the repression of dissent in order to secure loyalty, stability, and control. Nicholas’s personal investment in the spread of edinoverie is demonstrated by his actions after the encounter in Dobrianka. Protasov got the Synod to ask the bishop of Kaluga to dispatch a edinoverie priest to the region to oversee the construction of a church in the town. However, the bishop delayed and so the ober procurator sought out an interview with Timofei Verkhovskii, priest of the Petersburg Nikolskaia edinoverie parish.36 Satisfied with the cleric’s knowledge of the old rite, Protasov presented him to the emperor and tsarevich, the future Alexander II, on August 5, 1845: Verkhovskii noted that Nicholas’s knowledge of monophonic singing was so good it was as if “he himself sung in an Old Believer choir.”37 The priest was then dispatched to Chernigov, with the Synod and the metropolitan of St. Petersburg being informed as an afterthought. On August 29, Nicholas was in Dobrianka to attend a liturgy in the new church. Verkhovskii blessed him with the two-fingered sign of the cross, and the tsar “promised on behalf of himself and the heir that they [the Old Believers] would have priests who would always fulfil the liturgy by the old rites.”38 This example shows how the state could commandeer clergy from their parishes for missionary work with only minimal consultation of the ecclesiastical authorities.39 The campaign against Old Belief was aggressive. Legislation released from 1825 onward cut deep into the liberties the schism had accumulated since 1762. They

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were forbidden from building new chapels or repairing those that had existed before 1825.40 Priests could no longer be legally obtained.41 Old Believer marriage was considered illegitimate in the eyes of the state, thus depriving children of their inheritance.42 However, Old Belief was never declared illegal. Its existence was officially permitted, with some signs of secular criminality generally being required before confiscations and arrests were made. Only in the mid-1840s did it become normal to treat schismatic beliefs as a crime in and of themselves. This is when the most dramatic events of repression occurred, such as the utter destruction of the Vyg monastery and the 1854 law compelling merchants to join either Orthodoxy or edinoverie or face losing their estate privileges.43 The laws enacted against Old Belief certainly brought considerable booty into the hands of the Church throughout the reign, a sign of the determination of the government to pressure Old Belief. N. V. Pivovarova estimates that tens of thousands of items were collected in the Ministry of Internal Affair’s archive alone in this period.44 In 1907, the Viatka consistory submitted records of all the Old Believer property that they had received from confiscations over the nineteenth century. The catalog is well over a hundred pages long, with most items having been confiscated in the reign of Nicholas I.45 Military force could be used in such seizures, as happened when a large Old Believer chapel was seized in the city of Kazan in 1850: to guard the building and deter unrest, twenty-five infantry men and three mounted Cossacks were posted outside.46 One cannot understate the role that persecution played in pushing Old Believers into edinoverie. As one petition to Alexander II stipulated, “As a consequence of different threats against us, we resolved to accept edinoverie, not according to the conviction of our souls but only from fear.”47 Two edinovertsy from Ekaterinburg defended their decision to return to the schism because they had “accepted edinoverie on account of duress.”48 Indeed, for some Old Believer clergy, conversion to edinoverie meant release from prison: this was the case for Artamon Ankudinov, a priestless preceptor in Vitebsk (Vitsyebsk) who was freed from jail in 1850 on the condition that he converted and was ordained as a edinoverie priest.49 Some Old Believers might convert because it was the only way in which they could get their chapels reopened.50 Others would do so because it was the only way to save themselves from exile and forced labor for tempting others into apostasy.51 Many of the Old Believer merchant elites of Moscow converted when Nicholas I threatened to revoke their guild membership if they failed to do so: 539 joined just two days before the law went into force on January 1, 1855.52 The turn to more direct religious persecution occurred in part because of events among priestly Old Belief. By depriving Old Believers of the right to

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obtain priests from Irgiz, Nicholas had hoped to both limit their religious life and push them into the arms of edinoverie.53 However, it had the unintended consequence of forcing the priestly to resume their long search for an Orthodox prelate in the churches of east.54 Much to the consternation of state and church, they found one. Ambrosios (Pappa-Georgopoli), the metropolitan of Sarajevo, had been removed from his position for his support of Serbian rebels against the Ottoman sultanate but had not been defrocked. After negotiations with Old Believers and permission from the Austrian government, Amvrosii consecrated two of the delegates as bishops. Thus, a new concord was founded in Bukovina in 1846, known subsequently as the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy, after the location of its headquarters, or as the Austrian priesthood.55 This confirmed Nicholas’s views on Old Belief as fundamentally disloyal to himself and Russia since the Old Believers now appeared to be tools in the hands of Austria. The new threat, combined with the emergence of disturbing manifestations of priestless Old Belief, helped push Nicholas into the extreme repressive measures of the latter part of his reign.56 Edinoverie was an integral part in the actions taken against the schism. If Old Believers were so opposed to the new rites that conversion to Orthodoxy proper was unthinkable, then there was always the option of edinoverie, where the old rites and elements of Old Believer parish administration were maintained. The fact that edinoverie parishes usually inherited the former places of worship, complete with liturgical equipment and capital, made edinoverie all the more attractive. Through conversion to it, the Old Believers could maintain their community’s ownership of valued religious property and see their chapels reopened for divine service.57 The formation of edinoverie parishes also had the effect of splitting schismatic communities into mutually hostile groups. Finally, the new churches and their priests could act as police agents by keeping a close eye on the schism. The state’s interest in edinoverie was signified by a sizable amount of legisla­ tive activity on its behalf. It was becoming clear that the rules of Platon were either not being enforced or were unfit for purpose. Thus, a spate of edicts tried to fill in some of the gaps in the 1800 settlement by legislating on marriage with Old Believers (the latter had to convert) and where the edinovertsy could be buried (in either Orthodox or Old Believer cemeteries).58 In terms of ensuring that Platon’s rules were enforced, Nicholas issued an edict on April 5, 1845, requiring the bishops to stringently ensure that the integrity of the old rituals be respected and that the consistories not be involved in the running of edinoverie parishes. This edict also created the position of edinoverie deans to assist bishops with the management of the ever-increasing number of edinovertsy.59 The growth of

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edinoverie also challenged confessional dividing lines. The fifth rule, forbidding Orthodox conversion to edinoverie, came under question. On August 8, 1832, a change was made that reduced the stringency of Platon’s prohibition. Whereas the old rule required that conversion to edinoverie could be permitted only if the individual had never attended the Orthodox sacraments, the new amendment stated a minimum of ten years had to have passed since their last sacrament before someone who was registered as Orthodox could join edinoverie.60 While this change mitigated the problem slightly, it did not come close to resolving it. Nicholas was personally confronted with the issue in 1834 when a schismatic who had until very recently belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church asked to join edinoverie. The emperor declared that the government had never before allowed someone “to deviate from the Orthodox Church, even to the edinoverie one. But so as not to give the schismatics reason to clamor that the government divides the edinoverie church from the Orthodox by decisively refusing to [allow] this peasant to join to edinoverie, and through this shake the edinovertsy, . . . leave this matter without any action or response.”61 Confronted by Platon’s contradiction between assimilation and isolation, Nicholas decided silence was the best course of action. As for the Church, the hierarchy both esteemed edinoverie’s missionary appeal and remained fearful that it could be a gateway to the schism. Some of the bishops participated ardently in spreading edinoverie. Most notable was Arkadii (Fedorov), the long-standing archbishop of Perm.62 He had initiated the 1832 reform to allow Orthodox to join edinoverie ten years after the last sacrament in an Orthodox church.63 In a letter to the metropolitan of St. Petersburg, dated March 10, 1851, he declared that “the most diligent and zealous assistants against the schism are the sixty eight thousand edinovertsy who adorn Perm diocese.”64 Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow was also intensively involved with edinoverie matters in his diocese, pushing heavily for the seizure of parts of the Rogozhskoe and Preobrazhenskoe cemeteries in order to found edinoverie parishes in their midst.65 Another, Bishop Vasilii (Luzhinskii) of Polotsk, paid personal attention to the transformation of the priestless prayerhouse in Dinaberg (Daugavpils) into an edinoverie church: “Despite the distance from Vitebsk to Dinaberg (almost 500 versts one way) and the discomfort and danger of the spring-time roads, I left on 7 March for Dinaberg to bless the temporary church and tonsure Ankudinov [the former priestless preceptor] as a hieromonk: arriving early in the morning on 10 March, I performed the blessing by the old rite.”66 Others were not so confident of edinoverie’s value. Bishop Elpidifor (Benediktov) of Viatka, writing to Makarii (Bulgakov) in 1855, stated, “I consider this

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church [i.e., edinoverie], perhaps mistakenly, to be an incomprehensible institution that in reality little corresponds to its aims, is degrading to the Orthodox Church, and dangerous, lest it give birth to the division of the Church and the hierarchy.”67 Even Arkadii, while bishop of Orenburg in 1830, was horrified at how the absence of Orthodox churches in the Uralsk oblast had driven Orthodox parishioners to edinoverie churches: “Orthodox Christians, being compelled by extremity to go only to edinoverie churches for prayers and turn only to edinoverie priests with their Christian needs, do not have the pure light of true Orthodoxy and little by little leave from holy Orthodoxy . . . and become closer to the schism nesting in the settlements of Uralsk.”68 Filaret made a similar statement in 1824 to the Synod when refusing an Orthodox parish permission to join edinoverie: “Converting a general Orthodox church into a edinoverie one would be destructive for the Orthodox Church.”69 Whatever missionary value prelates saw in edinoverie, their attitudes were dominated by the fear that it would compromise Orthodoxy’s confessional integrity and thus undertook only mild changes to the rules of 1800. Equally, the intensity with which many bishops promulgated edinoverie probably had more to do with state pressure than any conviction in its utility. The 1832 reform on conversion and the 1845 reminder to enforce Platon’s rules reveal the long-term implications of their contradictions. The edict of 1845 was made because the government knew that maintenance of the old rite was fundamental in keeping edinoverie attractive to the Old Believers. However, enforcing the protection of the old rites and further institutionalizing them by creating edinoverie deans undermined the second attached opinion to Platon’s rules, which hoped that the edinovertsy would eventually forget their old rituals. This can hardly have pleased men like Filaret (Drozdov), who “looked on edinoverie as a measure that had as its final goal not simply drawing Old Believers to the Orthodox Church but the fullest unity with the Orthodox, even in ritual.”70 Although the edict of 1832 moderated the prohibitions against the Orthodox joining edinoverie, thus weakening the confessional dividing line somewhat, the fact that so many of edinoverie’s new recruits had been coerced into conversion meant that Platon’s suspicions of insincerity were essentially justified. The converts were likely to be “schismatics” in everything but name who might use their new position to proselytize among the Orthodox. Therefore, radical change to or abolition of the fifth rule could not be contemplated. Only its moderation was possible, but this left the basic criticism of confessional distinction intact. One final point is that Old Believers did not stop trying to propose “secular” alternatives to edinoverie. In some rare instances, this was actually permitted.

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In Ekaterinburg in 1838, one Old Believer community promised to convert to edinoverie but only on the basis of “special conditions”: these conditions were, first and foremost, subordination of their parish not to the diocesan prelate but to the chancellery of the Ural mining administration.71 News of this evidently spread, since an 1854 petition to Archbishop Grigorii (Postnikov) of Kazan asked for a church under the care of the local governor.72 A similar deal was formed in Uralsk in 1858. The Cossack converts stated their desire to have priests ordained by the Russian Orthodox Church but outright rejected both the rules of Platon and Synodal control, requesting instead that their new church be managed through the hetman’s chancellery.73 The hetman, A. D. Stolypin, was no doubt concerned about maintaining the loyalty of his men in a problematic border region and so acquiesced to their request. He was also able to obtain the support of the local bishop and the permission of the Synod, although the ober procurator stressed that this was the first time such an arrangement had been allowed.74 The new arrangement constituted two parishes, which came to be known as the “blessed churches.”75 The existence of these parishes demonstrates how edinoverie and the rules of Platon that governed it had failed to answer one of the principal demands of the Old Believers: inclusion into the state’s multiconfessional establishment without the mediation of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, it is important not to overstate their significance. The “edinoverie on special conditions” in Ekaterinburg was largely an informal arrangement (Nicholas I had personally rejected these conditions in 1837) that was permitted only to persuade the city’s leading and most influential Old Believer merchants to convert: how it operated in practice and for how long it existed are unknown. Similarly, the concession in Uralsk was made because the Old Believers were Cossack soldiers defending a border territory. In all other known cases, the Church and the state rigorously upheld the integrity of the rules of Platon: both were loath to allow the Old Believers a direct administrative connection to secular government organs, since this might be read as tacit recognition of the schism. Nonetheless, the fact that the state did, on rare occasions, offer this kind of deal to Old Believers is indicative of a decline in the Church’s autonomy under Nicholas I and immediately after: its interests, and those of edinoverie itself, were subordinated to those of the secular administration.

Conclusion The fate of edinoverie between 1801 and 1855 demonstrates how deeply changes in government policy influenced its evolution. The wide tolerance

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toward the schism and other religious minorities in the reign of Alexander posed the threat of redundancy for edinoverie. Old Believers did not need to accept Platon’s compromise if the government was making it painless to obtain priests who would not be subordinated to the Nikonian Synod. The insignificant growth of edinoverie between 1801 and 1825 meant there was no great pressure to reform its basis or seek further institutional development. By 1822, the secret commission was considering placing converts under governors, thus offering the Old Believers a direct link to secular authorities without the mediation of the Russian Orthodox Church. The exact opposite is true under Nicholas. His strategy to drive Old Believers into the arms of the Church was to deprive them of the major organizational basis of their religious lives: sketes, chapels, books, icons, and priests. Edinoverie had all of these things, with the added bonuses that it was entirely legal and performed the liturgy according to the old rite. Therefore, edinoverie became a significant component in the attempt to achieve an unprecedented degree of religious homogeneity in a broader scheme of social disciplining and modernization, but this meant that Nicholas and the Church had to start to address some of the problems inherent in Platon’s settlement. However, the process worsened some of the paradoxes and even introduced new ones. By further institutionalizing ritual differences, Nicholas blocked the assimilation for which Platon had hoped. Simultaneously, the massive influx of coerced, and thus insincere, converts meant that the Church had little reason to seek reform of those of the 1800 rules that created confessional barriers between Orthodoxy and edinoverie. They were required all the more to protect the Orthodox from “schismatic” infection. This was no idle fear: even as late as 1898, a Tomsk missionary congress estimated that no more than onefifth of the edinovertsy in that diocese were sincere members, which meant that roughly twenty thousand were inclined toward the schism.76 However, at the same time, coercion created a flock that had to be kept within edinoverie, especially when pressure from the state dropped. The campaigns against Old Belief made reform of edinoverie paradoxically desirable and undesirable in the same instant. The reigns of Nicholas and Alexander also imparted a perplexing legacy upon the Church. Under Alexander, the Church’s organizational reforms reached their fullest extent. The problem of religious dissent became the most significant motivating force for further confession building. The anxieties that had informed Platon’s formulation of the 1800 rules reached their high point. Initially, the state remained committed to a relatively tolerant course, resulting in conflicting stratagems in regard to heterodoxy. However, when

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the state joined the Church in pursuing confessional politics, the result was unprecedented government interference. In consequence, another paradox was formed. The Church became reliant on the government for enforcing repression of religious minorities and defending the prerogatives of Orthodoxy but equally began to begrudge the intrusions into church business. The outcome was an Orthodoxy simultaneously dependent on the imperial state and resentful of its interference.

Note s 1. N. Varushkin, “O edinoverii v nizhnetagilskom zavode i ego okrug,” Pravoslavnyi Sobesednik, no. 2 (1866): 172. For more on edinoverie in this region, see O. L. Kutev, “Edinoverie v Permskikh votchinakh stroganovykh (30-e–50-e gg. XIX v.),” Mir staroobriadchestva 4 (1998): 275–282 and A. S. Palkin, “K istorii vnutrenii zhizni edinovercheskikh obshchin Ekaterinburga i Nizhnego Tagila: Ot konfrontatsii k obedineniiu,” Vestnik museia “Nevianskaia ikona” 4 (2013): 186–197. 2. On June 18, 1837, the secret committee on Old Belief had considered another case from Perm province and had declared that only if all the Old Believers of a given community converted could the chapel be transferred to edinoverie. The edinovertsy were told to build a new church instead. Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1863), 1:184–185. 3. Varushkin, “O edinoverii,” no. 1 (1866): 10. 4. Ibid., no. 2 (1866): 180. 5. Ibid., no. 2 (1866): 188. 6. T. Marsden, The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia: Bibikov’s System for the Old Believers, 1841–1855 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 14. 7. For the attack on the Uniates, see T. Weeks, “Between Rome and Tsargrad: The Uniate Church in Imperial Russia,” in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. R. P. Geraci and M. Khodarkovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 74–77. 8. M. N. Vasilevskii, Gosudarstvennaia sistema otnoshenii k staroobriadtsam v tsarstvovanie imperatora Nikolaia I (Kazan: Tsentralnaia tipografiia, 1914), 5–16; P. Pera, “The Secret Committee on the Old Believers: Moving Away from Catherine II’s Policy of Religious Toleration,” in Russia in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. R. Bartlett (London: Macmillan, 1990), 222–241; I. Paert, Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760–1850 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 186–201. 9. Marsden, Crisis of Religious Toleration, 11. 10. Obzor meropriatii ministerstva vnutrennikh del po raskolu s 1802 po 1881 god (St. Petersburg: Departament obshchikh del, 1903), 45.

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11. Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1863), 1:21–22. 12. Paert, Old Believers, 69. 13. G. L. Freeze, “Rechristianization of Russia: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750–1850,” Studia Slavica Finlandensia 6 (1990): 107; S. Dixon, “The Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia, 1721–1917,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, 9. vols., ed. M. Angold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 5:329–330. 14. Paert, Old Believers, 61. 15. Z. P. Tinina, Samoderzhavie i russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov v pervoi chetverti XIX veka (Volgograd: Volgogradskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 1999), 44–73. 16. R. L. Nichols, “Old Belief Under Surveillance during the Reign of Alexander I,” in Russia’s Dissident Old Believers 1650–1950, ed. G. B. Michels and R. L. Nichols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 187. 17. Paert, Old Believers, 188–190. 18. Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1863), 1:39. 19. Ibid., 1:52–53. 20. Paert, Old Believers, 191. 21. Nichols, “Old Belief,” 190. 22. Ibid., 191. 23. Ibid., 193. 24. A. S. Palkin, Edinoverie v seredine XVIII–—nachale XX veka: Obshcherossiiskii kontekst i regionalnaia spetsifika (Ekaterinburg: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo universiteta, 2016), 130. 25. Amvrosii (Podobedov) was accredited with zealous promotion of edinoverie in Petersburg. A. I. Prostoserdov, Volkovskoe edinovercheskoe kladbishche: K stoletiiu ego Blagoveshchenskoi tserkvi, 1816–1916 (Petrograd: Obshchestvo rasprostraneniia religiozno-nravstvennogo prosveshcheniia, 1916), 24. 26. Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola, sostoiavshikhsia po vedomstvu sv. Sinoda, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia ministerstva vnutrennykh del, 1860), 1:16. 27. Simon (Shleev), Edinoverie v svoem vnutrennem razvitii (Moscow: Medium, 2004), 116–119. 28. N. Chernavskii, Orenburgskaia eparkhiia v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 2 vols. (Orenburg: Orenburgskaia dukhovnaia konsistoriia, 1901), 2:221. 29. RGIA, f. 796, op. 88, d. 534, l. 1. 30. Property confiscations could be highly arbitrary. In the 1848 case of Mikhail Khobarov, a peasant from Nizhnii Tagil, the police seized not just books and papers related to the schism but all his library: this included a book on metallurgy printed by the Academy of Sciences in 1801. GASO, f. 43, op. 3, d. 81, l. 14.

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31. Palkin, Edinoverie v seredine, 130. 32. For some examples, see RGIA f. 1473, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 16ob–17. 33. G. L. Freeze, Parish Clergy in 19th-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, CounterReform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 20. 34. Freeze, Parish Clergy, 21–22. 35. T. Verkhovskii, Starodube. Zapiski prot. S.-Peterb. Nikolsk. edinoverchesk. tserkvi T. A. Verkhovskogo, vysochaishe komandirovannogo v 1845–1848 g. gosudarem imp. Nikolaem Pavlovichem dlia ustroistva edinoveriia v Chernigovsk. staroobriadchesk. posadakh (Kazan: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1874), 4–5. 36. For biographical details of Timofei Verkhovskii, see O sluzhbe protoiereia S. Peterburgskoi edinovercheskoi Nikolskoi tserkvi, Timofeiia Verkhovskogo: Kopiia s formuliarnogo spiska za 1871 god (St. Petersburg: Strannik, 1872) and T. Verkhovskii, Timofei Aleksandrovich Verkhovskii, protoierei Nikolaevskoi edinovercheskoi, chto na Nikolaevskoi ultise, S.-Peterburgskoi tservki: Zapiski o ego zhizni, sostavlennyiaim samim (St. Petersburg: Strannik, 1887). For his personal correspondence, see RGIA, f. 834, op. 4, d. 1189. 37. T. Verkhovskii, Starodube, 20. 38. Ibid., 81. 39. Another example can be found in Nicholas I’s visit to Dinaberg (Daugavpils) on June 1, 1850, where a new edinoverie priest presented the tsar with bread and salt from his parishioners: Nicholas told the priest, “I have long desired this and I hope that your flock will multiply with time.” RGIA, f. 796, op. 131, d. 1788, l. 53ob. 40. Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1863), 1:72. 41. Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1863), 1:77. 42. I. Paert, “Regulating Old Believer Marriages: Ritual, Legality, and Conversion in Nicholas I’s Russia,” Slavic Review 63, no. 3 (2004): 555–576. 43. For the end of the Vyg monastery, see R. O. Crummey, Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694–1855 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 209–218; for the law targeting the merchants, see A. S. Beliajeff, “The Rise of the Old Orthodox Merchants of Moscow 1771–1894” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 1975), 164–175; and Marsden, Crisis of Religious Toleration, 190–212. 44. N. V. Pivovarova, “‘Kabinet raskolnichikh veshei’ ministerstva vnutrennikh del: Ob odnom nesostoiavshemsia muzee staroobriadcheskoi bogolosluzhebnoi kultury,” Izvestiia Uralskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 6, no. 85 (2010): 237. This scale is confirmed by Palkin’s research: in the years 1846– 1847 and 1850–1857 in Ekaterinburg alone, “more than 1,500 books, 1,265 icons, and 1,369 items were seized (although about 1/3 of the icons and 1/8 of the items

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were returned to their owners: books, as a rule, were not returned).” Palkin, Edinoverie v seredine, 146. 45. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 185, d. 88, ll. 144–265. 46. NART, f. 1, op. 2, d. 744, ll. 3–3ob. The list of property removed from the chapel runs to eighty-six pages: ibid., ll. 40–83ob. Deemed unsafe, the chapel was torn down and the materials sold to a merchant, a local orphanage, and the city duma: the authorities actually made a profit on the demolition, since the sales amounted to 1141.65 rubles and the costs to 739.85 rubles: NART, f. 1, op. 2, d. 791, l. 53; l. 66. 47. D. N. Belikov, Tomskii raskol (istoricheskii ocherk s 1834 po 1880-e gody) (Tomsk: P. I. Makushin, 1901), 131. 48. GASO, f. 6, op. 4, d. 17, l. 16. 49. RGIA, f. 796, op. 131, d. 1788, l. 3. Ankudinov was informed that if his conversion was insincere and he sought a return to the schism, then he would be punished to the full extent of the law. Ibid., l. 4. In another example, Petr Podgornyi, a peasant from Perm province, spent from 1826 to 1843 in a monastic prison in Irkutsk for spreading priestless Old Belief before using conversion to edinoverie to secure his release: however, as there was no edinoverie priest in Irkutsk, he had to travel to Tiumen. RGIA, f. 1473, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 275ob–276ob. 50. In 1840, the Old Believers of Nizhnesaldinsk told the bishop of Ekaterinburg that “if their chapel was re-opened and the liturgy was performed in it by a edinoverie priest, then they would go to it to pray to God together with the edinovertsy.” Varushkin, “O edinoverii,” no. 1 (1867): 281. 51. D. N. Belikov, Tomskii raskol, 203. 52. Beliajeff, “Rise of the Old Orthodox Merchants,” 165. 53. Seizure of part of the Irgiz monastery had already begun in 1829 when a substantial group of monks converted and brought the buildings with them. Polnoe sobranie postanovlenii i rasporiazhenii po vedomstvu pravoslavnogo ispovedaniia Rossiiskoi imperiia: Tsarstovanie gosudaria imperatora Nikolaia I (Petrograd: 1-ia Petrogradskaia Trudovaia Artel, 1915), 369–370. 54. This was only one reaction to government pressure on the supply of priests: others formed new priestless concords like the chasovennye. See S. A. Beloborodov and Iu. V. Borovik, Starovery gornozavodskogo Urala: Stranitsy istorii soglasiia beglopopovtsev/chasovennykh XVIII–nachala XX v. (Ekaterinburg: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo universiteta, 2017), 178–248. 55. N. Subbotin, Istoriia tak nazyvaemogo Avstriiskogo, ili Belokrinitskogo, sviashchenstva, 2 vols. (Moscow: E. Lissner and Iu. Roman, 1894–1899). 56. The problem was the sudden discovery of the beguny, the Wanderers. Marsden, Crisis of Religious Toleration, 83–87. 57. Refusal to convert, on the other hand, meant that the buildings would either remain locked or be destroyed. On occasion, church officials seem to have

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gone out of their way to humiliate the Old Believers: in the diocese of Mogilev in 1853–1854, the materials from a demolished prayer-house were used as firewood in the baking of Orthodox prosphora bread. RGIA, f. 796, op. 130, d. 911, l. 6. 58. For marriages, see a series of edicts from between 1840 and 1842 in Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola, sostoiavshikhsia po vedomstvu sv. Sinoda, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia ministerstva vnutrennykh del, 1860), 2:374, 381, 384–386; For burial, see an edict from March 17, 1839, in Obzor meropriatii, 143. Issues about the edinovertsy and Old Believers sharing cemeteries recurred constantly: see RGIA, f. 1473, op. 1, d. 24, l. 108ob for government concerns about disorders when the Old Believers went to bury their dead in the graveyard of the recently converted edinoverie church in Rzhev. 59. Trudy Moskovskogo edinovercheskogo sezda (Moscow, 1910), 123–124. 60. R. V. Kaurkin and O. A. Pavlova, Edinoverie v Rossii: Ot zarozhdeniia idei do nachala XX veka (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2011), 101. 61. Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1863), 1:103–104. 62. For a biography and some of his works, see N. Subbotin, Arkadii arkhiepiskop Permskii i Petrozavodskii i nekotorye ego sochineniia protiv raskola (Moscow: E. Lissner and Iu. Roman, 1890). 63. Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola, sostoiavshikhsia po vedomstvu sv. Sinoda, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia ministerstva vnutrennykh del, 1860), 2:250–251. 64. “Pismo preosviashchenneiskogo Arkadiia arkhiepiskopa Permskogo k Sankt-Peterburgskomu mitropolitu Nikanoru,” Ekaterinburgskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 12 (1888): 286. 65. Filaret had been dreaming of establishing a monastery near or in either cemetery since 1840. In 1854, he managed to seize chapels in both. It was only in 1862 that he established a convent in the Rogozhskoe cemetery and in 1865 a monastery in Preobrazhenskoe. V. Belikov, Deiatelnost Moskovskogo mitropolita Filareta po otnosheniiu k raskolu (Kazan: Imperatorskii universitet, 1895), 447– 499. For the full details of the seizure of the Rogozhskoe churches, see P. T. De Simone, “An Old Believer ‘Holy Moscow’ in Imperial Russia: Community and Identity in the History of the Rogozhskoe Cemetery Old Believers, 1771–1917” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2012), 134–146. 66. RGIA, f. 796, op. 131, d. 1788, ll. 25ob–26. 67. “Pisma k pochivshemu v Boze vysokopreosviashchenneishemu Makariiu mitropolitu Moskovskomu,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, no. 1 (1888): 127. 68. Uralsk was the only place in the Russian Empire where edinoverie preceded Orthodoxy. Chernavskii, Orenburgskaia eparkhiia, 2:293. 69. V. Belikov, Deiatelnost, 553. 70. Ibid., 550.

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71. Aleksandr Palkin has described the formation and development of this parish at length: see Palkin, Edinoverie v seredine, 137–145. 72. NART, f. 4, op. 1, d. 5246, l. 9–10. The request caused some confusion in Kazan, forcing the local suffragan to write to Bishop Iona (Kapustin) of Ekaterinburg and Archbishop Neofit (Sosnin) of Perm in order to find out what the special conditions actually were (see ibid., ll. 80–81 and ll. 86–87). There is no evidence to suggest that the edinovertsy in Kazan ever received such a deal, especially since all correspondence relating to this parish was dealt with by bishops, not the governor. 73. V. N. Vitebskii, Raskol v Uralskom voiske i otnoshenie k nemu dukhovnoi i voennograzhdanskoi vlasti v kontse XVIII i v XIX v (Kazan: Imperatorskii universitet, 1878), 137–138. 74. Vitebskii, Raskol v Uralskom voiske, 140. 75. For a full description of the liturgical life of the “blessed churches” and their relationship with the Orthodox and edinovertsy, see ibid., 141–148. 76. “Obzor deiatelnosti pervogo eparkhialnogo missionerskogo sezda v g. Tomske 10–27 avgusta 1898 goda,” Tomskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 6 (1899): 6.

thr ee

k

A “STEP TO ORTHODOX Y” NO MORE, 1865 –1886

Introduction On July 23, 1865, a special ceremony was held in the Troitskaia edinoverie church in Moscow to join some new converts to edinoverie. A large throng of people gathered at the church to observe Bishop Leonid (Krasnopevkov) of Dmitrovsk perform the liturgy.1 It was no ordinary ceremony.2 The six men being joined were all high-profile leaders of the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy. This was a major coup for the Russian Orthodox Church, and it was keen to broadcast its success. It had succeeded in converting three bishops, a hieromonk, an archdeacon, and a hierodeacon. Filaret commented that “undoubtedly in [the loss of] these people, the schism was deprived of a considerable part of their pseudo-hierarchy.”3 The most talented of the six men, Pafnutii (Ovchinnikov), the erudite and oratorically gifted Old Believer bishop of Kostroma, was put to work immediately. He was scheduled to become the abbot of a new edinoverie monastery located right in the center of the Preobrazhenskoe cemetery, the very heart of Russia’s priestless Old Believer community.4 The government seized one of the cemetery’s almshouses and then transformed it into the Nikolskii edinoverie monastery.5 On the surface, the appropriation of part of the Preobrazhenskoe cemetery marked the apex of policies against Old Belief and the triumph of innumerable campaigns of coercion and confiscation: the Irgiz monastery complex, for decades a source of fugitive priests, was entirely converted to edinoverie in 1857; the Vyg hermitage had been completely destroyed; and the Rogozhskoe cemetery had become home to a edinoverie convent.6 Across the Russian Empire, the number of edinoverie parishes had mushroomed, expanding to 223 in 1864.7

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It was the Old Believers who had paid for this impressive expansion with their chapels, icons, and books, many of which now lay in the hands of the converts and their Synod-approved clergy. The government and the Church could be satisfied that through these edinoverie churches they possessed missionary stations and surveillance posts that looked out onto hundreds of schismatic communities. However, the triumph over Old Belief was deceptive. With the death of Nicholas I in 1855, the Russian state moved away from the coercion of religious minorities, albeit at a typically sluggish pace. The infamous 1854 measure to deny Old Believer merchants access to the highest ranks of the guilds unless they converted to either Orthodoxy or edinoverie was repealed in 1856, very shortly after Alexander II’s accession. While the new emperor did not immediately abandon all of his father’s measures, it was becoming clear that the government’s attitude to heterodoxy was now in flux. The clearest sign of change coincided with the seizure of property from Preobrazhenskoe. In 1864, Alexander created a special commission to review and reform the legislation surrounding Old Belief. As slow and unwieldy as this commission was in fulfilling its task, its formation marked the end to dramatic campaigns of confiscation sponsored by the central government. The actions taken against the Preobrazhenskoe cemetery were, therefore, not the sign of a continuation of Nicholas I’s policies but rather their last gasp. In this chapter, I assess how the position of edinoverie changed as the pace of persecution slackened. As previously commented, the Church found itself in a difficult position. The consequences of the coercion employed against the schism between 1825 and 1864 led to a huge increase in parishes and parishioners but many of them were reluctant edinovertsy at best. This made the Church cautious about any attempt to resolve edinoverie’s peripheral position on the outskirts of the Orthodox confession. However, the extension of toleration might reduce edinoverie’s appeal since people were no longer being pressured into joining. In the worst-case scenario, the edinovertsy might start fleeing to the schism in large numbers. Thus, there were good reasons to both demand reform and reject it. This situation was complicated by outside pressures peculiar to the reign of Alexander II. On the one hand, in 1862, a split in the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy gave the Church confidence that edinoverie could still succeed without major changes to the 1800 settlement. On the other hand, a new and vibrant civil society was subjecting edinoverie to considerable critique. Social concern reached its climax between 1873 and 1874 when the St. Petersburg section of the Society for the Admirers of Spiritual Enlightenment held debates on the “needs

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of edinoverie.” These garnered a significant degree of attention in the secular press and even provoked comment from Fyodor Dostoyevsky.8 There was also pressure coming from within edinoverie itself. Petitions to change the rules of Platon, from Nizhnii Novgorod and Moscow in 1877–1878, utilized the upsurge of interest in edinoverie to gain a considerable amount of coverage in the secular and ecclesiastical press. No less than this, two new leaders emerged from among the edinovertsy, both backing reform. One was the firebrand Petersburg priest, Ioann Verkhovskii, who in 1864 wrote a savage condemnation of edinoverie and demanded the full legalization of Old Belief. Far more moderate was Pavel Prusskii, an esteemed priestless monk who converted to the Church in 1868. Working in tandem with Professor Nikolai Subbotin of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy, he pushed for a new definition of unity in faith that would stress solidarity in everything other than rites. In 1881 and 1886, the Synod turned this into its guiding principle. That this process of confessional integration occurred in the era of the Great Reforms is no coincidence: as Elena Campbell has remarked on the abolition of serfdom, “This trend toward societal integration also characterized the reforms of the judiciary, local self-government, the educational system, and the introduction of universal military service that followed the emancipation of the serfs.”9 While Platon’s rules had sought the isolation of edinoverie until its members assimilated into Orthodoxy and gave up their old rituals, Pavel and Subbotin believed it would be possible to integrate the edinovertsy into Orthodoxy without the abandonment of the pre-Nikonian ritual compact. This would require the Church to recognize the equality of the old rites, which in turn would require a change in ascribed Orthodox identity. By bringing a second set of rites into the Orthodox confession, the Nikonian rituals could no longer define Orthodoxy’s boundaries. Instead, they had to be defined through the changed perception of ritual seen for the first time in the 1760s. Ritual tolerance became a marker of what it meant to be Orthodox. Only then could Orthodoxy as a confession house two different rites while still maintaining a difference between themselves and the “ritually fanatical” Old Believers.

Opport u niti e s a n d Ch a ll enge s The shift from Nicholas’s persecution to tolerance was one reason why reform of edinoverie gathered steam in this period. Alexander II’s policy toward Old Belief was usually determined by ambivalence rather than by any concrete swing to either repression or tolerance. Alexander saw the problem of Old Belief not in the legislation surrounding it but rather in the ignorance, both

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deliberate and accidental, of the bureaucrats who implemented it.10 Thus, in the first decade of the new reign, the change in government policy was not particularly noticeable on a legislative level. The Synod proceeded as normal, even going so far as to codify a new set of regulations governing the seizure of Old Believer property in 1858.11 What changed in this first decade was not the policy but the tenor of that policy. As lethargic as Alexander’s approach to Old Belief was, it was still a shift compared to the intensity of Nicholas’s scheme. The impact of this shift on edinoverie was that the number of new conversions began to drop precipitously, declining to 757 in 1868, the low point of the century.12 This is eloquent statistical testimony of the role played by Nicholaevan coercion in building edinoverie and how it was affected the moment that persecution slackened even slightly. Reforming the laws on Old Belief gained more speed with the formation of a commission in 1864. However, it still took a decade for this committee to produce anything of substance. Its major product was a law on April 19, 1874, that gave Old Believers the right to have their own parish registers. This meant that their marriages and offspring were legitimized, ending the pressure on them to turn to Orthodox or edinoverie priests for baptisms and weddings.13 A second commission was formed immediately after. Once again, it took a while to bear fruit. Indeed, the next piece of legislation was not passed until 1883, two years after Alexander II’s assassination. This edict was more extensive as it gave the Old Believers and other religious dissidents the right to reopen their churches, repair old ones, and hold private religious ceremonies. Public displays of religiosity remained forbidden.14 Quite what consequences these changes had for edinoverie is difficult to tell, although L. N. Suslova has argued that the decline of edinovertsy in Tobolsk from 24,343 in 1875 to 19,784 in 1885 can be attributed to the legislative changes.15 With the accession of Alexander III, the stance of the state once again underwent a major transition. While the 1883 reform had been designed to mobilize Old Belief as a source of potential conservative support for the Russian state, Alexander III considered religious uniformity to be the best policy for stabilizing the empire.16 Conversions to edinoverie returned to levels comparable to those under Nicholas I.17 The tsar was aided by the new ober procurator of the Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev. This latter-day Protasov once again aimed to maximize the influence of the state over the Church and that of the Church over society: as Daniel Scarborough notes, “Pobedonostsev’s tenure in the Synod was marked by the simultaneous encouragement of coordinated pastoral work through the diocesan networks, and the suppression of those informal lateral ties that had developed to facilitate this work.”18 S. I. Alekseeva believes that it

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was Pobedonostsev, together with his loyal associate Subbotin, who pressured the Synod into carrying out reforms of edinoverie.19 This was undoubtedly the case, since he once described edinoverie as “that great work.”20 His role in the reform reflects the more nuanced consideration of Pobedonostsev’s role within the Church recently forwarded by Aleksandr Polunov, whereby Pobedonostsev is seen not just as a reactionary obscurantist but also a pious believer who “initiated the realization of a range of large-scale programs, the very scale of which does not allow us to label them as ‘weak’ or ‘indecisive’ policy, deprived of a positive guideline. The promotion of church book printing, the activation of missionary activities, the construction of churches, increasing the number of the clergy, the holding of churchly social celebrations, and the creation of a network of church schools for the people—all these phenomena had a conspicuous influence on the development of reform-era Russia.”21 Pressure for edinoverie reform had been mounting since the 1860s but the Synod had been unable to resolve the divisions among the episcopate in relation to edinoverie reform. Thus, it had barely done anything to change the situation it inherited from the reign of Nicholas I. It took Pobedonostsev’s activism of to produce results.

Th e Bel a i a K r initsa Hi er a rch y One of the most attractive prospects of edinoverie was that it offered Old Believers a canonically legitimate priesthood. The Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy was a direct challenge to edinoverie since it alleged that it could also offer legitimate clergymen to the Old Believers, thereby ending their dependence on a rapidly dwindling supply of fugitives. It was consistently regarded by the Russian Orthodox Church as one of their main rivals for the souls of its flock. However, there were some weaknesses, not least the lingering doubts over the canonicity of Metropolitan Ambrosios’s actions, since he had contravened the canonical prescription that two bishops needed to present in order to consecrate a third. Consequently, the hierarchy never succeeded in persuading all of the priestly concords to join its ranks.22 Equally, the persecution against the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy had been fierce under Nicholas I. Nevertheless, the hierarchy entered the era of the Great Reforms with considerable potential to disrupt the Church’s efforts in converting the Old Believers to edinoverie. However, the more moderate stance of Alexander II’s government to Old Belief posed difficult questions for the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy. It had to look again at how to relate to the Russian state. This was a critical matter. The hierarchy needed accommodation with the state to better manage those flocks that it had been able to gather, especially since Alexander had one bishop thrown

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into the Suzdal monastic prison in 1859.23 On February 24, 1862, an attempt to resolve the impasse was made by a council of bishops sitting in Moscow. Together, they formulated the so-called Circular Epistle (okruzhnoe poslanie), a document aimed at demonstrating that the Russian Orthodox Church did not worship the Antichrist. The epistle echoes Metropolitan Platon’s Exhortation to the Schismatics, listing the supposed areas of conflict as between the Synodal church and priestly Old Belief and dismissing them as either irrelevant or insubstantial: “The church that currently predominates in Russia . . . does not believe in another God but in the same one as us.”24 The venom of the letter was reserved for the priestless Old Believers. The idea that Russian Orthodoxy worshipped the Antichrist was “blind sophistry” that “was planted maliciously by the darkened consciences of the priestless.”25 The hope behind the document was that lessening the tensions between Russia’s official church and the hierarchy might result in the state looking upon the “Austrians” more favorably. However, it caused internal indignation. While an official council called in 1863 resolved in favor of the circular letter, the breach proved to be enduring. From this point on, the hierarchy was rent into two groups, the okruzhniki (those in favor of the letter) and the protivookruzhniki (those against). The former group was generally more successful, since they kept most of the key positions, monasteries, and financial resources. However, the prestige of the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy was diminished. They had not managed to preserve unity for even two decades after their creation. The sheer acrimony of the dispute left a sour taste in the mouths of many bishops, priests, and laymen. Filaret (Drozdov) believed that the split meant that “Orthodoxy is now given some hope that the ignorance, disorder, mutual strife, reproofs, and denunciations of the pseudo-bishops will shake the confidence of the lay schismatics.”26 He was not wrong. When Pafnutii and the other leaders converted in the presence of Metropolitan Filaret in 1865, they listed the disputes in the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy as a fundamental motivation. Hierodeacon Filaret declared that the split had shown him “how much evil, falsity, and ignorance is hidden in the schism.”27 They were not the only ones. In distant Uralsk, in 1870, when two Belaia Krinitsa priests converted to edinoverie, they both publicly derided the schism over the Circular Epistle: “Upon personally seeing the disputes, strife, and divisions between the okruzhniki and protivookruzhniki, the oaths of one against the other, the many lawless actions of the high ecclesiastical authorities, avarice, and violations of conscience, I did not have any peace in my soul either day or night.”28 One unforeseen consequence of the new schism was that Orthodox bishops may have felt that edinoverie was in a more secure position, and thus they were

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less inclined toward substantial reforms. Metropolitan Filaret furnishes a ready example. In 1857, he had sounded out Metropolitan Grigorii (Postnikov) of St. Petersburg about the possibility of a edinoverie bishop.29 In the interpretation of one biographer, Filaret embarked on this course because the tolerant approach of Alexander II, combined with the undimmed strength of the schismatic hierarchy, made him fear for edinoverie’s future. New measures were needed to increase its missionary potential. However, when the question of bishops arose again in 1865, Filaret resolutely declaimed against it. The change in opinion was related to the weakness he now sensed in the schism. The quarrel over the epistle and the subsequent conversions had strengthened the hand of the Church, thus negating the need for radical reform.30 The episode of the split in the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy illuminates two key points in regard to the Russian Orthodox Church and edinoverie. First, it shows that the policies of the former toward the latter were always intimately connected with developments within Old Belief itself. Second, it demonstrates that the Church’s attitude toward edinoverie was reactive rather than proactive. It largely depended on changes from outside rather than within the Church itself. This is one reason why reform of edinoverie was often half-hearted. So long as the schism was kept weak either by the government or by internal divisions, there was no urgent need to change edinoverie’s position on the confessional boundaries between Orthodoxy and the schism. However, this meant that edinoverie would be unprepared for those moments when the schism did occupy a position of relative strength.

Inter na l Pr e ssu r e Two groups with pretensions to leading Russia’s edinovertsy had arisen by the end of the 1860s. In St. Petersburg, there was Ioann Verkhovskii, the priest of the Milovskaia parish and son of the missionary Timofei. In Moscow, the recent convert Pavel Prusskii and his associate Nikolai Subbotin formed a camp around the Nikolskii monastery and Subbotin’s Brotherhood of St. Petr the Metropolitan. Both parties proposed reforms to edinoverie, but they were radically different from one another. Verkhovskii imagined nothing other than the abolition of Platon’s edinoverie and the full incorporation of Old Belief into the state’s multiconfessional establishment. Subbotin and Prusskii suggested reform of the 1800 settlement in a quest to integrate the edinovertsy more fully into the Orthodox confession. While completely irreconcilable, the threat posed by Verkhovskii motivated Subbotin to go further than perhaps he had initially intended. As he himself said, “The need to review and correct these

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rules [of Platon] was all the more imperative as the schismatics used the rules as proof of the putative falsity of edinoverie, that allegedly it did not stand in real unity with the Church and was despised by it. It was from here that Verkhovskii borrowed the main basis for his plan about the complete division of edinoverie from the Church.”31 In Verkhovskii’s hands, the critique of the Old Believers gained new potency for disruption. Verkhovskii, born in 1819, spent his formative years following the monastic career of his uncle, attending seminaries in Saratov, Perm, and Irkutsk.32 He returned to St. Petersburg only in 1842 to become priest of the Milovskaia parish. Fiery and embittered, he savaged the hypocrisy of Platon’s rules and mercilessly tore into the Synodal order of church government. He believed that reuniting Old Belief and Orthodoxy was a mission sent to him by God.33 This rendered him almost impervious to threats of punishment and bestowed on him a severe martyrdom complex. In 1874, his parishioners overheard a rumor that the metropolitan was so tired of him that he was about to send Verkhovskii to a rural parish.34 Verkhovskii then wrote a letter to Isidor (Nikolskii) that verged on the hysterical.35 He told the metropolitan that “exile to the countryside will be a half measure and, as with all half measures, a mistaken one.”36 He demanded to be either imprisoned or allowed to be a good pastor to his spiritual children.37 Verkhovskii’s attitudes emerged not just from his character but also from his experience. As a edinoverie priest, he had to live the contradictions of the rules of Platon and enforce their provisions on his flock. This had become most clear to him when he performed mixed marriages, particularly when one of the partners had to convert to edinoverie from Old Belief before the ceremony was conducted. He described this at length to Metropolitan Isidor in a letter from January 30, 1864, when he complained vociferously about the consistory asking him to which church Verkhovskii had joined an Old Believer: the Orthodox one or the edinoverie one. The very distinction angered Verkhovskii. Surely, he stated, edinoverie and Orthodoxy were one and the same and, therefore, it was entirely irrelevant to which of the two he had joined the Old Believer.38 If this was not the view of the consistory, then it would seem to indicate that they believed edinoverie was not Orthodox. The two were separate and different and as such edinoverie was “pure government fiction.”39 However, the consistory asked this question while maintaining the official line that edinoverie and Orthodoxy were united in faith: “What logic! A edinoverie priest does not have the right to marry two Orthodox people: this, according to the consistory, is direct proof that there is no essential difference between edinoverie and Orthodoxy.”40 The provisions of Platon turned the priest into a “secret missionary”

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and a “spy” for the Russian Orthodox Church among the edinovertsy, whose lack of privileges and rights demonstrated that they were a “non-Orthodox confession, tolerated only for a time.”41 In 1864, Verkhovskii sent a petition to Alexander II on behalf of some of his edinoverie associates in the Urals. Over a hundred pages long, it is an immensely rich document based on a distinctive ecclesiology.42 For our present purposes, it is necessary to concentrate on his commentary on edinoverie. He argued that from the beginning of the reign of Catherine the Great, the government had begun to tolerate the Old Believers and to search for ways to unite them with the Church. This was the spirit in which Paul ordered the Church to establish edinoverie. However, he had not counted on the duplicity of the Orthodox hierarchy and Metropolitan Platon.43 When the Moscow Old Believers sent their petition to Platon, they had been making a plea for “true” edinoverie, a real unity that would put an end to the schism. Platon, however, had transformed this into “false” edinoverie. His conditions and limitations had only created a hypocritical administrative measure that served to reinforce the very mistakes made in 1667: “Platon’s edinoverie is a sincere imitation of the Latin unia, only deprived of Jesuit sophistry.”44 The very term edinoverie was an outrage: “Edinoverie,” if it is Orthodoxy, should be called Orthodoxy; if it is not Orthodoxy, then it should not be called edinoverie: the name edinoverie should be abolished firstly because in general Orthodox society it carries a divisive meaning and secondly because it introduces error among the simple people. If the old ritual is Orthodox, then all the established dividing partitions between it and the official ritual should be overthrown and the old ritual should be blessed without any conditions, reservations, and limitations for all and everyone, in all churches and parishes of the official church. If the old ritual is not Orthodox, then it should be forbidden even in edinoverie churches, whose parishioners must either convert to the official church or return to the schism.45

Platon’s hope that the edinoverie would eventually abandon their rituals was called a “satanic delusion.”46 Verkhovskii asked Alexander for sixteen reforms. The Old Believers were to be recognized as Orthodox and all state and church repression against them should cease. They should be allowed to have a full and open liturgical life. All Old Believer communities should have elected bishops. Parishioners should choose their own priests. Since there was no reason to trust the Russian Orthodox episcopate, the new bishops would not be subordinated to the Synod and

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joint services would not be conducted until negotiations between the two episcopates removed the anathemas of 1667. It was hoped that the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy, on seeing the new Old Believer church in Russia, would give up their illegitimate bishops. The petition ended with the hope that the priestless Old Believers could be shown, through gentleness and love, that the Church “is their true mother.”47 Verkhovskii’s plan amounted to the formation of an Old Believer church that would be part of the multiconfessional establishment. Edinoverie itself would end, with the edinovertsy incorporated into an episcopate that existed beyond the control of the Synod. For all intents and purposes, two Orthodox churches would exist in the Russian Empire, one defined by the three-fingered sign of the cross and the other by the use of two digits. The extreme content and tone of the petition won Verkhovskii few friends. Even his supporters in Ekaterinburg were astonished. One, the merchant G. M. Kazantsev,48 wrote to Verkhovskii a year later asking him whether he believed that the sacraments he delivered in his parish church were of any value, and then, if he felt this way, why did he not defect to the schism?49 Kazantsev was also horrified at the way in which Metropolitan Platon was attacked.50 Opposition to Verkhovskii’s ideas from normal edinovertsy was not isolated to this one incident. On July 9, 1878, Pavel Prusskii noted an occasion when Verkhovskii gathered an assembly of Petersburg edinovertsy to try and gain support for the abolition of the anathemas. They were suspicious and the majority left, leaving only seventeen people in the meeting.51 Verkhovskii’s influence was limited by the extremity of his opinions and language. There was no likelihood whatsoever of the Church realizing his plans. However, he did have some impact.52 The sheer extent of Verkhovskii’s radicalism forced church leaders into action, if only to counteract the spread of his ideas: indeed, P. A. Valuev, the minister of internal affairs, noted in his diary that the more moderate edinoverie petitions received in 1864 served as a “useful counterweight”53 to Verkhovskii’s demands, in which “every word breathes hatred of our bishops.”54

Th e Profe ssor a n d th e Monk After the conversion of the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchs in 1865, the Russian Orthodox Church scored another major victory when Pavel (Lednev), the abbot of a skete in eastern Prussia, defected from the priestless Old Believers and joined edinoverie. Pavel (who was already universally known by his sobriquet, “Prusskii”) had achieved no small amount of fame among the Old Believers of

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Russia: his skills in running the skete had done much to turn it from a distant outpost of priestless Old Belief into a hub of learning and culture.55 During his lifetime, he conducted innumerable missionary expeditions throughout the Russian Empire.56 He also showed sufficient administrative acumen to be made the abbot of the edinoverie Nikolskii monastery in Moscow. Pavel spoke and wrote in a style comforting to his lowborn audiences, scattering his works with folk idioms and earthy language. His pamphlets were popular and became essential tools for anti–Old Believer missionaries.57 His personal charisma made him a necessary stage in the process of conversion for many.58 He became the closest thing edinoverie ever had to an elder (starets): Dostoyevsky certainly thought so, since he used Pavel as the model for some of the saintly monks in his works.59 Pavel’s name was nearly inseparable from that of Nikolai Subbotin. The scion of a clerical family, Subbotin had started teaching courses on the schism in the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy in 1855. Four years later, he was made a professor, a position he held until his death in 1905. In the course of his career, he was tremendously productive, writing innumerable books and essays on Old Belief. He also took an active role in missionary matters, founding the antischismatic Brotherhood of St. Petr the Metropolitan and providing it with a journal, Bratskoe slovo (Fraternal Word), in 1875.60 His relationship with Pavel was principally as a publisher and editor, but the abbot was also the personification of Subbotin’s ideas about edinoverie, their living manifestation. Like Verkhovskii, Subbotin’s theorizing about the contradictions of the rules of Platon began to manifest when he was personally confronted with their results. In 1868, Apollos (Beliaev), the bishop of Viatka, visited a edinoverie church in his diocese. An Orthodox believer in the crowd asked the bishop whether he could convert to edinoverie since he preferred the old rituals. The bishop answered, no: “Edinoverie is only a step to Orthodoxy.”61 This remark, taking up no more than a line in the official section of the diocesan newspaper, was rapidly reprinted, provoking Subbotin into responding. He pointed out that such statements could be damaging since they gave the impression that edinoverie was something less than fully Orthodox.62 In response, the editor of the newspaper claimed that it was he and not the bishop who had included the inflammatory remark. He also stood by it fully: “It is impossible to represent edinoverie as anything other than a type of step to Orthodoxy. It lacks true ecumenical Orthodoxy. Between edinoverie and Orthodoxy, there is no complete similarity in the confession of the Christian truths. On the contrary, there are differences that are clear and obvious to all and they are recognised by law in the rules of Metropolitan Platon.”63 Such denigratory comments

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were not unusual. In 1876, for example, the Kazan consistory told Orthodox petitioners asking for a edinoverie church that it “could only allow them to build an Orthodox church because they, as Orthodox [believers], must go from strength to strength in Christian life and strive for Christian perfection: they cannot go backwards and return to a state of infancy.”64 Subbotin was mortified by the implications of such arguments. If this was the case, he stated, then what did this mean for the Russian Orthodox Church? How could it allow something that was not truly Orthodox under its aegis?65 Subbotin’s remedy for the case was to turn to the rules of Metropolitan Platon, “the chief and almost only legal basis for their correct resolution.”66 Apollos, rather than telling the potential convert that edinoverie was something less than Orthodox, should have turned to the rule of Platon that forbade conversion from Orthodoxy to edinoverie since “conversion from edinoverie to Orthodoxy, from rituals that are not fully correct and ancient to rituals that are truly ancient and correct, is necessary and desirable.”67 This was an early stage in Subbotin’s thought. He evidently believed in the ability of the 1800 settlement to manage the questions of edinoverie and had not yet drawn the conclusion that it was precisely the rules of Platon that generated the kind of statements made by Apollos and the editor.68 The case was different in 1878 when Subbotin was called in by the Synod to give his opinion on several edinoverie petitions that had arrived a year earlier. A decade of acquaintance with Pavel and polemical jousting with Verkhovskii had left their imprint. Calling the latter an “ultra-schismatic,”69 Subbotin detailed his own understanding of edinoverie. The correct interpretation was that edinoverie was united with the Church, that it was one part of the same flock. Ritual was the only distinction between the edinovertsy and the rest of the Church, an interpretation epitomized in the person of Pavel Prusskii.70 The edinovertsy’s desire for change was motivated by a yearning to demonstrate their unity with the Russian Orthodox Church: Subbotin wanted the rules of Platon rewritten to better reflect this.71 The most important changes he suggested were that the Orthodox could convert to edinoverie on the proviso that there was no opposition from their spiritual leaders and that the edinoverie clergy be allowed to give the sacraments to Orthodox believers so long as it was understood that doing so did not turn them into edinovertsy. Thus, Subbotin’s new settlement eradicated the fifth and eleventh rules of Platon, those most responsible for perpetuating a sense of confessional difference. The difference between his views in 1869 and in 1878 is stark. Subbotin had now come to the conclusion that the 1800 settlement had to be significantly amended. His proposed reforms would completely end the confessional

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boundaries that separated the Orthodox from the edinovertsy and bring them together within a single confession. Inherent here was the recognition of some freedom in ritual matters. Orthodox believers could, if they so desired, join edinoverie and use the pre-Nikonian rituals. Two kinds of rituals could coexist within the Russian Orthodox Church without threatening either unity or the security of the confession. Subbotin’s review was, therefore, an outline of confessional integration: he sought to resolve Platon’s contradictions by coming down firmly on the side of ritual tolerance, the importance of conscience in liturgical behavior, and the inclusion of the edinovertsy within an Orthodox confession rather than being quarantined outside it.

Th e Ne eds of Edinov er i e In 1877–1878, two petitions arose among the edinovertsy. The first originated from Nizhnii Novgorod: the local edinovertsy assembled a conference to discuss the needs of their movement, also inviting coreligionists from other parts of Russia to participate. The second petition arose in Moscow almost simultaneously. The Nizhnii Novgorod petition was notable for the range of its requests: that the Orthodox be allowed to attend edinoverie schools and for marriages between edinovertsy and the Orthodox to be conducted in either church.72 These problems were not isolated to Niznhii Novgorod, as is shown by an 1878 Tomsk petition complaining about the Orthodox wives of edinoverie men being forbidden from attending old rite liturgies.73 The Moscow petition attempted to define edinoverie: “What, in fact, does the edinoverie church mean?”74 Their answer was straightforward. Edinoverie was “the one and the same Orthodox Church, consisting of nothing more and nothing less than a parish of the Orthodox Church.”75 The edinovertsy received priests from Orthodox bishops, and they were also under the same episcopal jurisdictions as the Orthodox. This led to their central claim. If the Orthodox and the edinovertsy were indeed one and the same, this meant that the differences imposed by the rules of Platon were largely unjustified and needed either modification or outright abolition. They saw in the rules of Platon “a sign of incomplete recognition of their unity and communion with the Orthodox Church.”76 Both petitions made several requests about changes to the rules. The Muscovites asked that those people who were noted in the confessional registers as Orthodox but were in reality Old Believers be allowed to convert to edinoverie if they had not taken a sacrament in five years.77 While they recognized that this rule had been sagacious to begin with, there was now no threat that the

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edinovertsy would attempt to convert the Orthodox, since they had proven that they undoubtedly and sincerely belong to the Russian Orthodox Church. In contrast, the Nizhnii Novgorod group asked for the fifth rule’s complete abolition.78 The Moscow edinovertsy also called for a change to rule eleven, which only allowed the Orthodox to turn to edinoverie priests for the sacraments when in deathly need: this caused them concern because it seemed to indicate that the sacraments dispensed by their clergy did not possess the same power as those of the Orthodox priesthood.79 The advice from Russia’s most senior antischismatic theologians on the edinoverie petitions in 1878 was mixed. The reformist stance of Subbotin was joined by Professor Nikolai Ivanovskii of the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy, who believed the petitioners were motivated “by a real desire to strengthen edinoverie at the expense of the schism.”80 However, the other two reviews by professors A. M. Voskresenskii and I. F. Nilskii adamantly rejected the need for change. The latter argued that to allow the Orthodox free conversion to edinoverie would mean to recognise that the rituals of edinoverie, and consequently those of the schism, are as correct as the Orthodox rituals, that the corrections of the books conducted by Patriarch Nikon were at the very least superfluous, and finally that all the subsequent actions of the Orthodox Church directed against the schism and to the establishment of the rituals of Orthodoxy were incorrect and unlawful. The Church cannot resolve to take such a step, not only because it would be unjustified . . . but especially because it would inevitably serve as temptation for the Orthodox and a victory for the schism. The Orthodox, seeing that the Church relates indifferently to rituals, both theirs and the edinoverie ones (and consequently schismatic ones), will be confused as to where there is truth and where there is error. To what conclusions such misunderstandings can lead is not difficult to understand. A new schism among the Orthodox could appear, independent of the existing schism.81

Voskresenskii also refused to countenance any change to the rules. He believed that the intentions behind the request were suspect. The edinovertsy only desired to increase their numbers and thus gain leverage for more radical reforms.82 Ultimately, he concluded that the desire of the edinovertsy was to establish a church within a church.83 In terms of the relation of the two groups, edinoverie was absolutely inferior: “Edinoverie relates to the Orthodox Church in the same way that a picture painted by a simple painter with mistakes in the details relates to a picture depicting the same subject but painted with an artistically skilled hand.”84

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Thus, there was an equal split between the most outstanding academic representatives of the antischismatic missionary movement. Subbotin and Ivanovskii concluded that Orthodoxy and edinoverie constituted the same confession and so were in favor of the abolition or modification of the rules of Platon. For them, Orthodoxy was not defined by the Nikonian rites but by its ability to contain two sets of rituals. Nilskii and Voskresenskii, however, delineated the Orthodox confession by the reformed rituals. Edinoverie stood outside Orthodoxy because it did not use these rites. To integrate it into the confession by any way other than ritual assimilation would expose the entire Orthodox flock to temptation and void the basis of the Church’s struggle with Old Belief. Both sets of views represent the quandary in which the Synod found itself. Further reform exposed the Orthodox to schismatic infection and ruined the role of ritual as a marker of confessional identity. Failure to reform might push both the edinovertsy and those Orthodox who preferred the old rite toward Old Belief. With Pobedonostsev’s accession to the position of ober procurator and the anticipated passage of the 1883 edict legalizing Old Believer places of worship, the Synod was pressured into acting. In 1881, it published a verdict wherein it made some changes to the rules of 1800. It explained their basic definition of edinoverie as those “who confess the same truly ecumenical faith but who use the old books that, while not being prohibited by the Orthodox Church, do contain some error.”85 Changes could be allowed to the rules of edinoverie but only because doing so meant “the elimination of great temptation and misunderstanding and only in the sense of greater easing [of conversion] for renegades who persevere to return to the bosom of the Church via the path of edinoverie.”86 First, it was ruled that children of mixed marriages could be baptized by either ritual. Second, Orthodox believers could convert to edinoverie once a five-year period had elapsed since their last sacrament. Finally, the Orthodox were allowed to take the sacraments from edinoverie priests so long as their parish priest agreed to it and it was understood that doing so did not make them edinovertsy.87 This essentially abolished rule eleven. The Synod’s definition of edinoverie suggests that the Orthodox confession had been widened. There was now no question that the edinovertsy “confessed” the same faith as the Orthodox. It also gave a sense of equality and legitimacy to the old rituals. They were good enough for the Orthodox as well as the edinovertsy and thus confirmed that rite was relatively unimportant. The provision that children of mixed marriages could be baptized by either ritual conveyed the same point. Even though the Synod defined the old rituals as containing some error, this was evidently no bar to the two rituals being de facto equal.

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Nonetheless, although the fifth rule was moderated, it remained a stumbling block to fostering unity between edinoverie and Orthodoxy. Equally, the commitment to ritual assimilation in Platon’s second attached opinion was not repealed, even if the reform theoretically undermined it. At the heart of the discussions over Platon’s settlement, there was a conflict about rituals and their value. Could Orthodoxy allow more than one set of ritu­a ls to be considered Orthodox? If so, how was the Synod to define the liturgical contours of the confession? The questions were about whether the reevaluation of ritual could be realized in reality as well as in theory and what such a realization would mean for Russian Orthodoxy. The central problem was the seventeenth-century anathemas, which had proclaimed the usage of two fingers or other pre-Nikonian rites to be nothing other than heresy. Clergymen from Platon onward had striven to reinterpret these proscriptions by suggesting that the anathemas fell on individuals using the rituals as “a symbol of the opposition of the Old Believers to church authority.”88 So, if a person used the old rituals while conceding the legitimacy of Nikonian Orthodoxy, the anathemas did not apply. The internal state of a believer changed the meaning of the rites themselves: “It is already clear for those who have eyes to see that the rituals of the schism and the rituals of edinoverie are not one and the same according to their internal meaning and consequently according to their essence, although they look similar externally.”89 The Church’s view on the anathemas embodied the way in which the reevaluation of ritual privileged the beliefs of a person over the way in which they displayed them to the rest of the world. However, such a reinterpretation was a highly contentious reading of the anathemas and ignored the laws and polemics released before 1764 that conflated ritual behavior with dogmatic purity. All of this might make theologically literate edinovertsy uneasy about the legitimacy of their churches and provided Old Believer polemicists a stick with which to beat edinoverie. In 1864, Verkhovskii vented his full fury at the anathemas, condemning them for having imposed “ritual exclusivity” and foreign Greek rites on the Church.90 In response, the Synod decided to sound out the Russian embassy in Constantinople about asking the ecumenical patriarch for a full explanation that the anathemas of 1667 did not apply to the rituals, only persons.91 The answer from the embassy was negative. The ambassador stated that the timing was not fortuitous; moreover, he was uncertain whether the patriarchs of the east had even the remotest conception of what edinoverie was. This might run the risk of the patriarchs telling the Synod that their indulgence to the edinovertsy was incorrect. Consequently, discussion of the issue could cause

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“innumerable future complications in relations between our Holy Synod and the patriarchal cathedrae.”92 Filaret (Drozdov) and the Synod accepted the ambassador’s advice and did not further pursue the matter.93 However, the patriarchate of Constantinople did not remain ignorant of edi­ noverie’s existence for long. Since the late seventeenth century, Old Believers had fled across state borders to evade persecution, rendering them a transnational religion.94 Although most settled down in neighboring countries, like the Baltics, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Romanian principalities, others went still further, to Habsburg lands and the Ottoman Empire. In the 1870s, a community of around six hundred Old Believers living on the coast of Lake Kuş (western Anatolia) applied to the Russian Holy Synod to join edinoverie.95 As they dwelled within the jurisdiction of the Constantinople patriarchate, the Synod had to explain what edinoverie was before the patriarch accepted the converts under his wing. A similar arrangement was reached when edinoverie was seeded in Bukovina, the center of the Belaia Krinitsa’s metropolitanate.96 Both parishes were often rhetorically flourished to prove that “edinoverie is recognized by the patriarch himself as an entirely legal and correct institution,” although this perhaps points to abiding insecurities about edinoverie’s status in canon law.97 The need for a patriarchal explanation of the anathemas and the creation of edinoverie communities in the jurisdiction of another Orthodox Church reveals an ecumenical dimension to the problem of edinoverie that was intimately woven with the Russian Church’s authority to define matters of ritual. It also begged a deeper question about autocephaly itself. Where did the local church’s authority end and the ecumenical church’s begin? Autocephaly led to many questioning the extent of the Church’s authority to decide on rituals and thus define the confession. As arcane as the questions surrounding the anathemas were, they captured the interest of the educated public in 1873–1874 when a long discussion was held in the Society for the Admirers of Spiritual Enlightenment in St. Petersburg. The main debate was between I. F. Nilskii and Tertii Filippov, a state bureaucrat and amateur theologian. On January 18, 1873, Filippov made a long speech entitled “the needs of edinoverie.” The principal need of the edinovertsy, he argued, was the abolition of the anathemas of 1667 on the old rituals. Turning back to the history of the ancient Church, Filippov traced the occasions on which ritual differences had emerged and how these situations had been resolved. He found that, on each occasion, the Church had not broken communion with those who used different rites but had instead valued church unity above ritual uniformity. The Church had consistently enthroned, in both practice and principle, the

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idea of “freedom of ritual.”98 In placing the anathemas on the rituals of the Old Believers, the Russian Orthodox Church had violated this long-standing and canonically justified principle. In the creation of edinoverie in 1800, it had proposed a new interpretation of these anathemas in order to escape the necessity of abolishing them. Filippov found this interpretation to be specious.99 He cited a great deal of evidence that suggested that Platon’s interpretation of the anathemas had never been held either by the 1666–1667 council or by every other Russian prelate addressing the issue before the 1760s. The reevaluation of ritual was no older than that.100 Therefore, the anathemas had to be abolished, and for this, a new ecumenical council had to be called.101 For his part, Nilskii first argued that freedom of ritual in the ancient Church was by no means as widespread or as definitive as his opponent claimed: I must say that, in my view, the Church cannot indifferently relate to the question about rituals. True, rituals are not dogmas of faith, they are not the foundational principles of morality; only these are unchanging, holy, and salvational. The Church knows this very well—it knows what meaning rituals have in the matter of faith and salvation. But if the Church has the right and the obligation to concern itself that the thoughts of believers are correct, then no-one can refuse it the right to be concerned about the fact that the expression of these thoughts should [also] be true and correct.102

So, while the Church did not equate dogma and ritual, it also did not believe every ritual was of equal value. This was why Platon and subsequent bishops had made it clear that the rituals of edinoverie had some “error” in comparison to the Orthodox ones and why they had wanted to see the eventual assimilation of the edinovertsy into the Nikonian rite. Turning to the anathemas of 1667, Nilskii went about justifying the interpretation that they related not to the rituals but to the intentions of the people using them. All of this demonstrated that the Church had always held that the anathemas did not apply to rituals, and, therefore, Platon’s indulgence was entirely correct.103 As such, the anathemas did not need to be removed, only explained.104 The debate between Filippov and Nilskii illustrates how far the new perspective on ritual had become engrained in the minds of theologians. Both men asserted that dogma and rite were not the same and that the internal intentions of believers were paramount for defining the worth of a ritual. The difference lay in how the two depicted the history of the changed attitude toward ritual. For Filippov, the 1666–1667 council marked a disjunction with earlier church history, the moment when dogma and rites were wrongly conflated. That mistake had to be removed by abolishing the anathemas. Nilskii believed that

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there had been no break and thus there was no need to remove the anathemas. The other major distinction was the extent to which they had realized the full consequences of the reevaluation of rite. Nilskii evidently believed that there was still some connection between ritual acts and internal belief, hence his statement that the Church had to intervene in ritual matters. Filippov regarded ritual as a pure externality and thus stood for full freedom, even arguing that Anglicans and Old Catholics105 could become Orthodox while still maintaining their liturgical traditions.106 The reading of the new conception of ritual into the history of the Church marks a shift in the way the Orthodox confession was conceived. It was part of the transformation of ritual tolerance into a marker of Orthodox identity. This was a predictable consequence of the creation of edinoverie. By allowing two rites within the Orthodox confession, the Nikonian rituals had begun to lose their power as ways of delineating Orthodoxy from the schism. This was especially the case in the 1870s and 1880s, when the Church was slowly moving toward recognizing the essential equality of both rites. Thus, it is from this period when we have the first statements defining Orthodoxy as ritually tolerant while defining the schism as ritually exclusive. Take this comment from a journalist writing in 1883: Their [the Old Believers’] point of view on the old rituals is essentially distinct from the views of the Orthodox on the same subject. The latter do not look on rituals as something that is unchangeable. If the Orthodox saw any error in their books or any similar kind of insufficiency in the ritual side of the liturgy, then the mistakes could be corrected. Therefore, the Orthodox are alien to intolerance of other opinions and relate indulgently to the mistakes and errors of others in that which relates to the ritual side of the liturgy. Not so among the followers of the ancient piety.107

Timofei Verkhovskii expressed similar sentiments, suggesting that Old Belief was defined by an unreasonable adherence to the old rites that had led “to the confusion of ritual with dogma, ritualism with faith. Old Believers have come to the conviction . . . that Catholic Orthodoxy requires compulsory uniformity of ritual to the smallest detail for all.”108 The corollary of his argument was that the Orthodox did not, or should not, do this. Pavel Prusskii said much the same in his missionary lectures. In one, he stressed the historical justifications for the reevaluation of rites, while stipulating that the biggest mistake of the Old Believers was the failure to accept the difference between ritual and dogma.109 The ability to make the distinction between the two categories was part of what it meant to be Orthodox.

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One should note that this idea was still at an early stage: so contentious was the idea of equality of ritual in the 1870s that one author claimed, if the edinovertsy won it, they would “attempt to bring about a revolution in the Church, leading to the full victory of edinoverie over Orthodoxy.”110 Nevertheless, when the issue was resolved in favor of de facto and then de jure ritual equality, the shift to defining Orthodox through ritual tolerance was decisive. The ultimate product of the debates was that the Synod issued an explanation of the anathemas in its edict of 1881, once more proclaiming that they fell on individuals in opposition to the Church rather than on rites.111 Given that the history of the Church had been rewritten to argue that it had never treated rituals as dogmas, no other result could be expected. The gradual transformation of the ritual reevaluation into the marker of Orthodox identity required it to be written into the past. Once this started to be accomplished, the Church could not easily admit that it had broken with that tradition; hence the removal of the anathemas became difficult. This reading of the anathemas was an “invented tradition,” designed to retrospectively justify the foundation of edinoverie.

Bishops After Verkhovskii’s petition and the establishment of the Old Believer commission in 1864, the Synod decided to ask twenty-two prelates for their opinions on changes to edinoverie. This request was bundled together with a question about how to conduct marriages between the Old Believers and the Orthodox, thus demonstrating just how interconnected were the issue of reforms of edinoverie and changes to the legal status of Old Belief.112 The key matter for the bishops was the matter of granting the edinovertsy their own prelate. The vote was surprisingly close: ten were in favor of some kind of bishop while twelve opposed the measure outright.113 With Filaret (Drozdov)’s opinion that the edinovertsy had already been given everything that could be given without violating the purity of Orthodoxy, “to go further would mean not to draw the alienated closer to Orthodoxy and the Church but to sweep Orthodoxy from the correct path and to plunge the well-ordered (blagoustroennyi) peace of the Church into the schismatic chaos of arbitrariness and disorganisation.”114 The fear of division preoccupied most of the bishops who opposed the idea. Antonii (Pavlinskii) of Volynia was particularly eloquent on this matter, arguing that it would create two Orthodox churches in Russia, healing one schism but causing a second.115 Evgenii (Sakharov-Platonov) of Simbirsk pointed out that it would have no influence on the Old Believers whatsoever since the new bishop would be created by a

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Church that they regarded as heretical.116 Filaret (Malyshevskii) of Ufa gave voice to one concern that dominated further discussions about edinoverie, and not just in relation to the bishop question. With the establishment of their own episcopate, “perhaps then a great mass of Orthodox people will freely convert to edinoverie.”117 Innokentii (Borisov) of Kamchatka, a future metropolitan of Moscow, had a far more contradictory response. He argued that most edinovertsy had joined the movement not out of conviction in the truth of the Russian Orthodox Church but simply to obtain their own priesthood: consequently, they remained in “the spirit of the schism.”118 Nonetheless, the edinovertsy had still taken a decisive step toward establishing the spirit of “true unity.” Innokentii backed the creation of a edinoverie bishop as this would improve the influence of edinoverie on Old Belief, presumably by raising its prestige and demonstrating the full extent of the unity between Russian Orthodoxy and edinoverie.119 However, he also had doubts. Giving the edinovertsy a bishop, he explained, would make edinoverie and the Russian Orthodox Church sisters. Sisters were not one and the same: they were not united.120 It is evident that Verkhovskii’s petition and its radical terms had a substantial influence on most of the bishops. Filaret (Gumilevskii) of Chernigov is a case in point. He conceded that bishops under the Synod were possible and even desirable, but then he proclaimed that “to allow that the so-called Old Believers could ever form a hierarchy independent from the Holy Synod of the Russian Church would mean the same as to legalize the schism by the order of the Synod itself, introducing a division into the Church that is as incompatible with the unity of the Holy Orthodox Church as it would be fatal for the singular authority of the Russian state.”121 The division in the Synod over the bishop question reflects the fundamental tension that the Church faced in the wake of the reign of Nicholas I. The incorporation of a mass of insincere converts essentially justified all the fears that Platon had had when he created his settlement. The confessional anxieties that had led him to blockade edinoverie outside Orthodoxy and deny them the right to episcopal representation were not only present but also perhaps stronger in the 1860s. Bishops were a contentious subject because of the danger they posed if the edinovertsy were disingenuous. Properly consecrated, these bishops would give Old Belief a fully legitimate hierarchy if they defected. However, there was also a realization that reform of edinoverie was necessary if the critiques of the Old Believers and Verkhovskii were to be countered. The question of bishops arose again in 1885 but in a very different way. On January 10, Pobedonostsev wrote to Subbotin that the metropolitan of Kiev had

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suggested to the Synod that Pavel Prusskii should be the new suffragan bishop of Novocherkassk while remaining resident in the Nikolskii monastery in Moscow. The ober procurator agreed with the suggestion, believing it was high time that Pavel was honored with such a reward.122 Pavel, however, refused, first citing his health and second questioning the value of making a edinoverets a bishop. He did not want “to pave the way for the edinovertsy to trouble (stuzhat) the government about establishing edinoverie bishops.”123 Subbotin gave a much fuller explanation to Pobedonostsev in his reply on January 18: As a edinoverets, his position in the Church would present uncomfortable problems to making him a bishop. It would be necessary for him either to reject edinoverie or, remaining a edinoverets, to be made into a edinoverie bishop! Firstly, he would not be able to decide [upon the latter course] because many in this could, completely unjustifiably but plausibly, suspect him of ambition: and he would not decide to be made a edinoverie bishop because from here could arise many difficulties for the Church—it is adequate to point to the fact that this event would represent something similar to the realisation of the dreams of Verkhovskii and could at least revitalise these dreams. Here is why I suggested that Father Pavel decline the proposal about the episcopate . . .124

Why did Subbotin reject the idea of promoting Pavel to the episcopate? On the surface, it would seem to have been one of the best ways of realizing confessional integration. Pavel, an entirely loyal son of the Church and friend of the Synodal order, would be made a bishop, thus answering one the main demands of the edinovertsy and thoroughly countering Verkhovskii’s plans. The answer lies in the limitations on Subbotin’s understanding of integration. Subbotin believed that unity in faith meant being the same in all things apart from ritual. This meant administrative unity as well. The idea of having separate edinoverie bishops was a step too far. It would only further institutionalize the differences between Orthodoxy and edinoverie. Subbotin was aware that the rules of Platon and subsequent legislation had set up unique administrative forms that served to divide the edinovertsy from the Orthodox. They had their own deans, their own priests, and their own monasteries: they were (at least theoretically) beyond the jurisdiction of the consistories. Ritual difference had become institutionalized and a degree of separation had occurred that could only be counterproductive in terms of further integrating the edinovertsy into the Orthodox confession. So Subbotin’s refusal to countenance the promotion of even so close an associate as Pavel to the episcopate shows that he did not want to add any further to ritual institutionalization.

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To do so would be prejudicial to confessional integration, a plan that sought to emphasize unity and downplay division in all matters other than ritual. As Innokentii (Borisov) had said, bishops would make edinoverie and Orthodoxy sisters, not one and the same.

Conclusion The changes to the rules in 1881 were the first step toward the Synod accepting Subbotin’s plan of confessional integration. The second came with the declaration of the episcopal council in Kazan between July 9 and July 25, 1885.125 The assembled bishops, representing the dioceses of the Volga region and the western provinces, affirmed Subbotin’s interpretation of true edinoverie in its entirety: Edinoverie does not represent any special confession, distinct from Orthodoxy: Orthodoxy and edinoverie comprise one Church. In Orthodox and edinoverie churches, they recognise the same Lord, confess the same faith, perform the same baptism, take together the same purgatorial bloodless sacrifice of Christ, and accept the same pure life-giving Body and Blood. In a word, they are one and the same, identical in everything by which man lives and eats. Therefore, from one side [i.e., the side of the Orthodox] no-one should belittle or reproach that which is blessed by the Church [i.e., the edinoverie rituals], no-one should think that the sacraments performed by edinoverie priests have any less power and sanctity. From the side of the edinovertsy themselves, they must remember—and these things need to be instilled in them—that the strength of edinoverie is in union with the Orthodox Church, that without this union there is no edinoverie, but again schism, and that therefore under the keeping of the so-called “old” rituals there should be no repudiation of the ritual kept by the Orthodox Church and, vice versa, repudiations from the Orthodox side of the rituals kept by the edinovertsy.126

There could be no clearer statement of confessional integration. The bishops directly declared that edinoverie was fully part of the Russian Orthodox Church. The old rituals were as legitimate and effective in terms of grace as the corrected ones, and as such no one from either side was to engage in polemics on the basis of ritual. Furthermore, unity was something that had to be “instilled” in the edinovertsy, a word that indicates the prelates were conscious that they could not rest on their laurels when it came to promoting union. More was to follow. In 1886, the Synod sent a secret edict to the diocesan bishops at the behest of the Kazan council in which the Church stated that

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prelates could make up their own minds as to whether to allow the Orthodox to join edinoverie:127 “Thank God!” was Subbotin’s response to this change.128 In theory, this rendered rule five null and void, thus shattering the final border between the two groups and allowing free passage between them as if they were members of one and the same confession. From 1886, we can talk of a Synodal policy of confessional integration that stressed unity and the de facto equality of rituals. However, the final form of the Kazan statement was a close-run thing. The original draft stated that “the unconditional full equality of the two rituals existing alongside each other and free conversion from one to another would lead to disorder and internal confusion in church parish life.”129 Evidently, there remained some bishops who wanted to keep the boundaries in place, and they had been considerable enough in number to impose their voice on the initial version of the declaration. It is probable that Pobedonostsev’s presence in Kazan led to the more favorable final version. However, he could not ensure that all bishops, priests, and missionaries would internalize the terms of the resolution or make use of the freedom to ignore the fifth rule of Platon. The original draft demonstrates that bishops continued to believe that the rituals were not equal and thus would do what they could to protect the Orthodox from the spread of the old rites. The fact that the 1800 settlement still existed meant they could do so legitimately. With the ascension of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Verkhovskii got the opportunity to test his commitment to martyrdom. As early as January 1882, Pobedonostsev complained to Subbotin that he would like to deal with Verkh­ ovskii but “to persecute him would drive him to the schism.”130 On January 27, 1885, Verkhovskii heard from a trusted source that he was about to be dealt with.131 At half past eight in the morning the next day, he fled by train to Moscow and there met with a monk of the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy. After accepting a blessing from the schismatic archbishop of Moscow, he had his hair cut and changed from his vestments. He was then smuggled across the border to a Belaia Krinitsa monastery in the Balkans. From there he protested his innocence and his loyalty to the Russian tsar but to no avail. He was excommunicated in March and the Russian embassies in Berlin, Vienna, and Constantinople were ordered to keep a strict eye on him lest he try and return.132 In response, Verkhovskii told Filippov that he would now “place all the unpleasant tyrannical exclusions of the Old Believers before the court of the entire world.” This he did by publishing three volumes of his collected essays in Leipzig.133 He was eventually given permission to return to Petersburg in early 1891 but died only a few days after his arrival on January 17.

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Verkhovskii’s fate and the Kazan episcopal council marked the victory of Subbotin’s scheme for confessional integration. It no longer had any substantial opponents within edinoverie itself and the council’s resolutions were Synodal policy. The Synod had made revisions to the rules of Platon and had publicly declared that edinoverie and Orthodoxy were one confession. By 1886, the Synod had answered the Platonic contradictions by favoring conscience over confession, inclusion over quarantine, and ritual tolerance over ritual exclusivity. By moderating or circumventing the prohibition against Orthodox transfer to edinoverie, conscience had won a moderate victory. It was now easier, at least theoretically, for an Orthodox believer to consciously choose to be part of edinoverie. This concession was achieved by expanding the parameters of the Orthodox confession. By including edinoverie in it, the Synod could safely concede that the Orthodox had the right to follow their consciences in this limited matter. It did not mean that one had the right to follow one’s conscience to another confession. Rather, it meant that one could choose a different ritual settlement within Orthodoxy. Through these reforms, the Synod had abandoned the practice of quarantining the edinovertsy. While doubts remained as to the intentions and beliefs of the converts, it was held to be more dangerous to keep them on the periphery of Orthodoxy. Only by bringing them within the confession could the Church’s commitment to unity be made transparent and hopefully stave off apostasy. Finally, the ritual assimilation of the edinovertsy into Orthodoxy was theoretically abandoned. By including edinoverie in Orthodoxy, the Synod had conceded that there were two legitimate ritual forms and ergo no need for the edinovertsy to abandon the old rites. This meant that the Nikonian rituals could no longer define the Orthodox confession. In its place, a new marker of Orthodox confessional identity emerged, ritual tolerance. At least from the point of view of ecclesiastical elites, to be Orthodox meant to be ritually tolerant. To be a schismatic meant to be fanatical and exclusive in relation to rites. The commitment to tolerance was limited. It did not mean the ritual freedom backed by Filippov, who believed that it could be extended to virtually any form of liturgical compact. What it meant was that the Church was willing to accept both the old and the new rituals as part of the confession so long as all who used the old rites conceded that the Russian Orthodox Church was canonically legitimate. On paper the change seems dramatic, but the reality was much more complex. The Church remained divided on how to deal with edinoverie throughout the period. When asked about the desirability of edinoverie bishops, the Synod had split almost down the middle. The professors consulted about the changes

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to the rules had also come to no consensus: two were in favor of changes and two were opposed. As a result, it took until the 1880s for any change to be made. When the shift in policy did occur, it was due to outside pressure. The 1881 corrections and the 1885 resolution were made to block ­Verkhovskii’s radicalism from gaining any more adherents, to reinvigorate edinoverie in response to the 1883 extension of toleration, and, perhaps most crucially, because ­Pobedonostsev intervened in favor of reform. A substantial number of prelates, theologians, priests, and missionaries also remained committed to the 1800 settlement and the confessional attitudes that it contained until 1917. The fact that Platon’s rules had not been abolished outright meant that these parties could continue to apply them and thus continue to provoke the very same feelings of denominational difference that had driven Verkhovskii into radicalism and revolt.

Note s 1. Savva (Tikhomirov), Sobranie mnenii i otzvyvov Filareta, mitropolita Moskovskogo i Kolomenskogo, po uchebnym i tserkovno-gosudarstvennym voprosam, 5 vols. (Moscow: Sinodalnaia tipografiia, 1886), 5:702. 2. Indeed, so remarkable was the case that even the British press picked it up: “Dissent in Russia,” London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art & Science 11, no. 279 (Nov. 4, 1865): 479–481. 3. Savva, Sobranie mnenii, 5:702. 4. It should be noted that Pafnutii’s future career betrayed the hopes placed in him. In 1866, he almost caused a riot on the Kremlin square when giving a sermon (see chap. 5). In 1868, he was put under police supervision for converting “from the schism to edinoverie in order to achieve high rank and then again go to the schism,” preaching freedom, meeting with “nihilists” (including Vasilii Kelsiev), and agreeing to help Aleksandr Herzen return to Russia: GARF, f. 109, op. 3(a), d. 1431, ll. 1–2ob. Unsurprisingly, he was replaced as abbot by Pavel Prusski. After a collapse in relations between himself, Pavel, and Professor Nikolai Subbotin in the 1870s, Pafnutii fled to the Balkans and rejoined the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy in 1882. 5. For a full description, see Ob otkrytii nikolskogo edinoverchskogo monastyria: Istoricheskaia zapiska (Moscow: E. Lissner and Iu. Roman, 1892). 6. For the conversion of the Irgiz monastery complex, see A. A. Naumliuk, Tsentr staroobriadchestva na Irgize: Poiavlenie, deiatelnost, vsiamootnosheniia s vlastiu (Saratov: Nauchnaia kniga, 2009), 77–89, and “Obrashchenie Irgizskikh

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staroobriadcheeskikh monastyrei k edinoveriiu,” Pravoslavnyi sobesednik, no. 1 (1858): 231–261. 7. M. S., Istoricheskii ocherk edinoveriia (St. Petersburg: V. Golovin, 1867), 179. 8. F. M. Dostoevskii, “Zasedanie obshchestva liubitelei dukhovnogo prosveshcheniia 28 marta,” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1980), 21:139–141. 9. E. I. Campbell, The Muslim Question and Russian Imperial Governance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 4. 10. P. Waldron, “Religious Toleration in Late Imperial Russia,” in Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. O. Crisp and L. Edmonson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 110. 11. D. V. Chichinadze, Sbornik zakonov o raskole i sektantakh, raziasnennykh resheniiami pravitelstvuiushchogo senata i sviateishogo sinoda, 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: D. V. Chichinadze, 1899), 108–110. 12. R. V. Kaurkin and O. A. Pavlova, Edinoverie v Rossii: Ot zarozhdeniia idei do nachala XX veka (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2011), 165. 13. Obzor meropriatii ministerstva vnutrennikh del po raskolu s 1802 po 1881 god (St. Petersburg: Departament obshchikh del, 1903), 281–294. 14. PSZ, vol. 3, no. 1545. 15. L. N. Suslova, “Edinoverie v Tobolskoi gubernii vo vtoroi polovine XIX—nachale XX v,” Problemy istorii Rossii 7 (2008): 217. 16. Waldron, “Religious Toleration,” 109–111. 17. Simon (Shleev), Edinoverie v svoem vnutrennem razvitii (Moscow: Medium, 2004), 9–10. 18. D. Scarborough, “The Pastoral Dilemma: Clerical Mutual Aid and Famine Relief during Russia’s Crop Failure of 1905,” Russian History 41 (2014): 73. 19. S. I. Alekseeva, Sviateishii sinod v sisteme vysshikh i tsentralnykh gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii poreformennoi Rossii 1856–1904 gg., 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2006), 183–184. 20. Quoted in S. Dixon, “Archimandrite Mikhail (Semenov) and Russian Christian Socialism,” Historical Journal 51, no. 3 (2008): 694. 21. A. Iu. Polunov, K. P. Pobedonostsev v obshchestvenno-politicheskoi i dukhovnoi zhizni Rossii (Moscow: Rosspen, 2010), 343. 22. R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), 31. 23. N. Subbotin, Raskol kak orudie vrazhdebnykh Rossii partii (Moscow: E. Lissner and Iu. Roman, 1867), 118. 24. Okruzhnoe poslanie staroobriadcheskikh episkopov, izdannoe 24-go fevralia 1862 goda (Moscow: I. P. Fedorov, 1911), 12–13. 25. Okruzhnoe poslanie, 6.

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26. Savva, Sobranie mnenii, 5:569. 27. “Obiasnitelnye zapiski, podannye mitropolitu Filaretu iskavshim prisoedineniia k pravoslavnoi tserkvi chlenami Belokrinitskoi ierarkii v 1865 g.,” Bratskoe slovo, no. 14 (1884): 228. 28. V. N. Vitebskii, Raskol v Uralskom voiske i otnoshenie k nemu dukhovnoi i voennograzhdanskoi vlasti v kontse XVIII i v XIX v. (Kazan: Imperatorskii universitet, 1878), 227. 29. Savva, Sobranie mnenii, 5:563. 30. V. Belikov, Deiatelnost Moskovskogo mitropolita Filareta po otnosheniiu k raskolu (Kazan: Imperatorskii universitet, 1895), 504–506. 31. N. Subbotin, Ko dniu pervogo godichnogo pominoveniia v Boze pochivshogo arkhimandrita Pavla (Moscow: E. Lissner and Iu. Roman, 1896), 246. 32. R. A. Maiorov, “Edinoverie i lider ego soedinencheskogo napravleniia vtoroi poloviny XIX veka sviashchennik Ioann Verkhovskii” (Kandidatskaia dissertatsiia, Moskovskii pedagogicheskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2008), 120. 33. RGIA, f. 796, op. 206, d. 466, l. 14. 34. I. Verkhovskii, Sochineniia Ioanna Verkhovskogo, 3 vols. (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1886), 3:27. 35. Verkhovskii was always prone to heated language, a flaw he himself confessed. However, personal tragedy in the 1870s no doubt further exacerbated this personality trait. His wife died in 1874, and two of his daughters followed her shortly afterward. His father also passed away in 1877, leaving Verkhovskii without a protector. Finally, the death of the younger daughter, Nadia, was a particularly harsh blow. He had loved her deeply: writing about the event later, he stated that if Christ had told him he could bring Nadia back to life by sacrificing himself and the rest of his family, then he would have done so. 36. I. Verkhovskii, Sochineniia, 3:31. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 3:7. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 3:20. 41. Ibid., 3:21–22. 42. For an examination of Verkhovskii’s ecclesiology, see J. M. White, “Ritual, Ecclesia, and the Reform of Russian Orthodoxy: The Life and Thought of Ioann Verkhovskii, 1818–1891,” in Orthodox Christian Renewal Movements in Eastern Europe, ed. A. D. Milovanović and R. Radić (Chalm: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 23–46. 43. I. Verkhovskii, Sochineniia, 3:155. 44. Ibid., 3:157. 45. Ibid., 3:150. 46. Ibid., 3:151.

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47. Ibid., 3:166–170. 48. Kazantsev was a figure of some importance in Ekaterinburg, both as a civic leader and one of the most prominent of the local edinovertsy. For a discussion of his role in the formation of edinoverie in the 1840s, see A. S. Palkin, Edinoverie v seredine XVIII—nachale XX veka: Obshcherossiiskii kontekst i regionalnaia spetsifika (Ekaterinburg: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo universiteta, 2016), 139–145. Some of his papers and correspondence can be found in GASO, f. 1, op. 1, d. 1–4. 49. I. Verkhovskii, Sochineniia, 3:179. 50. Ibid., 3:178. 51. Subbotin, Ko dniu, 278. 52. Verkhovskii even became a subject of study: in 1868, a student at the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy penned a thesis about his notorious petition. See NART, f. 10, op. 2, d. 510. 53. P. A. Valuev, Dnevnik P. A. Valueva, ministra vnutrennikh del. 2 vols. (Moscow: Akademiia Nauka SSSR, 1961), 1:304. 54. Valuev, Dnevnik P. A. Valueva, 1:276. 55. N. A. Kolosov, Arkhimandrit Pavel (Prusskii) (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1895), 12. 56. For one example of Pavel’s activities in the Don region, see O merakh, prinimaemykh Donskim eparkhialnym nachalstvom k oslableniiu raskola v Donskoi oblasti, i tom vliianii, kakoe proizveli ma Donskikh raskolnikov sobesedovaniia s nimi edinovercheskogo ieromonakha Pafnutiia i nastoiatelia Moskovskogo edinovercheskogo monastyria igumena Pavla (Novocherkask: Oblast voiska Donskogo tipografii, 1874). 57. For the full works, see Pavel (Lednev), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii nikolskogo edinovercheskogo monastyria nastoiatelia arkhimandrita Pavla, 4 vols. (Moscow: Bratstvo sv. Petra mitropolita, 1897). 58. Visiting Pavel in Moscow or speaking to him while he was on a mission became a common trope in conversion narratives. For example, see I. Nevestin, “Raskol v sele Poime i uchrezhdenie edinoveriia,” Penzenskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 10 (1868): 330; “Prisoedinenie k edinoveriiu,” Iaroslavskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 35 (1870): 296; S. Spiglazov, Moe obrashchenie iz raskola v pravoslavie (kratkoe zhizneopisanie obrativshchagosia iz raskola, nyne edinovercheskogo sviashchennika Savvy Spiglazova (Novocherkask: Redichkin, 1886), 15; T. I. Kasilov, “Ispoved byvshogo edinovertsa,” Tserkov, no. 30 (1908): 1036. 59. N. F. Budanova, “Pavel Prusskii i ego kniga ‘Beseda o prishestvii prorokov Ilii i Enokha ob Antikhriste i sedminakh Daniilovykh’ (Novye materialy k teme ‘Dostoevskii i staroobriadchestvo’).” Dostoevskii: Materialy i issledovaniia 18 (2007), 88–89. For more on Dostoyevsky’s interest in Old Belief and edinoverie,

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see I. Paert, “Religious Dissent,” in Dostoevsky in Context, ed. D. A. Martinsen and O. Maiorova (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016), 194–201; I. V. Pochinskaia, “Iz istorii vvedeniia edinoveriia v Rossii: Novyi istochnik o protsesse vossoedineniia s ofitsialnoi tserkoviu Starodubskikh staroobriadsev,” Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, no. 441 (2019): 177–182. 60. For biographical details, see I. M. Gromoglasov, “N. I. Subbotin (30 maia 1905),” Bogoslovskii vestnik 2, no. 7–8 (1905): 678–684; E. Krevsky, “Defining the Schism: Images and Interpretations of the Old Belief in Late Nineteenth-Century Russian Discourse” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2002), 234–255. 61. I. A., “Obozrenie Viatskoi eparkhii,” Viatskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 18 (1867): 549. 62. Subbotin, Ko dniu, 44–45. 63. “Ob otnoshenii edinoveriia k pravoslaviiu,” Viatskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 6 (1870): 100. 64. NART, f. 4, op. 1, d. 6902, l. 24. 65. N. Subbotin, Neskolko slov o edinoverii v otvete na vozrazheniia iz Viatki (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1869), 19–20. 66. Subbotin, Neskolko slov, 22. 67. Ibid., 28. 68. It certainly contradicted the authoritative view issued by Metropolitan Grigorii in 1857, where it was asserted that edinovertsy did believe in the same ecumenical church as the Orthodox. Grigorii (Postnikov), Otvet edinovertsa staroobriadtsy na ego vozrazheniia (St. Petersburg: Pochtovyi departament, 1857), 10–11. 69. N. Subbotin, Otzyv, 5–6. 70. Subbotin, Otzyv, 5–6. 71. Ibid., 6. 72. “Vazhnoe sobytie v edinovercheskom obshchestve,” Tserkovnoobshchestvennyi vestnik, no. 127 (1877): 1. 73. D. N. Belikov, Tomskii raskol (istoricheskii ocherk s 1834 po 1880-e gody) (Tomsk: P. I. Makushin, 1901), 210–211. 74. RGIA, f. 796, op. 145, d. 2257, l. 28ob. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., l. 29. 77. Ibid., l. 28. 78. “Vazhnoe sobytie,” 1–2. 79. RGIA, f. 796, op. 145, d. 2257, ll. 28–29ob. 80. N. I. Ivanovskii, Otzyv ekstraordinarnogo professora Kazanskoi dukhovnoi akademii Ivanovskogo po povodu proshenii edinovertsev sviateishemu sinodu o nuzhdakh edinoveriia, 2.

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81. I. F. Nilskii, Otzyv ordinarnogo professora S.-Peterburgskoi dukhovnoi akademii Nilskogo po povodu proshenii edinovertsev sviateishemu sinodu o nuzhdakh edinoveriia, 15. 82. A. M. Voskresenskii, Otzyv ekstraordinarnogo professora Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii protoiereia Voskresenskogo po povodu proshenii edinovertsev sviateishemu sinodu o nuzhdakh edinoveriia, 11. 83. Voskresenskii, Otzyv ekstraordinarnogo, 17. 84. Ibid., 23. 85. RGIA, f. 796, op. 145, d. 2257, l. 121. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., ll. 110–113. 88. I. F. Nilskii, “Rech po povodu rassuzhdenii o nuzhdakh edinovertsev, skazannaia 25 fevr. 1873 g. v zasedanii sankt-peterburgskogo otdela obshchestva liubitelei dukhovnogo prosveshcheniia,” Khristianskoe chtenie, no. 6 (1873): 285–286. 89. Neskolko slov dlia obiasneniia nedorazumenii otnositelno edinoveriia i raskola (Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografii, 1867), 4–5. 90. I. Verkhovskii, Sochineniia, 3:136. 91. RGIA, f. 796, op. 145, d. 2257, ll. 2–4. 92. RGIA, f. 796, op. 145, d. 2257, l. 8ob. 93. Ibid., l. 11ob. 94. Regrettably, little research has been conducted on the transnationality of Old Belief in the imperial period, although some attention has been paid to their migratory patterns in the Soviet era: see, for instance, S. Scherr, “‘As Soon as We Got Here We Lost Everything’: The Migration Memories and Religious Lives of the Old Believers in Australia,” (PhD diss., Swinburne University of Technology, 2013). 95. See RGIA, f. 796, op. 160, d. 1745; Mikhail, “Soglasie na prisoedinenie k edinoveriiu pereselentsev iz Rossii: Staroobriadtsev nekrasovtsev, prozhivaiushchikh v Aziatskoi Turtsii, v selenii Mainos,” Istina, no. 37 (1874): 1–48; I. G. Vinogradov, Uchrezhdenie edinoveriia u mainostsev (Moscow: L. F. Snegirev, 1880). 96. V. M. Skvortsov, ed. Iubileinoe torzhestvo pravoslavnogo staroobriadchestva (edinoveriia). (27 oktiabria 1900) (St. Petersburg: V. V. Komarov, 1901), 23–24. 97. Skvortsov, Iubileinoe torzhestvo, 24. 98. T. Filippov, Sovremennye tserkovnye voprosy (St. Petersburg: Obshchestvennaia polza, 1882), 273. 99. Filippov, Sovremennye, 281. 100. Ibid., 294. 101. Ibid., 302–303. 102. I. F. Nilskii, “Rech,” 271.

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103. Ibid., 285–286. 104. Ibid., 312. 105. Those Catholics who rejected the doctrine of papal infallibility. 106. Filippov, Sovremennye, 277. 107. “Po delam edinoveriia,” Tserkovno-obshchestvennyi vestnik, no. 113 (1881): 1. 108. T. Verkhovskii, Starodube. Zapiski prot. S.-Peterb. Nikolsk. edinoverchesk. tserkvi T. A. Verkhovskogo, vysochaishe komandirovannogo v 1845–1848 g. gosudarem imp. Nikolaem Pavlovichem dlia ustroistva edinoveriia v Chernigovsk. staroobriadchesk. posadakh, vol. 3 (Kazan: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1874), 89. 109. Pavel, Polnoe sobranie, 1:528–544. 110. “Pritiazaniia edinovertsev,” Tserkovno-obshchestvennyi vestnik 129 (1878): 1. 111. RGIA, f. 796, op. 145, d. 2257, l. 122. 112. RGIA, f. 832. op. 1, d. 48, l. 1. 113. Ibid., ll. 37–63. 114. Ibid., l. 25. 115. L. K. Brodskii, “K voprosu ob edinovercheskom episkop: Istoricheskaia spravka,” Khristianskoe Chtenie, no. 6 (1906): 911. 116. Brodskii, “K voprosu ob edinovercheskom episkop,” no. 6: 913. 117. Ibid., no. 6, 916. 118. Ibid., no. 7, 117. 119. Ibid., no. 7, 118. 120. Ibid., no. 7, 120. 121. Ibid., no. 6, 928. 122. V. S. Markov, K istoriii raskola-staroobriadchestva vtoroi poloviny XIX stoletiia: Perepiska N. I. Subbotina, priemushchestvenno neizdannaia, kak material dlia istorii raskola i otnoshenii k nemu pravitelstva (1865–1904) (Moscow: P. Barskii, 1914), 389. 123. N. Subbotin, Eshche piatnadtsat let sluzheniia tserkvi borbiu s raskolom (Moia perepiska s arkhimandritom Pavlom za 1879–1895). Vypusk vtoroi: 1887–1895 gg. (Moscow: G. Lissner and A. Geshel, 1904), 337–338. 124. Markov, K istoriii raskola-staroobriadchestva, 390. 125. For a description of its activities, see A. Kravetskii, Tserkovnaia missiia v epokhu peremen (mezhdu propovediu i dialogom) (Moscow: Kruglyi stol po religioznomu obrazovaniu i diakonii, 2012), 27–37. 126. Quoted in N. Subbotin, O edinoverii (po povodu ego stoletniago iubileia) (Moscow: Bratstvo sv. Petra mitropolita, 1901), 134–135. 127. RGIA, f. 796, op. 166, d. 1486, l. 167ob. 128. Subbotin, Eshche piatnadtsat, 24. 129. RGIA, f. 796, op. 166, d. 1486, ll. 30ob–31ob. 130. Markov, K istoriii raskola-staroobriadchestva, 234.

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131. In a letter to T. I. Filippov shortly after his flight, Verkhovskii mentions only vague threats to his person. He claimed that he had wanted to stay in Petersburg and face his fate but his daughter begged him to flee: see GARF, f. 1099, op. 1, d. 1552, ll. 45–46. 132. RGIA, f. 796, op. 166, d. 1486, l. 7. 133. GARF, f. 1099, op. 1, d. 1552, l. 54.

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CRISIS, REFORM, AND REVOLUTION, 1905 –1918

Introduction In October 1900, the centennial of edinoverie’s creation was celebrated in churches across the empire with quite sumptuous displays and ceremonies. In Moscow, a liturgy was performed in the Troitskaia edinoverie church by Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoiavlenskii) and his suffragan Parfenii (Levnitskii): in attendance were five Orthodox abbots, the governor-general of Moscow, the head of the Moscow police, Vladimir Sabler (the deputy ober procurator of the Synod), the head of the Synod’s Moscow offices, and Professor Nikolai Subbotin. Prayers were said for the eternal memories of Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) and Emperor Paul: the grateful edinovertsy bestowed on Metropolitan Vladimir an icon of the Holy Trinity, a symbolic representation of their church. After breakfast in the church’s almshouse (the wall was decorated with portraits of Paul, Platon, and the edinoverets who founded the shelter), Sabler and Subbotin made speeches, the latter dwelling particularly on the memory of the late Pavel Prusskii. Subbotin made clear his understanding of edinoverie: “Edinoverie is also Orthodoxy and the edinovertsy are Orthodox, the same members of the united, holy, ecumenical, and apostolic Church: . . . ritual cannot and must not serve as pretext for any division between the flocks of the united Church.”1 Even in distant Perm, Bishop Petr (Losev), in the presence of the city’s governor and leading monastics, declared following a commemorative liturgy held on November 5 that “as we change clothes corresponding to the time of year . . . so church rituals can be changed at the discretion of the Church: rituals themselves, when not animated by faith, do not have any significance.”2

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These ceremonies and the accompanying speeches sought to confirm and embody the definition of edinoverie that the Church had reached in the mid1880s: that edinoverie was unquestionably Orthodox, that the old rite was legitimate, and that ritual could not serve as the basis for division in the Church.3 The participation of high-ranking Orthodox hierarchs, the presence of civic dignitaries, and the prominent place given to edinoverie clergy sought to recreate the same supposedly harmonious relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church, the imperial government, and the converts from the schism that had led to edinoverie’s creation a century before. There seemed to be good reason for the Church to pat itself on the back as far as edinoverie was concerned: the wave of petitions in the 1870s had not recurred and no one like Ioann Verkhovskii had risen to challenge the definition of edinoverie championed by Pavel Prusskii and Subbotin. Indeed, the two men, backed by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, had pushed for close cooperation with the increasingly powerful Orthodox missionary movement, symbolized by the fact that Pavel’s Nikolskii monastery hosted the First All-Russian Missionary Congress in 1887. However, the old tensions were just barely concealed by the panoply of ceremonies enacted in 1900. Glancing to Kazan, some might have noted the prominent role played by the young and highly educated edinoverie priest Simeon Shleev, who used his jubilee speech to offer an interpretation at variance with the official Synodal line, focusing as it did on edinoverie’s Old Believer identity: “Edinoverie is a part of Old Belief, permitted to intercommunion with the Russian Church on the basis of unity in faith. It can be said otherwise: edinoverie is Old Belief reconciled with the ecumenical Russian Church.”4 The revolutionary year of 1905 exploded the carefully crafted narratives offered by the triumphal ceremonies only a few years prior. Following the April Edict of Toleration, an attempt to mollify the tumultuous imperial borderlands by extending the scope of toleration and legalizing apostasy from Orthodoxy, the hierarchs of the Church effectively rebelled against Pobedonostsev, rejecting his conception of church-state relations and forcing his resignation: an abortive attempt began to restore the Church to its canonical foundations, with the reestablishment of the patriarchate being first and foremost on the agenda. What is more, the Edict of Toleration legalized Old Belief and gave it most of the same privileges accorded to the empire’s other Christian confessions: the Old Believers finally achieved inclusion into the state’s multiconfessional establishment. Edinoverie, which, for so much of its history, was dependent on campaigns of coercion against Old Belief, thus entered into a material and existential crisis. Shleev, now a priest at the St. Petersburg Nikolskaia parish, saw this crisis as an opportunity and launched the most ambitious

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and sustained campaign ever seen to reform edinoverie. Unlike Verkhovskii, whose most fundamental desire had been the legitimization of Old Belief and the consequent abolition of edinoverie, Shleev sought the phenomenon’s modernization through a comprehensive package of centralization, institutionalization, and standardization. Through this, he hoped, edinoverie would find a new purpose: it would no longer be a “missionary encampment” chiefly aimed at combating the schism but instead a bridge to Old Belief allowing dialogue and negotiation that might, one day, provide mutual reconciliation between the two warring families of Russian Orthodoxy. As I show below, Shleev’s plans for edinoverie closely resemble the same schemes of confession building that Russian Orthodoxy, as well as various European churches, had been undergoing since the seventeenth century: by creating a range of both central and local institutions under the command of a single authority (a edinoverie bishop or committee) in St. Petersburg charged with enforcing both ritual standards and behavioral discipline, Shleev hoped to turn edinoverie from a disparate series of scattered communities into a unified, homogeneous movement. However, in order to justify this, Shleev and his supporters proclaimed a definition of edinoverie that emphasized its Old Believer heritage (particularly the old rite and clerical election) and distinguished it from the Russian Orthodox Church, with the result that their depictions of the latter were highly unfavorable and seemed to foment disunity. Edinoverie, they maintained, contained at its core the authentic essence of pre-Petrine Russian Christianity, which it could now restore to the secularized, westernized, and spiritually deficient Church: however, backed by the ritual assimilation inherent in Metropolitan Platon’s settlement, Orthodox bishops and clergymen had allegedly assailed edinoverie parishes, trampling on their legal rights in order to root out the old rite. Thus, it was held, edinoverie needed a set of institutions that would remove the edinovertsy from the control of prejudiced local prelates and protect the kernel of Holy Rus they brought to the modern world. In essence, this made the Shleevian project one of conservative ecclesiastical modernization underwritten by Slavophile Russian nationalism. Unsurprisingly, this made Shleev a lot of enemies. The Orthodox missionary movement roundly rejected Shleev’s conception and rallied to defend the legacy of Subbotin and Pavel Prusskii, denouncing the idea that ritual could be the basis for further institutionalization of the difference between edinoverie and Orthodoxy. The result was sustained and increasingly poisonous polemics between the missionaries and the Shleevian reformers; by 1912, the two parties could barely sit in the same room together. This opposition, combined with the

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Church’s shift to the right after 1907 and Shleev’s own unyielding militancy, meant that edinoverie reform would not be realized until 1918.

Chu rch Politics The year 1905 opened with two events that were to inspire the edinoverie reform program. The first was the declaration of an expansion of religious toleration on April 17. In a ploy to persuade the state to allow the Church autonomy enough to reform, Metropolitan Antonii (Vadkovskii) of St. Petersburg5 joined with Sergei von Witte to promote the extension of toleration to other religious groups, particularly the Old Believers.6 This was a response to the Gordian knot of Russian church-state relations in the late imperial period. The Church had grown comfortable relying on state support against religious minorities, but this had led to an increasing degree of secular interference in its internal affairs and the use of the institution for raison d’état. The state placed its interests first and those of the Church second. To ensure that this remained the case, the autocracy stymied structural reforms. As a result, members of the episcopate were humiliated by stringent restrictions on their activities,7 the clergy were declining in quality and barely paid, the consistories were collapsing through the sheer weight of business, and the laity were turning to alternatives that gave them a greater say in their religious lives.8 Antonii’s gamble was to sacrifice some confessional privileges in the hope that this would pressure Nicholas II into freeing the Church: it could then make the changes required to remain competitive on the religious marketplace. Initially, the bet paid off. The toleration edict was passed, and the tsar promised a sobor (a church council), which many expected to elect the first patriarch since 1700. The toleration edict’s single most important point was that it would now allow those ascribed to Orthodoxy to freely join other Christian denominations: in other words, apostasy was legalized.9 This served to make reform of edinoverie relatively urgent: if it were not reformed, a great number of the edinovertsy might utilize the terms of the toleration edict to join Old Belief.10 Indeed, taken collectively, most of the edict’s points related to Old Belief. In a seismic shift, Old Belief was, in terms of the Russian Empire’s confessional hierarchy, raised from its position on the cusp of illegality to the same position as the other non-Orthodox Christian faiths, with most of the benefits and privileges that this status entailed. The Old Believers thus finally entered the multiconfessional establishment, and the consequences were enormous.11 Old Belief came out of the shadows: the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy joyously reopened and repaired the closed churches of the Rogozhskoe cemetery (“a monumental

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moment in the identity and mentality of the entire community as well as the Old Rite”),12 while other concords hastened to organize national and local congresses, open printing presses, and, in general, assume a role in the empire’s civic life. Upon becoming prime minister in 1906, Petr Stolypin courted the Old Believers assiduously: he made efforts to have at least some of the property that was confiscated in the previous century returned to the Old Believers and sought to further codify the position of Old Belief into law.13 The Church looked on aghast as public figures patronized those who claimed to be the authentic version of Russian Orthodoxy. Treating the Edict of Toleration as a ne plus ultra, the Synod managed to manipulate its networks at court to stymie most of Stolypin’s efforts.14 One only need recall the fact that edinoverie was originally founded in an effort to circumvent Old Belief ’s entry into the multiconfessional establishment to understand why the Edict of Toleration presaged a crisis: with the legalization of Old Belief, edinoverie’s purpose, that of bringing the Old Believers out of hiding and under the control of the state via the Church, was completely undermined. Edinoverie’s role in the persecution of Old Belief since the reign of Nicholas I exacerbated the situation: edinoverie owed many of its members and much of its material position to government-mandated coercion against the Old Believers. Without the pressure of this coercion, it was reasonable to expect growth to decline or stop entirely. As a edinoverie dean in Nizhnii Novgorod observed: “With the declaration of the freedom of the schism and with recognition . . . of schismatic marriages and baptisms, it is necessary to anticipate mass apostasy from the Orthodox Church to the schism. To keep many in the bosom of the Church, it now follows to abolish any limits for conversion to edinoverie so that the lovers of strictness and church spirit in the liturgy can without obstacle satisfy their tastes and do not have to leave the Church.”15 Materially speaking, some Old Believers believed that they would soon get confiscated churches, icons, and books back, a belief that Stolypin’s efforts in this direction confirmed.16 In 1906, newly confident Old Believers in Voronok, Chernigov diocese, made efforts to have two churches that had been confiscated and given to the edinovertsy in 1846 returned to them. The panic in the petition of the edinovertsy against such an action is palpable: “Even if they do not give back both of the churches but just one, then there will be great sorrow for all. The blood of the edinovertsy will flow in all parishes in general but in Voronok in particular, where the edinovertsy number in the hundreds but the Old Believers in the thousands: the hundreds will be beaten to death for the truth and for their beloved holies.”17

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Did the edinovertsy apostatize en masse when the Edict of Toleration gave them the right to do so? On a diocesan level, the image is mixed. The edinoverie population of Tobolsk actually increased after 1905: between 1896 and 1915, seven new parishes were founded and the number of edinovertsy increased by over 5,000.18 However, Perm suffered a considerable decline, losing over 22,000 edinovertsy between 1894 and 1911.19 Viatka lost 769 edinovertsy (8.6% of the total) to apostasy in 1909 alone.20 In Stavropol diocese, numerical decline caused by apostasy had adverse effects on edinoverie clergy as the donations they received from the flock decreased: in 1917, the edinoverie priest Korotkov was demoted for marrying underaged couples and then forging the registries to conceal his actions. When he eventually confessed to his crime, he pleaded poverty: the defection of most of his flock to the schism in 1906 had reduced him to the most straitened circumstances.21 Thus, he sought to increase payments by performing weddings that would normally be forbidden by Russian law. A variegated movement dependent on local conditions and personalities, edinoverie did not act in a uniform way to the promulgation of toleration. However, some dioceses were clearly hemorrhaging edinovertsy. The Synod certainly believed that apostasy was a risk. After all, this was the message emerging from petitions where edinovertsy and Orthodox alike made use of a rhetoric of toleration to get satisfaction. Some believers just delivered outright threats. In 1907, petitioners against the removal of a edinoverie priest in Viatka stated that if he was not returned to his post “all of us, or at least most of us, will convert to Old Belief.”22 The Orthodox of Novets in Vladimir diocese were even more explicit in 1909 when they demanded the right to convert to edinoverie: “If you [the Synod], for some reason or another, refuse to satisfy our request [to join edinoverie], then we will be compelled to turn to the Austrians, whose church is nearby in the village of Valchikh. There they use rituals similar to ours. Some will convert to the priestless, who have also built prayer-houses among us.”23 Most chose to be more tactful. They might, for instance, plead the presence of a new Old Believer church in the vicinity or note the presence of a notorious preacher. Under this kind of schismatic threat, the only way to prevent those Orthodox inclined to schism from apostatizing outright would be to establish or strengthen edinoverie in the locality. Iaroslavl petitioners seeking to join edinoverie pointed out that an Old Believer monk of the spasovtsy concord had arrived in a local village and founded a women’s skete that had already attracted several female converts. No less dangerous was that two Belaia Krinitsa priests were present in a village only seven versts away and had established a church. Only a edinoverie parish would save the situation.24 Many would also play on

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the fact that religious toleration had granted freedoms to others that edinoverie lacked. The edinovertsy of Maikop were particularly plaintive when they reflected on their inability to open a church in 1910: “This is especially sorrowful and offensive because, in accordance with the emperor’s will, freedom of conscience and faith was given: all schismatics and sectarians use this with the full cooperation and protection from the civil authorities, according to the law. Why are there no such rights and privileges for us, the edinoverie flock of the Church of Christ? Why not satisfy our desires, despite some years of anguish and longing in our souls and hearts?”25 The vitality of the schism in the new era of religious toleration was thus played upon to maximize the perception of threat from the the Old Believers. Another event in 1905 also bore considerable importance for edinoverie. On February 7, Simeon Shleev was elected as a priest of the rich and prestigious edinoverie Nikolskaia church in the capital. The son of a edinoverie priest from Kostroma province, Shleev was an able student and entered the elite Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy in 1895. He came under the patronage of Antonii (Khrapovitskii), a vocal advocate of the restoration of the patriarchate and an admirer of the pre-Petrine piety preserved by Old Belief and edinoverie.26 It was thanks to Antonii’s support that Shleev procured the lucrative Petersburg parish. Shleev also associated with some of Antonii’s other pet students in Kazan, many of whom were to be visible members of the ecclesiastical reform movement.27 Most important among them were the Ukhtomskii brothers, the princely scions of an ancient house. Aleksei Ukhtomskii joined edinoverie in 1899 and eventually became the lay elder of Shleev’s Petersburg church: he was also a pioneering physiologist.28 Andrei (Ukhtomskii) made a name for himself thanks to his missionary activities among the Volga Muslims, becoming a suffragan bishop in 1907.29 He was sympathetic enough to the edinovertsy that he was frequently volunteered as a possible edinoverie hierarch.30 Once in Petersburg, Shleev added members of the edinoverie clergy and laity to his supporters. With the backing of Khrapovitskii, this was to be a determined faction for edinoverie reform. Shleev later stated that the toleration edict “freed the hands and opened the lips of the edinovertsy.”31 This was certainly true in his case. His first move was to become one of the thirty-two Petersburg priests who, with the blessing of Vadkovskii, printed an article advocating expansive changes for the Church.32 This group was to be the basis of the Union for Church Regeneration, a short-lived attempt to instigate liberal modernization of the Church.33 Shleev’s second action, in May, was to organize a petition for a edinoverie bishop.

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The religious environment of the post-1905 era both mirrored and influenced the new edinoverie activism. The stance taken by the thirty-two priests and Vadkovskii’s efforts to procure a new church council marked the culmination of processes over the previous decades whereby the professionalism of the pastorate had been enhanced, theology had flourished at the ecclesiastical academies, existing models of ecclesiastical authority and church-state relations had been questioned, and popular piety had flourished but at the risk of escaping the Synod’s control. One may take the situation in the capital as an example.34 The years prior to 1905 had seen the rise of Father Ioann Sergiev of Kronshtadt: his dynamic preaching, personal charisma, and thorough commitment to charitable outreach among the urban poor had established a new standard for clerical behavior, while his insistence on regular communion both provided the laity with a new means for interacting with the holy service and reworked the sacramental element of Orthodox identity and practice.35 Meanwhile, the Society for Moral-Religious Enlightenment and the St. Aleksandr Nevskii Temperance Society were attracting thousands of people and allowing them to engage with Orthodox beliefs in a new way. The St. Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy, under the leadership of Vadkovskii, an expert in homiletics, became the basis of a new Orthodox social gospel, which demanded that clergy actively seek to improve the material as well as the spiritual aspects of parishioner life.36 However, all of these developments produced effects that the Synod viewed with circumspection. Sergiev’s cult-like status produced the ioannitsy, a sectarian group who viewed Ioann as Christ on earth. The lay preacher Ivan Churikov attracted large audiences with his antialcohol message and his determination to explain the Gospels in terms of the everyday experiences of his parishion­ ers. However, the fact that he was outside the church hierarchy led to suspicion, accusations of sectarianism, and, ultimately, his excommunication.37 The Orthodox social gospel helped lay the foundations for Father Georgii Gapon’s revolutionary actions. Shleev’s attempts to consolidate edinoverie, defend it from Orthodox encroachments, and use it as a means to energize Russian religiosity was framed by this dynamic: a desire to encourage better outreach and higher levels of social piety that was tempered by a fear of losing control. Political and theological developments within the Church were also influential on both the emergence of the edinoverie reform party and its subsequent development. The years since the Great Reforms had seen two fundamental fissures in the Church widen significantly. On the one hand, there was the antagonism between the nonmonastic clergy and the monastic episcopate: on the other, there was the feuding between clergy and their parishioners.

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In both splits, much of the argument revolved around authority. The nonmonastic clergy resented their exclusion from most positions of authority in the Church, while the laity was aggrieved at their own lack of involvement in the management of parish life. On an intellectual level, these debates took place in the sphere of ecclesiology, the theological field dedicated to defining the nature of the Church. Who defined the Church as a body? Who had the right to wield authority and what were the limits of that authority? Conservatives defended the power of the episcopate, while reformers demanded the inclusion of the laity and lower-ranking clergy into decision-making processes. The arguments raged without consensus being achieved, even as the post-1905 period established new public forums for the discussions. Edinoverie’s reform movement put a particular spin on these issues: with its long-established tradition of clerical election, reformers tried to frame it as a model that proved the vitality of a lay-centered vision of the Church. On a different level, the Church’s relationship with the state had come under sustained scrutiny: the impingement on church autonomy, the flagrancy with which canons were violated by state actors, and the seeming inability of the Synod to deal with new sectarian denominations that offered converts an engaging, comprehensible, and relevant religious experience made a strong case for change. Both moderates and conservatives were able to agree on the basic labels of the proposed reform schemes. First, there was the demand to “return to the canons,” a return to the fundamental legal and theological bases of the Orthodox faith: these mandated not the Synodal system of church-state relations but the revival of Byzantine symphonia, a relationship where both bodies mutually supported each other while respecting each other’s autonomy. But what canons should be restored? And to what extent should the restoration consider the conditions of the modern world? Here, there was no consensus. Second, there was the focus on sobornost, a philosophical value first propounded by Slavophile philosophers in the 1840s and increasingly adopted into church discourse in the postreform period. By 1905, sobornost had come to represent a vision of ecclesiastical freedom founded not in administrative codes or a rights-based regime but in the “organic” customs of the people, preferably those from before the westernizing reforms of Peter the Great. The relationship between tsar, church, and people should be mediated not by bureaucrats or legislation but by these national habits. However, while broad consensus had emerged around the desirability of sobornost, few could agree on how it would be realized. What, for instance, would replace the Synod and its bureaucracy? A patriarch? And what would his powers be?38 While the edinoverie actors I consider in this chapter rarely contributed directly to the debate over the

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restoration of the patriarchate, their arguments, as well as those of their oppo­ nents, were clothed in the language of canonicity and sobornost. Finally, edinoverie proved, as ever, to be susceptible to the considerable changes occurring in Old Belief. The Edict of Toleration marked a golden age for the Old Believers. While I. Pozdeeva has pointed out that there was some residual persecution of the Old Believers, for the most part the schismatics were able to exploit their new liberties to the full.39 In the era between 1905 and 1917, Old Believer culture and communal life flourished. Campaigns of church and chapel construction were undertaken by all the major concords.40 Numerous newspapers and journals were founded to discuss all facets of Old Believer life.41 Congresses proliferated at an astounding rate, and they were not just limited to the leadership. In 1906, a congress of Old Believer peasants was held, as was a congress for ministers.42 An Old Believer Theological and Pedagogical Institute was opened in Moscow in 1912.43 It was hardly a coincidence that the Old Believer mania for congresses, councils, and new forms of national solidarity found their mirror image in edinoverie, where Shleev and his colleagues rushed to create new colloquia to both broaden the debate and, it was hoped, link communities together. Equally, one finds echoes of Old Believer discourses in edinoverie publications. Roy Robson notes that “the most liberal arm of the Old Belief . . . strongly believed that the problems plaguing Russian society could be solved through generous use of the balm of the Old Belief. Russia was rootless, but Old Believers could deliver a link to pre-Petrine piety; . . . Russia had lost its identity, but Old Believers could provide a community. The community issue itself allowed Old Believers to demonstrate they were the true heirs of Russian spirituality and to legitimize the Old Belief as a regenerative force for Russia.”44 This was precisely Shleev’s ideological legitimization for his new project, although with one core difference: edinoverie was even more valuable than Old Belief because it had the power to bridge the schism between the Church and the Old Believers, thus ending forever the divide in Russia’s fragmented Orthodoxy.

U niting Edinov er i e When it came to his petition for a edinoverie bishop, Shleev was ambitious. Rather than limiting himself to collecting signatures from his own diocese, as previous edinoverie petitions had done, his new plea was to be a call from all the edinovertsy scattered across the Russian Empire. To this end, he dispatched three lieutenants to the provinces.45 One hundred twenty edinoverie parishes signed the petition. This was an impressive achievement for a religious group that had never before attempted to stand together as a national community,

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but it remained less than 50 percent of all parishes.46 Still, the importance of this document is much greater than the number of signatories. It was Shleev’s creed, a statement of edinoverie’s meaning, purpose, and place. Shleev’s argument went thus. The maintenance of clerical election in edinoverie had given it “a monastic form of life” since, like the brethren of a cenobitic monastery, the edinovertsy chose their religious leaders and, therefore, kept a tradition of communitarian religious brotherhood.47 The supposition was that Russian Orthodox parishes had lost this heritage when they were deprived of the right to elect their clergy, which in turn had led to a decline in their religiosity. So, edinoverie parishes were “oases in a desert starved of piety.”48 However, they too were now under threat from an Orthodox episcopate that still remained loyal to the assimilative tendencies of the rules of Platon. They “[violate] the order of edinoverie-Old Believer church life, impoverish our monastic communal life, weaken discipline, and distort and diminish our liturgy.”49 It is not a coincidence that Shleev focused on the idea of edinoverie as an ascetic and monastic movement: as P. L. Michelson has recently commented, “claims in the late nineteenth century that asceticism was the essence of Orthodoxy often expressed criticism about the Synodal Church, the principal instrument of which, the Holy Synod, had led the way in curtailing and devaluing monasticism during the eighteenth century.”50 The solution Shleev envisioned was a single bishop subordinated to the Synod who would be responsible for all the edinovertsy in the Russian Empire. Such was required to defend edinoverie from local prelates and to unite them into a single coherent whole, an important matter since “edinoverie suffers from its fragmentation. It is scattered all over Russia.”51 In a nutshell, Shleev was proposing a plan of institutionalization and centralization intended to maintain edinoverie’s distinctiveness and extend a singular source of authority over all its parishes and monasteries. Some of his opponents believed that this was a call for “a special independent church,” one that was not just “a church within a church but another church alongside the Orthodox Church, also Orthodox and fully legitimate.”52 The edinoverie bishop under the Synod was only the most essential point of a wider program of administrative expansion. To begin with, Shleev noted that the edinovertsy needed more and better deans (blagochinnye), a position that served as the main administrative link between the parish priest and the bishop. Shleev demanded the exclusion of Orthodox clergy from this rank.53 Also required were deanery congresses, which were “the first step in the matter of unifying and animating edinoverie.”54 After these had been achieved, a regular system of diocesan congresses could be established.

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This plan came close to realization. Three diocesan congresses were held in Kursk (1906), Viatka (1908), and Moscow (1910). In January 1912, a national congress was convened, which proposed the following to the Synod. First, there was to be a central body to organize other national congresses. Known as the Council of the All-Russian Congresses of Orthodox Old Believers, it would be headed by a bishop with Synod membership, fifteen clergy, and fifteen laymen and would meet in St. Petersburg no less than three times a year. It would control charitable funds for education and poverty relief.55 This body would pass resolutions from the national congress to the Synod for confirmation. The national congresses themselves had an incredibly wide remit, ranging from the construction of churches to realizing “improvements and corrections in church life.”56 This was mirrored at the diocesan level where local councils, chaired by Orthodox bishops, would take all edinoverie business out of the hands of the consistories. Shleev seems to have been directly inspired by the example set by the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy, which, in 1898, had created the Council of the All-Russian Congress of Old Believers: “Led by lay merchants, the council both mobilized commercial capital on behalf of the denomination and created a national forum and a national arena for Old Believer capitalists who wished to serve their church.”57 Had this plan been put into action, edinoverie would have been more thoroughly institutionalized and centralized. Individual edinoverie parishes would have been no longer isolated from each other but instead joined by a series of local and national bodies. The bishop chairing the national council would have access to the Synod, which could then pass legislation that the diocesan congresses would implement. The consistories were removed entirely from the chain of command, although diocesan bishops would still maintain a degree of influence through their chairmanship of the diocesan councils. This single concession maintained edinoverie’s canonical subordination to the Church while also protecting and advancing the cause of the Old Believer liturgical compact.

Th e Old Russi a n Pi et y The most visible element of edinoverie’s separateness was its ritual. In 1912, Shleev argued that the old pre-Nikonian rites were of existential importance: “With another [form of] liturgy, edinoverie churches will lose the meaning of their existence, they will not satisfy the aim with which they were established.”58 But why was ritual so important? Certainly, it was an easily understood mark of distinction, but the matter went much deeper for the reformers. The old rites were missionary tools and cultivators of religious discipline. First,

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even Shleev’s opponents agreed that the Old Believers could not be attracted to edinoverie if the pre-Nikonian liturgy was not strictly kept or was infused with post-Nikonian elements.59 Ritual purity was thereby imbued with a missionary significance. It was the means by which the Old Believers were to be brought back to the Church. As such, any “innovations” that might have crept into edinoverie ritual had to be removed.60 Second, the rituals of the edinovertsy and their attitude toward them were seen as the generators of piety. If properly performed and esteemed, the rites not only were a lure for Old Believers but also directed the thoughts of believers toward the divine: “For the edinovertsy, observation of the rituals and ritualistic formalities is closely connected with conscience, it is a necessary condition for spiritual peace.”61 The old rites, therefore, had an “educational significance” in that they helped discipline the thoughts and actions of believers, producing the piety that made edinoverie so valuable. If the pre-Nikonian liturgical regulations were violated, the divine services of edinoverie would be “as soulless as those which exist in many Russian [i.e., official Orthodox] parishes.”62 It was, therefore, entirely logical that Shleev’s plan for centralization and institutionalization was intended to lead to a degree of standardization of the edinoverie liturgy by ensuring Orthodox practices were extirpated and that believers conducted themselves properly. The aim of extending the administrative organs of a central edinoverie authority was to police the bodies of edinovertsy. For instance, at the second national edinoverie congress in 1917, G. I. Simagin listed the behaviors that needed to be amended in the “egregious muddle” of typical religious ceremonies: the number of prostrations had to be regulated, children needed to be named after saints and not “the requirements of fashion,” and couples needed to cover their heads when they came to be married.63 Simagin felt that women’s bodies in particular posed a threat to piety because of their presumed weakness for voguish Western fashions that exposed their physical allure. Old Believers, he noted, would doubt that grace dwelt among the edinovertsy if they saw women “with uncovered heads or in bonnets and dresses of the most tempting form” at church.64 So, the old liturgical compact was a marker of distinction, a missionary tool, and a way in which to produce piety. It had one other virtue: it was a symbol of Russianness. One of the ways in which reformers distinguished edinoverie from Synodal Orthodoxy was by insisting that the latter had become westernized: it was after all a product of Peter the Great’s reforms. In this, they were undoubtedly influenced by the Slavophiles, who had long portrayed the pre-Petrine era as a paradise of unsullied Russian values. As the strength of nationalism increased in late imperial Russia, “some publicists started to make

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a direct connection between the Old Belief and Russianness.”65 This attitude spread even within the Church: in 1918, Archpriest A. G. Albitskii stated that “without a doubt, the Old Believers were more national than Peter the Great, who tried to remake Russia according to the western European example.”66 This meant, as John Strickland has recently shown, that “Old Believers and their lay sympathisers were in a position to challenge clerical Orthodox patriots who claimed that the official faith represented the national faith.”67 The whole picture can be summed up with a 1906 statement from the Kursk edinoverie priest Ioann Riabukhin: Edinoverie, as the last scion of the ancient national and religious form of Russian life in the Church, protects in the majority of its followers (with a few exceptions) the inviolability of that form, and with it the best national ideals, customs, and traditions of families and the Church. The reverent attitude towards the liturgy, the protection of a strict order, and the piety, moral strictness, and religious habits of the domestic lives of the edinovertsy serve as proofs of this. I am not speaking just about the moral significance of edinoverie in the matter of raising the simple dark masses in the spirit of Orthodox devotion to the Church and pious Russian antiquity, its populism, [but also about the fact that] by its high calling, by the strength and depth of its national Orthodox foundations and devotion to the Church, edinoverie should be the bridge which will join into one the two feuding families of the great Russian people—Orthodoxy and Old Belief.68

In other words, the old rituals preserved national traditions and served to discipline the behavior of edinovertsy both in the church and in the home so that they were true models of Orthodox piety. This would allow for edinoverie to become an effective missionary tool, leading the Old Believers back to the Church through example. Rituals, therefore, needed to be protected and perfected. However, standardization brought its own problems. Shleev’s critics asked a reasonable question: What ritual order would the new bishop defend? Local edinoverie communities often maintained diverse textual and ritual practices, and there was no single “true” template on which to base a process of correction. As the missionary Vasilii Marakulin pointed out in 1908, uniformity among edinoverie parishes in ritual matters was “not possible since the edinovertsy serve by the old [pre-Nikonian] books but, as is well known, in these there are many contradictions and variant readings: in order to achieve uniformity, it would be necessary for the edinovertsy to reject the old books but this would mean they will have stopped being edinovertsy.”69 Given such a

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tricky conundrum, Shleev never clearly articulated any positive definition of edinoverie rituals or the method of standardization. The mission statement of Shleev’s newspaper Pravda pravoslaviia (The Truth of Orthodoxy) was to spread knowledge about edinoverie rites and their correct performance. This it did by publishing Old Church Slavonic prayers and detailed descriptions of liturgies in Petersburg churches, perhaps indicating that the “correct” rites were those performed by Shleev and his party.70 Standardization was presumably to be accomplished by granting the edinoverie reformers access to empire-wide administrative mechanisms. To justify the broad statements made above, let us take one particular instance of a edinoverie ritual to see precisely how the associations with Russianness, discipline, and missionary value led to advances in institution­ alization. Of all the edinoverie ritual questions, singing took up most attention. The edinoverie practice consisted of unison, melismatic liturgical chanting.71 It also used Russian medieval sheet music known as “hook notation” (kriukovaia notatsiia).72 Post-Nikonian Orthodox musical practices, in contrast, often tended to be polyphonic and used Western musical notes. To Aleksei Ukhtomskii, the medieval musical form defined Old Belief and edinoverie: “Take away the humble motifs of the [hook] note chanting and the Old Believer church stops being an Old Believer church.” In the same speech, he stated why. Edinoverie singing was simple and lacked “variegation” in tone, which made it perfect for use in church since it concentrated the minds of believers on the act of worship. In contrast, the Western music of Russian Orthodox churches was full of “superfluous, incautious musical effects” that distracted churchgoers.73 Shleev emphasized that the edinoverie musical preferences allowed them to maintain “the customs of the ecumenical church,” which Russian Orthodoxy had lost because it had “assimilated Italian singing.”74 Therefore, the older style of music distinguished not only edinoverie from Russian Orthodoxy but also the heavenly from the worldly, Russia from the West, and the Church from the secular. Revival of the old form was also a way of disciplining the thoughts of believers in churches, focusing them on the act of prayer. The importance of singing as a mark of edinoverie identity led reformers to the conclusion that it, too, had to be institutionalized. The maintenance and improvement of musical standards was the pretext for school construction. Edinoverie singing was widely believed to be abysmal. One observer noted that a edinoverie choir “was not an assembly of singers but a crowd of the blind, which gropingly follows a one-eyed singer, fearing to stumble. Indeed, the leading singer scarcely trusts himself. What comes out is not singing but a kind of

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inconceivable chaos.”75 Grigorii Dribintsev proposed a program in 1912 that would establish singing schools and crash courses for the clergy in the major cities to rectify this situation. Learning to read the hook notes would also be a compulsory course in edinoverie parish schools and cheap choral books would be printed.76 Music was not only the reason why more edinoverie educational institutions were needed. For one, the education from secular or Orthodox teachers was perceived as being unsuited to inculcating piety. G. Goviadin denounced the disrespectful behavior of “enlightened” teachers in church (“they do not make the customary bows, do not even mark themselves with the sign of the cross, and they stand in a lordly fashion”) and further accused them of corrupting the people.77 Dribintsev added that since seminarians and female graduates from diocesan schools (eparkhialki) were “completely alien to the spirit of edinoverie,” their teaching methods did not raise the thoughts of the children to worship. When teaching the alphabet, they committed the grievous sin of trying to make it a “fun experience”: rather than illustrate the letters with “holy words,” they used the names of animals instead. Thus, “from childhood, the school develops in the pupils a love of the world but not of heaven.”78 Meanwhile, Shleev denounced Orthodox seminaries. In these institutions, future clergymen lost their piety and so avoided edinoverie parishes in the future. This denied edinoverie its most gifted sons, whose talents were necessary if it was to deflect accusations from the Orthodox of “worship of the letter alone, of ceremonialism (obriadstvo).”79 In 1908, Shleev opened a edinoverie middle school (realnoe uchilishche) in St. Petersburg that would focus on “an Orthodox understanding of Christianity and instil respect for churchliness (tserkovnost), discipline, and the canons of the Councils and the Holy Fathers.” It would achieve this through “serious study of the liturgical regulations and singing.”80 The Muscovite edinovertsy copied Shleev’s example in 1911, justifying the new institution to the metropolitan on the basis of a need for capable singers.81 However, their regulations suggest a much wider intent. Throughout the three-year course, they would teach canon law, singing by the hooks, Old Church Slavonic, Russian, general church history, geography, scriptural geography and archaeology, Russian history both church and civil, pedagogy, hygiene, arithmetic, and orthography. Indeed, the intent behind both schools was for their transformation into training grounds for the edinoverie clergy, “only without those defects that abound in church schools and seminaries.”82 In 1917, Shleev went further still and suggested a “theological school” in Moscow: given that this reform was discussed in the context of choosing appropriate persons for a proposed

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edinoverie episcopate, it is possible that this institution was supposed to serve as an academy for future bishops.83 A separate edinoverie system of education was being proposed, one that would divide the edinovertsy from the Orthodox at all levels of religious instruction, from parish schools to the ecclesiastical academies. All of this was to be done to protect a ritual that maintained a spirit of strict Russian piety.

Com m u nit y In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Orthodox theologians spilled much ink on the subject of religious community and its institutional embodiment: Vera Shevzov has called this “a crisis in modern Russian Orthodox ecclesial identity.”84 In practical terms, the debate revolved around lay participation: Were parishioners merely the pupils and assistants of the clergy or did they have a right to a voice in their churches and some measure of control? What was the fundamental unit of the Church: the parish or the diocese? As we have already seen, Shleev stressed that the principle of clerical election was a fundamental reason why edinoverie had maintained a monastic level of zeal. Furthermore, in an undated letter to Metropolitan Flavian (Gorodetskii) of Kiev, Shleev declared that “in the understanding of the edinovertsy, communal parish life is the most essential nerve of the Church organism, [it is] the glory of the Church and its saints.”85 Revitalizing communal life was, therefore, essential to edinoverie reform. One method proposed was to form a national religious fraternity. As one of his supporters put it, this would allow the edinovertsy “to closely join themselves together firstly in one diocese and then throughout Russia as members of one living body of Christ” and thus prevent the atomization of social and religious life occurring in Orthodox parishes.86 While the Synod ultimately quashed the idea, Shleev was allowed to open a diocesan fraternity in 1908, which he described as “a union of zealots, a union of chosen Christians, dedicated to the revival of parish life.”87 At the same time, Shleev severely criticized the Synod’s parish policy, since it only offered parishioners a consultative voice in the management of their churches. Edinoverie was posed as being the only “haven” in the Russian Orthodox Church where a parishioner “can not only direct his duties but also use all of his rights.”88 In 1912, Shleev penned a parish regulation to be passed at the national edinoverie congress, another attempt to embody edinoverie distinction through an institution. Rather bizarrely, he stated that this document had been influenced by I. S. Berdnikov, a conservative church theologian who saw “the diocese, or episkopiia, not the parish, as the basic ecclesial unit” and rejected “governing

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roles for the laity.”89 However, the regulations do not bear this out. The very definition of the parish was that “it consists of clergy and laymen.” The parish council would have the right to acquire and dispose of church property in the name of the parish.90 This was far closer to the parish reforms proposed by liberals, stressing as it did the centrality of lay participation and parish institutions.91 The conception of religious community held by the edinoverie reformers had its foundation in the principle of clerical election. This signified a vision of the ecclesia where both clergy and laity possessed rights, responsibilities, and authority. The same principle was used as a marker of distinction to counterpoise a communal edinoverie to an atomized Orthodoxy: further institutionalization of the former was required to prevent its violation by the latter. It was a vision at odds with post-1905 Synodal policy, which enforced the control of the clergy over popular piety and blocked expansion of lay authority.

Th e Pr e ss With the slackening of censorship after 1905, Shleev and his backers made use of print media to first assert the distinctive character of edinoverie and second forge a sense of a wider national community of edinovertsy. His first opportunity to disseminate his message widely came with the establishment of his journal, Pravda pravoslaviia, in the second half of 1906. This organ was originally intended to cover more than just edinoverie. Its slogan (“for a free press and a free Church”) painted the editors’ radical sympathies on the wall. The articles of the first few issues eradicated any possible doubt, assailing both church hierarchs and the Synodal order. Even Antonii (Khrapovitskii), Shleev’s mentor and most important supporter, was attacked in an article about religious toleration.92 The Synod was quick to respond and demanded the removal of the slogan. After some prevarication, Shleev complied; from that point on, the journal stuck entirely to printing pieces about edinoverie.93 These subsequent issues aimed to both distribute the core tenets of Shleev’s reform scheme and engender a wider consciousness of edinoverie as a national community. In terms of the first, the printing of Old Church Slavonic prayers in the appendix and the descriptions of services in Shleev’s church were meant to aid the process of ritual standardization: other articles laid down the key elements of his episcopal, administrative, and educational reform programs. In terms of the second aim, articles might focus on the history and present standing of individual edinoverie parishes or larger communities scattered throughout the empire, such as reporting the completion of a new church in Chernigov diocese in 1907.94 Equally, the printing of letters from correspondents and

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readers helped give the sense of a wider community. Some letters distributed news from other parts of the empire. For instance, a message from Nizhnii Novgorod relayed the rumor that the Kerzhensk edinoverie convent was to be turned into an Orthodox monastic community.95 Others implored fellow edinovertsy for aid. Two priests sent a letter begging for donations to their impoverished and starving parish in Samara.96 Another cleric asked for assistance in constructing a school for an Arkhangelsk church, where local Old Belief had become particularly strong following the Edict of Toleration.97 This reflects the growth of clerical collective action that was distinctive of Russian Orthodoxy in the late imperial period: as Daniel Scarborough remarks, “clerical mutual aid grew along with these networks to support diverse tasks for the benefit of both clergy and nonclergy such as religious schools, shelters for the elderly, and disaster relief. As an economically imperative component of the pastoral profession, participation in mutual aid became a defining feature of the distinctively clerical form of Orthodox religiosity.”98 Thus, Pravda pravoslaviia not only created the idea of a edinoverie beyond the confines of local parishes and dioceses but also helped establish informal networks of aid that would give substance to the “imagined community” of edinoverie.99 Had the journal lasted longer, it might have helped forge a sense of solidarity, the idea of an expansive religious group with common interests regardless of location. Certainly, this could do no harm to Shleev’s demand for the centralization of edinoverie under a Synodal bishop. Equally, this was the only edinoverie journal to be published, a fact that further privileged Shleev’s narrative. The journal was closed in 1908 for reasons that remain mysterious. This might have been part of the Synod’s crackdown on the Union for Church Regeneration that took place in the same year. No doubt the Synod was also less than impressed by the fact Pravda pravoslaviia occasionally carried adverts for Old Believer journals and newspapers.100 Afterward, Shleev turned to historiography. This provided him with the opportunity to forge a historical narrative that would legitimate his vision for edinoverie as the end product of a natural process. Orthodox theologians had done precisely this throughout the course of the nineteenth century when they sought to demonstrate that ritual tolerance was a fundamental part of Orthodox Church history. By finding instances of such tolerance in the past, the Church had turned the ritual reevaluation into a key point of their identity, thus forging a way to distinguish Orthodoxy from the schism. Shleev, too, had to write a historical narrative to justify his vision. He had begun penning such a history when he was a student in Kazan and continued to research over the next decade, periodically publishing segments

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in his journal. In 1910, the full book was released, covering edinoverie’s story from 1657 to 1909.101 The argument that Shleev wanted to investigate was why edinoverie had enjoyed so little success. Why had it not ended the Old Believer schism, as had originally been intended? Shleev answered that the root of the problem was a failure to truly understand edinoverie by both the Orthodox and the edinovertsy. The former understood edinoverie as “constant striving to ritual uniformity,” while the ignorance of the latter was largely down to the “insincerity of the church authorities in the matter of conditional unification of the Old Believers with the Church.”102 This mutual incomprehension, rooted in Platon’s rules, had to be resolved. The Orthodox Church had to fully affirm its unity with edinoverie and establish that the old rituals were equal in honor and value to the Nikonian ones. Of course, Shleev’s conception of unity was different from that of most Russian Orthodox clergymen. This was unity on Shleev’s own terms, and those terms were the assertion of doctrinal unity while vigilantly observing edinoverie’s ritual compact and the privileges of its parish life. Part of that vigil meant necessarily enacting measures to protect the edinovertsy from any further encroachments: in other words, the consecration of a edinoverie bishop. Shleev thus created a narrative of edinoverie that had to end with his scheme for centralization, institutionalization, and standardization. Only with these steps would edinoverie succeed in reaching out to the Old Believers.

Br i dge to th e Schism For all their dislike of “official Orthodoxy,” at no point did the reformers cease to emphasize that edinoverie was distinguished from Old Belief by the fact that it was canonically a part of the Russian Orthodox Church. Edinoverie would remain part of the Church, even if it attained an unprecedented degree of autonomy. However, Shleev and his backers spent much more time enforcing the frontier with Synodal Orthodoxy than the one with the schism. After all, it was the assimilative tendencies of the Church that allegedly posed the major threat. The result was that some of the commonalities with the Old Believers were often emphasized when it came to matters of ritual. This led to a redefinition of edinoverie’s missionary methods and goals. As we saw in Riabukhin’s statement from 1906, edinoverie was envisioned as “a bridge to the schism,” a meeting place for discussion, negotiation, and compromise. “So long as we, the Orthodox, do not soften our relations to the schismatics and do not change our usual views

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on the old rituals,” opined Petr Aksentov, another edinoverie priest in Petersburg, “the schism will not stop nursing hostility to the Orthodox Church.”103 I. Legatov, an Arkhangelsk missionary, proposed “that missionary affairs should stand not on the basis of polemics over disputed ritual questions . . . but on the grounds of uniting the schismatic Old Believers with the edinovertsy.”104 There were several attempts to turn edinoverie into a bridge to the schism. At the 1912 national edinoverie congress, several Old Believers were invited and spoke in favor of Shleev’s program, stating that the establishment of edinoverie bishops would be sufficiently tempting to draw them back to the Church.105 Antonii (Khrapovitskii), the chair of the congress, used the event to send a circular letter to the Old Believers.106 In 1917, an unprecedented gathering in Moscow took place when Andrei (Ukhtomskii), Iosif (Petrovykh), and Shleev journeyed from Petrograd to meet the heads of the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy. Never before had Orthodox hierarchs countenanced appealing to the Belaia Krinitsa prelates on the latter’s turf. Nor had they ever been willing to concede so much. For instance, Andrei declared that Patriarch Nikon had been both mistaken and ignorant when he forcibly changed the ritual order of the Church.107 However, both Khrapovitskii’s letter and the 1917 delegation failed in the face of understandable Old Believer obduracy. The Old Believers maintained that the Russian Orthodox Church lacked legitimacy and would only consider union via the Church’s “full return to pre-Nikonian Orthodoxy, with the abolition of all novelties and the renunciation of insults and anathemas.”108 In other words, the Church would have to admit complete defeat. The softening of the boundaries with Old Belief thus led to a new conception of the mission among the edinovertsy, one that emphasized reconciliation. This was entirely at odds with the attitude of the Orthodox missionaries, for whom the goal was to defeat the schism outright. This was to be accomplished by using edinoverie as a lure, engaging in (usually self-defeating) public debates, and deploying police measures designed to make religious life difficult. After the toleration edict, the Church remained wedded to this methodology, with at least one of its bishops insisting that “all civil and criminal laws guarding the faith of the followers of the Russian Orthodox Catholic Church and her ruling position in the Orthodox Russian state should remain inviolable and enforced.”109 As Heather Coleman argues, the missionaries were interested not in devising a new concept of mission adapted to an atmosphere of freedom of conscience but rather with finding “ways to shove the pluralistic genie back into the bottle.”110 Even if the new edinoverie approach to the schism bore little fruit, it was at least more in touch with a Russia where the state no longer prohibited religious conversion away from the predominant confession.

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Opposition a n d Fa i lu r e The initially sanguine atmosphere of 1905 rapidly soured. When the PreConciliar Commission met to prepare for the sobor in 1906, the political and theological gulf between the various wings of the Church was clear for all to see. Furthermore, Nicholas II proved unwilling to keep his word. No sobor was summoned and he quickly moved to guarantee the Synod’s future loyalty by filling it with conservative prelates. The episcopate itself, scarred by the events of 1905 and deeply worried by the loss of state protection, swerved to the right. Antonii (Vadkovskii), alone and discredited, fought a hopeless rearguard action to prevent the Church from actively supporting the nationalist Union of the Russian People.111 By 1908, the leaders of the Union for Church Regeneration had been pushed out of either the Church or public life.112 Nonetheless, the possibility of a sobor continued to be dangled in front of clergymen’s noses. This left the Synod reluctant to enact major reforms, even if it had desired them: such changes might be revoked or rendered redundant by the future sobor, a body with far greater authority. Edinoverie reforms were certainly hampered by this fact. The Pre-Conciliar Commission, while not entirely adhering to Shleev’s viewpoint, did suggest some form of edinoverie bishops but attached the reform to a much wider project of diocesan reorganization. The scope of the plan meant that only the sobor would have the authority to pass it. Equally, the lack of a sobor meant that debates were left to rumble on, generating animosity and crystallizing political positions so that willingness to compromise withered away.113 The lack of a council and the Synod’s inability to act caused other problems. It was widely recognized as desirable to abolish the rules of Metropolitan Platon. Shleev wanted to dispose of anything that suggested edinoverie was inferior to Orthodoxy. The Viatka and national edinoverie congresses voted for the offending rules to be abolished: so, too, did the 1908 Fourth All-Russian Missionary Congress.114 The Pre-Conciliar Commission resolved to ask the sobor for the same.115 One reason was that the provisions of the Edict of Toleration (namely, that leaving Orthodoxy was now permitted by law) contradicted the fifth rule barring the Orthodox from joining edinoverie: no one could be sure which was supposed to supersede the other. The edict of 1886 that allowed bishops to make up their own minds on whether to permit the Orthodox to become edinovertsy remained secret, so it was of no help. Another issue was that the confessional integration project was beginning to have some influence in the parishes. The edinovertsy were increasingly defining edinoverie in terms of Subbotin’s ideas. In Iaroslavl, some parishioners argued,

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“We do not consider the edinoverie church as separate from the Greco-Russian Church: but we consider it united to the Orthodox Church, keeping the single Orthodox Catholic faith in the Holy Trinity. We even consider the GrecoRussian Church as a mother, having given birth to the edinoverie church by [granting it] the apostolic leadership of the priesthood.”116 Another parish in Maikop quoted the 1885 Kazan episcopal council to protest the contemptuous attitude with which the consistory treated them.117 In Saratov, applicants to join edinoverie quoted at length an article by Professor Nikolai Ivanovskii that extolled confessional integration.118 The Synod was under pressure from parishioners who wanted it to realize unity in action as well in words. The makeshift solution that the Synod arrived at was to use its function as the highest body of appeal in church matters to abolish the fifth rule in practice. When the Orthodox found their application to join edinoverie stymied by consistories and bishops, they appealed to the Synod. In most cases, the Synod overturned the decisions of the diocesan administrations and referenced the resolutions of the Pre-Conciliar Commission and the fourth missionary congress as the reason for doing so. Diocesan support for the Platonic rules was thus squeezed from above as the Synod strove to integrate edinoverie and Orthodoxy into a single confession. Indeed, the Synod went so far as to block attempts by edinovertsy to join Orthodoxy, thus undermining Platon’s old desire for ritual assimilation. Some of the edinovertsy of Elionka asked the Synod “to accept our little community of believers into the bosom of the Holy Eastern Catholic Church, transferring our edinoverie church to Orthodoxy, [an action] which is extremely necessary in the town: besides our true desire, it is a means of keeping in the faith local Christians apostatising away from it due to the absence of Orthodox influence and a means of drawing other non-Orthodox believers [inovertsy] into Orthodoxy, because many of them are sympathetic.”119 This met with little favor from any party (other edinoverie parishioners said that it would mean “edinoverie would die in Elionka”).120 The Synod decreed “that edinoverie and Orthodoxy compose one true Church of Christ and therefore the petitioners already dwell in the bosom of the Church of Christ without changing their church to Orthodoxy.”121 Nevertheless, the use of the Synod’s appellate function was only a stopgap. While the rules of Platon remained, they were a visible symbol of confessional division and offered diocesan authorities the opportunity to legitimately contradict Synodal policy. The failure to call a church council consequently left the Synod hamstrung. As was mentioned above, the notion of the mission held by Shleev and his allies was at variance with that held by the Orthodox missionary movement. This movement had become increasingly powerful and institutionalized in the

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latter decades of the nineteenth century, meaning that its leaders had considerable influence in the post-1905 era.122 Given that edinoverie was essentially devised as a missionary tool against the schism, it is unsurprising that the missionaries viewed it as part of their turf. The bone of contention between Shleev’s party and the representatives of the mission was about edinoverie’s place in the Orthodox mission and thus the definition and purpose of edinoverie. For Shleev, edinoverie was not primarily “a missionary encampment”: this was too narrow a definition, since it was also a source of piety and religious renewal.123 The missionaries believed that the needs of the mission came first, while the requirements of edinoverie came second: “There are no questions of edinoverie and there cannot be,” announced the missionary Dmitrii Aleksandrov in 1912, “there are questions of the success or failure of the Orthodox mission into which questions relating to the development and good order of edinoverie can enter.”124 In connection with this, the missionaries believed that the road to greater edinoverie autonomy was the road back to the schism. True unity, they argued, meant unity in administrative matters and obedience to Orthodox prelates.125 Equally, the missionaries (among others) argued that Shleev’s scheme for a bishop under the Synod would violate the Orthodox canons: many pointed out that the eighth rule of the Council of Nicaea forbade the presence of two bishops in one diocese. A edinoverie bishop with jurisdiction over the entire empire would necessarily infringe upon the jurisdictions of Orthodox prelates in their eparchies.126 This was a potent argument in a period when a great many clergymen believed that the solution to the Church’s problems was a return to the canonical roots of the Orthodox faith. This provoked the weak Shleevian response, that the Synod had created positions also in violation of these particular canons,127 to be easily brushed aside: as the missionary Ioann Polianskii reasoned, now was the time to reduce canonical violations, not introduce more of them.128 On the anathemas, the missionaries and Shleev’s party violently disagreed. Shleev called for their complete repeal, since they “do no small harm to the spread of edinoverie among the Old Believers and they disturb the edinovertsy and many of the representatives of Orthodoxy.”129 The missionaries were resolutely opposed to such an action. The most that they were willing to concede was the removal of the 1656 anathemas imposed by Patriarch Macarios of Antioch and that once again the Synod explain the true meaning of the 1667 anathemas: that they had been placed on individuals who used the rituals to signify their revolt against church authority rather than the rites in and of themselves.130 Macarios’s anathemas could be sacrificed because they were

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nothing more than his personal opinions and were rendered superfluous by the resolutions of the 1667 council anyway.131 Such was the course of action chosen by the Pre-Conciliar Commission, the best compromise that could be hoped for in the circumstances.132 Thus, missionary opposition was based on a mixture of theological objection and jurisdictional anxiety. While relations were initially amiable between Shleev and missionary leaders, discussions rapidly soured into antagonistic polemics.133 Things had gotten so bad by 1908 that missionaries attempted to have Shleev tossed out of Kiev for “disturbing the peace” when he attended the All-Russian Missionary Congress.134 Shleev also faced opposition from within edinoverie itself: his leadership was by no means secure or universally acknowledged. It is difficult to gauge the extent of this opposition, not least because Shleev’s considerable journalistic and scholarly endeavors dominate the sources. On the one hand, Shleev’s initial petition was signed by a considerable number of parishes and the vast majority of his proposals were ratified by the various edinoverie congresses. On the other hand, this evidence must be treated with a degree of caution. As already noted, the 120 parishes who joined Shleev’s petition did not constitute a majority of edinoverie parishes, while the congresses (especially that of 1917) were dominated by Shleev’s followers.135 There are also instances of internal edinoverie disagreement we must take into account. First, in 1905, Shleev entered into a running polemic with the edinoverets V. Senatov of Moscow, one of the men in charge of the edinoverie typography in that city, over the bishop question.136 Evidence suggests that Senatov and others in Moscow grouped around the typography remained unconvinced by Shleev’s arguments even in 1917, when a group of Muscovite edinovertsy complained vociferously against Father Simeon to the future patriarch Tikhon (Bellavin).137 Second, between 1905 and 1907, Shleev was engaged in a running battle to be elected as the head priest (nastoiatel) of his parish in St.  Petersburg: in the struggle, his edinoverie opponents in St.  Petersburg thoroughly rubbished his ideas.138 Worse still, they reported Shleev to the police for allegedly failing to say prayers for the imperial family.139 It would appear that only the death of his rival saved Shleev and his friends in the capital from disaster. Third, while Shleev often brought up evidence from provincial edinovertsy in support of his scheme, most of them spoke only of a desire for edinoverie bishops, a century-old demand. They seldom used Shleev’s rarefied terms to describe edinoverie or spoke of the wider package of proposals. Fourth, Shleev provoked a revolt against his authority in St. Petersburg when he

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attempted to have the first national congress pass a measure that increased the authority of edinoverie priests in parish affairs: most damningly, the signatories of the protest included some of his closest followers.140 As a edinoverie priest, Shleev was elected, meaning the attack of these parish elders represented a real threat to his authority. Rather red-faced and abashed, Shleev backed down and the offending clause was stricken from the proposal. Evidently, neither Shleev’s program nor his position was safe from opposition within edinoverie. Several explanations exist for such resistance: there was little tradition of a national edinoverie leadership; there was a long-standing divide between the edinovertsy of Moscow and St. Petersburg; and the electoral principle made party strife between clerical candidates widespread in edinoverie parishes. We also cannot discount principled opposition: it is clear that not all edinovertsy were willing to subscribe to the Shleevian paradigm of edinoverie. One must also consider Shleev’s personality. There are indications that he had authoritarian proclivities: Aleksei Ukhtomskii, the parish elder at Shleev’s church from 1912, accused him of behaving in a Rasputin-esque manner toward his parish.141 Nor was Shleev a particularly tactical thinker. He deliberately provoked comparisons between himself and the excommunicated radical Ioann Verkhovskii. Shleev’s plans had little in common with those of Verkhovskii, so why he invited these comparisons is somewhat unclear. What is certain is that the missionaries were able to use the parallel to paint his ideas in the blackest colors, while some edinovertsy were evidently disturbed by the prospect of a second Verkhovskii.142 It is thus not unreasonable to suggest that Shleev’s authoritarian leadership style and lack of tact both divided edinoverie and prevented compromise with important church groups like the missionaries.

1912 a n d 1918: T wo Denou e m ents On January 22, 1912, the Synod sought to repeat the experience of 1900 by using grandiose ceremony to demonstrate the unity between edinoverie and the Russian Orthodox Church. The occasion was the First All-Russian Edinoverie Congress, held in St.  Petersburg. The Synod spared no expense: the opening ceremony and cross procession was attended by twenty-one bishops, the ober procurator, Nicholas II’s confessor, a representative from the ecumenical patriarchate of Constantinople, all the high-ranking Synodal bureaucrats, and representatives from the State Duma, including the brother of Petr Stolypin. Leading prelates like Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoiavlenskii), Archbishop Sergii (Stragorodskii), and Archbishop Antonii (Khrapovitskii) performed

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liturgies at the St. Petersburg Nikolskaia church and chaired sessions in the ober-procuratorial palace. Even some Old Believers from Ekaterinburg made an appearance, joining some 250 delegates from across the Russian Empire. After the conclusion of the congress, Shleev and Khrapovitskii were granted an audience with Nicholas II and Tsarevich Aleksei: the emperor and his heir were gifted an icon of St. Anna of Kashin and two distinctive Old Believer prayer cushions.143 A beautifully bound commemorative volume recording the congress was published shortly after: it came complete with a set of photographs of the major personalities and events. However, unlike in 1900, the problems of edinoverie were no longer lurking under the surface: now they were out in the open, very visibly disrupting the image of harmonious concord that the Church wished to project. The sessions of the congress were perturbed as Shleev’s party and the representatives of the Orthodox missionaries slung insults at each other. Shleev was denounced as “a chameleon” with some “hidden aim,” while leading edinovertsy casually made use of the time-honored Old Believer slur “novoobriadtsy” (new believers) to refer to the Orthodox and the Church.144 Antonii (Khrapovitskii), as the chair of the congress, was repeatedly forced to intervene in order to call for calm and order.145 The Old Believer press, no doubt feeling some glee at the rancorous proceedings, printed claims that one of the foremost missionaries, Nikita Griniakin, was drunk.146 Secular journalists, too, decried the behavior of the missionaries. Rather than demonstrate the unquestionable unity of Orthodoxy and edinoverie to the world, the Church had put out some of its dirtiest laundry for all to see. Although the 1912 congress passed most of Shleev’s proposals in one form or the other, the Synod did not legislate these resolutions, leaving the entire plan to hang in the air. By this point, Shleev may have been protected only by the efforts of Khrapovitskii, his patron. However, not even he could stand up to Rasputin: indeed, the Siberian holy man thoroughly humiliated him by denying him a long-sought promotion to the Moscow metropolitanate in 1912.147 In the same year, Andrei (Ukhtomskii) found himself bundled off to the obscure diocese of Sukhumi in Abkhazia, finding out only from a local newspaper.148 In such an atmosphere, Shleev no doubt believed that discretion was the better part of valor and went uncharacteristically silent, publishing very little between the end of 1912 and 1917. Almost the exact same battle lines emerged in 1917, when edinoverie reform again came to the table. The context, however, was entirely different. The Romanov monarchy and the apparatus of the imperial state were no more: the Synod had refused to publicly back Nicholas II in his final days in power.

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A new patriarch, the first since the beginning of the eighteenth century, was triumphantly elected on October 19.149 Meanwhile, what Pavel Rogoznyi has identified as a “church revolution” was underway, as priests and laymen start to throw out allegedly “Rasputinist” or otherwise unpopular bishops: the crumbling structures of hierarchical authority meant that the new reformist Synod had little choice but to accept these as fait accompli.150 Shleev and Andrei (Ukhtomskii) (the former now a widowed archpriest, the latter the bishop of Ufa and a member of the Synod) were quick to capitalize on the situation in edinoverie’s favor, rapidly reactivating the previously moribund Council of the All-Russian Congresses of Orthodox Old Believers and organizing a second national congress to be held in Nizhnii Novgorod in July.151 Meanwhile, both men began engaging with the Old Believers, leading to the aforementioned historical meeting with the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy in Moscow. The second national edinoverie congress lacked both the ostentatious ceremony and the acrimonious conflict that had marked its predecessor. Only two Orthodox prelates (Andrei (Ukhtomskii) and Lavrentii (Kniazev) of Balakhninsk, representing the diocese of Nizhnii Novgorod) were in attendance, while the state limited itself to dispatching a telegram of greetings from Prince Vladimir Lvov, the revolutionary ober procurator. No missionaries were present. Shleev capitalized on the provincial location to connect edinoverie symbolically with Minin and Pozharskii, two local heroes who had been responsible for rallying Russia against foreign invaders during the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the seventeenth century.152 The truly Russian piety of edinoverie, Shleev argued, could perform a comparable role, inspiring Russians to unite and drive the German armies back. During the main sessions of the congress itself, much on the program was very familiar to all those acquainted with Shleev’s earlier campaign: abolishing the rules of Platon, creating more edinoverie institutions, trying to perfect ritual performance, bolstering edinoverie educational establishments, and improving the moral and religious conduct of both the clergy and the laity. A few new items also made their way onto the menu: the relationship with the new republican state and its official policy of freedom of conscience, the need to form a union in order to wield political influence in whatever institutions emerged from the revolutionary tumult, and a petition demanding that the government protect Orthodox holy places and relics in the recently captured Trabzon.153 The biggest change was to Shleev’s plan for edinoverie leadership. No longer satisfied with just one bishop or panel under the Synod, Shleev instead proposed an entire edinoverie episcopate. As was appropriate in the new atmosphere of the church revolution, the bishops would be elected by

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diocesan edinoverie institutions containing both laity and clergy. The senior bishop would chair the Council of the Congresses of Orthodox Old Believers, which would be subordinated to whatever new form of supreme authority the Russian Orthodox Church chose to create. Orthodox diocesan prelates could, therefore, expect to lose all control of their edinoverie parishes: unity was to be symbolic (mutual liturgies and so forth), not administrative.154 The congress passed all of the proposed measures with overwhelming majori­ ties.155 However, the much harder test was still to come: the resolutions had to get through the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church.156 Now rid of its erstwhile imperial benefactor, the Church wasted little time in calling and convening the long-desired council, a body capable of canonically and thoroughly reforming the ecclesia. The second congress’s proposals made it through the council’s committee stages but only just. What was more, Andrei and Shleev’s visit to the Old Believers in Moscow had caused quite the stir among the missionaries: worries had already been registered at the Fifth AllRussian Missionary Congress in August that this was indicative of edinoverie’s hidden schismatic tendencies emerging.157 Andrei had already added fuel to the fire by making an extremely ill-advised statement during the preparations for the council: “An independent church of the old ritual is necessary: even if there are anomalies in a canonical sense, it is impossible to sacrifice the advantage of the Church because of the letter of the canons. What is necessary for the Church must be canonical. With time, the aforementioned anomalies will be smoothed out if Old Belief and the Orthodox Church are not to be gnawed away by two ulcers—in Old Belief, presbyterianism and in Orthodoxy, the mission. . . . Even if we violate some canons, by it we will accomplish a great deed.”158 Finally, the collapse of ecclesiastical authority in the provinces, the declaration of autocephaly by the Georgian Orthodox Church, and the worrying signs that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church might just be about to follow suit made a great many clergymen anxious about any plan with the slightest whiff of separatism.159 All of these factors must have made Shleev less than sanguine about getting his proposals through. He was dealt a further blow just before the plenary sessions on edinoverie met. Metropolitan Antonii (Khrapovitskii), who was to sit beside Shleev as an official proponent of the new edinoverie deal in the plenary sessions, was stranded in Kiev by the ongoing military conflicts: his place was taken by Bishop Serafim of Cheliabinsk, who, before taking monastic tonsure, had been Dimitrii Aleksandrov, one of the missionaries most implacably opposed to Shleev in the debates between 1905 and 1912. This led to the peculiar situation where one of the two men supposed to present the new plan to the council was in fact a die-hard opponent.

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Shleev opened the first session by arguing that the revival of religiosity in Russia was necessary to save it from collapse; thus, it would be “criminal” for the council to refuse the requests of the edinovertsy. Serafim delivered a blistering broadside. He compared Shleev’s project to order no. 1, the proclamation by the Petrograd Soviet to the Russian army that called for them to ignore the orders of the Provisional Government if they contradicted those of the Soviet: “If order no. 1 introduced disorganisation into our army and we are now living through hard days thanks to it, we will introduce the same into our church life if we accept this plan.”160 In other words, two episcopates in the Church would produce the same anarchic results as two authorities in the army. Consequently, he demanded that Shleev’s plan be rejected entirely. Serafim reiterated that Orthodoxy and edinoverie were part of the same confession and the same Church: “As a mother, the Orthodox Church considers them [the edinovertsy] its right hand and the Orthodox the left, and it does more for the right than for the left.”161 At the heart of the debates was whether difference in ritual could justify such an expansive division between Orthodoxy and edinoverie. Archimandrite Ilarion (Troitskii) put the question succinctly: “Can ritual be a basis for the creation of special hierarchy?”162 If the council said yes, then it would repeat the mistakes of the seventeenth century, granting ritual an importance it did not possess. The councils of that century had attempted to freeze the ritual life of the Russian Orthodox Church but this was impossible. Ritual is a “sphere where everything lives, develops, and changes.”163 However, the edinovertsy were now attempting to continue this tradition of freezing ritual forms by institutionalizing them under an episcopate. Archpriest Albitskii also discussed the meaning of ritual and their relevance for the current debate. The Old Believers assigned an exclusive importance to the matter of ritual: “When the Old Believer says that the two fingers are the same as the three fingers, he has already stopped being an Old Believer, his Old Belief has lost its vital force.”164 Thus, the moment that the edinovertsy had recognized the validity of the three-fingered sign of the cross, they had ceased being Old Believers and had begun down the road to integration with the Russian Orthodox Church.165 Such arguments could reach extremes. N. D. Kuznetsov welcomed the idea that edinoverie would die without an independent episcopate: “Through such a death, the edinovertsy will be purified of their excessive adherence to the old rituals and the ancient customs of life which now often darken their religious horizons, and they will be reborn as members of the united Ecumenical Apostolic Church with wider church consciousness.”166 The death foretold by Shleev would thus be the death of schismatic edinoverie. Those who were

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reborn would be purged of the ritual intolerance that was little more than an unfortunate remnant of their time in the schism. The edinovertsy would finally become conscious of ritual as an indifferent matter and become truly Orthodox, sharing the ritual tolerance that defined the Orthodox confession and set it apart from the schism. Kuznetsov imagined wiping the slate clean, burning to the ground all those divisions the rules of Metropolitan Platon had fostered. Shleev’s cousin Grigorii reacted angrily: “For such orators, perhaps it would be better if there was no edinoverie at all?”167 In making such arguments, Ilarion, Albitskii, and Kuznetsov asked why such a measure was necessary when the edinovertsy had already conceded upon joining the Church that ritual was a matter of secondary importance? Those edinovertsy who were seeking to create an episcopate solely on the basis of the ritual differences were returning to the exclusivity of the Old Believers and rejecting the tolerance on which their unity with the Russian Orthodox Church was predicated. “True” edinoverie, much like “true” Orthodoxy, had to be open to ritual change, and an episcopate was a useless attempt to freeze rituals in time. Kuznetsov made this transparent later when business turned to changing the name of edinoverie to Orthodox Old Belief: The concept of Old Belief [staroobriadchestva] itself contains a sign of excessive devotion to the old ritual. However, ritual in itself has secondary importance in the question about belonging to the Church. What aim is behind the proposed name? If it underlines that Old Believers can be Orthodox, then this is understandable. If it points to the fact that the Old Believers present a special community in the Church, then this is meant to signify the possibility of division in the Church according to secondary symbols: this already does not correspond to the nature of the Church and therefore is not only excessive but in some cases even harmful.168

The exchange of opinions got to the core of the problem of edinoverie. Without a change in its attitude toward ritual, the Russian Orthodox Church could never have conceded that more than one form of ritual was permissible. This in turn had led to a crisis of confessional identity, whereby ritual could no longer distinguish between Old Belief and Orthodoxy. The response had been to transform attitude to ritual into a marker of Orthodox confessional belonging. To be Orthodox, one had to have a proper understanding of the relative insignificance of ritual. However, the act of creating edinoverie necessarily meant conceding that the pre-Nikonian rites were so important to the Old Believers that they were willing to join only if the rites were preserved. Platon’s rules had thus institutionalized ritual. The participants of the council divided along

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the two sides of this paradox. For the Orthodox, it was about trying to stop any reform that would further institutionalize ritual, while for Shleev it meant extending that institutionalization to its furthest possible extent. When it came to voting on the edinoverie episcopate, Shleev saw the writing on the wall: the council was not going to pass his proposition for an episcopate.169 He thus suggested that if the Church’s supreme authorities believed that there were sufficient numbers of edinoverie parishes in an eparchy, then they could appoint a special edinoverie bishop who would be subordinated to the diocesan prelate.170 In other words, he was proposed edinoverie suffragan bishops in everything but name.171 This was a colossal U-turn. Since 1905, when Shleev had said that “[the idea of] suffragan edinoverie bishops is a still-born child,” he had argued against them.172 The sudden change of heart was undoubtedly wise. When the vote came on the original formula, it was comprehensively defeated. Shleev’s new proposal was accepted by the narrowest of narrow margins: ninety-five in favor, ninetytwo against.173 Uproar followed. A voice from the crowd demanded a recount, Serafim insisted on the attachment of a dissenting opinion to the protocols, and P. A. Astrov declared that such a matter could not be decided by so slim a majority.174 Nevertheless, the vote was conclusive: the edinovertsy now had bishops. The remaining points of the new thesis were passed without a great deal of debate, but the atmosphere remained rancorous.175 At the end of the discussion, Kirill (Smirnov) wanted to add a further point that all communications about edinoverie parishes would lie in the hands of the diocesan prelate, thereby interposing the Orthodox bishop between the church authorities and the edinoverie suffragan.176 Shleev responded that if the Orthodox bishop controlled all communication, the church authorities would not get fully accurate information about edinoverie parishes.177 This earned him a rebuke from the chair, Arsenii (Stadnitskii). Shleev had always accused the Orthodox of distrusting the edinovertsy but now he was doing the same thing: “From you, it is always mistrust, mistrust, mistrust.”178 Far more disturbing was a proposed amendment that made the opening of new edinoverie suffragancies dependent on the permission of the diocesan bishop. Serafim claimed such was necessary to preserve the supremacy of the bishop: “Even the Council, without the will of the local bishop, cannot interfere in the matters of his diocese.”179 The change was accepted, ensuring that new edinoverie suffragancies had to be permitted by diocesan bishops and not simply brought into being by the patriarch. This blow pushed Shleev beyond the limits of endurance. Edinoverie bishops were dependent on those very hierarchs against whom he had spent more than a decade railing. The amendment

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they had just passed on bishops meant that “we have worked for eight days— and completely in vain.”180 With this, Shleev got up and left the hall, not even waiting for the session to close or to receive thanks from the chair. His project was in tatters, defeated at the last hurdle.181 As disappointed as Shleev was, however, the council had finally replaced the rules of Platon with a new arrangement, thus ending the 118-year-long legacy of the Moscow metropolitan.182 Besides the personal animosity fueling the quarrel between 1905 and 1918, the battle between Shleev and the missionaries involved two conflicting concepts of edinoverie and two contradictory responses to the Edict of Toleration. For Shleev and his backers, the crisis enveloping edinoverie following the legalization of both Old Belief and apostasy called for innovative and thoroughgoing reform that would modernize the movement, enabling it to cope with the new conditions of religious plurality. Moving away from a conception of edinoverie that defined it in terms of its instrumentality (i.e., as a weapon pointed at the schism), they sought to demonstrate that edinoverie had a value beyond its initial missionary purpose: as the bearer of an authentically Russian, authentically Orthodox liturgical tradition dating from before the corrupting, westernizing reforms of Peter the Great, edinoverie could help restore the Russian Orthodox Church to its true position. In doing so, the rift between Old Belief and the Church could be healed on the basis of mutual reconciliation. First and foremost, however, the need to preserve that kernel of the seventeenth century demanded edinoverie’s administrative isolation from allegedly assimilationist Russian Orthodox clergymen: thus, edinoverie needed to undergo an unprecedented process of centralization, institutionalization, and standardization. Had these reforms been realized and given time to mature, Shleevian edinoverie would have looked something like a confession within a confession, a movement that, while canonically attached to the Russian Orthodox Church, defined itself against so-called “official” Orthodoxy with a series of institutions whose existence was justified on the basis of that distinction. The Russian Orthodox missionaries, in contrast, remained wedded to the concept propounded by Professor Nikolai Subbotin and Pavel Prusskii: edinoverie and Russian Orthodoxy were joined in all matters other than a few trifling externalities, which could not be the basis for the further institutionalization of difference. What is more, they could not and would not concede the idea that the schism would be ended by mutual reconciliation rather than missionary conquest: such would undermine their position and prestige within the Church. Edinoverie was a “missionary encampment,” a tool of the mission. Beyond this purpose, it had no value. Such reasoning also reflected

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their reaction to the Edict of Toleration. Rather than adapt to the situation, the best possible thing was to seek a restoration of the pre-1905 status quo, with Orthodoxy enjoying full legal protections and the schism once again being illegal. If restoration could not be achieved, then it was necessary to fight every step to move beyond the 1905 edict. Of course, the missionaries did have a point. Shleev’s insistence that a edinoverie bishop was a step toward restoring Orthodoxy’s canonicity, for instance, rang hollow when many theologians pointed out that such a plan violated several canons relating to a prelate’s sovereignty over his diocese. Equally, the idea of mutual reconciliation between Old Belief and Russian Orthodoxy struck a decidedly utopian note when one realized that most Old Believers had no intention of accepting the legitimacy of the Nikonian rite, especially not when they were in the ascendant.

Note s 1. V. M. Skvortsov, ed., Iubileinoe torzhestvo pravoslavnogo staroobriadchestva (edinoveriia) (27 oktiabria 1900) (St. Petersburg: V. V. Komarov, 1901), 22. 2. F. Loginovskikh, “Stoletie edinoveriia v g. Permi,” Permskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 23 (1900): 455. 3. For a full account of the role of ceremonies in confirming unity with edinoverie, see J. M. White, “Edinoverie i ofitsialnoe pravoslavie: Neudavshiisia opyt obedineniia v praktike publichnykh tseremonii (1900–1913),” Quaestio Rossica 2 (2015): 201–223. 4. S. Shleev, ed., Edinoverie i ego stoletnee organizovannoe sushchestvovanie v Russkoi tserkvi (St. Petersburg: V. V. Komarov, 1901), 17. 5. For a general overview of the political positions of various members of the episcopate in this era, see A. K. Pisiotis, “Between State and Estate: The Political Motivations of the Russian Orthodox Episcopate in the Crisis of Tsarist Monarchy, 1905–1917,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 46, no. 3 (2012): 335–363. 6. Zhurnaly komiteta ministrov po ispolneniiu ukaza 12 dekabria 1904 g. (St. Petersburg: Komitet ministrov, 1905), 3–7. 7. So afraid was the state of unauthorized collective action from the episcopate that it banned newly appointed bishops from dining with the metropolitan of St. Petersburg when they arrived in the capital to be consecrated. S. I. Alekseeva, Sviateishii sinod v sisteme vysshikh i tsentralnykh gosudarstvennykh uchrezhdenii poreformennoi Rossii 1856–1904 gg., 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2006), 63. 8. E. Heir, Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy 1860–1900: Radstockism and Paskovism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970); S. I. Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation:

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Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830– 1917 (Washington, DC: John Hopkins University Press, 2004). 9. PSZ, vol. 25, 237. 10. It is uncertain whether widespread apostasy from edinoverie was indeed the consequence of the edict. Werth cites a table showing that 4,240 individuals left Orthodoxy for Old Belief between 1905 and 1909; however, the accuracy of this figure is open to doubt and we do not know whether many of these people were edinovertsy. P. W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827–1905 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 250. 11. It is worth comparing the successes of the Old Believers post-1905 with the continuing travails of the Mennonites, who were not incorporated into the multiconfessional establishment by the toleration edict: see A. Friesen, “The Case of a Siberian Sect: Mennonites and the Incomplete Transformation of Russia’s Religious Structure,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 30 (2014): 139–158. 12. P. T. De Simone, “An Old Believer ‘Holy Moscow’ in Imperial Russia: Community and Identity in the History of the Rogozhskoe Cemetery Old Believers, 1771–1917” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2012), 231. 13. Stolypin ordered that the Ministry of Internal Affair’s collection of valuable Old Believer property be returned: N. V. Pivovarova, “‘Kabinet raskolnichikh veshei’ ministerstva vnutrennikh del: Ob odnom nesostoiavshemsia muzee staroobriadcheskoi bogosluzhebnoi kultury,” Izvestiia Uralskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 85, no. 6 (2010): 237. Furthermore, he sent out a circular to all government offices in the provinces requiring that they document their holdings of Old Believer property in preparation for its return; most of the governors replied that had little or no such property, since most of it was now held by the Church. See RGIA, f. 1284, op. 185, d. 88, l. 1. 14. For the full details of this campaign, see P. Waldron, “Religious Reform after 1905: Old Believers and the Orthodox Church,” Oxford Slavonic Papers 20 (1987): 110–139. For church opposition to an Old Believer military chaplaincy, see J. M. White, “Battling for Legitimacy: Russian Old Believer Priests on the Frontlines of the First World War, 1914–1917,” First World War Studies 7, no. 2–3 (2017): 5–7. 15. TsANO, f. 570, op. 559, d. 16, l. 3ob. 16. In 1907, the Synod passed a regulation to allow Old Believers to reclaim property that had been confiscated after 1883 (when the law allowing the Old Believers to build and repair places of worship had been passed): this reflected a Senate ruling from 1898. However, the law only mentioned items seized from prayerhouses, ignoring personal and immovable property (see RGIA f. 796, op. 97, d. 366, 1. 3): this allowed the Synod and diocesan chancelleries to circumvent the law. The matter of Old Believer property came to national attention in 1912,

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when the Old Believer Duma member M. K. Ermolaev passed a proposal to ensure Old Believer property was returned. Gosudarstvennaia Duma. Sozyv (3). Sessiia (5). Stenograficheskie otchety (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1912), 909–910. 17. RGIA, f. 796, op. 190, VI otd., 3 st., d. 95, l. 9ob. Earlier in 1906, edinovertsy in the same location reported being accosted by Old Believers as they held a cross procession to bless the waters of a local spring: the Old Believers shouted out, “Ah, here are the Mazepas [traitors]! Look, we have re-blessed your waters!” 18. L. N. Suslova, “Edinoverie v Tobolskoi gubernii vo vtoroi polovine XIX—nachale XX v.,” Problemy istorii Rossii 7 (2008): 216–217. 19. I. Shestiakov, ed., Adres-kalendar Permskoi eparkhii na 1894 god i spravochnaia kniga dlia dukhovenstva 1894 (Perm: P. F. Kamenskii, 1894), 203–204; P. Ershov, ed., Spravochnaia kniga Permskoi eparkhii na 1912 god (Perm: P. F. Kamenskii, 1911), 106–111, 212–213. 20. Viatskaia eparkhiia. Istoriko-geograficheskoe i statisticheskoe opisanie (Viatka: Viatskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, 1912), 78–80. 21. RGIA, f. 796, op. 204, 5 otd., 1 st., d. 32, l. 11. 22. RGIA, f. 796, op. 188, d. 7811, l. 5. 23. RGIA, f. 797, op. 79, 2 otd. 3 st., d. 22, l. 8. 24. RGIA, f. 796, op. 187, d. 7174, l. 2. 25. RGIA, f. 796, op. 190, 6 ot. 3 st., d. 49, l. 32. 26. For Khrapovitskii’s views on Old Belief, see J. W. Cunningham, A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Renewal in Russia, 1905–1906 (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981), 64, 300–302; J. Strickland, The Making of Holy Russia: The Orthodox Church and Russian Nationalism before the Revolution (New York: Holy Trinity, 2013), 127–132. 27. S. Dixon, “Archimandrite Mikhail (Semenov) and Russian Christian Socialism,” Historical Journal 51, no. 3 (2008): 694–695. 28. P. Chubarov and V. N. Pavlov, “Akademik A. A. Ukhtomskii— prikhozhanin Nikolskoi edinovercheskoi tserkvi Sankt-Peterburga,” in Pravoslavnoe edinoverie v Rossii, ed. P. Chubarov and V. N. Pavlov (St. Petersburg: RGPU im. A. I. Gertsena, 2004), 65–67. 29. M. Zelenogorskii, Zhizn i trudy arkhiepiskopa Andreia (kniazia Ukhtomskogo), 2nd ed. (Moscow: Mosty kultury, 2011), 29. 30. For instance, see a petition dated June 15, 1906. RGIA f. 796, op. 190, 6 otd., 3 st., d. 15, l. 179. 31. S. Shleev, Edinoverie v svoem vnutrennem razvitii. (V raziasnenie ego malorasprostranennosti sredi staroobriadtsev) (St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipografiia, 1910), 231–232. 32. “O neobkhodimosti peremen v Russkom tserkovnom upravlenii,” Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 11 (1905): 321–325.

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33. E. E. Roslof, Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905–1946 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 6–12; J. E. Hedda, His Kingdom Come: Orthodox Pastorship and Social Activism in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 153–198. 34. Regrettably, most works dedicated to Orthodoxy’s turn-of-the-century urban mission have focused on Petersburg. For one of the few sustained efforts to look further afield, see M. E. Grabko, Deiatelnost Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi v rabochei srede Moskovskoi gubernii v kontse XIX—nachale XX v. (Moscow: PSTGU, 2017). 35. N. Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 36. S. Kenworthy, “An Orthodox Social Gospel in Late-Imperial Russia,” Religion and Society in Central and Eastern Europe 1 (2006): 1–29. 37. P. Herrlinger, “Trials of the Unorthodox Orthodox: The Followers of Brother Ioann Churikov and Their Critics in Modern Russia, 1894–1914,” Russian History, 40 (2013): 244–263. 38. In particular, see J. D. Basil, Church and State in Late Imperial Russia: Critics of the Synodal System of Church Government (1861–1914) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005); V. M. Lavrov, V. V. Lobanov, I. V. Lobanova, and A. V. Mazyrin, eds., Ierarkhiia Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi, patriarshestvo i gosudarstvo v revoliutsionnuiu epokhu (Moscow: Russkaia panorama, 2008). 39. I. V. Pozdeeva, “The Silver Age of Russia’s Old Belief, 1905–17,” in Russia’s Dissident Old Believers 1650–1950, ed. G. B. Michels and R. L. Nichols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 74. 40. For an analysis of post-1905 Old Believer architecture, see R. Robson, Old Believers in Modern Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), 53–74. 41. R. Robson, “The Old Believer Press, 1905–1917,” in Russia’s Dissident Old Believers 1650–1950, ed. G. B. Michels and R. L. Nichols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 277–290. 42. O. P. Ershova, Staroobriadchestvo i vlast (Moscow: Unikum tsentr, 1999), 103–104. 43. Pozdeeva, “Silver Age,” 85. 44. Robson, Old Believers, 128. 45. Shleev, Edinoverie v svoem, 240–242. For the activities of one of these disciples in Uralsk, see RGIA f. 796, op. 190 6 otd., 3 st., d. 15, ll. 1–1ob and ll. 14–15. 46. Shleev, Edinoverie v svoem, 252. 47. Ibid., 241. 48. Ibid., 242.

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49. Ibid. 50. P. L. Michelson, Beyond the Monastery Walls: The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, 1814–1914 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), 31. 51. Shleev, Edinoverie v svoem, 227. 52. V. Senatov, “Kakoi episkop nuzhen edinoveriiu?” Missionerskoe obozrenie, no. 10 (1905): 33. 53. S. Shleev, “Blagochinnye edinovercheskikh tserkvei,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 10–11 (1908): 2. 54. S. Shleev, “Edinovercheskie blagochinnicheskie sezdy,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 14–15 (1908): 4. 55. Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev (edinovertsev) (St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipografiia 1912), 144. 56. Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd, 144. 57. E. Clay, “An Old Believer Monastery on the Volga: The Cheremshan Monastery Complex, 1820–1925,” Slavonica 7, no. 2 (2001): 23. 58. Clay, “Old Believer Monastery,” 71. 59. See, for instance, the decision of the Fourth All-Russian Missionary Congress in Kiev to keep the old rites free from innovations. “Voprosy edinoveriia na IV vserossiiskom missionerskom sezde v Kieve,” Missionerskoe obozrenie, no. 4–5 (1908): 604. 60. “Viatskii edinovercheskii sezd (10–17 iunia 1908 g.) i ego postanovleniia,” Viatskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 42 (1908): 1090. 61. RGIA, f. 796, op. 190 6 otd., 3 st., d. 15, l. 115. 62. Shleev, Edinoverie v svoem, 224–225. 63. Vtoroi vserossiiskii sezd pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev (edinovertsev) v N. Novgorode 23–28 iulia 1917 goda (Petrograd: Sovet vserossiiskogo sezdov pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev, 1917), 101. 64. Vtoroi vserossiiskii, 105. 65. E. Krevsky, “Defining the Schism: Images and Interpretations of the Old Belief in Late Nineteenth-Century Russian Discourse” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2002), 223. 66. Deianiia sviashchennogo sobora pravoslavnoi Rossiiskoi tserkvi, 11 vols. (Moscow: Izdanie Sobornogo Soveta, 1918), 6:64. 67. Strickland, Making of Holy Russia, 24. 68. I. Riabukhin, “Pervyi edinovercheskii sezd,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no 4 (1907): 15. 69. “Viatskii edinovercheskii sezd,” no. 42, 1093. 70. S. Shleev, “Vnimaniiu edinovertsev,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 2 (1907): 1–2. 71. For detailed accounts of this musical tradition, see A. J. Swan, “The Znamenny Chant of the Russian Church—Parts I–III,” Musical Quarterly 26,

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nos. 2–4 (1940): 232–243, 365–380, 529–545; J. L. Roccasalvo, “The Znamenny Chant,” Musical Quarterly 74, no. 2 (1990): 217–241. 72. For an interesting account on the revival of the Old Believer singing style in late imperial Russia, see I. V. Dynnikova, Morozovskii khor v kontekste staroobriadcheskoi kultury nachala XX veka (Moscow: Indrik, 2009). 73. Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd, 92. 74. Ibid., 73. 75. S. I. Sungurov, “O drevnem kriukovom penii i penchesko-uchitelskoi edinovercheskoi shkole,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 12 (1906): 7. 76. Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd, 82–83. 77. G. Goviadin, “Vzgliad edinovertsa na svoi shkoly,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 10 (1906): 9–10. 78. G. Dribintsev, “Tserkovnaia shkola v edinovercheskom prikhode,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 22–23 (1908): 1. 79. S. Shleev, “K otkrytiiu pravoslavno-staroobriadcheskogo realnogo uchilishcha v g. S.-Peterburge,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 40–41 (1907): 2. 80. Shleev, “K otkrytiiu pravoslavno-staroobriadcheskogo,” 3. 81. RGIA, f. 796, op. 197, 6 ot. 3 st., d. 111, l. 1. 82. Shleev, “K otkrytiiu pravoslavno-staroobriadcheskogo,” 3. 83. Vtoroi vserossiiskii, 60. 84. V. Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 13. 85. RGIA, f. 796, op. 190, 6 otd., 3 st., d. 15, l. 111. 86. I. Egorov, “K voprosu o vserossiiskom bratstve staro-pravoslavnykh,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 13 (1906): 12. 87. S. Shleev, “Edinovercheskoe bratstvo,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 30–31 (1908): 4. 88. S. Shleev, “K otkrytiiu edinovercheskogo bratstva,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 20–21 (1908): 3. 89. Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, 40–41. 90. Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd, 219–222. 91. Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, 36–40. 92. M. Cheltsov, “O veroterpimosti (Po povodu statei L. N. Tolstogo i arkhiepiskopa Volynskogo Antoniia),” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 2 (1906): 9–10. 93. Shleev initially tried to keep the slogan and changed the name of the journal to Glagol vremen (Word of the Times) but evidently to no avail. N. P. Zimina, Put na Golgofu, 2 vols. (Moscow: Pravoslavnyi Sviato-Tikhonskii gumanitarnyi universitet, 2005), 1:107. 94. I. Cherednikov, “Klimovskaia kazanskaia edinovercheskaia tserkov,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 8 (1907): 11–14. 95. “Pisma k redaktsiiu,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 10 (1906): 15.

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96. “Vozzvanie,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 10 (1906): 16. 97. L. Zavarin, “Golos edinovertsev-kargopoltsev,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 7 (1906): 15–16. 98. D. Scarborough, “Faith without Works Is Dead: Sacred Space and Civil Society in Late Imperial Moscow and Tver,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 63, no. 2 (2015): 207–232. 99. A mutual aid fund for all the edinoverie parishes of the empire was another project floated in the pages of Pravda pravoslaviia. See G. Dribintsev, “Fond dlia vsepomoshchestvovaniia bedneishim edinovercheskim tserkvam Rossiiskoi imperii,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 24–25 (1908): 7–9. 100. See, for example, the advert for the Old Believer journal Staroobriadets in Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 16–17 (1907): 16. 101. Shleev tried to use the book to obtain a master’s degree in theology from the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy in 1911 and the St. Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy in 1913 but was refused by both institutions. Zimina, Put na Golgofu, 1:150–152. 102. Shleev, v svoem, 3. 103. P. A., “Mnenie startsa protoiereia ob edinoverii i avstriiskom sviashchenstve,” Glagol vremen, no. 12 (1906): 8. 104. I. Legatov, O sovremennykh nuzhdakh edinoveriia i o merakh dlia sblizheniia staroobriadtsev s pravoslavnoi tserkoviu (Arkhangelsk: V. Cherepanov, 1905), 30. 105. V. M. Skvortsov, Pervyi vserossiiskii edinovercheskii sezd (St. Petersburg, 1912), 38. 106. Antonii (Khrapovitskii), Okruzhnoe poslanie ko vsem otdeliaiushchimsia ot pravoslavnoi tserkvi staroobriadtsam (St. Petersburg: V. M. Skvortsov, 1912). 107. Vtoroi vserossiiskii, 12. 108. This was the response of Ioann (Kartushin), the Belaia Krinitsa bishop of Moscow, to a letter from Antonii (Khrapovitskii) sent on April 29, 1906. Antonii (Khrapovitskii), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg: I. L. Tuzov, 1911–1918), 1:512. 109. V. Chaplin et al., eds., Otzyvy eparkhialnykh arkhereev po voprosu o tserkovnoi reforme, 3 vols. (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Krutitskogo dvora, 2004), 1:634. 110. H. J. Coleman, “Defining Heresy: The Fourth Missionary Congress and the Problem of Cultural Power after 1905 in Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 52, no. 1 (2004): 85. 111. M. Agursky, “Caught in a Cross Fire: The Russian Church between Holy Synod and Radical Right, 1905–1908,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 59, no. 1 (1984): 163–196. 112. For the fates of Antonin (Granovskii), Mikhail (Semenov), and Grigorii Petrov, see Roslof, Red Priests, 8; Dixon, “Archimandrite Mikhail,” 705–708.

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113. S. Dixon, “The Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia, 1721–1917,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity 9 vols., ed. M. Angold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 5:342. 114. “Viatskii edinovercheskii sezd,” 44, 1156; Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd, 59–61; “O zaniatiiakh IV-go vserossiiskogo missionerskogo sezda v gor. Kieve,” Pribavleniia k tserkovnym vedomostiam, no. 36 (1908): 1741. 115. Zhurnaly i protokoly zasedanii vysochaishche uchrezhdennago predsobornago prisutstviia, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipografiia, 1906–1907), 2:219–220. 116. RGIA, f. 796, op. 187, d. 7174, l. 3ob. 117. RGIA, f. 796, op. 204, 6 ot., 3 st., d. 12, l. 1ob-2. 118. RGIA, f. 796, op. 195, d. 1441, l. 1ob. 119. RGIA, f. 796, op. 194, d. 1767, l. 1. 120. Ibid., l. 5. 121. Ibid., ll. 9–9ob. 122. A. Kravetskii, Tserkovnaia missiia v epokhu peremen (mezhdu propovediu i dialogom) (Moscow: Kruglyi stol po religioznomu obrazovaniu i diakonii, 2012). 123. Shleev, Edinoverie v svoem, 186. 124. Skvortsov, Pervyi vserossiiskii edinovercheskii sezd, 61. 125. N. Ivanovskii, “K voprosu O edinovercheskom arkhieree, v sviazi s drugimi voprosami otnositelno edinoveriia,” Missionerskoe obozrenie, no. 7–8 (1906): 96. 126. See, for instance, I. Polianskii, Nuzhen li edinovercheskii episkop? (Moscow: Russkaia pechatnia, 1912), 11. 127. Shleev and his cohorts pointed out that the military and court clergy and the stauropegic monasteries were also directed by the Synod rather than by the diocesan bishops. Shleev, Edinoverie v svoem, 246. 128. Polianskii, Nuzhen, 13–14. 129. Simon (Shleev), Edinoverie v svoem vnutrennem razvitii (Moscow: Medium, 2004), 400. 130. Quite a few were reluctant to even make this concession, such as Nazarii (Kirillov), the bishop of Nizhnii Novgorod. Nazarii, “K voprosu o kliatvakh Antiokhiiskogo patriarkha Makariia i sobora 1656 g. na znamenuiushchikhsia dvuperstno,” Missionerskoe obozrenie, no. 1 (1910): 33–42; no. 2 (1910): 222–233. 131. “O zaniatiiakh,” no. 36, 1740. 132. Zhurnaly i protokoly, 244–245. 133. P. Aksenov, “Vynuzhdennye rechi,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 8 (1906): 1–3. 134. “Dnevnik edinovertsa, byvshogo na missionerskom sezde,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 34–35 (1908): 19. 135. Some edinovertsy from Ekaterinburg complained that they had not been properly represented at the second national congress in 1917: GARF, f. R-3431, op. 1, d. 365, l. 22.

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136. See V. Senatov, “O smysle edinovercheskogo episkopstva,” Missionerskoe obozrenie, no. 16 (1905): 823–836; no. 17 (1905): 1032–1045; S. Shleev, “K voprosu: Kakoi episkop nuzhen edinoveriiu?” Missionerskoe obozrenie, no. 11 (1905): 219–242. 137. GARF, f. R-3431, op. 1, d. 365, ll. 75–75ob. 138. RGIA, f. 796, op. 190, 6 otd., 3 st., d. 15, l. 134. 139. RGIA, f. 797, op. 77, 5 otd., 3 st., d. 3, l. 1. Many thanks to Simon Dixon for this reference. 140. RGIA, f. 796, op. 193, d. 1959, ll. 53–54. 141. A. Ukhtomskii, Intuitsiia sovesti (St. Petersburg: Peterburgskii pisatel, 1996), 384. 142. GARF, f. R-3431, op. 1, d. 365, ll. 87–89. 143. Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev (edinovertsev) (St. Petersburg, 1912), 370. St. Anna of Kashin was a fourteenth-century princess from the Grand Duchy of Tver who was canonized in 1611; however, because it was alleged that the hand of her preserved body was stuck in the Old Believer two-fingered sign of the cross, she was decanonized in 1678, after the Nikonian reforms. She continued to be worshipped by the Old Believers: in 1909, she was again canonized by the Church, partially at the request of the edinovertsy. For a description of the recanonization and its importance for edinoverie, see Shleev, Edinoverie v svoem, 451–456. 144. Skvortsov, Pervyi vserossiiskii edinovercheskii sezd, 21, 26. 145. Ibid., 38. 146. Shalaev, “Resultaty edinovercheskogo sezda,” Tserkov, no. 6 (1912): 140. 147. Cunningham, Vanquished Hope, 91. 148. Andrei (Ukhtomskii), Trudy, ed. T. G. Sidash and S. D. Sapozhnika (St. Petersburg: Svoe izdatelstvo, 2013), 223. 149. On the patriarchal election, see S. Dixon, “Orthodoxy and Revolution: The Restoration of the Russian Patriarchate in 1917,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 28 (2018): 149–174; F. Silano, “(Re)Constructing an Orthodox ‘Scenario of Power’: The Restoration of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate in Revolutionary Russia (1917–1918),” Revolutionary Russia 32, no. 1 (2019): 1–27. 150. For the church revolution and the breakdown of ecclesiastical authority, see P. G. Rogoznyi, Tserkovnaia revoliutsiia 1917 goda: Vysshee dukhovenstvo Rossiisskoi tserkvi v borbe za vlast v eparkhiiakh posle fevralskoi revoliutsii (St. Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2008); C. Evtuhov, “The Church’s Revolutionary Moment: Diocesan Congresses and Grassroots Politics in 1917,” in Russian Culture in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 1: Popular Culture, the Arts, and Institutions, ed. M. Frame, B. Kolonitskii, S. G. Marks, and M. K. Stockdale (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 377–402; P. Brown, “The Orthodox Church in Revolutionary Cheliabinsk: Reform, Counter-Reform, and Popular Revolution in 1917,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 59, no. 1–2 (2017): 70–100.

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151. RGIA, f. 796, op. 204, 6 otd. 3 st., d. 72, l. 1. 152. Vtoroi vserossiiskii, 20. 153. Ibid., 64–78. 154. Ibid., 79–80. 155. For the proposed replacement to Metropolitan Platon’s rules, see Appendix B. 156. For the best discussions of the council in English, see H. Destivelle, The Moscow Council (1917–1918): The Creation of the Conciliar Institutions of the Russian Orthodox Church, trans. M. Plekon (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015); C. Evtuhov, “The Church in the Russian Revolution: Arguments for and against Restoring the Patriarchate at the Church Council of 1917–1918,” Slavic Review 50, no. 3 (1991): 497–511. 157. I. Aivazov, ed., Deianiia piatogo vserossiiskogo missionerskogo sezda (Moscow, 1917), 30. 158. GARF, f. R-3431, op. 1, d. 367, l. 33ob. 159. For Georgian and Ukrainian autocephaly, see P. Werth, “Georgian Autocephaly and the Ethnic Fragmentation of Orthodoxy,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 23 (2003): 74–100; B. Bociurkiw, “The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, 1920–1930: A Case Study in Religious Modernization,” in Religions and Modernization in the Soviet Union, ed. D. J. Dunn (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977), 310–347. 160. Deianiia sviashchennogo sobora, 6:24. 161. Ibid., 6:25. 162. Ibid., 6:44. 163. Ibid. 164. Ibid., 6:63. 165. Ibid. 166. Ibid., 6:101. 167. Ibid., 6:109. 168. Ibid., 7:97. 169. Ibid., 6:123. 170. Ibid. 171. Ibid. The words “suffragan bishop” (vikarnyi episkop) were deliberately not used since Shleev argued that their Latin origins would provide a “temptation” for the edinovertsy. 172. Shleev, “K voprosu: Kakoi episkop nuzhen edinoveriiu?” 219. 173. Deianiia sviashchennogo sobora, 6:134. 174. Ibid., 6:135. 175. Ibid., 6:144. Shleev was routinely reprimanded for insulting other delegates. He was forced to apologize to N. M. Shakhov for referring to him as a Nikonian while Serafim alleged Shleev had frequently told him that “I have lost my conscience and forgotten God and his law.”

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176. Ibid., 7:44. 177. Ibid. 178. Ibid., 7:45. 179. Ibid., 7:84. 180. Ibid., 7:98. 181. For the full list of resolutions taken with regard to edinoverie, see Sobranie opredelenii i postanovlenii sviashchennogo sobora pravoslavnoi Rossiiskoi tserkvi 1917–1918 gg. (Moscow: Izdanie sobornogo soveta, 1918), 3–5. 182. For the replacement of the rules of Metropolitan Platon, see Appendix B.

five

k

LIVED EDINOVERIE, 1825 –1917

Introduction For almost the entirety of edinoverie’s existence, it was bound by the rules of Platon. These gave it a uniform set of privileges and restrictions that could be applied across the Russian Empire. They set out how edinoverie was to fit in to the administrative structures of the Russian Orthodox Church and determined the relationship of edinovertsy with parishioners, priests, and prelates. They defined the shape of edinoverie and its position in relation to both Orthodoxy and Old Belief, providing the contours that demarcated all three groups. The administrative and confessional boundaries formed through the 1800 settlement were not theoretical or abstract. Through church policy, they affected the religious lives of believers, molding the ways in which they converted and worshipped. “Edinoverie became thought of as inseparable from the rules of 1800,”1 one historian commented: the Old Believers even occasionally dubbed the edinovertsy “Platonites.”2 However, many manifestations of edinoverie religious life emerged from the caesuras that the sixteen rules left open. Nicholas I could claim an almost equal influence on edinoverie: the way in which he used it as a mechanism of coercion ultimately transformed its fortunes in ways that were not entirely predictable. Equally, local conditions shaped edinoverie, sometimes just as much as edicts and instructions from the central authorities. This was especially the case given that “before the Great Reforms, practical mediation between the state religion and multiconfessional groups was often relegated to provincial bureaucrats and bishops to sort out among themselves.”3

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This chapter is a longue durée account of how the rules of Platon and Nicholaevan persecution formed the experience of edinovertsy. I consider numerical strength, geographic distribution, administrative structures, and distinctive institutions. A second aim is to examine how the contradictions inherent within the rules of Platon helped create a sense of difference between edinoverie and Orthodoxy. It was not only the boundaries between the two groups that helped foster this separation but also the privileges that the edinovertsy gained from the rules. These privileges were meant to make edinoverie more attractive to those within and outside of the new movement. Third, I examine edinoverie’s relationship with Old Belief by taking into account polemics, daily interactions, and conversions. By analyzing the difficulties that edinoverie had with both the Church and the schism, we come to a better understanding of its liminal position and the problem of confessional identity.

Statistics When it comes to the statistics of edinoverie, the historian is hamstrung by an unfortunate insufficiency. From its creation in 1800 to the Church Council of 1917, no official survey of the number of edinovertsy was conducted.4 This makes it impossible to provide substantive figures about edinoverie’s size or to ask questions about growth or decline over this considerable period.5 The edinovertsy found this issue no less problematic. The second national edinoverie congress in July 1917 addressed the question, deciding to compile a thorough census. However, this work was never started.6 Secular actors were equally confused about the matter of edinoverie statistics, with rather telling consequences: as late as 1894, the army’s chief of staff asked the Synod whether they needed “a separate chart for the edinovertsy [when counting them] or the inclusion of the edinovertsy under one common rubric with the Orthodox, since now, when the edinovertsy are placed in the same chart as schismatics, cases have occurred when regimental priests refuse them confession or the sacraments.”7 E. E. Lebedev, writing a statistical essay in 1904 based entirely on the annual reports of the ober procurator, stated that 235,498 people converted from Old Belief to edinoverie between 1828 and 1895. Nearly 70 percent, or 164,504, joined between 1828 and 1855.8 However, it is difficult to use this figure even as a baseline. Such conversion statistics were legendarily inaccurate since they were often inflated, and they did not account for the birth or death rate within edinoverie, apostasy from it to Old Belief, or transfer to it from Orthodoxy. Antonii (Khrapovitskii) guessed at the number of one million in 1918 but this

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figure is highly improbable.9 One can also dismiss the claim of one Old Believer journalist writing in 1914 that “to the 15 million Old Believers, the edinovertsy do not number more than one hundred thousand.”10 By using diocesan figures, we can come to a very rough approximation of edinoverie’s standing in the final decades of imperial Russia. I have relatively precise data for Perm (41 parishes and 54,148 parishioners in 1911), Tobolsk (17 parishes, 20,614 parishioners in 1915), Tomsk (26,635 parishioners in 1901), the city of St. Petersburg (4 parishes, 2,865 parishioners in 1899), Tver (5 parishes, 1,826 parishioners in 1914), Polotsk (8 parishes, 4,547 parishioners in 1884), Kostroma (19 parishes, 9,672 parishioners in 1911), Ekaterinburg (33 parishes, 24,384 parishioners in 1887), Orenburg (11 parishes, 15,379 parishioners as of 1898: the figure excludes numbers for the Uralsk and Turgaisk oblasts), Viatka (16 parishes, 8,969 parishioners in 1912), Penza (12 parishes, 3,591 parishioners in 1905), Riga (3 churches with 984 parishioners in 1914), and the Starodub region in the Chernigov diocese (17 parishes, 10,153 parishioners in 1905). Moscow had two principal parishes and two much smaller ones under its monasteries. An Old Believer journalist suggested in 1908 that the parishioners there consisted of four hundred to five hundred families.11 Nizhnii Novgorod had around 14,000 parishioners in 23 parishes in 1904.12 In the European north of Russia, I. N. Ruzhinskaia has counted 38 parishes by the end of the imperial era.13 The one place in the empire where the edinovertsy did make up a majority was the Uralsk oblast. A report of the hetman from 1901 stated that of an estimated 112,000 Christians, there were 3,000 Orthodox, 54,000 edinovertsy, and over 50,000 Old Believers.14 The unusual predominance of edinoverie in the region led one excited writer to proclaim that “the Uralsk oblast is truly a little kingdom of edinoverie!”15 If we collate all of the figures provided above, it is certain that there were never a million edinovertsy: indeed, it seems unlikely that their population ever peaked above 350,000. In terms of parishes, there is clear evidence of growth across the nineteenth century. Simeon Shleev stated that no more than ten edinoverie churches were founded throughout the reign of Alexander I (1801–1825). By 1851, there were a total of 179 parishes.16 One writer counted 223 edinoverie churches throughout the Russian Empire as of 1864,17 a substantial growth rate no doubt aided by Nicholas I’s repression of Old Belief. The last official statistic is from 1897, when the annual account of the ober procurator stated there were 278 parishes.18 This figure does not support the optimistic estimate of 600 parishes given by various individuals in the early twentieth century since this would imply more than a doubling in size in two decades.19 Irina Paert’s estimate of 300 parishes by 1917 is probably close to the mark.20

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Edinoverie was thus a tiny fraction of the total Orthodox population. Even in Perm, the edinovertsy of the diocese made up only 5.5 percent of all those registered as Orthodox in 1881.21 If we take the figure of 350,000 and compare it to the number of Orthodox in Russia in 1897 (87,123,604), then we find that they constituted 0.4 percent of the total. No less notable was that the edinovertsy were concentrated most strongly in distant regions of the empire. It is, therefore, prudent to assume that edinoverie had only a marginal impact on the lives of most Orthodox believers. This may account for the relative lack of attention that Orthodox prelates paid to edinoverie parishes, a common complaint that the edinovertsy had against their bishops. Not only did some of them hold edinoverie rituals in contempt but also the number of this flock was so small in comparison to the rest of the faithful that it must have seemed barely worth a hierarch’s already constrained time to deal with them, especially when it was so easy to trample on the sensibilities of the edinovertsy. Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) was once quoted as saying, “It was easier to manage a whole diocese than one edinoverie parish.”22 Thus, a feeling of separateness and isolation from the Russian Orthodox Church may have derived from relative numerical insignificance. Edinoverie’s impact on Old Belief in demographic and geographic terms was more pronounced. Edinoverie parishes were formed out of Old Believer communities, a fact that ensured Old Believers would reside near the new churches. Therefore, relations between the edinovertsy and their former coreligionists were much more prolonged and closer than those they had with the Orthodox. In Viatka, 6,724 Old Believers lived in edinoverie parishes: thus, only 55 percent of their residents were edinovertsy.23 In Starodub, the Old Believers outnumbered the edinovertsy almost five to one.24 Given that their numbers in all of these cases were undoubtedly underestimated, the data point to how intensive the contact was between Old Believers and edinovertsy within edinoverie parishes. Comparing the national figures for both edinoverie and Old Belief gives a sense of the former’s missionary success over the course of its existence. General estimates for Old Belief at the beginning of the twentieth century range between ten million and twenty million.25 Therefore, edinoverie constituted 1.75–3.5 percent of the general total, little more than a drop in the ocean. However, it is somewhat misleading to consider Old Belief as a single category, given that it was divided into a considerable number of concords. While these concords were larger than the figures imply, edinoverie was numerically comparable to the separate priestly groups: official statistics for the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy and the beglopopovtsy in 1912 stated that the former was 788,425

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strong and the latter 260,950.26 It is certain that by 1917 edinoverie had not accomplished its original mission of bringing the schism to an end: indeed, it had hardly scratched the surface.

A dm inistr ation Platon’s sixth rule stated that the edinovertsy were directly under the supervision of the bishop, thereby removing the consistory from the chain of command. Nicholas I’s edict of April 5, 1845, directly confirmed this, telling the bishops, “In the matters of edinoverie churches, do not allow any participation of either the ecclesiastical consistories or other diocesan authorities.”27 However, the fact that this was rarely enforced gave rise to friction. Three edinovertsy from the town of Nikolaev on November 5, 1909, complained that “the subordination to the orders of the ecclesiastical consistory terribly oppresses us.” They accused the consistory of closing schools and filling those that remained with Orthodox students and teachers, destroying edinoverie singing, and seizing parish funds.28 Platon’s sixth rule gave the edinovertsy a right that they were reluctant to surrender. It made every incursion by the consistory seem like an Orthodox violation of treasured edinoverie privileges and furnished opportu­ nities for friction between edinovertsy and the bishops. In 1907, an elder at the Nikolskaia church in St. Petersburg refused to give an explanation as to why he had refused a priest an allowance from church funds, reasoning that the consistory had no right to demand an explanation from him under the law of 1845. For his contumacy, the metropolitan removed him from his post.29 Deprived of the consistories, the edict of 1845 allowed bishops to create a new intermediary in the form of edinoverie deans. This was a way for the bishops to delegate some of their duties to trustworthy priests, an action warranted by the rapidly growing number of edinoverie parishes from 1825: “The dean makes himself a mediator or, more correctly, a guide for the reciprocal spiritual connections between representatives of the holy hierarchy and mem­ bers of the edinoverie flock.”30 The bishop appointed these men from among the edinoverie clergy. They were typically the priests of the largest or most senior churches of the diocese who were assigned districts (okrugi) that covered some of the edinoverie parishes. The number of edinoverie deans depended on the size of the edinoverie population of a diocese. St. Petersburg only had one dean while Tobolsk had three, although the third district contained only one church.31 The parishes of Ekaterinburg diocese were divided into three okrugi: Ekaterinburg uezd (containing fifteen churches), Verkhoture uezd (six churches), and Shadrinsk uezd (twelve churches).32 However, as late as 1905,

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the twelve edinoverie parishes of Penza diocese were administratively part of Orthodox okrugi.33 Thus, the edinovertsy of most dioceses were part of a hierarchical order very close to that of the Orthodox, with the bishop at the top, the dean in the middle, and the priest at the bottom. However, the middle and bottom ranks of this hierarchy were usually dominated by edinoverie clergy, giving the impression of a local edinoverie chain of command spoiled only by the presence of an Orthodox prelate at the top. This view was reinforced by the fact that deaneries fused edinoverie parishes together into groups distinct from their Orthodox neighbors. An Orthodox parish might be right next to a edinoverie one but the latter would be supervised by its own dean: “In their administration, edinoverie churches are separated from the ranks of other Orthodox churches.”34

Th e Wor ld of th e Cl ergy Many of the secular, or white, clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church were in a particularly difficult position in their parishes, stuck as they were between the bishop and their parishioners. Both held power over them. The bishop expected them to improve moral standards, combat Old Belief, and perform administrative tasks: if they failed to accomplish these duties, then they could expect reprimands and punishment. However, since most clergy did not receive a wage from the state or the Church, they were economically dependent on their parishioners, who gave them emoluments for key ritual ceremonies, like baptisms, marriages, and funerals.35 Trying to prohibit popular superstitions or curb the excessive consumption of alcohol would necessarily lead to confronta­ tions between the priest and his flock and the possible cessation of donations. This was true for the edinoverie clergy as well: “The unpaid edinoverie clergy are between two extremes. Required to strictly insist that the edinovertsy fulfil their religious duties, they risk being left without any means to live: in being indulgent to the weakness of their parishioners and in satisfying their arbitrary requirements, they risk trampling on church rights and civil laws.”36 Dependence on payments “effectively frustrated attempts by the Church and state to use clergy as ‘official agents’ for social and religious control.”37 The state itself was responsible for this situation. When Catherine the Great secularized the Church’s land in the 1760s, she essentially deprived the institution of the ability to pay its clergy a wage. Dependence on parishioners was even more pronounced for edinoverie clergy because the second rule of Metropolitan Platon confirmed the

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electoral principle. Clergy were dependent on their parishioners not only for financial support but also for their positions: in edinoverie parishes, “the priest is nothing, his parishioners everything.”38 From the point of view of the Synod and the hierarchy, the matter was scarcely any better. Since the edinovertsy often chose former Old Believer ministers to become village priests, they could hardly rely on them to strengthen the sense of union with the Russian Orthodox Church and to struggle against Old Belief. While bishops retained the right to confirm or deny elections, refusal to confirm the parish’s choice might push them back to Old Belief.39 Such priests were not the best supervisors for the edinovertsy and, indeed, posed a considerable danger if it later emerged that their conversions were less than genuine. A second problem with the electoral principle was that it made infighting a prominent characteristic of edinoverie parishes. Parties could form around candidates and lead protracted campaigns to have their man elected to the posi­ tion, causing prolonged disruption and instability. The most famous example of such a conflict was the one that occurred when Simeon Shleev attempted to oust Archpriest Nikolai Kastorskii, the head priest (nastoiatel) of the Nikolskaia church in St. Petersburg between 1905 and 1907. The struggle became so intense that Kastorskii’s supporters reported to the Petersburg police that Shleev had failed to say prayers for the tsar, a political crime.40 The conflict was only resolved on November 11, 1907, when Kastorskii died, allowing Shleev to be elected to the vacant position. While extreme, the incident in Petersburg was not unique. In Warsaw diocese, six psalmists came and went in the course of two years because of the “party behavior” of the parishioners.41 In a 1911 clerical election held in the Kazan edinoverie church of the Four Evangelists, protests occurred when an Orthodox priest (who “consented to convert [perekhod] not out of love for the old rituals but for other reasons”) was elected: the petitioners alleged that the dean had organized the election (thus supposedly violating Platon’s rule that bishops manage edinoverie parishes without mediation) and had allowed non-parishioners to vote.42 Another disadvantage of the electoral system was the cultural distance it could foster between the edinoverie clergy and their Orthodox counterparts. By 1860, over 80 percent of Orthodox priests wielded a seminary certificate and thus had undergone a similar formative experience that helped foster a sense of soslovie consciousness and, later, professional pride.43 Those edinoverie priests who had previously been Old Believer ministers did not possess this education or the experiences that came with it. Nor were they party to the closed clerical cultural world, which came complete with its own forms of dress, reading materials, and values. An insight into the feelings of a new edinoverie priest when

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confronted by this world is offered by Pavel Ivanovich Smirnov, a convert who went to Novgorod to be ordained by the archbishop in 1892: I knocked again on the door in order to be heard. Suddenly an alarmed man came running up to me: —Who is making such a racket, why are you here? —I have come to the bishop to be ordained as a priest. The man looked at me from head to foot with a suspicious gaze. It must have been the first time he had seen such a creature: I was in an Old Believer caftan, an old peasant hat, simple boots, and with a knapsack in my hands: in a word, the purest rural provincial peasant. He looked at me and said: wait here. Then he returned and took me with him. I went to the bishop, prayed, accepted his blessing, and gave him the letter from Father Ksenofont.44 The bishop read the letter, sat me in a chair, and began to ask how I had lived in the schism, why I had joined the Orthodox Church, and other such questions. I, of course, told him all the details and cited to him many texts from the Scriptures about the illegitimate separation of the schismatics from the Church and how, through knowledge of the Scriptures, it was clear that bishops were placed in [the Church]. Good, he said, if it pleases God, you will be a priest, let us pray. We prayed. Only now, he said, the matter is thus: tomorrow I leave to review the diocese for an entire month, you have not arrived in time. Did you really not read about this in Tserkovnye vedomosti?45 —No. Truth be told, this is the first time I have heard about this Tserkovnye vedomosti.46

Smirnov, living in Novgorod while awaiting the bishop’s return, further reported that “at first the brothers of the episcopal residence were shy of me: they looked at me and asked me questions. I must have seemed like an alien creature to them.” He proceeded to tell a hieromonk that he had placed a crucifix in the wrong place (“truly, my remark confused many that day”) and was bewildered when the bishop’s steward came to fit him for clerical vestments: “I did not even know that a priest needed a cassock.”47 Smirnov found this world of newspapers and cassocks was alien to him. Nor would it have become any less so since he had only a month to learn the rudiments of service before his ordination. Such short time periods seem to have been typical: in 1850, the new edinoverie hieromonk Avtonom (Ankudinov) was trained by the bishop of Vitebsk over the course of a visit to the former’s church that lasted only a few days: given that both Smirnov and Avtonom had previously been priestless preceptors, with no experience of performing the liturgy, such can

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hardly have been adequate.48 If their experiences are representative, then there must have been a considerable cultural gulf between new edinoverie priests and their Orthodox colleagues. Of primary importance to ascertaining the extent of that gulf is to look at how many edinoverie clergy lacked church education. There are no national figures but numbers from individual dioceses give an indication. In 1911, in Perm, there were forty-one ordained priests (sviashchenniki) in the diocese: no educational information is provided for eight of these men.49 Of the remaining thirty-three, eleven had not received any formal education: this included the dean. Seven (21%) had received church schooling and fourteen (42%) had been educated in state schools: only one was a seminary graduate.50 Therefore, 75 percent of the edinoverie clergy in Perm had been educated outside of the clerical estate schooling system. Of those who had been educated by the Church, only one had managed to go through the system in its entirety. In Viatka in 1912, 84 percent of the Orthodox clergy had at least some seminary education while none of the edinoverie clergy had.51 Of the eighty-seven ordained edinoverie servitors in Tobolsk between 1874 and 1915, 56 percent had some level of church schooling but only 20 percent had attended the seminary.52 In St. Petersburg, in 1899, only three of ten clergy had not been to the seminary.53 The educational level of the clergy showed considerable regional variation but in general was quite low, even compared to the declining seminary graduation rate among Orthodox clergy in the late imperial era.54 This was either because of the election of former Old Believer ministers as priests or because some edinovertsy held Orthodox schools in suspicion.55 Clashes between the Orthodox and edinoverie priesthoods could also take on an economic dimension. If the edinovertsy were supposed to eventually abandon their rituals and join Orthodoxy proper, as the second attached opinion of Platon dictated, then they would have to leave edinoverie parishes and deprive the clergy of emoluments: “Here the interests of the clergy are contrary to the interests of the Church itself.”56 For their part, the Orthodox clergy also had reason to fear losing parishioners, and income, to nearby edinoverie churches. Between 1828 and 1829, one edinoverie priest in Cheliabinsk was able to increase his parish from 660 to 1,443 purely by proselytizing among the Orthodox. The result was outrage from Orthodox priests: his actions “were not lawful and not in the interests of Orthodox clergy, since they reduced the flock and equally served to [bring] disorder into the life of neighbouring Orthodox parishes.”57 The complaints to the consistory resulted in the removal of the edinoverie cleric. In 1898, Aleksei Iordanskii was also removed from his position as the edinoverie dean of

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Kostroma diocese after Orthodox priests complained that “Father Iordanskii’s system is to attract rich Orthodox parishioners to edinoverie.”58 Given that Orthodox priests lived off remuneration from their parishioners, it is not surprising to find that they were often vigilant defenders of the fifth rule of Platon that prohibited Orthodox transfer to edinoverie churches. Thus, the settlement of 1800 interacted with the general economic condition of the clergy to reinforce edinoverie’s place on the outskirts of the Orthodox confession. On occasion, an Orthodox priest would be selected to serve in a edinoverie parish. While some edinovertsy defended the right to elect one of their own very strongly, others acquiesced to the choice of the bishop, even if he picked an Orthodox cleric. Parishioners of the Sosednenskaia church in the Petersburg region accepted Father Simeon Zhemchuzhin, an Orthodox priest with some knowledge of the old rite, when he was selected by Metropolitan Palladii (Raev). His presence only became onerous in 1902, more than a decade after his arrival, when a faction of edinovertsy took umbrage at the transfer of the church from edinoverie to Orthodoxy.59 No doubt a limiting factor in the appointment of Orthodox priests was their ignorance of the old rites. A Tomsk missionary congress in 1898 put its finger on the problem when it argued that “the majority of edinoverie priests from the Orthodox are completely unacquainted with the peculiarities of edinoverie church singing and also with the liturgical rituals.”60 No less than this, Orthodox priests probably did not want these appointments. L. N. Suslova refers to an instance in Tobolsk diocese of an Orthodox priest being punished for a misdemeanor by transfer to a edinoverie parish and more than forty petitions from clergy asking the bishop not to inflict a similar fate on them.61 The financial situation of edinoverie priests depended very much on the economic life of their parishes. This was subject to enormous degrees of variation. No doubt the richest edinoverie churches in the empire were those in Petersburg. The grandiose Nikolskaia church was so wealthy that its four clergy lived on the 28,000 rubles derived annually from the interest on church capital. This was supplemented by donations from rich Petersburg merchants and the rent received from two apartment buildings that the Church owned. The clergy also received accommodation.62 Elsewhere the picture was bleaker. In Perm, the richest parish was SredneEgvinskoe, where the clergy received 220 rubles in donations in 1910, supple­ mented by 340 rubles in rent from its landholdings and the provision of housing for each of the three priests.63 This did not necessarily mean that the parishioners in Egvinskoe were rich: there were just more of them since this parish was the largest in the diocese with 2,800 edinovertsy. On the poorer end, a new

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parish in Arkhangelsk diocese received only 25 rubles in donations in 1895, making its clergy entirely dependent on stipends received from the state.64 In Tver, donations in 1914 were as high as 209 rubles and as low as 140: clergy of the main parish in Torzhok also received 1,600 rubles in interest from church capital.65 No uniform policy was enacted to extend state payments to edinoverie clergy, but most parishes seem to have received subsidies by the end of the nineteenth century. In Polotsk in 1884, all of the clergy received payments, ranging from 150 for psalmists to 550 for the lucky priest of the village of Iakubino.66 Nonetheless, the Third All-Russian Missionary Congress argued in 1897 that “better maintenance of edinoverie priests could influence the improvement of the parishes themselves” and, therefore, edinoverie priests should receive 600 rubles and psalmists 200 from the state budget.67 Thus, the edinoverie clergy were no better off than their Orthodox counterparts in terms of either donations or treasury payments. However, there was one financial benefit to officiating in a edinoverie church. An edict of 1808 exempted edinoverie from forwarding the profits from candle sales to the diocesan administration.68 This could mean considerable additional wealth for a church and its clergy if the parish was large or located in a city: the small Solunskaia parish in St. Petersburg made 1,085 rubles in candle sales in 1909.69

Th e Pa r ish a n d Pa r ishioner s The character of the parish was dependent on hundreds of minute factors like wealth, proximity to the diocesan administration, size of the Old Believer population, distance to the nearest Orthodox priest, character of the bishop, and qualities of the clergy. Geography was no less important. Roads helped and rivers hindered the edinovertsy in gaining access not only to the sacraments but also to parish institutions, particularly schools and charitable foundations. In its administration, the edinoverie parish would not have looked much different from an Orthodox one. Its governing body, the parish council, was the same, and its officials, church elders, performed the same tasks. These duties were, typically, maintaining the church and its grounds, representing the views of the parish to the clergy, and accounting for parish funds. Some parishes also attained guardianships (popechitelstvo) after they were introduced by reforms in the 1860s. These were initially intended to provide greater material support for the clergy but resulted in more parishioner participation in the economic management of their churches.70

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The distinctions in edinoverie parishes mostly came from the way in which they were formed. This process usually began with a group of Old Believers deciding to convert. They would then apply either to a missionary, the local bishop, or the Synod itself for permission to create a parish. Typically, the bishop and the Synod requested proof that the new parish was financially sustainable, whether a new church was required, and who the priest would be. Once all this had been ascertained, the Synod would form a new parish.71 The initiative to create a edinoverie parish could come from above as well as below. The archbishop of Tver in 1908 applied for permission to create a parish in his diocese in order to grant better coverage for the edinovertsy divided between the two churches of Torzhok and Rzhev.72 This process of parish formation only applied if the bishops and the Synod found it necessary or possible to provide the converts with their own parish. If there were too few converts and there was an extant edinoverie church relatively close by, they would be joined to this parish. The result was that edinoverie parishioners were often scattered in numerous villages that could be huge distances away from the church and in the midst of strong schismatic centers. Even in the relatively small central diocese of Tver, the Pokrovskaia church in Torzhok had parishioners in three villages that were between forty-five and one hundred versts distant. The 3,925 parishioners of the Troitsko-Nikolskaia church in Ekaterinburg diocese were divided between seven settlements that were anywhere between five and fifty versts apart. Most unfortunate were the 6,122 parishioners of the Blagoveshchenskaia church in Tobolsk. The parish was constituted of sixty-three different settlements, none closer than 55 versts and some as remote as 485. Given that Siberia was home to many edinovertsy, travels of great distances must have been a regular occurrence for both parishioners and priests.73 In 1842, two edinoverie priests of the Nizhnii Tagil parishes reported traveling 6,174 versts in a year between them.74 This was problematic since even the emoluments offered by these distant parishioners would have hardly offset the costs of travel. In Tomsk, several outlying communities were attached to the city church. However, the priest did not possess the funds to travel. Equally, his urban parishioners “always look on the travel [of the priest] to village parishes with great dissatisfaction and even petulance” because they supported the church materially while the rural groups did not.75 There was thus no incentive to serve or supervise these distant believers. Edinoverie priests also had to teach in the schools that were sometimes attached to their parishes, something that could take up much of their time. Instructed to go and administer confession to new converts in the Chernoe Selo (Mustvee) parish of Estland province in 1844,

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the Riga edinoverie priest Emelianov excused himself by arguing, “I absolutely cannot go three hundred versts from Riga to visit them and cleanse their consciences with the confession and Holy Sacraments because I am occupied every minute of every day of the entire week with teaching and putting the school in order.”76 This meant that the new edinovertsy were left for three years without confession. In this instance, we see that the duties of a parish priest conflicted with the additional expectation that edinoverie clergy were supposed to also function as missionaries. Fostering unity in faith with the Orthodox was undoubtedly difficult. The relations between the two groups ranged from cordial to outright enmity. For their part, Orthodox believers rarely reported complaints against the edinovertsy. This is due to several factors. For one, the edinovertsy were so few and so scattered that interaction was seldom intensive. The rules of Platon also served to limit contact. Prior to 1881, the Orthodox were forbidden from attending edinoverie churches for the sacraments. Arguments, where they were recorded, typically revolved around the possession of churches or chapels. A chapel in Perm diocese was the subject of dispute between two parishes, one edinoverie and one Orthodox. The edinovertsy asserted the right to exclusive use over it, while the Orthodox suggested a compromise solution that the edinovertsy could have access whenever they liked, apart from two holy days a year.77 This case, among others, suggests that the Orthodox were willing to reach compromises while the edinovertsy were more interested in asserting the exclusive right of access over church buildings.78 Some edinovertsy sought separate celebrations from the Orthodox: those in the city of Vitebsk petitioned twice (in 1888 and 1889) to be allowed their own exclusive cross procession when blessing the waters for Epiphany. Noting that the Orthodox “take the holy water when eating, which in our opinion is against the dogmas of the faith,” they argued that a rejection of their request would “give many a reason to apostasise from edinoverie, as if it were some kind of oppressed religion.”79 Such was a common pattern. Many of the edinovertsy, especially those who had been coerced into joining, maintained their old views on the Nikonian ritual as heretical and thus tried to keep their churches free from the stain of sin that Orthodox believers brought with them. In 1906, the bishop of Perm reported that he had allowed the edinovertsy and Old Believers of one town to use an Orthodox cemetery church for their services: “The edinovertsy and Old Believers, zealously defending the integrity of their rituals, cannot agree that the liturgy is performed by the edinoverie or the Orthodox ritual, although at different times, in one and the same church: moreover, it seems shameful [to them] that their priest serves by the edinoverie ritual and then in the Orthodox

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church by the Orthodox one.”80 In the Tomsk town of Sibiriachikha, the edinovertsy declared the Nikonian rites to be “a pinch of tobacco” (tabachnaia shchepot): in other words, heretical. Thus, “when anyone from the Orthodox, unacquainted with the local order, enters into the [edinoverie] church, they make a ruckus and drive him from the church to the gate.”81 So, there was some truth behind the argument that the edinovertsy had failed to accept the relative insignificance of ritual. In terms of religious identity, these incidents suggest that a great many edinovertsy had left the schism only in the name. They were not willing to engage with the Orthodox and evidently maintained the belief that the rituals of the Russian Church were unacceptable. Despite these examples, the relations of the edinovertsy with the Orthodox were not necessarily negative. In Nizhnii Tagil, the edinovertsy donated money to the Orthodox parish church, let their children study together with the Orthodox and marry Orthodox partners, and had those marriages performed by Orthodox priests. The edinovertsy “relate to them [the Orthodox] in the spirit of Christian love, neighbourliness, and respect.”82 In the town of Pokas in Tambov diocese, the edinovertsy went further still, declaring their desire in 1888 to fuse their parish with an Orthodox one and abandon the name “edinoverie”: they promised “to allow any Orthodox Christian in their church for joint prayers and not to shun the Orthodox for their different usage of fingers for the sign of the cross, fashionably cut dresses, or cutting their hair and shaving their beards.” In return, they asked to be allowed to continue the old style of church singing, the old books, and some rituals “not wholly in accordance with purely Orthodox [chistopravoslavnym] customs, for example the two fingers.”83 The edinovertsy further noted that they required the old rituals only for themselves and not for their children, whom they were happy to have raised according to the Nikonian rite. Who were edinoverie parishioners? In estate terms, they exclusively came from the peasantry, the petty townspeople, and the merchants. The latter group formed the economic elite of edinoverie, providing the funds for church construction and their subsequent beautification.84 In Kazan, a parish was formed in 1861 at the behest of Andrei Poduruev, a merchant of the first guild.85 Two women of the merchant estate, Ekaterina Iureva and Nadezhda Avdeeva, founded the Uralsk Pokrovskii convent in 1881.86 Merchants also functioned as the leaders of edinoverie in some dioceses. The edinoverie council, formed in Moscow in 1864–1865 to oversee the transformation of the male almshouse of the priestless Preobrazhenskoe cemetery into the Nikolskii edinoverie monastery, was formed of several edinoverie merchants, all having the rank of “honoured citizen.”87 The merchants of Nizhnii Novgorod played the predominant

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role in writing a petition in favor of reforming the rules of Platon in 1877, a fact that led Professor Ivan Nilskii to sneer that the inconsistencies in the document were due to its composers being too busy at the Great Fair to pay proper attention.88

Mona ster i e s When the monk Nikodim converted to edinoverie in 1784, he brought his mon­ astery in Chernigov with him. Only two years later, at the request of Prince Potemkin, a stone monastery was built in Tauride diocese. Their number continued to grow in the nineteenth century, reaching sixteen (eight monasteries and eight convents) by 1908. At this point, there were 99 monks, 157 nuns, and 600 novices of both genders.89 Their locations reflect concentrations of the edinoverie population: Chernigov had three, Nizhnii Novgorod two, and the Urals five. Despite the relatively small number of edinovertsy present in Moscow, it had a monastery and a convent. The most important monastic institution was the Nikolskii monastery in Moscow. Founded in 1865 to house the prominent converts from the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy, Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) decided to place it directly in the heart of the Preobrazhenskoe priestless Old Believer cemetery. That the buildings he suggested were already occupied did not faze him. The fragile justification offered was that one of the churches had already been seized and therefore most of the residents had converted (which was not the case).90 Thus the Old Believers were promptly evicted from the male almshouse and were moved to the female almshouse just down the street. The only comfort that they could muster was that they managed to take all of their old icons with them. A rumor circulated that, on the transfer of the icons, the Old Believers “saw divine grace, in the form of a fire, leave from the men’s chapel and move to the women’s court.”91 We possess remarkably little information about what monastic life in these institutions was like. Occasional reports of misconduct and disorder appear in the archival record, as was the case in 1886, when Archimandrite Gedeon, abbot of the Uralsk Nikolaevskii monastery, was removed from his position for drunkenness, although the real root of the problem might have been a conflict with the local Cossacks: a townsman speaking in Gedeon’s defense argued that “those from the Cossack estate living in the monastery always relate to out-of-towners with hostility: with the aim of getting rid of the abbot, who is an alien in terms of provenance [he was probably from Chernigov diocese], some of them have deliberately attempted to ensnare him with drunkenness.”92

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In Mogilev diocese, the Chonsko-Makarev edinoverie monastery, extant since 1845, was threatened with transfer to Orthodoxy in 1897. Its four remaining monastics, besides being “semi-literate, incapable and completely untrained for missionary service,” were not “true edinovertsy: they are all members of the Orthodox confession by provenance. The [liturgical] regulations of the edinoverie monastery are alien to them, they do not observe them in an appropriate manner.”93 Although the local edinoverie community of Gomel protested, the matter was duly resolved when the seventy-seven-year-old abbot was murdered in his sleep by a drunken locksmith, the monastery’s night watchman, and the cook.94 In terms of economic life, it would seem the edinoverie monasteries were poor, at least in comparison to the larger Orthodox ones and even to persecuted Old Believer cloisters like the Cheremshan monastery: no edinoverie monastery could have claimed to be “a large, complex business enterprise whose agricultural products were sold as far away as the Urals, the Don river valley, and the Caspian Sea.”95 Treasury payments were small (the Uspenskii monastery only received 799 rubles and 26 kopeks a year), and it seems doubtful that they would have attracted a great number of pilgrims.96 One writer, describing the Zlatoustovskii monastery in Ufa diocese, pinned down one potential reason. The monks were nearly all old men while the novices were often scarcely more than boys, training in the old ritual in order to become clergy in edinoverie churches. The result was that the monastery was deprived of any “working hands.”97 In other words, the monastery did not produce any handicrafts or produce to sell to visitors and sustain itself. The idea of the monasteries functioning as schools for the edinoverie clergy gained currency only at the beginning of the twentieth century as reformers began focusing on ways to improve the condition of the edinoverie priests and create institutions capable of providing them with the unique skills that they required (namely, knowledge of the pre-Nikonian liturgy). Edinoverie monasteries were expected to have a missionary role, serving as surveillance outposts among the Old Believers. A. D. Stolypin, the hetman of the Uralsk Cossack host, once declared that “if we manage to build a [edinoverie] monastery, then the [Old Believer] sketes will destroy themselves because adjacency with a monastery will be impossible for them: a monastery by the sketes will be better than the police.”98 However, another author ruefully opined that the same monastery “did not justify all the hopes placed on it upon its establishment . . . , it did not have any especial importance in the successful conversion of schismatics.”99 Even after 1905, the monasteries were a peripheral issue in the otherwise wide-ranging debates. Perhaps their poverty and the small number

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of monastics prevented them from taking the center stage. Nevertheless, the monasteries and convents provided another way in which the edinovertsy could be compartmentalized away from other Orthodox believers. They also further institutionalized the ritual differences that, at least according to Platon, were supposed to disappear once God had enlightened the new converts about the flaws in their rites.

Th e T y pogr a ph y In 1818, a edinoverie typography was founded in Moscow.100 Under the care of the clergy of the Troitskaia edinoverie church, its purpose was to reprint the old liturgical books from the seventeenth century.101 It was kept under strict control by the Synod. Yearly accounts of the books proposed for printing had to be sent to Petersburg for assent, a practice that continued even after the relaxing of censorship laws in the 1860s and 1905. The main customers of this institution were not edinovertsy but Old Believers. First, the Old Believers were not only prohibited from printing books but also forbidden from owning or buying ones that did not come from the typography.102 Second, the massive campaign of property seizure conducted under Nicholas I (and afterward) meant that the edinovertsy themselves were rarely short of old books. As with icons, prayerhouses, and monastery buildings, they were usually the recipients of this destructive form of religious coercion.103 This gave the Synod a way in which it could indirectly extend limited control over the books that Old Believers read. However, it rendered the typography entirely dependent on the government’s policy toward Old Believers and the relations that Old Believers had with the edinovertsy. In the 1870s, this worked out quite favorably. Archpriest Zvezdinskii, the senior priest of the Troitskaia church, reached an amicable understanding with Archbishop Anto­ nii (Shutov), the Belaia Krinitsa hierarch of Moscow. The prelate ordered all the Old Believer churches under his authority to buy books from the typography while Zvezdinskii would informally consult Antonii over which seventeenthcentury book should be used as the model for the copies.104 This resulted in considerable sales since the Old Believers had to replace the books they had lost from half a century of confiscations: for instance, between 1892 and 1894, the typography made a profit of just over 28,000 rubles.105 The riches gained turned the Troitskaia church into one of the wealthiest edinoverie temples in Russia and a source of funding not only for edinoverie churches but also for Orthodox schools.106 Such profits also made it a tempting target for others: Pavel Prusskii launched a campaign in 1879 to have the typography transferred

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to the Nikolskii monastery.107 The attempt failed: Pavel had to be satisfied with the order that the typography provide his monastery and Subbotin’s Brotherhood of St. Petr the Metropolitan with yearly subsidies.108 The typography thus served as a vital source of financial and material support for parishes and other edinoverie institutions across the empire.109 However, when the 1905 October Manifesto granted the Old Believers freedom of the press, the predictable happened. The profits of the typography fell precipitously, leading its overseers to unsuccessfully protest the stipends it was doling out to the Nikolskii monastery and the Brotherhood.110 Thus, the financial situation of edinoverie’s leading monastery and its Moscow churches was not only dependent on relations with the Old Believers but in fact had an intimate interest in seeing that repressive policies against the schism continue.

Oth er Instit u tions Other edinoverie institutions were much more localized in character. Like their Orthodox equivalents, edinoverie parishes had almshouses for succor of the poor and schools for the education of the young.111 The Troitskaia church school in Moscow was opened in 1863 through the generous donations of one Ivan Ryzhkov, a wealthy merchant and overseer of the typography. He was guided by the laudable aim of the “importance of popular education on the one hand and, on the other, delivering the opportunity to study to children of poor parents without distinction [in regard to] their religious views.”112 This guiding principle meant that education was free and a dormitory was provided for some of the poorer students.113 The first two decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the first secondary schools in Petersburg and Moscow and a psalmist school in Perm, all with the aim of better educating the next generation of edinoverie clergy. Further details about the problems of edinoverie education are furnished by the Bolshoe Murashkino school in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese. Built in 1869 by Ivan Shestov, a Moscow merchant born in Murashkino, the institution was meant to function on the same basis as that under the Troitskaia church in Moscow, offering free education to boys and girls and teaching not just the children of the edinovertsy but also those of the Orthodox and Old Believers.114 However, Bishop Ioannikii (Rudinev) required that it exclude Orthodox children in 1874, thus turning the issue of education into a site for confessional confrontation. When reviewing the edinoverie school in Bolshoe Murashkino, the director of the (secular) Nizhnii Novgorod school board directly referred to Shestov as an Old Believer who had “no business educating any children of

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Orthodox parents.” He concluded his letter: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts! [Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, his emphasis].”115 Timofei Dobrozrakov, the edinoverie dean in charge of Bolshoe Murashkino, was in full concord with this kind of sentiment. Calling the institution “an Old Believer school,” he was afraid that enrolling Orthodox children in the school would lead not only to the children converting but their parents as well.116 However, when Mikhail Raevskii, the Orthodox priest in Bolshoe Murashkino, reviewed the school, he noted that although some of the older edinovertsy showed hostility to Orthodoxy, this had declined with time to the point that they allowed “those who cross themselves with three fingers [triperstniki] to attend mutual liturgies and prayers; they allow the edinoverie clergy to go with crosses . . . to Orthodox churches to meet the most honoured [local] holy icons; and they allow the Orthodox clergy the same in the edinoverie church.”117 The curriculum of this school was quite basic, confining itself to teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as the most fundamental prayers of the Russian Orthodox Church. The three courses, each supposed to last a year, were all taught by the edinoverie priest, his deacon, and a teacher paid for by Shestov. It was estimated in 1886 that between four hundred and five hundred pupils had graduated from at least one of the courses.118 The Old Believers always formed a tiny minority of the pupils; indeed, by 1890 they seemed to have stopped attending entirely. The distinctly edinoverie character of the school came into play in terms of the texts used for teaching. These included a reprint of a Psalter from the time of Patriarch Iosif (d. 1642) and an old-style alphabet book originally from 1647. In other words, the materials focused almost exclusively on Old Church Sla­ vonic.119 The teaching methodology employed was a frequent source of tension: numerous reports from both Orthodox and edinoverie priests complained that the method of rote learning was inadequate since the children forgot what they had learned and did not understand its meaning. However, attempts to impose newer methods upset both Shestov and the parents. When a young Orthodox overseer suggested phonetic teaching of the alphabet and religious lectures to those who had not yet learned to read or write, Shestov wrote to Ioannikii to ask for his removal as the parents were “extremely dissatisfied” with such changes: “The time still has not yet come [for] the new means of teaching children in our school.”120 Why the parishioners were so fiercely protective of the old method is suggested in a later letter from Shestov to Bishop Modest (Strelbitskii): “In our fatherland in the olden days, children were taught literacy by the Holy Scriptures and a necessary group of holy writings and, after [basic] literacy was

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achieved, with the Hours, Psalter, and books of a predominately liturgical and religious [character]: this is precisely how reading is taught in our school.”121 Thus, the attachment to the old method was closely linked to tradition and the requirement of both the edinovertsy and the Old Believers that literacy be mostly in the older liturgical language rather than modern Russian. Reports on the quality of the school are peppered with criticisms about the inefficiency of the teaching. In 1887, the edinoverie dean complained that only some of the students knew the basic prayers and even they could not explain them. All of them were entirely ignorant of the Scriptures: “No-one from among the students was able to independently relate a single event either from the Old or New Testament.”122 While they could read Old Church Slavonic, the children could “scarcely grasp a word” of modern Russian. Numeracy was not much better since the young edinovertsy were taught only to write the numbers and little else.123 Admittedly, this was not all down to the pedagogical method. An Orthodox priest reviewing the school noted that pupils could enter a course at any given point in the year, which meant the teacher was unable to speak to the class collectively but had to spend his time monitoring individual lessons for each child.124 The priest was also busy with Bolshoe Murashkino’s burgeoning congregation and could not devote great amounts of time to educa­ tion.125 One clergyman was particularly damning, stating that “such a school brings very little advantage to popular education. There are repeated instances when the parents of the children move them to the Orthodox school.”126 However, Orthodox parishioners thought the literacy and numeracy skills attained were satisfactory,127 and Shestov claimed that a great many of its pupils had gone on to find work as secretaries.128

R it ua l Of all the factors that separated edinoverie from Orthodoxy, the ritual dimension was undoubtedly the most important. Most edinoverie churches observed the same practices as the Old Believers: using two instead of three fingers to bless themselves and be blessed, proceeding around the church in the direction of the sun, using eight rather than seven pieces of prosphora bread in the Eucharist, and singing the hallelujahs not thrice but twice. Minor grammatical differences were present in incantations recited by the priest, most famously in the words spoken at the end of the service “i vo veki vekom” (forever and ever): the Orthodox books instead required “i vo veki vekov.” The edinovertsy made use of a small cushion, a podruchnik or kovrik, to keep the hands and faces of worshippers clean during prostrations. The Orthodox bishops had to bless

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edinoverie antimensia, a decorated cloth placed on the altar during the service, by the old rites. When possible, the edinovertsy preferred an antimension to come from the period prior to Nikon’s tenure as patriarch.129 V. M. Skvortsov, describing the services held during the first national edinoverie congress in 1912, noted that “since the edinovertsy do not allow electric lighting in their churches, the prayers here were conducted in semi-darkness.”130 Prince Aleksei Ukhtomskii, also speaking at the 1912 congress, argued that a major difference that everyone would spot was the length of the edinoverie service, since it was much longer than the Orthodox one.131 As minor as so many of these issues seem to be, a failure to observe them or an attempt to alter them could provoke the edinovertsy into opposition: “Every movement and every word of the pastor is subordinated to strict control. The smallest omission or an insignificant change in the ritual by a priest: all of this is noted by the edinovertsy and brings forth censure and accusations of heresy.”132 The most obvious dissimilarity with Orthodox ritual, and, therefore, one of the most contentious, was in the form of singing practiced. Attempts to change this singing were often a cause of tension between clergy and parishioners. Archpriest Dobrovolskii caused an uproar in 1878 when he tried to introduce the Orthodox form of singing in his church in Warsaw diocese: “The zealots of the old piety undertook an entire war, which fell wholly on the head of the poor deacon who was, after this, forced to transfer to another position.”133 A later priest of the same parish brought in a edinoverie choirmaster to simply improve standards. This resulted in some edinovertsy saying, “All your children are being taught Orthodox singing. Farewell tradition!”134 Similarly, in 1905, a party of edinovertsy in Ekaterinburg tried to have their priest removed for introducing polyphonic singing.135 Strict adherence to the old singing was far from unproblematic. Few choirmasters knew the hook notes, and, as Old Believers, they might not be able or willing to teach edinoverie choirs to use them properly. The hooks were legendarily difficult for singers raised on Western notes. One edinoverie choirmaster stated that although his pupils enjoyed the challenge, they found the process similar “to studying a Chinese grammar.”136 One aspect of the old liturgy, in particular, provoked constant clashes between the edinovertsy and the authorities: the litany of thanksgiving for imperial personages and institutions required by Platon’s fifteenth rule.137 As early as 1804, a edinoverie priest in the Sretenskaia church in St. Petersburg was defrocked for failing to say the prayers for the health and well-being of the tsar and the imperial family: the following year, the parish split over the issue, with one party promising to say the prayers so long as their priest was returned

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to them and the other effectively rejoining Old Belief.138 Unsurprisingly, the Synod and the government viewed these prayers as a litmus test for the sincerity of conversion and were eager to ensure conformity in this matter. However, we should not take every accusation that a priest omitted these prayers at face value: parish factions involved in internecine struggles might deploy denunciations tactically, since such claims would immediately garner the scrutiny of the authorities and might discredit their opponents.139 The other issue with these prayers was their format. As in all other things, the edinovertsy wanted to use the formulas from pre-Nikonian books: the issue was that while these made mention of the tsar and his wife, heir, and family, they did not mention the Holy Synod or the bishops (the principal ecclesiastical figure cited was the patriarch).140 The fifteenth rule, however, insisted that the edinovertsy use the Synodal version of the prayers from 1721. In other words, this was an area where the identification of the edinovertsy with the old rites and the Synod’s concern for the extension of its authority over the converts collided, creating a rather intractable problem. The Spaso-Preobrazhenskaia edinoverie church in Kazan provides an interesting example of this. Initially, the bishop and consistory were reluctant to appoint the priest Sveshnikov after his election by the laity because “in the liturgy he allows some peculiarities: 1) he mentions the imperial names differently [i.e., he used the word tsar rather than emperor] and 2) he does not mention the Synod and hierarchs.”141 Asked to explain the omission, the clergyman argued, “In the litany, the Holy Governing Synod and the local bishop are not mentioned because this is not in Patriarch Iosif ’s service book”: changing this, he stated, was against the wishes of the converts and would make turning the local Old Believers to edinoverie even more difficult.142 These events occurred in 1856, but the battle over the form of the prayers continued until 1861, since the local bishop refused to bless the church until the edinovertsy obeyed the fifteenth rule of Platon, which they eventually did.143 There was also a tremendous amount of local variation in edinoverie rituals. The possession of a single centralized typography never resulted in the establishment of a uniform liturgy. This may have been because of the policy of distributing seized books among the edinovertsy. Since they rarely had reason to turn to the typography, they used seventeenth- and eighteenth-century copies of books first printed in “the time of the first five Russian patriarchs.” This lack of uniformity meant that it was not just Orthodox priests who could feel the wrath of their parishioners for ritual changes. If a edinoverie priest transferred from one diocese to another and tried to introduce a different form of edinoverie ritual, he, too, would be in deep trouble. An interesting

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example is the dispute that occurred in Moscow in 1878. Father Ioann Zvezdinskii, arriving from Tver diocese, tried to introduce the practice of administering the sacraments to communicants with three holy spoons (lzhitsy) rather than one, a practice that had been accepted in his old parish. Georgii Vozdvizhenskii, another priest at the Troitskaia church, “considered it contrary to his duty and his conscience to allow this innovation in the Troitskaia church” and so an acrimonious battle was spawned between the supporters of the two priests as each vied to gain the support of the metropolitan.144 As hard as they tried, neither group could find anything definitive in their favor in the pre-Nikonian books. The matter became ugly as accusations flew of wanting to abolish the litany to the imperial family at the end of the service. Those who preferred the one spoon won out: however, a petition from the late 1880s reveals that advocacy of the three spoons died hard as senior members of the church continued to press for the change, which they cast as following “the example of the edinoverie churches not only of the city of Moscow but of all Russia.”145 Such arguments were only propelled onward by the existence of the electoral principle. The issue of ritual and authority in the parish thus became intimately intertwined as individuals bidding for power cast themselves as defenders of an older ritual form truer to the spirit of edinoverie. Ritual was so interwoven with other aspects of parish life that it became impossible to distinguish one from the other. The problem was that the Synod and local prelates had no real way of solving the dispute. An ideal blueprint of the edinoverie liturgy did not exist to check practices against. No less important were the various pronouncements insisting that the bishops strictly maintain the edinoverie liturgical order. Whichever side lost the debate could claim that the bishop was violating the legislation governing edinoverie, placing the hierarchs at a considerable disadvantage no matter which party they chose to support. The liturgy and its attendant rituals were instant markers of distinction between Orthodoxy and edinoverie. It is also an area in which the edinovertsy and the Old Believers, especially the priestly, had a great deal in common. All of the institutions I have noted in this chapter existed to maintain and perpetuate the old rituals, thus ending any possibility of Platon (Levshin’s) pious hope that time and the grace of God would reveal to the edinovertsy the errors inherent within these “uncorrected” rites. Any assault on the old rituals was taken as an assault on edinoverie itself and they thereby caused extreme discord between Orthodoxy and the edinovertsy. For instance, after his conversion from the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy, Pafnutii (Ovchinnikov) was allowed to hold weekly lectures in the Kremlin from the steps of the Ivan the Great bell tower.146 At the

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same time, Ivan Vinogradov, a Moscow priest, published a book on the alleged novelty of the two-fingered sign of the cross.147 While there was nothing especially unusual about this kind of work, its language and questionable assertions made it particularly offensive to the Old Believers and the edinovertsy. So, on September 11, 1866, when Pafnutii climbed the steps of the bell tower, he launched an attack on the new book and its author. Indignation among the Old Believers and edinovertsy followed. Count P. A. Shuvalov, the head of Russia’s gendarmerie, described it as a “storm” that had filled the Kremlin square with insulting language. He demanded an explanation from D. A. Tolstoi, the ober procurator, as to why Filaret (Drozdov) had permitted this monk to speak.148 The above incident proves that Platon’s sixteenth rule (which barred the Orthodox and the edinovertsy from speaking ill of each other’s rituals) was justified: it is no small wonder that the edinoverie petitions of the 1870s frequently required the Synod to confirm this rule and ensure its strict observance.149 Regional diversity and a lack of any attempt to create a uniform liturgy meant that the rituals were just as much a force for division among the edinovertsy themselves. It could provoke endless squabbling and become intermeshed with other parish problems to produce truly embittered infighting. The bishops and the Synod could intervene only with extreme caution. They had no instant way of distinguishing a “correct” ritual from an “innovation,” even though they were compelled by law to prevent the latter from disturbing the liturgical order. The reason that changes to the rituals could have such drastic consequences was because they were a core tenet of identity. The edinovertsy defined themselves through the use of the old books, the two-fingered sign of the cross, and their style of singing: consequently, changes were not just alterations to liturgical minutiae but challenges to how edinovertsy located themselves in the constellation of Orthodoxy and the various forms of Old Belief. The investment of identity in the rites demonstrates that the edinovertsy continued to identify themselves as members of staroobriadchestvo, as adherents of the old rites. This may explain why a significant number of edinovertsy continued to maintain more affinity with the Old Believers than they did with the Orthodox. Certainly, among some edinovertsy there was a theological commitment to Russian Orthodoxy and its claim to canonical legitimacy. They might even concede Nikonian rituals were legitimate, so long as they themselves were not forced to endure them. However, that theological commitment was always predicated on the Church’s willingness to allow the old rites. The institutionalization of ritual by Platon’s rules thus ensured the preservation of a sense of belonging to Old Belief.

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Facing Old Beli ef Aleksandr Palkin, in his analysis of Old Believer polemics from the 1790s to the 1840s, argues that “Old Believers, not without basis, saw in edinoverie the chief threat to their religious independence.”150 Peter Thomas De Simone further notes that “edinoverie created the problem of determining the ‘pure’ form of the Old Rite.”151 Polemical literature emerged as a defense mechanism intended to safeguard Old Belief from apostasy and delineate its identity: not surprisingly, the number of such manuscripts increased significantly in the reign of Nicholas I.152 One such essay, produced in 1840 by a priestless pomorets in Perm, noted seven reasons why the Old Believers could not accept edinoverie: (1) the foundation of edinoverie did not correspond to the rules of the ecumenical church; (2) the anathemas of 1667 were still in force; (3) the Synod continued to republish polemics from the eighteenth century that insulted pre-Nikonian rituals; (4) the edinovertsy did not follow the rituals of their bishops, violating the Scriptures; (5) the rules of Platon were constantly broken, especially that which forbade the Orthodox from attacking the old rites; (6) edinoverie relied on forcible coercion to fight Old Belief; and (7) there were two liturgical regulations within Orthodoxy, pre-Nikonian and post-Nikonian.153 This list had enduring popularity: in 1900, the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy circulated a pamphlet in Tobolsk making nearly identical claims.154 The line of attack was twofold. First, the aim was to prove that edinoverie was in violation of the basic foundations of the Christian faith. Second, the Old Believers sought to paint Synodal Orthodoxy as hypocritical and untrustworthy. It contradicted its own rules, making edinoverie little more than “the drag net by which the hierarchy hopes to catch Old Belief not for communion with them on conditions of equality but for the easy devouring of Old Belief by New Belief [i.e., the Church].”155 The point, therefore, was not only to keep Old Believers away from edinoverie but also to persuade those who had already converted of their sad position. It is not coincidental that many of the points made by the Old Believers were the same that reform-minded edinovertsy made from the 1860s onward. The Old Believers knew the problems of the edinovertsy and sought to exploit their dissatisfaction. The theological argumentation was an attempt to draw up more firmly the dividing line between Old Belief and edinoverie by portraying the latter as heretical. On leaving Old Belief, the edinovertsy became heretics. Indeed, in 1909, the priestless polemicist L. V. Pichugin remarked that their entire mental state changed: “They become proud, arrogant and, like policemen, direct their activities to betraying anyone from the Old Believers to court or at least making slanders before

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officialdom.”156 This sentiment could also be found among normal Old Believers. In 1854, Father Dorofei Emelianov of Riga reported a conversation with the son of an Old Believer merchant: “To my question about why he would not leave the schism and accept edinoverie, he replied that he is now a schismatic and consequently an honest man, but if he goes to edinoverie, he will be a thief and a fraudster and will be called this publicly.”157 Comparisons to the Catholic Uniate Church were also a frequent occurrence throughout edinoverie’s existence.158 Pichugin went a step further: “The Russian Uniates, that is the edinovertsy, stand lower than their exemplar. At least the Polish Uniates have their own bishops, handed to them by the Roman pope: the Russian Uniates do not have their own bishops and this means, firstly, distrust from the side of the Russian ecclesiastical authorities and, secondly, that the edinovertsy are limited by the 16 articles [of Platon], further than which they cannot go a step.”159 The intent of such a comparison was not simply to insult both the edinovertsy and the Orthodox through an unflattering comparison. It was also to starkly divide heresy from Old Belief. On the side of the former was Catholicism, the Uniates, official Orthodoxy, and edinoverie, all of them opponents of the Church of Christ. On the other side stood Old Belief, alone in its maintenance of a pure Christian faith. Equally, Pichugin was no doubt aware of the controversy in edinoverie over the issue of bishops, which was reaching fever pitch in 1909. Pointing out to the edinovertsy that the Orthodox refusal to grant them episcopal representation meant they were even lower than the Catholic Uniates had a missionary aim. It was a statement made in the hope of convincing the edinovertsy to return to the bosom of Old Belief. All in all, the polemical literature reveals no ground for compromise. As one Orthodox observer said, “So much venomous sarcasm, merciless irony, and open malice flies from the mouths of the Old Believers on addressing edinoverie.”160 This was for three reasons. First, the Old Believer polemicists needed to be as firm as possible in their rejection of edinoverie to keep their own members from defecting. Second, they wanted to try and convince the edinovertsy to return. The best way to do so was to deny any possibility of reconciliation beyond flight from the Nikonians. The third was to construct a confessional border between edinoverie and Old Belief. For some Old Believers, Orthodoxy and edinoverie were both heresies: it was just that one form of the heresy happened to use the two-fingered sign of the cross. There could be no possible moderation when dealing with the enemies of the true Church. Edinoverie was placed firmly outside Old Belief and within the camp of the official Church. What is also noticeable is that these pamphlets differ little, despite the fact that they emerged from distinct Old Believer concords. Their authors rarely

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attacked the members of different priestly or priestless groups.161 The construction of a confessional border with edinoverie gave Old Belief something of an idealized homogeneous character. The real dividing line between Orthodoxy and heresy lay not within Old Belief but outside it. The uncompromising position forwarded in the polemical literature did not stop some Old Believers from seeking rapprochement with the Church. The Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy’s 1862 Circular Epistle made clear that this concord was willing to concede that Orthodoxy was not of the Antichrist. So controversial was this that it caused a break in the hierarchy’s ranks, but it was nevertheless the policy carried out by the okruzhniki until 1917. Old Believers were not necessarily against limited discussions with the edinovertsy and the Orthodox about possible reunification. A group of chasovennoe priestless Old Believers participated in the 1912 national edinoverie congress, offering commentary on those reforms most likely to bridge the schism.162 Second, the edinovertsy lived alongside Old Believers, which meant that there would necessarily be interaction, some of it religious in nature. In Nizhnii Tagil, it was noted that the edinovertsy and Old Believers together continued to observe the cult of the founder of the schism in the area, a fact that suggests the edinovertsy maintained links to a shared past.163 In 1872, the Old Believers, edinovertsy, and Orthodox all participated in an icon procession in famine-stricken Uralsk in a collective prayer for rain and respite from a cholera epidemic: “At this time, no one thought about ritual differences, all were occupied by the single design, the single prayer, ‘Give rain to the thirsty earth, oh Saviour!’”164 Third, the Church itself provided institutional bases where the Old Believers could meet with the edinovertsy. We have already seen the Moscow typography, which not only led to trade relations with the Old Believers but also inadvertently engendered financial dependency. Schools and almshouses could also function in a similar way. The Troitskaia school in Moscow allowed Old Believers to study there so that it could serve as a “link to the reconciliation [of the Old Believers] with the official Church.”165 Indeed, of the nine hundred pupils to pass through the gates between 1864 and 1879, three hundred were Old Believers.166 Some writers also noted that Old Believers would often attend the first liturgies to be held in new edinoverie churches: some did so out of curiosity but others to begin their path toward conversion.167 Edinoverie parishes were expected to function as missionary camps so the presence of edinoverie churches and chapels in the very heart of Old Believer communities was considered advantageous. However, the attitude of the Church toward the relationship that the edino­ vertsy maintained with their former coreligionists was ultimately ambiguous.

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Thus, while the Synod did offer some opportunities for Old Believers and edinovertsy to interact, it also regarded close relations with the schism as cause for alarm. When an Arkhangelsk priestless group asked for a new edinoverie parish, the Synod stipulated that it be placed as close as possible to an Orthodox church in order to ensure that the converts be kept under close supervision.168 Equally, bishops were cautious about confirming the election of priests who had been former schismatic ministers: the priests of the new parishes would be fundamental in keeping the new edinovertsy under the watchful eye of the prelate. In 1878, a Belaia Krinitsa hierarch and his flock in Orenburg expressed the desire to convert to edinoverie on the condition that their former prelate was ordained as a edinoverie priest. However, because he had fled from his place of exile in Vologda, the Orthodox bishop judged him to be untrustworthy and refused his candidacy, complicating the conversion of one hundred Old Believers.169 There was also the matter of intermarriage. It was only allowed on the precondition that the Old Believer partner convert to edinoverie prior to the ceremony. Priests who failed to perform the conversion, or check whether one had already been performed, faced stiff penalties. One priest in Don diocese was suspended in 1862 for the mere suspicion that this had occurred, despite two decades of nearly faultless service and the ardent protests of his parishioners.170 When the Edict of Toleration in 1905 gave the Old Believers almost the same rights as other Christian confessions, a group of missionaries in Samara wondered whether this meant the Old Believers could remain in the schism when they married edinovertsy. One of them argued that to allow this “gives a new reason to the Old Believers to make strong accusations against the Orthodox Church for violating the teachings of the faith and repels them [still] further from the Church, which of course is not in the interests of the mission.”171 The Synod could accept interaction between Old Belief and edinoverie but only on its own terms and in scenarios that could be closely controlled. For the Church, the ambiguity of proximity to the schism lay in edinoverie’s liminal status. Edinoverie was supposed to have some presence among the Old Believers. As one priest put it, “It is necessary to establish affairs so that the schismatics see clear evidence of God’s grace dwelling in the Church in the lives of the edinovertsy . . . every edinoverets in his own way must be a mis­ sionary, a propagator of light among the dark schismatics of the local region.”172 At the same time, the Church was well aware that the conversions were often insecure and that apostasy was a very real risk if the edinovertsy went unsu­ pervised. Ambiguity was formed by the metaphor of “infection” that predomi­ nated church discourse.173 Sheer physical proximity to Old Believers meant

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that the edinovertsy were at risk. The same rhetoric also justified keeping the edinovertsy in their confessional quarantine zone. Bringing them more fully into the Orthodox confession risked the further spread of schismatic infection. Thus, the need to utilize the edinovertsy as missionaries justified the caution of Platon’s rules and the hierarchs’ suspicion of edinoverie. But that same distrust meant exacerbating the feeling of religious difference and possibly pushing the edinovertsy back toward the schism. The logic of infection and quarantine thus contained a deep contradiction. While close living conditions and certain institutional contexts might create a breeding ground for at least some mutual understanding, there was no undoing the damage caused by conversion. Edinoverie parish formation left a jagged wound between communities that seldom healed. The problem was that usually part of the Old Believer community did not convert. In the best-case scenario, the new edinovertsy founded their own churches by either building them or making use of the house of their leader until the new parish had accumulated enough funds to make construction possible. The latter occurred when the future missionary Ksenofont Kriuchkov converted. The tiny parish (it had only seventeen members) used Kriuchkov’s house as a church with the permission of the bishop of Penza.174 In other cases, however, the formation of a edinoverie parish involved the seizure of Old Believer places of worship and liturgical equipment. The church in the Iaroslavl town of Romano-Borisoglebsk was formed by seizing a priestly chapel and then transferring the icons from a priestless prayerhouse in a triumphant display on September 23, 1854.175 Pavel Smirnov noted that his conversion first to the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy and then to edinoverie (he was originally a spasovets) caused consternation. Although the priestless chapel was contained within his home, the Old Believer community had dedicated funds for its beautification and for its liturgical equipment.176 When the Troitskaia church in Moscow was sequestered in 1854, the edinovertsy got their hands on more than fifteen hundred icons.177 Even when Old Believers converted to edinoverie to get their property back, it could take a while: in 1853, the new edinovertsy of the Chernoe Selo parish (Estland province) found that the bells seized from their former Old Believer chapel (now a edinoverie church) had already been installed in Orthodox churches, causing delays in their restoration.178 Conversion to edinoverie could also shatter families. T. I. Kasilov noted how his mother entreated and his wife wept when he joined edinoverie.179 One husband in Tomsk was allegedly arrested when he “declared the intention to murder his wife and new-born little girl because the former had agreed to

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baptize the girl in the edinoverie church.”180 This kind of family strife could be deadly to the cause of edinoverie, as Timofei Verkhovskii observed in Chernigov: “The fact is that the people accepting edinoverie are not whole families. They are parts of families with close relatives who remain in the schism and therefore can easily be drawn to their former form of thought, if not by conviction, then to settle the disorder and strife in the family caused by [the conversion to edinoverie].”181 The seizure of part of the Preobrazhenskoe cemetery to create the Nikolskii edinoverie monastery caused decades of bad blood. Their shared cemetery was a particular bone of contention: as M. Surer has discussed with reference to multiconfessional (Orthodox and Baptist) communities in Ukraine, “Burial conflicts also demonstrated the intertwining of religious and civic identity. Villagers feared violating the sanctity of the Orthodox cemetery with the burial of heretics and Stundists’ unbaptized children. At the same time, the cemetery was a continuation of their living community, and Stundists disturbed the unity of that community.”182 In 1879, the Old Believer undertakers refused some edinovertsy permission to bury the body of one Natalia Nikolaeva, whose grieving friends were told that “they would not bury any more edinovertsy in their cemetery.”183 Pavel Prusskii had to summon the police to get the priestless to comply. Nor did the indignities the Old Believers had to endure in their graveyard ever seem to end. On April 18, 1913, two edinoverie novices broke into the cemetery while drunk: when the Old Believer undertakers confronted them, one drew a revolver and screamed, “I will shoot you all!” after which “he advanced on the undertakers, swearing in deplorable language.”184 Unsurprisingly, therefore, the new edinovertsy could find themselves the recipients of community persecution and disturbances. In Irkutsk, they were subject to constant insults and economic pressure from the more prosperous Old Believers.185 The priest of the edinoverie church in the midst of the Moscow Preobrazhenskoe cemetery complained that the Old Believers left their horses near the altar of the Uspenskaia church during the liturgy.186 In 1884, Bishop German (Osetskii) reported that a Cossack communal gathering (skhod) in Chervlennaia (today in Chechnia) had sentenced two new edinovertsy to administrative exile in Siberia as punishment for their conversion from Old Belief.187 The Old Believers, for their part, lost the treasured chapels that they and their ancestors had spent years and hundreds, if not thousands, of rubles building and beautifying. Deprived of their chapels and prayerhouses, their religious life undoubtedly suffered. Of course, that was the point. Edinoverie divested the Old Believers not only of numerical strength but also of the buildings and accoutrements necessary to worship, pressuring them to

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convert: conversion was often the price paid to get prayerhouses and chapels either reopened or saved from complete destruction.188 The ideologists of Old Belief wanted a firm line between heresy and their own brand of Orthodox Christianity. The Church and state helped in this matter. The seizure of property and the martyrdom of Old Believer leaders was the best possible way of ensuring the Old Believers looked on edinoverie with distrust at best, outright hatred at worst. Coercion, therefore, turned the confessional borderline created by the Old Believer polemics into a reality. This begs the question: How could edinoverie function when Old Believers had no love for either edinoverie or the edinovertsy? The polemical literature itself dismissed edinoverie because it relied on coercion and thereby violated Christian conscience and love: the reputation of edinoverie among the Old Believers was permanently soiled. What did this mean for the religious identities of the edinovertsy? The polemics made it clear that, in the eyes of their former coreligionists, the converts were no longer Old Believers. They might use the old rituals but they had become heretics the moment they joined the Nikonian Church: “There is no doubt that the edinovertsy will, on death, be in the same prison of hell with Judas the traitor, with the Yids, the crucifiers of Christ, and with Arius and other anathematized heretics.”189 While edinoverie’s position in relation to Orthodoxy was difficult to define for church writers, the Old Believers had no such problems: edinoverie’s adherents were beyond the pale of Old Belief. However, it is difficult to say what impact this would have had on edinoverie identities. As was noted earlier, a substantial proportion of edinovertsy undoubtedly maintained their preconversion beliefs about the Russian Orthodox Church and thus remained inclined to the schism, even if the attitude of the Old Believers toward them was far from positive. Coercion and legal obligation were insufficient to make them feel Orthodox. The upsurge in popularity for changing the name of edinoverie to Orthodox Old Belief (pravoslavnoe staroobriadchestvo) at the end of the nineteenth century may be the key to this question.190 The name demonstrated that the edinovertsy had not abandoned their identity as Old Believers, as practitioners of the pre-Nikonian rites, but it also pointed out the theological transformation that they had undergone in the process of conversion.

Con v er sion Conversion to edinoverie was a complex matter because it required identifying who were Orthodox and who were Old Believers. The fifth rule of Platon,

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and the confessional anxieties it embodied, demanded that a person ascribed to Orthodoxy could only join edinoverie if that individual had never taken the sacraments: this was judged a reliable way of identifying allegiance to the schism. Thus, the parish and confessional registers, hefty tomes denoting whether Orthodox parishioners had fulfilled their religious obligations by attending the Eucharist and confession, were key in this process of identification. The process was analogous to that used in other missionary campaigns, such as those in the Baltic: “Converts’ names were recorded on specific lists and added to metrical books (metricheskie knigi), which were used to record vital information (births, deaths, marriages, divorces, conversions). Such records were essential for identifying which parishioners would belong to various newly opened parishes and were, therefore, instrumental in allowing parish clergy to track their flocks. Priests tracked parishioners’ religious obligations by recording the dates of confession and communion on confessional registers (ispovednye rospisi), which in turn were used to compile lists of those fulfilling or neglecting their spiritual obligations.”191 Being marked as having received an Orthodox sacrament in the confessional registers meant ascription to the Orthodox confession and thus being barred from joining edinoverie. However, Old Belief posed a problem to such a system of confessional ascrip­tion. Rites of passage performed by Old Believer ministers, particularly marriage and baptism, were denied legitimacy because they were not, and could not be, marked in Orthodox parish registers. This was highly problematic since it meant children of such marriages would be deemed bastards and thereby denied the right of inheritance. Some Old Believer concords adopted the practice of having Orthodox priests conduct their weddings and baptisms while continuing their own religious practices and ceremonies: thus, husbands, wives, and children gained legitimacy in the eyes of the law, although they continued to regard themselves as Old Believers. The spasovtsy were paradigmatic in this regard. Stefan Smirnov, a convert from this group, described it exactly as a “rather strange sect” that “married and baptized children in the Orthodox Church but [Old Believer] preceptors buried the dead, commemorated them, and performed services.”192 Douglas Rogers has shown that the pomortsy priestless Old Believers in Perm province did very much the same thing in order to deflect the scrutiny of the imperial government during Nicholas I’s campaign to promote marriage within the Church, demonstrating that even priestless groups with a relatively severe attitude toward official Orthodoxy did not necessarily eschew adapting to legal requirements if they could be utilized for their own benefit.193 Thus, Old Believers could be considered as Orthodox as far as the Church was concerned. They were registered in

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Orthodox parish and confessional registers because of their participation in the sacraments and that was the end of the matter. However, the Old Believers themselves felt differently. Their ascription was a pragmatic action undertaken to attain legal protection and not a statement of their religious belonging. The process by which one joined edinoverie reflected the sacramental and administrative character of ascription. New converts underwent what was called “the joining ritual,” which was made up of the sacrament of chrismation (confirmation) and a prayer taken from the rules of Platon whereby the convert denounced the schism and affirmed the legitimacy of the Russian Orthodox Church.194 In the majority of cases, one priest noted, this was performed in the local church, although it was also possible to conduct the rite in private homes.195 The converts would then be noted in the parish registers as belonging to the edinoverie parish. The system was more formally bureaucratized in 1876 when all the diocesan journals published a template that missionaries and priests should use to report conversions to the consistories.196 The cleric would have to state that the joining ritual had been performed and duly noted in the registers and that the convert had proven his or her belonging to edinoverie by confessing, taking the Eucharist and “fulfilling other Christian duties.” Sometimes, this ceremony might be accompanied by additional requirements for purification prior to taking the sacraments: in 1841, the Riga edinoverie priest Dorofei Emelianov told a potential convert to purify himself with prayer, fasting, and a visit to the bathhouse before the joining ritual.197 It is tempting to see these elements as marking a clear and unambiguous “rite of passage” from the schism to edinoverie. However, the matter could be much more opaque in reality. In 1857, Father Grigorii Sveshnikov, the edinoverie priest of the Spaso-Preobrazhenskaia church in Kazan, reported that the wives of three leading parishioners were in fact Old Believers: this was at variance with the testimony of Father Dmitrii Nikolskii, another edinoverie priest who claimed to have performed the joining ritual over the women four years earlier.198 In interviews with clerical investigators, the women also denied ever having joined edinoverie. One, Praskeva Riazanova (the daughter-in-law of the church’s founder), declared confusingly: “I belong to the Greco-Russian Orthodox Church, but I maintain Old Belief of the priestly concord.”199 Nikol­ skii cited several pieces of evidence to back his claim: the church register in which the performance of the ritual was noted; signed documents from the men in question, where they attested to their conversion as the heads of households; and the fact that, upon the baptism of one couple’s son, Sveshnikov had not extracted a promise from the mother that she would bring up her child as an Orthodox believer (such promises were legal requirements in mixed

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marriages: since Sveshnikov did not require such a statement, he obviously believed the woman to be a edinoverka).200 The matter was muddied even further when two of the men involved claimed that, while they considered themselves edinovertsy, no rite of joining had been held in 1854 for them or their wives.201 Praskeva’s husband, Andrei, noted that he had not even been in Kazan at the time of his “conversion”: his father, on his behalf, had had him joined to edinoverie.202 Finally, there was a question over whether Father Sveshnikov himself might have been a crypto-schismatic: Nikolskii noted that Sveshnikov consistently refused to call his church a edinoverie one, referring to it instead as an Old Believer parish.203 The file ends with no clear conclusion, despite multiple interviews with those involved between 1857 and 1862. Here, several issues clouded conversion: the selfidentification provided by individuals was not always clear-cut; it was uncertain whether householders had the right to convert on behalf of their families; and the two priests may have had differing attitudes toward edinoverie, while also bearing personal grudges toward one another. Nonetheless, in general terms, the official shape of edinoverie was defined in three ways: bureaucratically, via notation in the parish and confessional registers; sacramentally, through chrismation and confession; and verbally, by reading the prayer prescribed in rules of Platon. However, it was administrative ascription rather than sacramental behavior that frequently determined the actions of consistories. When the peasant Nikolai Sergeev sought to join edinoverie in 1891, he reported that he always went to the edinoverie church for the Eucharist: in his mind, this meant he had converted.204 The Nizhnii Novgorod consistory, however, disagreed since he was ascribed as Orthodox.205 The Synod itself showed the same priorities with its edict in 1881, when it de facto abolished the rule preventing the Orthodox from attending a edinoverie church for the sacraments: the modification stipulated that taking these sacraments did not turn the Orthodox into edinovertsy.206 The argument that the petitioners were “in reality” Old Believers cut no more ice than other factors. The edinoverie priest F. Ternovskii argued that Orthodox peasants appealing to him for the sacraments “does not serve as proof that they are converting from Orthodoxy to edinoverie but rather proves that many of the peasants of Somovki have begun to leave their schismatic convictions in favour of edinoverie.”207 The consistory ignored this. Internal convictions of the parishioners were not a concern while there existed a more bureaucratic way of determining religious identity. However, the modifications made to Platon’s fifth rule in 1832 and 1881 (which imposed waiting times before an ascribed Orthodox believer could

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join edinoverie of ten and five years since one’s last sacrament, respectively) damaged the extent to which the registers could ascribe identity: the changes meant that someone bureaucratically ascribed to Orthodoxy could, out of a sense of conscience and religious identity, join edinoverie. In strong contrast to the decisions of the consistories, petitions to join edinoverie are awash in the language of conscience (sovest). Petitioners frequently stated that their desire to join edinoverie was caused by the trouble inflicted on their consciences when they thought about the sacraments and the lack of a proper clergy. F. A. Shkinev, a peasant from Kuzminki, declared that the petitions of his family emerged from a need for the “cleansing of conscience” and the desire “to go where conscience and the old rituals draw us.”208 The villagers of Rabotki talked about  how “we are aware in our consciences that without the Holy Church salvation . . . is not possible, that the life-giving aid of the holy Christian sacraments is necessary for eternal life,” also mentioning how the rituals (obriadnosti) “calm the troubled consciences of the Old Believers and then attract many apostates of the flock into the bosom of the Holy Apostolic Church.”209 They also directly contested the bureaucratic ascription of religious identity by stating that “according to the registers, all the parishioners number more than a thousand souls, but very few, no more than fifty-two people, take the holy sacraments.”210 Ivan Sergeev gave a nod to Platon’s attached opinion when he declared that it was impossible for him “by reason of weak conscience to leave them [the old rituals] and accept the new corrected ones.”211 The saturation of petitions with this language demonstrates the importance of religious conviction and ritual choice to the arguments of the applicants. Ritual preference was often mentioned with reference to ancestral tradition. The petitions would state the applicant’s adherence to the old rituals. The declaration of the villagers of Urasov that “we are all in general more inclined [sklonny] to the old rituals given to us from our ancestors” is typical, demonstrating the role of tradition in the constitution of religious identity.212 The same can be seen from the petition of V. P. Korotkin, a peasant in Varmalei: “We and our ancestors were always more inclined to see the rituals in God’s church [performed] by the old book and not by that such as they have in the Orthodox church of God. But we know that without God’s church a person cannot be saved.”213 Normally, there were also statements in which the individual concerned declared his or her realization that the Russian Orthodox Church and its priest­ hood were legitimate. The priestless community of Ventsa stated in a petition for a edinoverie church that they “all recognise that without repentance and the priesthood there is no salvation and have come to the conviction that it

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is best to join to the faith recognised by the law.”214 Those last two words are very telling, a sign that legal acceptance may have been just as important a reason for conversion as the recognition of the necessity of priests. The Belaia Krinitsa hierarchs who joined the Church in 1865 also emphasized that both the Scriptures and the church canons demanded priests who were indisputably part of the apostolic succession.215 Pavel Prusskii’s conversion narrative was little more than a long list of citations from Scripture justifying the need for the priesthood.216 Such petitions suggest that applicants understood edinoverie on the basis of two interconnected sets of conditions. The first related to the old rituals or, more precisely, the ability to practice them without hindrance. The second related to a more theological category, that of the legitimacy of the Church and its priesthood. This legitimacy manifested itself in the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. For instance, the petitioners of the village of Rabotki paraphrased John 6:54 (“whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day”) to drive home the recognition of their own errors and the canonicity of the Russian Orthodox Church.217 Individuals might also become disillusioned with various other strands of Old Believer teaching. The priestless convert Ksenofont Kriuchkov explained that Alexander II’s ending of the Crimean War (1853–1856) and liberation of the serfs (1861) “were the acts of the eternal Lord God and not the acts of the Antichrist.”218 However, the validity of the Church and its sacraments often takes second place in the petitions compared to declarations of adherence to the old rituals. As reviews of the registers attest, many applicants had already been taking at least some of the Orthodox sacraments in previous years, a fact that the potential converts misrepresented because they were aware of the impor­ tance of documentation for the Synod’s policy for defining membership of the Church. However, they doubted in the efficacy of the sacraments as a vessel for the grace of God because they were performed by the Nikonian rituals. In one meeting held by a clerical investigator with those who wanted to convert, a local church elder stated that he considered his baptism by the new rituals invalid: only when he joined Old Belief and was rebaptized did he receive the true grace of God.219 In a Nizhnii Novgorod missionary congress held in 1900, it was stated that the edinovertsy believed “[edinoverie’s] priesthood is blessed and its sacraments salvational, although not because of the union with the Orthodox Church but because of the content of the old pre-Nikonian rites.”220 What made the sacraments, and, therefore, edinoverie, legitimate in the eyes of the would-be converts was that they occurred within the framework of an

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institution that made the old rituals legal. Church missionaries emphasized this very fact: as Timofei Verkhovskii told Old Believers in Chernigov, acceptance of edinoverie meant “no-one then will persecute and catch your priests because . . . they will be confirmed by the administration.”221 In other words, what edinoverie represented for many believers and converts was not the beginning of a new identity, be it Orthodox or some kind of distinctly edinoverie one, or even necessarily new religious behaviors, but rather a continuation of Old Believer identity and worship within the Russian Orthodox Church with access both to salvation through the sacraments and legal recognition from the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. It was official Old Belief. Father Vladimir Serebrovskii of Nizhnii Novgorod hit the nail on the head when he wrote that “edinoverie gives one the opportunity to be an Old Believer and [part of] the flock of the Orthodox Church at the same time.”222 Ritual remained a crucial point around which religious identity was constructed. As one group of self-described “schismatics” stated, they were “by ritual [part] of Orthodox Christianity [po obriadu pravoslavnogo Khrisitanstva]” and, therefore, should be joined “to the edinoverie church.”223

Conclusion The shape of edinoverie was formed by two confessional boundaries: one with the Russian Orthodox Church and another with the Old Believers. It possessed commonalities with both groups. In the act of conversion, edinovertsy officially signed up to the theological position of Church but they maintained many of the same rituals as the Old Believers. However, the commonalities were not sufficient to bridge the divisions. The rules of Platon and subsequent policies ensured that ritual differences would be institutionalized. The edinovertsy possessed their own clergy, their own deans, their own forms of parish order, their own monasteries, their own typography, and their own schools, all of which served to protect and maintain the old rites. This utterly undermined Metropolitan Platon’s second attached opinion that the edinovertsy should abandon their rituals. Indeed, any attempt by Orthodox clergymen to thrust the Nikonian liturgy on their parishes served to accentuate a feeling of resentment and religious difference. In the worstcase scenario, it could provoke apostasy or driving the offending cleric out. Edinoverie clergymen were also hostile to attempts to fulfill Platon’s hope, since this would diminish the size of their parishes and thereby deprive them of economic support. Therefore, the road that led to confessional assimilation was permanently closed. Edinoverie ritual was not going to die out. The path

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to integration formulated by Subbotin and Pavel also suffered. By the time it was established as Synodal policy in 1885, the edinovertsy had already had over eight decades of experience of being treated separately from their Orthodox coreligionists. That experience could not be eradicated, even if the entire Church had wholeheartedly embarked upon Subbotin’s plan for confessional integration. There was also the problem that the Orthodox priesthood had no reason to back the abolition of Platon’s fifth rule that prevented Orthodox transfer to edinoverie. Such threatened their livelihoods. The failure of the state to provide decent salaries for Orthodox and edinoverie clerical groups damaged their ability to generate unity in faith on the ground. The financial reliance on parishioners rendered the Orthodox clergy unreliable tools. The same made the edinoverie clergy unsuited for bringing their flocks closer to the Church. Attempting to infuse the edinoverie liturgy with Orthodox rites could threaten both a priest’s emoluments and his position. Election also made it possible, or even probable, that the edinovertsy would elect their former Old Believer ministers to priestly posts, which meant that the person most responsible for “elucidating to the edinovertsy the truth of the Greco-Russian Church and the falsity of the schism” might be completely uninterested in doing so.224 And even if such priests were committed to some degree of confessional integration, the cultural differences and economic competition between themselves and the Orthodox clergy may have denied them useful allies in such a struggle. Nor was it easy to overcome the differences between the edinovertsy and the Old Believers. Polemicists told their flocks that edinoverie was heretical, and, therefore, they should not associate with it. This barrier was confirmed by the coercive policies of Nicholas I. The seizure of chapels, monasteries, books, and liturgical equipment furnished the Old Believers with a ready-made reason to despise edinoverie. This damaged the future of edinoverie’s mission to the schism: it simply was not trusted. The statistical evidence speaks volumes. Even with approximately 350,000 adherents by 1917, the movement had barely touched Old Belief, much less brought it back into union with the Church. Worse still, by turning edinoverie into a tool for coercion, Nicholas had made it dependent on persecution. The Moscow typography, a source of funding, books, and equipment for parishes, needed prohibitions against Old Believer books to be financially viable. Continued persecution was required to keep those forced to convert in the fold and maintain growth. If religious toleration was extended or freedom of conscience introduced, the prospects of edinoverie did not look good. Coercion also had a paradoxical effect on church policy in relation to edinoverie. The surge of insincere converts warranted

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distrust to the edinovertsy but also provided the impetus for reform. This helps explain the slow and ambiguous pace of reform between 1864 and 1917. The hierarchs of the Church were never fully able to decide between quarantine and integration because both directions were justifiable. One was needed to prevent infection by “insincere” converts. The other was necessary to keep edinovertsy in the flock and counter the accusations of Old Believer propagandists. Thus, the rules of Metropolitan Platon and the coercive policies of Nicholas I made unity in faith almost impossible to attain and at the same time damaged edinoverie’s ability to attract Old Believers. Edinoverie could neither make converts feel secure in their Orthodoxy nor offer much to the world whence they had come. One Belaia Krinitsa pamphlet put it clearly in 1900, “The edinovertsy are neither New nor Old Believers but something in between: in short, they are neither fish nor fowl, neither this nor that.”225 It was down to the edinovertsy to find a third way where they could balance their past and their present, their Old Believer rituals and their Orthodox theology. This lay in the notion of pravoslavnoe staroobriadchestvo, Orthodox Old Belief, which was championed by Simeon Shleev and his supporters between 1905 and 1918. However, it failed to win the backing of Russian Orthodox clergymen, whose continuing confessional anxieties about edinoverie meant they could not back a definition of edinoverie that heightened the emphasis on its Old Believer heritage. Hence, the 1917–1918 Church Council refused to allow the term to appear even in parentheses, leaving the seeds of a distinct edinoverie identity buried within the projects of a few reformers.

Note s 1. K. Plotnikov, Istoriia Russkogo raskola staroobriadchestva (St. Petersburg: I. V. Leontev, 1911), 199. 2. See, for example, the scurrilous polemical pamphlet N. Zenin, Budushchii episkop platonovtsev, sirech “edinovertsev.” (Nizhnii Novgorod: N. A. Mashistov, 1907). 3. M. Kozelsky, “A Borderland Mission: The Russian Orthodox Church in the Black Sea Region,” Russian History 40, no. 1 (2013): 116. 4. The 1897 census, the source of so much other useful information for the late imperial period, is not helpful: the Orthodox and the edinovertsy were counted together as one group, making it impossible to distinguish between the two. 5. Only recently have scholars started to apply demographic methods when examining edinoverie populations: see Iu. V. Borovik and A. Palkin, “Brachnye

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strategii v edinovercheskoi obshchine Ekaterinburga v nachale XX v.,” Quaestio Rossica 7, no. 4 (2019): 1311–1323. 6. See the planned questionnaire in Vtoroi vserossiiskii sezd pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev (edinovertsev) v N. Novgorode 23–28 iulia 1917 goda (Petrograd: Sovet vserossiiskogo sezdov pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev, 1917), 84–87. 7. RGIA, f. 796, op. 175, d. 1989, l. 3. 8. E. E. Lebedev, Edinoverie v protivodeistvii russkomu obriadovomu raskolu. Ocherk po istorii i statistike edinoveriia s obzorom sushchestvuiushchikh o nem mnenii i prilozheniiami (Novgorod: Selivanov, 1904), 23–25. The total figure for the period 1828–1895 does not include 1862–1865 as figures were not compiled for these years. 9. Deianiia sviashchennogo sobora pravoslavnoi Rossiiskoi tserkvi, 11 vols. (Moscow: Izdanie sobornogo soveta, 1918), 7:13. 10. “Svoboda veroispovedaniia v Galitsii,” Tserkov, no. 41 (1914): 948. 11. P. Ershov, ed., Spravochnaia kniga Permskoi eparkhii na 1912 god (Perm: P. F. Kamenskii, 1911), 106–111, 212–213; L. N. Suslova, “Edinoverie v Tobolskoi gubernii vo vtoroi polovine XIX—nachale XX v.,” Problemy istorii Rossii 7 (2008): 217; D. N. Belikov, Tomskii raskol (istoricheskii ocherk s 1834 po 1880-e gody) (Tomsk: P. I. Makushin, 1901), 194; N. M. Kutepov, ed., Pamiatnaia kniga po S.-Peterburgskoi eparkhii (St. Petersburg: Otdelnyi korpus pogranichnoi strazhi, 1899), 201–204; A. I. Prostoserdov, Volkovskoe edinovercheskoe kladbishche. K stoletiiu ego blagoveshchenskoi tserkvi, 1816–1916 (Petrograd: Obshchestvo rasprostraneniia religiozno-nravstvennogo prosveshcheniia, 1916), 81; A. Geno, Dannye o Peterburgskoi eparkhii. K 200-letiiu S.-Peterburga (St. Petersburg: A. S. Suvorin, 1901), 10; Spravochnaia kniga po Tverskoi eparkhii na 1915 god. (Tver: Tverskaia dukhovnaia konsistoriia, 1914), 450–451; Statisticheskie svedeniia o tserkvakh i prichtakh Polotskoi eparkhii (Vitebsk: G. A. Malkin, 1884), 87–89; Kratkie statisticheskie svedeniia o prikhodskikh tserkvakh Kostromskoi eparkhii: Spravochnaia kniga (Kostroma: Gubernskaia tipogafiia, 1911), 216, 398–485; Adres-kalendar Ekaterinburgskoi eparkhii na 1887 god (Ekaterinburg, 1887), 72–74, 90–91, 122–123; N. Chernavskii, Orenburgskaia eparkhiia v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 2 vols. (Orenburg: Orenburgskaia dukhovnaia konsistoriia, 1900), 1:277–312, 320; Viatskaia eparkhiia: Istoriko-geograficheskoe i statisticheskoe opisanie (Viatka: Viatskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, 1912), 76–83, 657–665; Penzenskaia eparkhiia: Istoriko-staticheskoe opisanie (Penza: Penzenskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, 1907), 36–37; LVVA, f. 4754, op. 1, d. 280, l. 50; “Chislennost edinovertsev i staroobriadtsev v ‘Starodube,’” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 16–17 (1907): 15–16; “Pravda o Moskovskikh edinovertsakh,” Tserkov, no. 51–52 (1908): 1785. 12. N. I. Dranitsyn, Adres-kalendar Nizhegorodskoi eparkhii na 1904 g (Nizhnii Novgorod: Gubernskoe pravlenie, 1904), 306–308.

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13. This includes the provinces of Arkhangelsk, Novgorod, Vologda, Olonets, and St. Petersburg (thus the number contains the aforementioned four city parishes). I. N. Ruzhinskaia, “Edinoverie v religioznom landshafte Evropeiskogo severa Rossii,” Uchenye zapiski Petrozavodskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 171, no. 2 (2018): 55. 14. RGIA, f. 796, op. 190, 6 otd., 3 st., d. 15, l. 82. 15. V. Demidov, “K voprosu ob ucherezhdenii edinovercheskogo episkopata v g. Uralske,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 28–29 (1907): 5. 16. Simon (Shleev), Edinoverie v svoem vnutrennem razvitii (Moscow: Medium, 2004), 146, 156. 17. M. S., Istoricheskii ocherk edinoveriia (St. Petersburg: V. Golovin, 1867), 197. 18. A. S. Palkin, Edinoverie v seredine XVIII—nachale XX veka: Obshcherossiiskii kontekst i regionalnaia spetsifika (Ekaterinburg: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo universiteta, 2016), 235. 19. See Shleev’s estimate in 1917 in Vtoroi vserossiiskii sezd, 42. 20. I. Paert, Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760–1850 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2003), 61. 21. Permskii eparkhialnyi adres-kalendar na 1882 (Perm, 1882), 171. 22. Deianiia sviashchennogo sobora, 6:110. 23. Viatskaia eparkhiia, 76–77. 24. “Chislennost edinovertsev,” 15–16. 25. I. V. Pozdeeva, “The Silver Age of Russia’s Old Belief, 1905–17,” in Russia’s Dissident Old Believers 1650–1950, ed. G. B. Michels and R. L. Nichols (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 67–68. 26. Pozdeeva, “Silver Age of Russia’s Old Belief,” 76–77. 27. Trudy Moskovskogo edinovercheskogo sezda (Moscow, 1910), 123–124. 28. Trudy Moskovskogo edinovercheskogo sezda, 64. 29. V. Solovev, “Skorbnyi put,” Pravda pravoslaviia, no. 5–6 (1907): 13–14. 30. N. Varushkin, “O edinoverii v Nizhnetagilskom zavod i ego okrug,” Pravoslavnyi sobesednik, no. 1 (1867): 314. 31. Tobolskii eparkhialnyi adres-kalendar na 1897 god (Tobolsk: Tobolskoe eparkhialnoe bratstvo sv. vlm. Dmitriia Solunskogo, 1897), 228. 32. Adres-kalendar Ekaterinburgskoi eparkhii, 27. 33. Penzenskaia eparkhiia, 290–291. 34. A. Nikolskii, Shestidesiatletie 1843–1903 Pokrovskoi edinovercheskoi tserkvi v Kholmsko-Varshavskoi eparkhii (Warsaw: Varshavskii uchebnyi okrug, 1904), 11. 35. State subsidies had begun to be issued to the Orthodox clergy in 1829: by 1905, two-thirds of all parish priests received a subsidy, but they were usually not substantial enough to liberate priests from the need for emoluments.

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G. L. Freeze, The Parish Clergy in 19th-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, CounterReform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 453. 36. V. P., “K voprosu o sostoianii edinoveriia v Sibiri,” Tomskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 8 (1884): 14. 37. Freeze, Russian Levites, 172. 38. “Pritiazaniia edinovertsev,” Tserkovno-obshchestvennyi vestnik, no. 129 (1878): 2. 39. This caution could lead bishops and consistories to forgive fairly serious misdemeanors. In 1844, a Don dean reported a edinoverie priest for his “greed for profit,” which had led him to “taking exorbitant payment for the performance of rites—especially for marriage and baptism.” The priest was only spared dismissal because the parishioners had elected him. N. V. Lysogorskii, Edinoverie na Donu v XVIII i XIX v. (po 1883 g.) (Sergiev Posad: Sv. Trotiskaia Sergiev lavra, 1915), 606–609. 40. RGIA, f. 797, op. 77, 5 otd., 3 st., d. 3, l. 1. 41. A. Nikolskii, Shestidesiatletie, 22. 42. NART, f. 4, op. 1, d. 127924, l. 11. Their interpretation of Platon’s rule was incorrect. 43. Freeze, Parish Clergy, 455. 44. Ksenofont Kriuchkov, a prominent missionary and disciple of Pavel Prusskii. 45. Tserkovnye vedomosti was the principal Synodal newspaper. 46. S. Smirnov, Zapiski selskogo sviashchennika: Dnevnikovye zapisi sviashchennosluzhitelia edinovercheskogo khrama arkhangela mikhaila sela Mikhailovskaia Sloboda protoiereia Stefana Smirnova, napisannye im samim s 1905 po 1933 god, ed. E. Sarancha (Moscow: Liniia grafika, 2008), 32–33. 47. Smirnov, Zapiski selskogo sviashchennika, 35. 48. RGIA, f. 796, op. 131, d. 1788, l. 26ob: Avtonom was tonsured in the same visit. 49. “Ordained clergy” means both priests and deacons. 50. Permskii eparkhialnyi adres-kalendar, 106–111. 51. Viatskaia eparkhiia, 82–83. 52. Suslova, “Edinoverie v Tobolskoi gubernii,” 228. 53. Kutepov, Pamiatnaia kniga, 201–206. 54. When the clerical estate was opened in the 1860s, the sons of the parish clergy were granted access to other professions and educational institutions. This caused flight from the clerical estate and a manpower shortage by the end of the nineteenth century. The Church was, therefore, obliged to ordain those with an incomplete seminary education. Consequently, the percentage of clerics with a seminary certificate declined from 88.1 percent in 1890 to 63.8 percent in 1904. Freeze, Parish Clergy, 455.

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55. Certainly, the edinovertsy of the town of Vysk in Perm diocese protested the bishop’s choice to send them a seminarian as their new priest in 1843. They preferred their priests to have been psalmists “who had learned from the Psalter alone.” Varushkin, “O edinoverii,” no. 1 (1867): 276. In an 1893 case in Tambov diocese, where the edinovertsy were seeking to become Orthodox, the bishop noted that the sincerity of the edinovertsy was proved by the fact that “they have even accepted a priest from [among] the seminarians.” RGIA, f. 796, op. 170, d. 1489, l. 20ob. 56. V. P., “K voprosu o sostoianii edinoveriia v Sibiri,” 12–13. 57. N. Chernavskii, Orenburgskaia eparkhiia, 2:314–317. 58. RGIA, f. 796, op. 179, d. 2901, l. 9ob. However, it should be noted that while the consistory scolded Iordanskii for confessing an Orthodox parishioner and his family, the reason they cited for his dismissal was the decision to abolish the separate edinoverie okrug because it contained only two parishes. 59. RGIA, f. 796, op. 190, 6 otd., 3 st., d. 30, l. 4. 60. “Obzor deiatelnosti pervogo eparkhialnogo missionerskogo sezda v g. Tomske 10–27 avgusta 1898 goda,” Tomskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 6 (1899): 9. 61. Suslova, “Edinoverie v Tobolskoi gubernii,” 227–228. 62. Kutepov, Pamiatnaia kniga, 201–202. 63. Ershov, Spravochnaia kniga, 107. 64. “Poduzhemskii edinovercheskii prikhod,” Arkhangelskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 11 (1896): 118. 65. Spravochnaia kniga po Tverskoi, 450–451. 66. Statisticheskie svedeniie o tserkvakh, 87–89. 67. V. M. Skvortsov, ed., Deianiia 3-go vserossiiskogo missionerskogo sezda v Kazani, po voprosam vnutrennei missii i raskolosektantstva, 2nd ed. (Kiev: I. I. Chokolov, 1898), 236. 68. For reference to the operation of this law in Moscow diocese, see Polnoe sobranie rezoliutsii Filareta, mitropolita Moskovskogo, 5 vols. (Moscow: Dushevnopoleznoe chtenie, 1914), 4:41. For its operation in Nizhnii Novgorod, see TsANO, f. 570, op. 559, d. 98 (1874), l. 27ob. 69. Otchet po soderzhaniiu Pokrovskoi, Dmitrevskoi i Mariinskoi edinovercheskikh tserkvei i kladbischa, chto na B. Okhte v S-Peterburge za dekabr mesiats 1908 g. za 1909, 1910 i 1911 (St. Petersburg: Strashuner, 1912), 2–3. 70. The Milovskaia parish attained a guardianship in 1891. For its regulations, see Ustav prikhodskogo popechitelstva pri S.-Peterburgskoi edinovercheskoi NikoloMilovskoi tserkvi, chto v Zakharevskoi ulitse (St. Petersburg, 1893). For parish guardianships in general, see G. Young, “Into Church Matters: Lay Identity, Rural Parish Life, and Popular Politics in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian History 23, nos. 1–4 (1996): 367–384.

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71. For a typical example, see the foundation of a parish in Omsk diocese between 1911 and 1913: RGIA, f. 796, op. 193, d. 1853. 72. RGIA, f. 796, op. 189, d. 7950, ll. 3–4ob. For the foundation of the Rzhev edinoverie church, see RGIA, f. 1473, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 104ob–108ob. 73. Spravochnaia kniga po Tverskoi, 450–451; Adres-kalendar Ekaterinburgskoi eparkhii, 122; Tobolskii eparkhialnyi adres-kalendar, 227–228. 74. Varushkin, “O edinoverii,” no. 1 (1867): 271. 75. V. P., “K voprosu o sostoianii edinoveriia v Sibiri,” 10. 76. Quoted from F. Kiprianovich, “Ustroenie edinovercheskoi tserkvi v Rige,” Rizhskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 4 (1914): 106. This is not improbable: there were one hundred pupils at the school in 1844. Kiprianovich, “Ustroenie edinovercheskoi tserkvi v Rige,” no. 5 (1914): 141. 77. The Synod sided with the Orthodox parish in 1909. RGIA, f. 796, op. 190, 6 otd., 3 st., d. 76, ll. 8–9ob. 78. In 1871, a group of Cossack Old Believers in Don diocese applied to join edinoverie and suggested they be given the Orthodox church in their encampment. The Orthodox were not opposed in principle but reported that the prospective converts had threatened to forbid them entry to the church once it was turned into a edinoverie one. Lysogorskii, Edinoverie na Donu, 637–646. 79. RGIA, f. 796, op. 170, d. 1405, l. 4. The Synod had earlier refused their request on the basis that joint ceremonies were “more in accordance with the principles of edinoverie and the spirit of the Orthodox Church, which condemn any division”: RGIA, f. 796, op. 169, d. 1417, ll. 3ob– 4. This was a complicated case, since it was connected to the resentment of the fact that a bishop had earlier ignored the results of a clerical election and the desire for a edinoverie dean in Polotsk diocese. 80. RGIA, f. 796, op. 187, d. 7074, l. 4ob. 81. V. Iunovidov, “Kratkii ocherk sostoianiia raskola i edinoveriia v Altaiskoi, Anuiskoi, Aleiskoi, Shimanaevskoi, Vladimirskoi i Bobrovskoi volostiakh Biiskogo okruga,” Tomskie eparkhialnye vedomosti 1 (1887): 3–4. 82. Varushkin, “O edinoverii,” no. 2 (1867): 37. 83. RGIA, f. 796, op. 170, d. 1489, ll. 3ob–4ob. This rather interesting case was apparently preceded by several years of the Orthodox and edinoverie priests serving in each other’s churches. The deanery council ruled that the fusion of the parish into one, while maintaining a few of the old rituals, was possible so long as this did not provoke Orthodox efforts to convert to edinoverie. However, the Synod ruled against the idea, noting that while one half of the edinovertsy had petitioned in favor of getting rid of almost all the pre-Nikonian rites except the two-fingered sign of the cross, the other half had wanted to maintain more rituals. In 1895, following a further petition where the entire parish resolved to completely abandon the old rites, the Synod revoked its earlier ruling and created a new Orthodox parish.

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84. The only noble edinoverets I have found was Prince Aleksei Ukhtomskii, an elder of the Nikolskaia church in Petersburg from 1912. P. Chubarov and V. N. Pavlov, “Akademik A. A. Ukhtomskii—prikhozhanin nikolskogo edinovercheskoi tserkvi Sankt-Peterburga,” in Pravoslavnoe edinoverie v Rossii, eds. P. Chubarov and V. N. Pavlov (St. Petersburg: RGPU im. A. I. Gertsena, 2004), 65–67. 85. R. V. Kaurkin and O. A. Pavlova, Edinoverie v Rossii: Ot zarozhdeniia idei do nachala XX veka (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2011), 111. 86. L. I. Denisov, Pravoslavnye monastyri Rossiiskoi imperii (Moscow: A. D. Stupin, 1908), 879. 87. TsIAM, f. 1181, op. 1, d. 2; Ob otkrytii nikolskogo edinoverchskogo monastyria: Istoricheskaia zapiska (Moscow, 1892), 21. 88. I. F. Nilskii, Otzyv ordinarnogo professora S.-Peterburgskoi dukhovnoi akademii Nilskogo po povodu proshenii edinovertsev sviateishemu sinodu o nuzhdakh edinoveriia, 2. 89. Data compiled from the information in Denisov, Pravoslavnye monastyri. Numbers for monks and male novices are somewhat distorted because the Zlatoustovskii monastery in Ufa did not distinguish between monks and novices. 90. The priest sent to investigate found thirty-three residents, five of whom were edinovertsy. TsIAM, f. 1181, op. 1, d. 2, l. 9, 18. 91. Ibid., l. 112. 92. RGIA, f. 796, op. 167, d. 1463, l. 2. Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Akumin agreed with this assessment, as did a local edinoverie priest. Gedeon himself proclaimed that any oddities in his behavior had been caused by “apoplexy,” which had rendered the right side of his face numb. Gedeon had had a glowing career as a edinoverie monastic, having won the Order of St. Anna, third class, in 1871 (Ibid., ll. 2ob–5). 93. RGIA, f. 796, op. 178, d. 1971, ll. 1ob–2. The diocesan authorities wanted to turn the monastery into an Orthodox one to attract pilgrims travelling to and from Kiev via the River Sozh. 94. Ibid., l. 18, 21. The edinovertsy of Gomel claimed that the abbot had always sought to turn the monastery into an Orthodox one by driving away edinoverie novices and performing the liturgy according to the Orthodox regulations. 95. E. Clay, “An Old Believer Monastery on the Volga: The Cheremshan Monastery Complex, 1820–1925,” Slavonica 7, no. 2 (2001): 17. 96. Denisov, Pravoslavnye monastyri, 328. 97. S. I. Matveev, Kratkaia istoriia zlatoustovskogo voskresenskogo edinovercheskogo muzhskogo monastyria, ufimskoi gubernii, zlatoustovskogo uezda (Ufa: Solovev, 1913), 2. 98. V. N. Vitebskii, Raskol v Uralskom voiske i otnoshenie k nemu dukhovnoi i voennograzhdanskoi vlasti v kontse XVIII i v XIX v (Kazan: Imperatorskii universitet, 1878), 129.

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99. Chernavskii, Orenburgskaia eparkhiia, 2:410. 100. I. V. Pochinskaia, “Iz istorii organizatsii edinovercheskoi tipografii v Moskve,” in Uralskii sbornik: Istoriia, Kultura, Religiia 4 (Ekaterinburg, 2001), 143–151. 101. The books produced were quite impressive in terms of sheer numbers. It printed 3,600 Psalters in 1850, 36,000 theological tracts in 1852, and 12,800 books in 1860. See M. S., Istoricheskii ocherk edinoveriia, 147, footnote 2. 102. The sale or purchase of Old Believer religious books and pamphlets could land the repeat offender in jail for two to four months. Ia. A. Kantorovich, O raskolnikakh: Svod zakonov rossiiskoi imperii (St. Petersburg: Deshevnoe izdatelstvo dlia naroda, 1901), 23–24. 103. P. I. Ivanov, “Izdevatelstva nad edinovertsami (Udivitelnaia istorii edinovercheskoi tipografii),” Tserkov, no. 11 (1909): 376. The edinovertsy were not only the beneficiaries of Old Believer misfortune: the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy also regularly received Old Believer books and papers for use in its missionary department. See NART, f. 10, op. 1, d. 1627 for books sent to the academy in 1857. 104. Ivanov, “Izdevatelstva nad edinovertsami,” 377. 105. TsIAM, f. 690, op. 1, d. 16, ll. 2–64: income amounted to 165,569.34 rubles, while outgoings came to 137,564.63. Many of the typography’s expenses were donations to various institutions and edinoverie parishes. 106. For a list of those institutions that benefited from the typography’s largesse, see N. I. Gorlitsyn, Otchet nachalnogo troitskogo edinovercheskogo uchilishcha v Moskve s 1864 g. po 1878 g. (Moscow, 1879), 1–2. A parish founded in Penza in 1868 also received a promise for books, money, and liturgical equipment at the typography’s expense. I. Nevestin, “Raskol v sele Poime i uchrezhdenie edinoveriia,” Penzenskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 12 (1868): 395. 107. RGIA, f. 796, op. 187, d. 7011. 108. Six thousand rubles went to the monastery and one thousand to the Brotherhood. Ivanov states that 162,000 and 27,000 went to each, respectively, between 1881 and 1907. P. I. Ivanov, “Izdevatelstva,” 377. 109. In the month of September 1871 alone, the typography gave 5,759 rubles to the Moscow Vsesviatskii edinoverie convent, 3,000 to the Moscow Nikolskii monastery, 500 rubles to another monastery, and 150 rubles each to two edinoverie parishes in Penza and Kharkov. TsIAM, f. 690, op. 1, d. 3, l. 13–14. 110. Ibid., 379; For the difficulties the typography was having meeting its financial obligations to the Troitskaia parish school, see Trudy Moskovskogo edinovercheskogo sezda, 27. 111. As an example, see Ustav bogadelni A. A. Sandalina pokrovskoi Molvitinskoi edinovercheskoi tserkvi v sele Molvitine, Buiskogo uezda, Kostromskoi gubernii (Korpusnov, 1900). 112. Gorlitsyn, Otchet nachalnogo, 2.

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113. M. S., Istoricheskii ocherk, 108; Tobolskii eparkhialnyi adres-kalendar, 224–225. 114. TsANO, f. 570, op. 559 (1870), d. 15, l. 3. 115. Ibid., op. 559 (1870), d. 15l. l. 116. 116. Ibid., l. 130. 117. Ibid., l. 124. 118. Ibid., ll. 121–121ob. 119. Ibid., l. 5ob. The senior class also read the works of Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) and several books printed by the Synodal typography, so some modern Russian was evidently taught. The New Testaments they used were apparently in both modern Russian and Old Church Slavonic. 120. Ibid., l. 53ob. 121. Ibid., l. 107. 122. Ibid., l. 131. 123. Ibid., l. 48. 124. Ibid., ll. 120–121ob. 125. Ibid., l. 130ob. 126. Ibid., l. 131ob. 127. Ibid., l. 98ob. 128. Ibid., l. 107. 129. The edinovertsy placed a lot of importance on the provision of antique antimensia: the newly formed Spaso-Preobrazhenskaia church in Kazan wanted one dating from 1557 that had originally been blessed by the city’s very first bishop. Unsurprisingly, the abbot of the Uspenskii monastery in Sviazhsk, where the antimension was kept, proved reluctant to surrender the artifact: the Synod agreed and rejected the request. The edinovertsy refused to back down and petitioned Alexander II on this subject, with the result that they finally obtained the item in 1862, some five years after the initial request. NART, f. 4, op. 1, d. 5246, l. 95–160. 130. V. M. Skvortsov, ed., Pervyi vserossiiskii edinovercheskii sezd (St. Petersburg: V. M. Skvortsov, 1912), 14. 131. Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev (edinovertsev) (St. Petersburg: Sinodalnaia tipografiia, 1912), 87. 132. Iunovidov, “Kratkii ocherk,” 4. 133. A. Nikolskii, Shestidesiatletie, 22. 134. Ibid., 42–43. 135. RGIA, f. 796, op. 187, d. 7257. 136. Vtoroi vserossiiskii sezd, 107. 137. For the changing forms of these prayers from the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries, see M. Babkin, Sviashchenstvo i tsarstvo (Rossiia, nachalo XX veka-1918): Issledovaniia i materialy (Moscow: Indrik, 2011), 160–183.

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138. Palkin, Edinoverie v seredine, 98–99. 139. The edinovertsy were not alone in using religious denunciations to fight intracommunity battles: as Burds has shown, the Orthodox denounced each other as “schismatics” in order to assert behavioral control in the village community. J. Burds, “A Culture of Denunciation: Peasant Labour Migration and Religious Anathematization in Rural Russia, 1860–1905,” Journal of Modern History 68, no. 4 (1996): 786–818. 140. For an example of the old form of the prayers said during the litanies, see N. V. Lysogorskii, Moskovskii mitropolit Platon Levshin kak protivoraskolnichii deiatel (Rostov on Don: A. I. Ter-Abramian, 1905), 516. It was not only these prayers that caused problems. In the Biisk region, new edinoverie parishioners also refused to chant prayers in 1844 on the occasion of the marriage of Maria Nikolaevna, the daughter of Nicholas I: they did so because such were not mentioned “in the old books of prayer songs.” RGIA, f. 1473, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 218–219. 141. NART, f. 4, op. 1, d. 5246, l. 62ob. 142. Ibid., ll. 73–73ob. 143. Ibid., ll. 110–112, ll. 118–119, l. 120. 144. “Po povodu novovvedenie v nekotorykh edinovercheskikh tserkvakh,” Moskovskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 4 (1878): 46. 145. GARF, f. 1099, op. 1, d. 938, l. 1. 146. See a collection of these talks in Pafnutii, Zapiski po narodnym besedam ieromonakha Pafnutiia, 3 vols. (Moscow: Imperatorskoe obshchestvo istorii i drevnostei Rossii pri Moskovskom universitete, 1877). 147. I. G. Vinogradov, O Fedoritovom slove (Moscow: Sinodalnaia tipografiia, 1866). 148. Savva (Tikhomirov), Sobranie mnenii i otzvyvov Filareta, mitropolita Moskovskogo i Kolomenskogo, po uchebnym i tserkovno-gosudarstvennym voprosam, 5 vols. (Moscow: Sinodalnaia tipogafiia, 1886), 5:912. 149. See point six of the Nizhnii Novgorod petition “Vazhnoe Sobytie” 1 and point (d) of the Moscow petition, RGIA, f. 796, op. 145, d. 2257, l. 29ob. 150. A. S. Palkin, “‘Ne soedinentsi, no podchinentsi . . .’. Otnoshenie staroobriadtsev k edinoveiiu v kontse XVIII—serdine XIX vv (po materialam polemicheskikh proizvedenii),” Vestnik Ekaterinburgskoi dukhovnoi seminarii 2, no. 4 (2012): 75. 151. P. T. De Simone, “An Old Believer ‘Holy Moscow’ in Imperial Russia: Community and Identity in the History of the Rogozhskoe Cemetery Old Believers, 1771–1917” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2012), 87. 152. Palkin, “Ne soedinentsi,” 78. 153. V. Kelsiev, Sbornik pravitelstvennykh svedenii o raskolnikakh, 3 vols. (London: Trübner, 1860), 1:199–208; Palkin, “Ne soedinentsi,” 79–80.

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154. A. Shalabanov, “Vzgliady staroobriadtsa i pravoslavnogo na edinoverie,” Tobolskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 21 (1900): 395–404; no. 22 (1900): 447–456. Palkin has also shown that these views were still being propagated by priestless Old Believers in the 1890s. See A. S. Palkin, “Otnoshenie staroobriadtsev pomorskogo soglasiia k edinoveriiu (na primere polemicheskikh sochinenii I. I. Zykova i D. V. Batova iz sobraniia drevlekhranilishcha LAI UrFU),” in Novye tekhnologii v informatsionno-bibliotechnom obespechenii nauchnykh issledovanii (Ekaterinburg, 2012), 372–376. 155. V. Belikov, “K voprosu ob edinoverii,” Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii, no 1 (1917): 4–5. 156. L. F. Pichugin, O edinoverii v Russkoi tserkvi (uniia edinoveriia): Polemicheskii ocherk (Moscow: Arkheodoksiia, 2009), 21. It is unknown whether Pichugin published the essay in his lifetime. For a biography, see A. I. Samoilenko, “Lev Feoktistovich Pichugin i staroobriadtsy s. Poima Penzenskoi oblasti,” Mir staroobriadchestva 4 (1998): 356–361. 157. LVVA, f. 7462, op. 1, d. 231, l. 1. 158. Palkin, “‘Ne soedinentsi,” 82. 159. Pichugin, O edinoverii, 39–40. 160. V. Belikov, “K voprosu ob edinoverii,” 4. 161. Pichugin does briefly blame the beglopopovtsy for edinoverie’s emergence: had their priests not been so immoral and criminal, then edinoverie would never have been seen as a viable solution in the first place. Pichugin, O edinoverii, 10. 162. Skvortsov, Pervyi vserossiiskii, 38, 42. 163. Varushkin, “O edinoverii,” 1 (1866): 15–17. 164. Vitebskii, Raskol v Uralskom voiske, 201–202. 165. Gorlitsyn, Otchet nachalnogo, 2–3. 166. Ibid., 6. 167. Nevestin, “Raskol v sele Poime,” 394. 168. N. Prialukhin, “Usttsilemskii edinovercheskii prikhod (Istoriia postroeniia tserkvi i obrazovaniia prikhoda),” Arkhangelskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 17 (1910): 592. 169. Vitebskii, Raskol v Uralskom voiske, 189–191. 170. Lysogorskii, Edinoverie na Donu, 634. 171. RGIA, f. 796, op. 190, 6 otd., 3 st., d. 20, ll. 4–5. 172. A. Nikolskii, Shestidesiatletie, 49. 173. For the examination of such rhetoric, see D. Beer, “The Medicalization of Religious Deviance in the Russian Orthodox Church (1880–1905),” Kritika 5, no. 3 (2004): 451–482. 174. Nevestin, “Raskol v sele Poime,” 389. 175. A. Mizerov, Spaso-Arkhangelskaia edinovercheskaia tserkov v g. RomanoBorisoglebske (Iaroslavl: Gubernskaia zemnaia uprava, 1883), 2–3.

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176. Smirnov, Zapiski selskogo sviashchennika, 27. 177. TsIAM, f. 1181, op. 1, d. 2, l. 127. 178. EAA, f. 5271, op. 1, d. 496. 179. T. I. Kasilov, “Ispoved byvshogo edinovertsa,” Tserkov, no. 30 (1908): 1036. 180. D. N. Belikov, Tomskii raskol, 201. 181. T. Verkhovskii, Starodube. Zapiski prot. S.-Peterb. Nikolsk. edinoverchesk. tserkvi T. A. Verkhovskogo, vysochaishe komandirovannogo v 1845–1848 g. gosudarem imp. Nikolaem Pavlovichem dlia ustroistva edinoveriia v Chernigovsk. staroobriadchesk. posadakh (Kazan: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1874), chap. 3, 92. 182. J. M. Surer, “The Russian Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian Village, and Religious Identity in Kyiv Province, 1870–1913,” in Church and Society in Modern Russia: Essays in Honor of Gregory L. Freeze, ed. M. Hildermeier and E. K. Wirtschafter (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015), 201–202. 183. TsIAM, f. 1181, op. 1, d. 66, l. 1. 184. TsIAM, f. 203, op. 360 (1879), d. 4, l. 2. 185. M. S., Istoricheskii ocherk, 135. 186. The Uspenskaia church was located above the gate to the Preobrazhenskoe cemetery: the complaint was that the Old Believers were leaving their horses in the gateway, beneath the altar. TsIAM, f. 1181, op. 1, d. 2, l. 9. 187. RGIA. f. 796, op. 187, d. 6918, l. 40ob. In the settlement in question, Old Believer Cossack officers seem to have dominated local politics. 188. Take, for example, the 1843 case of a prayerhouse in Kharkov province, where the Old Believers converted to edinoverie in return for the unlocking of the building. RGIA, f. 1473, op. 1, d. 24, ll. 48ob–49. 189. Pichugin, O edinoverii, 30. Pichugin was deploying the exact same words that had been used in the 1667 anathema against the Old Believers. 190. The first time this term was used was in a petition to the Holy Synod from August 28, 1890. This petition was from Muscovite edinovertsy and set out a plan for bishops, the removal of the anathemas, and the reorganization of edinoverie education in Moscow. TsIAM, f. 1181, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 1–2. 191. D. C. Ryan, “Religious Conversion and the Problem of Commitment in Livland Province, 1850s–1860s,” Ajalooline Ajakiri 121–122, no. 3–4, (2007): 374. 192. S. Smirnov, Zapiski selskogo sviashchennika, 23. For the spasovtsy, see J. Bushnell, Russian Peasant Women Who Refused to Marry: Spasovite Old Believers in the 18th–19th Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 161–188. 193. D. Rogers, The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 35–70. 194. For a description, see Nevestin, “Raskol v sele Poime,” 394.

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195. NART, f. 4, op. 1, d. 5321, ll. 35–35ob. 196. “Formy,” Penzenskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 11 (1876): 30–32. 197. F. Kiprianovich, “Ocherk istorii edinoveriia v g. Rige,” Rizhskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 10 (1913): 308. 198. NART, f. 4, op. 1, d. 5321, l. 2ob. 199. Ibid., l. 44. 200. Ibid., l. 30ob. 201. Ibid., l. 42. 202. Ibid., l. 43. 203. Ibid., l. 31ob. He further alleged that Sveshnikov was a liar who had installed himself as priest of the church and did not bother to maintain proper parish registers (ibid., l. 32). Petitions penned by Sveshnikov refer to the church as “the Old Believer Spaso-Preobrazhenskaia edinoverie church”: NART, f. 4, op. 1, d. 5246, l. 76. 204. TsANO, f. 570, op. 559 (1891), d. 92, l. 7. 205. Ibid., l. 18. 206. RGIA, f. 796, op. 145, d. 2257, ll. 111ob–113. 207. TsANO, f. 570, op. 559 (1891), d. 91, l. 7. 208. RGIA, f. 796, op. 164, d. 1327, ll. 1–1ob. 209. TsANO, f. 570, op. 559 (1888), d. 46, ll. 2–2ob. 210. Ibid., op. 559 (1888), d. 46, l. 1ob. 211. Ibid., op. 599 (1881), d. 17, l. 1ob. 212. Ibid., op. 559 (1873), d. 53, l. 2. 213. Ibid., op. 559 (1881), d. 30, l. 1. 214. Ibid., op. 559 (1892), d. 104, ll. 1–1ob. 215. “Obiasnitelnye zapiski, podannye mitropolitu Filaretu iskavshim prisoedineniia k pravoslavnoi tserkvi chlenami belokrinitskoi ierarkii v 1865 g.,” Bratskoe slovo, no. 13 (1884): 165–176; 14 (1884): 222–232. 216. Pavel (Lednev), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Nikolskogo edinovercheskogo monastyria nastoiatelia arkhimandrita Pavla, 4 vols. (Moscow: Bratstvo sv. Petra mitropolita, 1897), 2:1–41. 217. TsANO, f. 570, op. 559 (1888), d. 46, l. 2. 218. “Beseda po rukopolozhenii v iereiia,” Penzenskie eparkhialnye vedomosti, no. 4 (1879): 4. 219. TsANO, f. 570, op. 559 (1892), d. 104, l. 66ob. 220. RGIA, f. 796, op. 185, d. 2927, l. 9ob. 221. T. Verkhovskii, Starodube, part 1, 53. 222. TsANO, op. 559 (1904), d. 16, l. 3ob. 223. Ibid., op. 559 (1891), d. 25, l. 51 224. “Obzor deiatelnosti,” 10. 225. Shalabanov, “Vzgliady staroobriadtsa,” no. 21, 395.

k

CONCLUSION Decline, Disappearance, Reinvention

On March 6, 1918, Metropolitan Veniamin (Kazanskii) of Petrograd received a petition from the Petrograd edinoverie community asking for the establishment of a cathedra of Okhta.1 A vote was held on May 18, with Simeon Shleev gaining sixty-one votes of the seventy-one available.2 Quickly taking monastic vows, he adopted the name Simon and was consecrated as bishop on June 3 by Patriarch Tikhon and Veniamin in the Aleksandr Nevskii monastery. The ceremony was performed according to the old rituals.3 However, the new bishop’s career was to be relatively brief. On August 18, 1921, he was returning home after performing an evening liturgy in Ufa’s cathedral.4 His party noticed two men in the courtyard of the convent where the bishop resided. When they were only fifteen meters away, one of the strangers produced a revolver and fired twice. Both shots hit the bishop and the assailants fled into the darkening night. So died the first edinoverie bishop of Russia.5 Equally violent and distressing fates awaited the new edinoverie episcopate, most of whom died in the Stalinist purges. Edinoverie’s further development was cut short by the Bolshevik Revolution and the Red victory in the following civil war. In response to government edicts decreeing the separation of church and state and the seizure of ecclesiastical property in early 1918, Patriarch Tikhon declared anathema on the enemies of the Church: this, in turn, provoked a harsh repression from the Communist regime. Priests, bishops, nuns, and monks were summarily shot, churches ransacked, and holy reliquaries cracked open to show the people that the supposedly pristine bodies of saints were as desiccated as those of sinners.6 Such a campaign was mandated by the militant atheism of Bolshevik ideology, but it must also be remembered that the vast majority of the clergy were actively

199

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hostile to the new regime, with many members serving the White armies in the brutal civil conflict: Antonii (Khrapovitskii), having fled Russia with the army of Petr Wrangel in 1920, led the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in opposition to Bolshevik rule. For instance, in 1921, he made the following request to “the peoples of the world”: “Do not support them [the Bolsheviks], do not strengthen them against your children and grandchildren! It is better to help honorable Russian citizens. Put weapons in their hands, give them your volunteers, and help them drive out Bolshevism, a cult of murder, rapine, and blasphemy, from Russia and the entire world.”7 However, the direct assault on the Church frequently proved more trouble than it was worth: the confiscation of churches and their property in particular provoked furious and violent reactions from the laity.8 This worried Lenin and Trotsky, who recognized that such disorder was problematic given their tenu­ ous grip on famine-stricken, war-torn Russia. Instructions for the seizure of church valuables to help with hunger relief in 1921–1922 insisted on a legalistic and careful approach: “The comrades to whom this task is instructed must fulfil it quickly and energetically, but while observing the greatest caution that the religious feelings of the believers are not insulted and clashes are not provoked.”9 Meanwhile, the Bolshevik leadership sought to undermine the Church by sponsoring a schism within it. Liberal clerics, the successors of the Union for Church Regeneration, felt that the 1917–1918 Local Council had not gone far enough to modernize the Russian Orthodox Church and broke away from the patriarchate, forming what its opponents dubbed “the Renovationist schism”: they allowed married, secular priests to become bishops, introduced modern Russian into the liturgy, and followed the Gregorian, rather than the Julian, calendar. The Communist government sponsored their demands for church property, seeing to it that their legal claims to buildings were supported. For his part, Patriarch Tikhon realized that the overthrow of Bolshevik power from either within or without was not likely in the immediate future: subject to frequent house arrests, he buckled under the pressure and recognized the Soviet government. Finally, one should note that the Bolshevik assault fell most heavily on the Russian Orthodox Church, and “to weaken the Orthodox Church, the party was willing to forge alliances with those religious groups that had been persecuted under the imperial autocracy.”10 Indeed, as Irina Paert notes, “The government in the 1920s generally paid more attention to Old Believer petitions than to those of Orthodox congregations.”11 However, neither they nor the Russian Orthodox Church were spared during the purges: “By 1941 only one out of forty Old Believer bishops had not been imprisoned. Only 10 per cent of

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Old Believer places of worship in Sverdlovsk oblast were still functioning by the end of the 1930s.”12 The Church, run by the patriarchal locum tenens Sergii (Stragorodskii), had only a handful of bishops still at liberty, a situation that lasted until World War II pushed Stalin to reach a concordat in 1943. As for edinoverie, the Russian Orthodox Church had far bigger problems to deal with in the 1920s and 1930s than the few hundred parishes belonging to the united faith. Its leadership began to crumble away: Shleev was dead, while Andrei (Ukhtomskii) and Antonii (Khrapovitskii), the two most sympathetic Orthodox bishops, were in prison and exile abroad, respectively. In some regions, edinoverie parishes grouped together to form “organisations,” as was reported by the OGPU (the secret police) with regard to seventy edinoverie parishes in the Urals under the control of an “elected edinoverie bishop” in Nizhnii Tagil.13 The last gasp at some kind of centralized organization came in August 1924, when Patriarch Tikhon appointed Bishop Pavel (Volkov) of Kerzhensk “to have spiritual care over and management of the edinoverie parishes that turn to him”: furthermore, he was “to directly communicate with the patriarch of all Russia on [the basis of] stauropigial rights.”14 In other words, Shleev’s plan from 1905 finally came to fruition: a single edinoverie bishop with a direct line to the central church authorities now had the right to manage all the edinoverie parishes of Russia (although in reality he only did so for twelve regions).15 Bishop Pavel himself seemed shocked at this development: “Such a revolution in the views of the higher church authorities is entirely remarkable and gratifying.”16 Pavel’s most important act as the leader of edinoverie was to summon the Third All-Russian Edinoverie Congress in Nizhnii Novgorod. Held from June 19 to June 27, 1927, with the permission of the Soviet authorities,17 many of the old points from the previous congresses were raised: the creation of a edinoverie episcopate, the establishment of a seminary in Moscow, the publication of a edinoverie newspaper, and the composition of “a fraternal address to other Old Believer groups with a call [for them] to reconcile with us so that we can all be members of the single body of Christ, the Church.”18 They also called to the government for the return of the confiscated edinoverie typography. It goes without saying that none of these requests bore any fruit. Pavel himself renounced his monastic vows in 1929, thus ending the brief experiment with a centralized edinoverie leadership.19 Meanwhile, confiscations disrupted edinoverie liturgical life: reporting on a trip he made to edinoverie parishes in several provinces to inform them of his appointment by the patriarch in 1924, Bishop Pavel reported that “my personal impressions are that edinoverie is really being pulverised and could be stopped

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dead.”20 Following the seizure of property in 1922, the elder of the Khristorozh­ destvenskaia edinoverie church in Verkh-Iset begged for the return of liturgical utensils: “The church is left completely without the items necessary for the performance of the liturgy.”21 The Nikolskii edinoverie monastery in Moscow, the former home of Pavel Prusskii and perhaps the most prominent edinoverie religious establishment, was seized in 1923 and turned into a dormitory for workers at a radio factory: its final abbot was shot in 1937.22 Shleev’s former church, the stately Nikolskaia edinoverie temple in Leningrad, was converted into the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic in 1933, which it remains to this day.23 In other parishes, something close to normal services continued: in his diary, Father Stefan Smirnov dutifully noted the performance of liturgies in his church near Moscow until November 8, 1933 (Old Style), the diary’s last entry (Smirnov died a natural death just over a month later).24 Equally, some edinoverie churches were beyond the reaches of the Soviet government and so continued relatively normally. This was true of the Chernoe Selo (Mustvee) parish in the new Estonian Republic. In this parish of 467 people (as of 1920), edinoverie confronted both old and new problems: an attempt by a faction of the parish council to overthrow the priest in 1921–1922, the ruinous condition of the parish buildings because of German occupation during World War I, and negotiating their way through treacherous church politics. In terms of the latter, the edinovertsy returned to the rules of Metropolitan Platon to demand that Archbishop Aleksander (Paulus) of Tallinn take them under his direct and unmediated care.25 In independent Latvia, seven edinoverie parishes existed in the Latgale region as of 1940.26 Grigorii Dribintsev, a former church elder in Shleev’s parish, led the Latvian Orthodox Church’s anti–Old Believer mission.27 Meanwhile, the Russian-language church journal in Latvia continued to publish pieces on edinoverie right up until World War II.28 However, the 1930s were even more disastrous for the edinovertsy than for the Orthodox and the Old Believers simply because of their smaller numbers: it would seem that only three parishes continued to exist until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.29 With the virtual disappearance of edinoverie, the questions that it provoked died away as well. However, the ritual reevaluation that had brought edinoverie into being was still playing out. On April 10, 1929, Sergii (Stragorodskii) declared the seventeenth-century anathemas abolished.30 Every aspect of the pre-Nikonian ritual was declared purely Orthodox. A Local Church Council between May 30 and June 2, 1971, backed Sergii’s decision.31 The resolution maintained that the Church had never conflated ritual with dogma but Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) of Leningrad went further, stating

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that Patriarch Nikon had “looked on differences in ritual as on differences in faith.”32 The Russian Orthodox Church finally conceded the antiquity of the old rituals and their full and absolute equality with the Nikonian ones. The abolition of the anathemas marked the logical conclusion of the ritual reevaluation and with it the demise of the Nikonian rites to function as a way to distinguish the Orthodox confession. Edinoverie has made something of a comeback in post-Soviet Russia. There can be no doubt that it owes much of this to Patriarch Kirill (Gundiaev), a disciple of Nikodim (Rotov). He has given it considerable attention since the early years of the twenty-first century, with the consequence that there are now thirty-seven parishes extant, mostly in the territory of the Russian Federation: the others are in Ukraine, Belarus, and the United States.33 This marks a relatively quick increase from eight parishes with ten thousand to twelve thousand members noted by Ekaterina Levintova in 1998.34 In 2009, Kirill established the Patriarchal Center of the Old Russian Liturgical Tradition to study edinoverie’s past and plan for its future. However, he made a telling statement on the subject of edinoverie’s problems in 2004: In some edinoverie circles, the ideology and psychology of the schism are maintained, and alienation from general church life and even from the hierarchy itself occurs. Incidentally, this unpleasantly surprises those from the Old Believers who strive to find genuine unity with the Orthodox Church while maintaining old customs and traditions. Thus, life drives us to consider the feasibility of forming a special church organ. It could work in partnership with bishops in dioceses where Old Believer parishes are present, co-ordinate and support their activities, and, in cases of necessity, respond in a timely fashion to the appearance of potentially negative tendencies connected with the lives of edinoverie communities.35

This is a repetition of the suspicion of the motives and internal convictions of the edinovertsy that have framed Orthodox relations with them since the late eighteenth century. There is even a return to a distinction between “true” and “false” edinovertsy, the former striving for “genuine unity” and the latter asserting their independence. The resolution Kirill proposes is an institution that will serve to integrate the edinovertsy with their diocesan prelates while being watchful for those “potentially negative tendencies” that blight edinoverie communities. Once again, the idea that such institutions might provoke the separatism that the Church seeks to avoid has not been considered. Kirill’s declaration demonstrates the depths of the structural problem of edinoverie. Even after its virtual destruction, the attempt to find a new solution is bound

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by a contradiction between downgrading the significance of ritual and reifying it through institutional forms. The institution created at Kirill’s behest is a commission for the affairs of Old Believer parishes, which is convened under the jurisdiction of the patriarchate’s department for external church relations: however, its role is mostly advisory, since the new edinoverie communities are managed by diocesan prelates. Some questions remain: What precisely is being revived (or, perhaps, reinvented)? And what is its purpose? With regard to the first matter, we need not go to the extreme of the contemporary Old Believer philosopher Kirill Tovbin, who insists that modern edinoverie is a postmodern pastiche designed to bring a simulacrum of the sacred to an otherwise spiritually bankrupt Russian Orthodox Church,36 to suggest that it is a reinvention rather than a revival. The near-complete destruction of edinoverie in the 1930s and the absolute lack of interest in the secular and ecclesiastical historiography throughout the rest of the Soviet period37 mean that it is not some partially faded tradition only needing a shot in the arm but rather the wholesale re-creation of an otherwise deceased movement. This is true even in terms of terminology. Officially, a neologism is employed to describe the new parishes: they are staroobriadnyi (as opposed to staroobriadcheskii/starovercheskii [Old Believer] or edinovercheskii [edinoverie]). In these ways (and also because intellectuals are the driving force behind modern edinoverie), edinoverie’s reinvention somewhat resembles the various neo-pagan movements that have appeared in the post-Soviet space.38 This reinvention is heavily dependent on Shleev’s conception of edinoverie. Patriarch Kirill has defined modern edinoverie’s purpose as creating a bridge of understanding between Old Belief and the Russian Orthodox Church: the ultimate aim is a joint front on social, cultural, and moral issues in Russia. This purpose stands directly on Shleevian grounds and is at variance with the missionary definition offered both by Platon (Levshin) and the 1917–1918 Local Church Council. Others have gone further, suggesting that edinoverie’s value lies in what it can bring to the Russian Orthodox Church. In an article entitled Edinoverie’s Mission Addresses Orthodox Parishes, Not the Old Believers, Father Ilia Maslov notes that “in an epoch of the total secularisation of the Church (when there are incessant temptations to have the church order of life imitate modernity and bring comforts even into the liturgical regulations) and in conditions of growing religious modernism and conformism, the edinoverie attitude to the letter and form . . . of church tradition can serve as a wonderful example.”39 Given that Shleev’s historical and journalistic works dominate the primarysource material (especially that available to nonhistorians: his major works

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were reprinted in the early 2000s)40 and his status as a saint (he was canonized in 2000 as a martyr and confessor), the dependence on him is hardly surprising. There is also some ideological commensurability between Shleev and neotraditionalist intellectuals like Aleksandr Dugin. For Dugin, as for Shleev, the pre-Petrine rituals and piety maintained by edinoverie offer an antidote to secular, materialistic, and Western phenomena allegedly plaguing modern Russian society and culture: contemporary controversies over globalization and its impact give this an additional punch.41 However, the consequences of an ideological and blinkered overreliance on Shleev are clear: the alternative visions for edinoverie present throughout its history are ignored, as are the many controversies it provoked and the lived historical experiences of its members. A very recent debate within modern edinoverie has made it obvious that the old problems are far from dead. On January 25, 2018, at the annual “The Old Ritual in the Past and Present” conference, the modern edinoverie intellectual and benefactor Leonid Sevastianov42 made a surprising request: he asked Metropolitan Ilarion (Alfeev), the chair of the department of external church relations, to assume the role of a edinoverie bishop. Ilarion, no doubt somewhat flummoxed, refused the call, noting (much as the missionaries did in the early twentieth century) that a edinoverie bishop with control over all edinoverie parishes would violate the canonical rules guaranteeing episcopal sovereignty in a diocese. Sevastianov’s request stirred up controversy among the internet commentariat. On the one hand, an author named A. Shunin took the opportunity to condemn modern edinoverie for abandoning its predecessor’s missionary purpose, noting that it “in principle cannot bring unity in faith, being fragmented into a few dissimilar (and even mutually hostile) groups.” He goes on to damn edinoverie priests for preferring to attend Old Believer services rather than Orthodox ones, for being hostile to the “300-year-old tradition” of the Nikonian rites, and for putting up icons of Avvakum, the Old Believer heresiarch. Associating the edinovertsy with both the renovationists and several leading liberal clergymen from the twentieth century, he concludes by suggesting that their modern counterparts intend to recognize the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy and by stipulating that the Russian Orthodox Church cannot tolerate two alternative ritual traditions within its walls.43 From the opposite side, the blogger Aleksandr Soldatov has used this issue to attack the patriarchate for the “unprecedented concentration of power into one set of hands.” The principal reason the edinovertsy will not be given bishops, he argues, is because the resolutions of the 1917–1918 Local Church Council

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demand that such individuals be elected by their parishes. However, the patriarchate cannot tolerate the restoration of clerical and episcopal election even within such a small group of parishes: “The contemporary system of the Moscow patriarchate rests on the serfdom of the parish clergy before the governing bishops. The appearance of a ‘jurisdictional alternative’ inside this system— like the opportunity to ‘exit to stauropegia’ [i.e., to have a direct relationship with the patriarch unmediated by diocesan prelates]—would be a great temptation for the bonded clergy, who suffer from extravagant episcopal extortion and defencelessness. Any [such] alternative would destroy the authoritarian ‘vertical’ system.”44 For this writer (who defines edinoverie as “not only an organic part of the body of the Church, but also as a valiant custodian of the ancient liturgical, canonical, and daily traditions to which all the Russian nation should return after the spiritual and cultural errors of the Synodal period”), the matter of a edinoverie bishop has the potential to raise controversial questions about the way the Church is currently governed. These two authors, of course, represent the extreme ends of a lively debate that has only just emerged: for the first (who sounds like a whole range of nineteenth-century ecclesiastics), edinoverie is scarcely even permissible, especially in its modern form, since it inclines more toward the schism and insists on insulting the Nikonian rituals; for the second (whose polemical style and ideas bear more than a passing resemblance to Ioann Verkhovskii’s), edinoverie is a symbol of traditional Russian piety whose maintenance of clerical election could be an antidote to a highly centralized, bishop-centered model of church governance. However, what they show is that the reinvention of edinoverie on the basis of an uncritical reading of Shleev has led to the importation of many of the same difficulties as before. After its disastrous and crisis-ridden twentieth century, edinoverie looks set to once again pose troublesome questions before the Russian Orthodox Church regarding ritual, confession, and authority. Having followed edinoverie from the first experiments in old liturgy parishes in the 1780s to its reinvention in the 2000s, we can indulge in some general conclusions. Can edinoverie be called a success? By most measures, no: numerically, materially, and in terms of its position on the public stage, it was and is a phenomenon defined by marginality. In terms of the state’s confessional policy, it never really functioned properly as an alternative to incorporating Old Belief into the multiconfessional establishment: not enough Old Believers were interested in joining for that to occur. So, in 1905, the state finally legitimized Old Belief and with that lost all interest in edinoverie: it was certainly never again an object of interest among the empire’s leaders, at least on a central level. Ultimately, the government abandoned the project that it had foisted onto the

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reluctant Russian Orthodox Church more than a century before. However, the freedom given to the Old Believers in the 1905 toleration edict initiated the process whereby the reformist intentions of most of the episcopate and a great deal of the clergy were brought out into the open: the failure to satisfy these requirements was partly why the Church turned its back on the Romanovs at the beginning of 1917. Thus, the reason why edinoverie had been called into being remained salient: it was extremely difficult for an officially Orthodox confessional state to legitimize Old Belief, a movement explicitly proclaiming that it was the one “true” representative of Orthodoxy, without running the risk of alienating the Russian Orthodox Church, a core institutional and ideological support for the imperial order. With regard to Old Belief, more research needs to be done on how the theology, self-perception, and identity of various groups changed in reaction to the emergence and growth of edinoverie, particularly during and after the reign of Nicholas I. However, this book has offered some initial conclusions. First, as I have just stipulated, most Old Believers did not accept edinoverie as an alternative to full toleration from the state. For the most part, this was because it required submission to Russian Orthodox hierarchs and the Holy Synod. The conditions in which this submission was framed may have never mattered: any kind of surrender to the detested Nikonians, even on the most beneficial terms, was probably quite unacceptable. Nonetheless, we should still consider the role the rules of Platon played in making edinoverie unattractive: the second opinion of Metropolitan Platon, which asserted the hope that the edinovertsy would abandon their old rites in the not-too-distant future, gave the Old Believers ample reason to argue that the purpose of edinoverie was to root out the pre-Nikonian rites. Second, edinoverie’s role as an accomplice in the persecution of Old Belief had a profoundly negative impact on Old Believer communities: indeed, one might justifiably describe it as traumatic. It was not just that conversion to edinoverie split communities (and thus financial resources) and led to the seizure of sacred property. These confiscations were often designed to humiliate the remaining Old Believers, such as in victorious transfers of icons from closed Old Believer chapels to newly opened edinoverie churches. Carved out of Old Believer communities, edinoverie parishes brought with them police supervision, missionary interference, and, potentially, defilement from persons using the Nikonian rite. However, as Peter Thomas De Simone has recently observed, the history of Old Belief was as much one of opportunity as it was one of persecution. The fact that edinovertsy and Old Believers lived cheek by jowl meant that

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the latter could still wield influence over the actions and behavior of the former, whether it be through threats, petty acts of resistance, economic pressure, or support for those whose membership of edinoverie was at best desultory. Equally, we should remember the fact that edinoverie offered the easiest choice in extremely difficult situations: when threatened with the loss of property, imprisonment, or exile, edinoverie at least offered the opportunity for individuals and communities to keep property and avoid punishment while being allowed to practice the hallowed old rites entirely legally. When it comes to the Russian Orthodox Church, edinoverie was an imposition from the beginning: it seems likely that most Orthodox hierarchs would never have freely opted to create it, since doing so endangered the integrity of the confession, erased a carefully crafted distinction between doctrinal rectitude and heresy, and robbed ritual of its capacity to extend the Church’s authority over its flock. However, the Church did not possess a free choice in the matter. Platon, confronted by pressure from the secular authorities, did what he could to ensure that edinoverie bore the distinct imprint of the Church’s confessional interests and contained all the necessary safeguards. If the purpose of these actions was to prevent crypto–Old Belief from secretly proselytizing within the Church, then they were an unqualified success: this does not seem to have occurred. However, the rules disquieted the edinovertsy and helped repel those Old Believers who might have considered joining otherwise. Moreover, once an integrative approach was adopted toward edinoverie following the Great Reforms, the rules of Platon formed a roadblock, preventing further progress down this route. It is unfair to blame Metropolitan Platon for failing to adequately prepare his rules for scenarios that played out decades after his death. However, the Synod itself cannot escape so easily: it failed to adopt any integral and thorough reform of edinoverie until 1917, by which point it was far too late. I have pointed out that one reason for the failure to reform was the fear that the rapid accumulation of coerced converts between 1825 and 1855 posed a threat to the Orthodox confession, thus making the maintenance of Platon’s edinoverie ghetto reasonable. However, the Synod was hardly an innocent bystander during Nicholas I’s campaign of persecution: it participated with gusto. After all, police assistance in missionary matters was one of the benefits the Church derived from its close relationship with the state, and it was a benefit that few wanted to surrender even after 1905. The problem of insincere converts was caused by this reliance on strategies of coercion: so, the Synod brought this issue on itself. In the final account, when it came to edinoverie, the Synod and the episcopate were almost wholly dependent on impetus from outside when

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realizing a new policy. Part of the problem in the post-1905 era was that the impetus never came: Nicholas II would neither allow nor refuse the convention of the local Church Council and so the Synod could neither confirm nor reject proposed edinoverie reform. Incidentally, this lack of decisive action from the central ecclesiastical authorities no doubt helped the feud between Shleev’s party and the missionaries reach fever pitch, preventing the emergence of a middle ground on which compromise could be built. Emphasizing the reactive nature of the Synodal order in this case is a worthy antidote to a modern historiographical trend that focuses on the Church’s proactive approach to other problems emerging from the modernization of the late Russian Empire. However, if we move away from the central institutional perspective, edinoverie did, indeed, both reflect and manifest the religious vitality of post-Reform Russia. From the public debates on the seventeenth-century anathemas at the Society for the Admirers of Spiritual Enlightenment to the congresses organized and held after 1905, one cannot deny that edinoverie’s leadership was fully participating in an emerging civil society whose discourses were circulated and acted out by means of the print media, new mechanisms of transportation and communication, and higher levels of social activism and self-organization capable of transcending the older categories of estate and confession. Both Verkhovskii and Shleev, in particular, used relatively open atmospheres to voice and print conceptions of lay participation, clerical election, and episcopal authority that, while not novel in and of themselves, originated in their distinct edinoverie backgrounds: this allowed them to offer particular perspectives on all these issues and contribute to the debates. Meanwhile, on the ground, there is no evidence to suggest that the rules of Metropolitan Platon particularly hampered expressions of religiosity and piety among the edinovertsy. Certainly, what little evidence we have of the edinoverie monasteries and convents does not suggest that they were important sites of pilgrimages or were beneficiaries of the widespread monastic revival. However, the edinovertsy did participate in the burgeoning popularity of the institution of elderhood through their own charismatic elder, Pavel Prusskii. It is, of course, impossible to say whether Shleev was right and the principle of clerical election really did make the religious lives of the edinovertsy more pious: however, it did offer at least some of them another avenue for participating in the management of their parishes by opening spaces for negotiations with priests, deans, and even bishops over questions of worship, finance, and personnel. When looking at whether edinoverie constitutes a success or a failure, we should also look at the fate of similar experiments. Paul Werth recently

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identified edinoverie as one example of “confessional engineering” among several others in imperial Russia, efforts by the state to manipulate unions with or mass conversions to Russian Orthodoxy from other confessions or dissenting groups: this was a counterpart to the multiconfessional establishment, which sought the domestication of foreign confessions through toleration and legalinstitutional ties to the government.45 Proposals for an Armenian Gregorian edinoverie (Werth’s subject of study) and a Roman Catholic edinoverie (put forward between 1839 and the 1860s) remained on paper, as did suggestions for union with the Old Catholics and the Anglican Church. Meanwhile, the mass conversions of Uniates were instances of direct assimilation, since little was done to accommodate their religious traditions: equally, 250,000 “Orthodox” (in reality, former Uniates) converted to Catholicism following the 1905 edict of religious toleration, effectively ending the century-long effort to annex the Uniate Church. Edinoverie was a realized project, maintained its traditions, and did not suffer mass apostasy after 1905 (although such was greatly feared): indeed, it received special institutions, personnel, and even a lobby group (Shleev and his supporters) dedicated to their maintenance. Thoroughly imperfect, edinoverie did rather well in comparison to these other Russian efforts at confessional engineering. The same is true when we turn our attention to efforts to incorporate two rites under one church roof in the rest of Europe. The Anglican Church, with its High Church and Low Church traditions reflecting Catholic and Protestant liturgical tastes, seems to offer a more successful example of an attempt to allow two liturgical rites. However, this state of affairs was contested. When the Anglo-Catholics, following on the heels of the Oxford Movement of the 1830s, tried to catholicize a largely Protestant ritual compact, the result was rioting and, ultimately, an Act of Parliament in 1867 that forbade the introduction of Catholic liturgical practices. Five clergymen went to prison as a result.46 Frederick William III’s Prussian Church Union, an effort to merge the Calvinists and Lutherans together under a single ritual in 1817, fared little better. It provoked an Old Lutheran separatist movement that refused to abandon its rites: many emigrated to Australia and America.47 Thus, union movements and other products of confessional engineering in both Russia and elsewhere seem to have produced worse results than those achieved by edinoverie, which managed over a century of existence and a relatively stable core group of adherents. Why was this the case? I would argue it was because edinoverie managed to change Russian Orthodoxy. Edinoverie symbolized an encounter between the Russian Orthodox Church and Old Belief. In the course of this encounter, notions of Russian Orthodox identity

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and the meaning of liturgical rite entered into flux. Before the 1760s, the Russian Orthodox Church contained only one legitimate rite, that produced by the Nikonian reforms. This was the basis of institutionalization, a legally enforced tenet of identity, and a tool for wielding authority over the bodies and minds of believers. The Other against which it was routinely defined was the preNikonian, Old Believer rite, considered a heresy in key texts and reason enough for expulsion from the Church according to Synodal law. However, beginning in the 1760s and receiving fateful confirmation in 1800, the Church moved, exceedingly reluctantly, to admit the anathematized rituals. This compromised the ability of the reformed rites to signify Orthodoxy. Thus, the focus now fell on attitude toward ritual, on the mental processes and intentions that lay behind the physical act of making the cross with two fingers or three. This was clear in the new reinterpretation of the anathemas, which argued that they did not fall on the old rites themselves but rather on people who used the rites to signify their opposition to the Church. As Gregory Freeze has commented with regard to Orthodoxy more generally, the Church sought in the nineteenth century “to make folk more cognitively Orthodox, to be not only ‘right-praising’ but also ‘right-believing.’”48 This interiorization of the meaning of religious behavior and belief can also be interpreted as a step toward religion’s individualization. Equally, now the old rites could no longer be defined as the excluded Other against which Russian Orthodoxy stood, there was a need to find a new way of defining confessional identity. What became apparent by the 1860s and 1870s was that some in the Church argued that it was one’s attitude to ritual plurality that defined Russian Orthodoxy. Understanding ritual as a “middling matter,” as something that could and even should be subject to processes of historical change, was defined as characteristic of Russian Orthodoxy (and thus edinoverie). On the other hand, regarding ritual as unchanging, as something akin to a dogma, was alleged to be a mark of the “fanaticism” and “ignorance” of the Old Believers. It is evident that many Orthodox clergymen at all levels continued to have their doubts about the legitimacy of the old rites, to say the very least. Equally, while edinoverie leaders like Shleev agreed with the new conception (after all, it was what had allowed edinoverie to exist in the first place), they were also forced to find new ways to defend the particular regard in which they held the old rites and why it was that the old rites needed additional institutions to defend them. However, regardless of how slow and contradictory the process was, there can be little doubt that by 1918 the Russian Orthodox Church had come to define itself as an institution capable of containing two equal liturgical

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ritual compacts: no less than this, it also defined its identity around that capability. The story of edinoverie is the story of how the Russian Orthodox Church changed in the course of its interaction with Old Belief, becoming more ritually tolerant in the process.

Note s 1. RGIA, f. 831, op. 1, d. 51, l. 8. 2. Ibid., l. 2. 3. M. Krasnozhen, “K postavleniiu pervogo edinovercheskogo episkopa Simona Okhtenskogo,” Pribavleniia k Tserkovnym vedomostiam, no. 23–24 (1918): 703–704. 4. Shleev had been sent from Petrograd to Ufa in 1920 to fill in for the imprisoned Andrei (Ukhtomskii). 5. N. P. Zimina, Put na Golgofu, 2 vols. (Moscow, 2005), 1:304–305. In an effort to justify Shleev’s canonization as a martyr in 2000, Zimina states that the attack was ordered by the Bolsheviks. However, the evidence she offers suggests that the local Communists in Ufa were somewhat well-disposed to Shleev, making it more likely that the murder was a random act of violence committed in the course of a robbery. 6. For the best account of the campaign against relics, see S. A. Smith, “Bones of Contention: Bolsheviks and the Struggle against Relics 1918–1930,” Past and Present 204 (2009): 155–194. 7. Antonii (Khrapovitskii), Sila pravoslaviia (Moscow: Institut Russkoi tsivilizatsii, 2012), 543–544. 8. G. Young, Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religious Activists in the Village (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 49–78. 9. TsDOOSO, f. 225, op. 1, d. 256, l. 18. 10. V. Smolkin, A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 28. 11. I. Paert, “Popular Religion and Local Identity during the Stalin Revolution: Old Believers in the Urals, 1928–41,” in Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917–1953, ed. D. J. Raleigh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 2001), 177. 12. I. Paert, “Memory and Survival in Stalin’s Russia: Old Believers in the Urals during the 1930s–50s,” in On Living through Soviet Russia, ed. D. Bertaux, P. Thompson, and A. Rotkirch (London: Routledge, 2004), 198. 13. TsDOOSO, f. 6, op. 1, d. 175, l. 26. 14. TsGAUR, f. 20, op. 1, d. 17, l. 47. 15. Ibid., l. 8–8ob.

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16. Ibid., l. 54. 17. GARF, f. R-393, op. 43a, d. 1439, l. 17. 18. Ibid., l. 8. 19. Manuil (Lemesevskij), Die russichen orthodoxen Bischofe von 1893 bis 1965: Bio-Bibliographie, pt. 5 (Erlangen, 1987), 290. 20. TsGAUR, f. 20, op. 1, d. 17, l. 54. 21. TsDOOSO, f. 76, op. 1, d. 653, l. 31. 22. Damaskin (Orlovskii), Mucheniki, ispovedniki i podvizhniki blagochestiia Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi XX stoletiia, vol. 6 (Tver: Bulat, 2002), 428–437. 23. This has not been for lack of trying on the part of the modern edinoverie community of St. Petersburg: numerous petitions have been submitted to the courts for the return of the building. However, they have all been rejected: “Peterburgskie edinovertsy prodolzhat borbu za muzei Artiki i Antarktiki,” ­ Life​.­r u, accessed February 20, 2018, ­https://​­l ife​.­r u​/­p​/­763453. 24. S. Smirnov, Zapiski selskogo sviashchennika: Dnevikovye zapisi sviashchennosluzhitelia edinovercheskogo khrama arkhangela Mikhaila sela Mikhailovskaia sloboda protoiereia Stefana Smirnova, napisanye im samim s 1905 po 1933 god, ed. E. Sarancha (Moscow, 2008), 117–203. 25. EAA, f. 1655, op. 2, d. 2607 (file unpaginated). 26. V. Nikonov, Staroverie Latgalii: Ocherki po istorii starovercheskikh obshchestv Rezhitskogo i Liutsinskogo uezdov (2-ia polovina XVII—1-ia polvina XX vv.) (Rezekne: Rezeknenskaia kladbishchenskaia staroobriadcheskaia obshchina, 2008), 223. 27. G. Dribintsev, “Ob organizatsii pravoslavno-missionerskogo delaniia sredi staroobriadtsev v Latvii,” Vera i zhizn, no. 10 (1923): 11–19; G. Dribintsev, “Pamiati o. Klimenta Bukina,” Vera i zhizn, no. 3 (1927): 10–12. 28. G. Dribintsev, “Iakubinskaia Sv.-Pokrovskaia edinovercheskaia tserkov ko dniu 50-letiia eia sushchestvovaniia,” Vera i zhizn, no. 6 (1930): 81–87; N. Koliberskii, “Iz Daugavpilsa,” Vera i zhizn, no. 10 (1937): 314–317; G. Dribintsev, “K istorii edinoveriia, ili pravoslavnogo staroobriadchestva,” Vera i zhizn, no. 7 (1939): 146–155; V. Rushakov, “Edinoverie,” Vera i zhizn, no. 3 (1940): 66–70; no. 5 (1940): 109–115; no. 6 (1940): 133–138. 29. E. Sarancha, I. Miroliubov, and N. P. Zimina, Kratkii ocherk istorii edinoveriia, 51–52, E ­ dinoverie​.­com, accessed March 29, 2014, h­ ttp://​­w ww​ .­edinoverie​.­com​/­i mg​/­200911261211024AA ​.­pdf. 30. Quoted in A. Kravetskii, “K istorii sniatiia kliatv na donikonovskie obriady,” Bogoslovskie trudy, no. 39 (2004): 327. 31. “Deianie osviashchennogo pomestnogo sobora Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi: Ob otmene kliatv na starye obriady i na priderzhivaiushchikhsia ikh,” Zhurnal Moskovskoi patriarkhii, no. 6 (1971): 6.

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32. “Ob otmene kliatv na starye obriady: Doklad mitropolita Leningradskogo i Novgorodskogo Nikodima (Rotova) na pomestnom sobore 31 maia 1971 goda,” Zhurnal Moskovskoi patriarkhii, no. 6 (1971): 63. 33. “Staroobriadnye prikhody Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi/Spisok prikhodov,” ­Oldrpc​.­r u, accessed February 26, 2018, ­http://​­w ww​.­oldrpc​.­r u​/­old​-­believe​/­l ist. 34. E. Levintova, “Does History Repeat Itself? Public Discourse of the Contemporary Russian Old Believer Elite,” Slavonic and East European Revew 85, no. 3 (2007): 757. 35. “Doklad mitropolita Smolenskogo i Kaliningradskogo Kirilla, predsedatelia otdela vneshnikh tserkovnikh vsiamootnoshenii s Russkoi zarubezhnoi tserkoviu i staroobriadchestvom,” P ­ atriarchia​.­r u, accessed January 31, 2014, ­http://​­w ww​.­patriarchia​.­r u​/­db​/­text​/­423152​.­html. 36. K. M. Tovbin, Postreligiia i ee stanovlenie v russkom staroobriadchestve (Moscow, 2014). For a full review of Tovbin’s works, see J. M. White and A. S. Palkin, “Religion and Nationalism in Modern Russia; Or the Uses and Abuses of Edinoverie,” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 44 (2017): 352–354. 37. For one of the very few pieces dedicated to edinoverie in the Soviet era, see E. Shleev, “O edinoverii,” Zhurnal Moskovskoi patriarkhii 6 (1950): 34–43. 38. For an instructive comparison, we can look at the re-creation of Burkhanism, otherwise known as Ak Jang, in the Altai. Burkhanism was a reformist shaman movement that arose in the early twentieth century among the indigenous locals: it was subsequently destroyed by the Soviet authorities and is now being re-created by intellectuals, academics, and the educated urban middle class. See A. Vinogradov, “The Phenomenon of ‘White Faith’ in Southern Siberia,” in Religion and Politics in Russia: A Reader, ed. M. M. Balzer (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2010), 251–252. It is also worth noting that one modern edinoverie leader has drawn the parallel with neopaganism: he suggests that revitalized interest in Old Belief is connected to the same search for a national identity that drives the fashion for revived pagan religions. See “Leonid Sevastianov: ‘Ideologiia staroobriadchestva zakliuchaetsia v tom, chto russkost iavliaetsia kriteriem vsekh veshchei,’” R ­ uvera​.­r u, accessed February 17, 2018, ­http://​­r uvera​ .­r u​/­a rticles​/­lsevastyanov​_ moda​_ na​_ staroobryadchestvo​_ 2. 39. I. Maslov, “Missiia edinoveriia obrashchena ne k staroobriadtsam, a k pravoslavnym prikhodam,” ­Ruskline​.­r u, accessed February 12, 2018, ­http://​ ­r uskline​.­r u​/­news​_ rl​/­2018​/­02​/­07​/­m issiya​_edinoveriya​_obrawena​_ ne​_ k​_ staro obryadcam​_ a​_ k​_ pravoslavnym​_ prihodam. 40. Principally Simon (Shleev), Edinoverie v svoem vnutrennem razvitii (Moscow, 2004). 41. For a sample of his views on edinoverie, see A. Dugin, “Staroobriadchestvo i edinoverie,” ­Med​.­org, accessed April 8, 2016, ­http://​­med​.­org​.­r u​/­a rticle​/­1326. 42. Sevastianov is a permanent member of the Church’s commission for Old Believer parishes and head of the St. Gregory the Theologian Charitable

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Foundation, which has made donations to several causes related to Old Belief and edinoverie. Most recently, it has provided funds to the Simbirsk research center on the old Russian liturgical tradition to research edinoverie’s past and present: the aims of the project are to travel to edinoverie parishes worldwide in order to produce a photograph album and a documentary. See “Proekt ‘Sokrytaia Rus rasskazhet o zhizni sovremennykh edinovertsev,” ­Media​.­elitsy​.­r u, accessed February 12, 2018, ­http://​­media​.­elitsy​.­r u​/­novosti​/­zapuskaetsja​-­masshtabnyj​ -­proekt​-­jekspedicija​-­po​-­issledovaniju​-­zhizni​-­sovremennyh​-­edinovercev. 43. A. Shunin, “Sovremennoe edinoverie—put k edineniiu ili raskolu?” ­Blagogon​.­r u, accessed February 12, 2018, ­https://​­w ww​.­blagogon​.­r u​/­d igest​/­819​/. 44. A. Soldatov, “Tserkov vtorogo sorta,” C ­ redo​.­press, accessed February 13, 2018, ­https://​­credo​.­press​/­179166​/. 45. P. W. Werth, “One Eastern Church or Two? Armenians, Orthodoxy, and Ecclesiastical Union in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies 1, no. 2 (2018): 190–192. 46. For a general account of “Ritualism,” see N. Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain, 1830–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For the legislation against it, see J. Bentley, Ritualism and Politics in Victorian England: The Attempt to Legislate for Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 47. C. Clark, “Confessional Policy and the Limits of State Action: Frederick William III and the Prussian Church Union, 1817–1840,” Historical Journal 39, no. 4 (1996): 984–1004. 48. G. L. Freeze, “Russian Orthodoxy: Church, People and Politics in Imperial Russia,” in The Cambridge History of Russia vol. 2, ed. D. Lieven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 297.

APPENDIX A The Rules of Metropolitan Platon, September 27, 18001

Moscow Old Believers

Platon

1. That the Holy Synod removes the previously placed anathemas on the twofingered sign of the cross and other similar rituals.

1. The anathemas placed on them are to be removed, although the Church was correct to place them, which they themselves recognize since they consider themselves bound by them and they ask for their removal. However, as they are now reconciling or joining with the Church and recognize its real truth, by necessity these anathemas (under which those still rejecting the Church correctly continue to stand) should no longer weigh on their consciences. So that this removal is open and calms them, the bishop or priest is to read over each of those joining the following prayer of removal with a hand laid upon them: “Our Lord God Jesus Christ, by His grace and love of humanity, removes from you, a person turning to the Holy Church, any anathema placed on those who reject it. And I, unworthy bishop or priest (so-and-so), by the authority given to me by Him, remove from the slave of God (so-and-so) any anathema and all your sins. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.”

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A ppen di x A

Moscow Old Believers

Platon

2. That His Grace deigns to choose priests and deacons who, by their desire and by the desire of parishioners, agree to be in Old Belief. If those chosen do not refuse, then ordain them by the old printed books of the priests chosen by Your Grace and by the desire of the parishioners. Also, priests who have defected into Old Belief before, if they seem without fault and go to Your Grace with true humility, allow and bless them to perform the Divine Service and Christian requirements. Such priests who fled without the permission of their bishop to Old Believer churches will not be accepted.

2. The second article in all its force is allowed by indulgence so as to place priests by the election of the parishioners and by the review and judgment of the bishop: but their previous priests, who were fugitives and traitors of the Church, their consciences, and their ranks, will not be placed in such churches.

3. That the Holy Synod and Your Grace 3. The third article is also allowed, because bless Old Believer priests to perform the although there is error in the books they Divine Service, sacraments and Christian use, it is not in the essential dogmas of requirements according to the books the faith but in words and rituals: the previously printed under the all-Russian acquisition of church peace is important patriarchs Iov, Ermogen, Filaret, Ioasaf, and above all else. Iosif, which deacons and church servitors must [also] follow. 4. That the churches of the Old Believers are blessed by Your Grace according to the old books or by the blessing of Your Grace on Old Believer priests; and that antimensia, blessed under the aforementioned patriarchs or again blessed by Your Grace according to the old books as is shown in the old Typikon, [be given to us].

4. It is possible to profess agreement to the fourth article.

5. Old Believer priests are not required 5. Also allowed, but it is appropriate before to go to the Greco-Russian Church for refusing some of the mentioned persons collective prayers and the same for cross into the church [that they] present processions and anything similar; [they this [matter] to the good reason of the are to be] administered in Old Believer assigned priests, with the exhortation of churches by the blessing of Your Grace. the bishop. In order not to forbid those Also, do not compel Old Believers to who [now] ask and other unregistered allow in common prayers those who mark [Old Believers] who long ago separated themselves with the three fingers, shaven from the community of the Grecobeards, and others who have disagreements Russian Church from joining, this with the old customs (excepting the highest can be allowed, [but] only if, after an personages). Do not prohibit those Old investigation by the bishop, they have Believers who are unregistered but were never before been in the Orthodox

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long ago separated from the Greco-Russian Church to join Old Believer churches.

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Church and have never taken its sacraments. If this is found to be so, [the bishop will] read over them the attached absolving prayer upon acceptance into the Church. Those who have been in our Church before cannot be allowed to join [edinoverie].

6. That Old Believer priests and those Old Believers accepting the priesthood in spiritual matters will be subject to the court and full instruction of Your Grace. In matters pertaining to the Old Believers, allow hearings and judgement via Old Believer priests, except for those persons who require legal investigation. But in this the priest is required to turn to the Holy Synod and Your Grace: [for this there should be] a special secretary with payment coming from the Old Believer community.

6. It is possible to accept the sixth article.

7. Old Believer priests will receive holy anointing oil from Your Grace.

7. Agreed.

8. Old Believer priests are not compelled to confess to anyone other than Old Believer priests.

8. This is left to the conscience of each priest.

9. That Your Grace allows Old Believer priests and Old Believers to make the sign of the cross with two fingers by the custom formerly in Russia.

9. This is given to the good reason and conscience of each bishop, although protecting others from temptation.

10. Sacraments previously performed by Old Believer priests, such as baptism, marriage, prayers, monastic vows (if there is no obstacle to this from the secular government), and other Christian requirements, are to remain in their existing force and should not be repeated.

10. Agreed.

11. If any son of the Greco-Russian Church desires to be administered the holy sacraments by an Old Believer priest, such is not forbidden. Equally, if an Old Believer desires to be administered the Holy Sacrament in the Greek Church, this is not forbidden.

11. With regard to this article, a son of the Orthodox Greek Church can only have permission [to do this] when in extreme need and in fatal cases where it is not possible to find an Orthodox priest and church. However, Old Believers are allowed [to go to the Orthodox Church] without any difficulty.

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12. If an Old Believer priest commits a crime deserving expulsion, such is presented to the court of Your Grace. If it seems there is guilt which only requires temporary punishment, then he should take penance in Old Believer churches, by the judgement of Your Grace.

12. Agreed.

13. Old Believer churches are to have threepart books [i.e., parish registers] but, if any from the Old Believers at the time of the holy fasts does not go to confession and have the Holy Sacraments administered, then they shall not have a fine placed upon them and will not be sent anywhere. Rather, their spiritual fathers should judge them by the holy rules. If from sloth, negligence, or another illegal reason they deviated from the holies, then they should be noted in special books and punished with penances and other spiritual corrections.

13. Although it is possible to agree to this article, such fines contribute to the treasury on which the well-being of the Holy Synod depends. If all the Orthodox were liberated from fines and were punished for spiritual crimes with penances, then this would be the same as spiritual sin.

14. If there is a marriage consisting of one 14. It is possible to accept this article. person from the Greco-Russian Church and the other from the Old Believer, then they are to be married by mutual agreement either in the Greco-Russian Church or the Old Believer Church. 15. Old Believer priests in all cases have to pray for the health and good days of His Imperial Majesty, His Spouse Her Imperial Majesty, His Heir, and all the rest of the imperial family according to the Synodal form.

15. This is required.

16. Insults, strife, and disparagements about 16. A good and worthy request that will be the contents of different rituals of different kept precisely by all. books used in the liturgy are not to be heard because such differences do not belong to the essence of faith: Old Believers and the sons of the Greco-Russian Church will abide in peace, love, and unity as a flock of the one holy, ecumenical, and apostolic Church.

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With the above are included the opinions: (1) upon the mutual acceptance and agreement of the above points, those being received on the aforementioned basis the Church no longer calls schismatics or Old Believers (because in the Church there is nothing new and no new believers) and so calls them soedinentsy or edinovertsy. They, at my [Platon’s] proposal, said that they agree to be such and, therefore, their church is to be called edinoverie. However, those dwelling in obstinacy and in division from the Church are to remain under their former name, schismatics. (2) Upon granting permission [to convert] to the petitioners, the declamation of the following is required: The Church exerted all diligence and zeal to bring those divided from it back to the true path from the unhappy schism whence they came, as is well known from many books published on the matter. For this purpose, the Church published many books in which the errors of those who divided from it are clearly and conclusively shown, as well as the errors of sloth and ignorance that germinated in the old books: through comparisons with Greek and Old Church Slavonic books, such error was corrected and so the corrected books are used in our Orthodox Church. Although there now cannot be any other thought about all this (hitherto the Church recognised and recognises it as the truth), it, as a mother ill at heart, has not seen any great success in the conversion of those divided from it (although some enlightened by God have completely joined it) and so it has judged it good to make some indulgences to those err through ignorance, although without temptation for those who think correctly. This will be done especially judging by their petitions, which by their good will reconcile them with the Church or otherwise join it. The Church thereby follows the example of the Apostles: “To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak [1 Corinthians, 9:22].” This is conceived in the good hope that with time God will enlighten those who join and that they will come to agree that in nothing will they be different from the Church. This it considers necessary so that it is known to all that the Church now gives them indulgence for any fault and that the lecherous do not interpret [this to mean that] the Church itself sins and recognises their truth, as some dare to think and say.

Note 1. R. V. Kaurkin and O. A. Pavlova, Edinoverie v Rossii: Ot zarozhdeniia idei do nachala XX veka (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2011), 187–192.

APPENDIX B Replacements for the Rules of Platon, 1917–1918

Rules confirmed by the second national edinoverie congress, July 23–28, 1917.1

Establishment of the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, February 22, 1918.2

1. Edinoverie society is the totality 1. The edinovertsy are a flock of the one holy, of Orthodox Old Believer parishes ecumenical and apostolic Church whom, located in the bosom of the Orthodox with the blessing of the Local Church, under Russian Church and living according unity of faith and administration, perform to their special church customs and the church rites according to the liturgical morals. books published under the first five Russian patriarchs with the strict keeping of the old Russian customs and manners. 2. As they are distinguished by special 2. Edinoverie parishes enter into the composition religious church customs and morals, of Orthodox dioceses and are managed either edinoverie parishes are divided according to the definition of the Council or, into different dioceses, headed by on the instruction of the diocesan bishop, by edinoverie bishops: on the first special edinoverie bishops who are dependent occasion, [they are created] by on the diocesan prelate. the order of the All-Russian Local Council and, on following occasions, by the order of the same Council according to the presentations of regional councils, with the obligatory participation in the latter, personally or through representatives, of bishops of those diocese from which edinoverie parishes are divided into new edinoverie dioceses.

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Rules confirmed by the second national edinoverie congress, July 23–28, 1917.1

Establishment of the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, February 22, 1918.2

3. Edinoverie bishops receive the name of their cathedra from this or that town or populated place where there are edinovertsy.

3. The diocesan bishops have the same episcopal care for the religious life of edinoverie parishes as for Orthodox parishes: upon review of the diocese, they can visit edinoverie parishes and serve in them by the regulations accepted in edinoverie churches. Also, edinoverie bishops who administer edinoverie parishes can, according to the instruction of the diocesan bishop and with his blessing, visit edinoverie and Orthodox parishes and serve in the latter by the order accepted in the Orthodox Church, giving the diocesan bishop an account of all his journeys.

4. Edinoverie diocesan bishops, together with Orthodox diocesan bishops, are canonically united in regional and all-Russian local councils of the Russian Orthodox Church and are subordinated to the higher church administration established in the upcoming Local All-Russian Council of the Russian Orthodox Church.

4. Edinoverie bishops receive their name from the town or other populated place with edinoverie parishes which is included in the title of the diocesan bishop.

5. Edinoverie and Orthodox diocesan bishops, composing the high hierarchy of the united Russian Orthodox Church, are engaged in continual canonical communion, in consequence of which the Orthodox bishops have diocesan care for the religious lives of edinoverie parishes in the borders of their parishes, can visit edinoverie parishes on review of their diocese, and serve in edinoverie churches by the edinoverie ritual. In the affairs of edinoverie parishes, they communicate with the appropriate edinoverie bishops so as to create the opportunity for full church unity between the edinovertsy and the Orthodox.

5. Edinoverie bishops participate in local councils of the Russian Orthodox Church in a number defined by the regulations of the Council.

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Establishment of the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, February 22, 1918.2

6. Edinoverie bishops are elected 6. Candidates for the position of edinoverie in congresses of edinoverie bishops are elected by a gathering of edinoverie bishops. Orthodox bishops and clergy and laymen under the chairmanship of representatives of the clergy and the local diocesan bishop, who will present the laymen of that diocese which the election with his review to the confirmation elected bishop will manage can of the higher church authorities. The elected participate by appointment of the edinoverie bishops are consecrated by high ecclesiastical administration Orthodox and edinoverie bishops. of the Russian Orthodox Church. Those selected to the episcopate are confirmed in this rank by the church administration of the Russian Orthodox Church and consecrated by edinoverie bishops and by Orthodox bishops appointed by the same higher church administration. 7. With the aim of better managing the 7. Under edinoverie bishops exist deans with activities of the diocese, edinoverie district councils, as on the normal basis. bishops have, as assistants, diocesan edinoverie councils and their commissions, composed from the clergy and laymen. In these, the latter enter in double quantity. 8. A general congress of the clergy and the laity of those parishes that make up the edinoverie diocese elect the diocesan councils and their commissions every three years.

8. In parishes, parish assemblies and councils exist on the normal basis.

9. Moreover, diocesan congresses command the business of funding edinoverie parishes to the advantage of church institutions of edinoverie dioceses.

9. All clerical positions in edinoverie parishes are occupied by the generally established church order: by the selection of parish communities with the confirmation of the edinoverie bishop.

10. Making contributions to their diocesan needs, edinoverie are not liberated from payments to the general needs of all the Russian Orthodox Church.

10. With the aim of the good order and strengthening of edinoverie, the right is presented to edinovertsy to gather in diocesan, regional, and all-Russian congresses in order to discuss questions about the needs of edinoverie. In regional and all-Russian congresses, the bishop who chairs is appointed

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Rules confirmed by the second national edinoverie congress, July 23–28, 1917.1

Establishment of the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, February 22, 1918.2

by the patriarch and the Holy Synod. In diocesan edinoverie congresses, either the edinoverie bishop, on the instruction of the diocesan bishop, or the diocesan bishop himself chairs.

11. Elected district priests are the local organs of church authority in edinoverie dioceses.

11. All communications with the higher church authorities on the business of the edinovertsy of the diocese are managed through the diocesan bishop. Petitions about the establishment in this or another diocese of a edinoverie bishopric, with a statement of means for its support, are also initiated via the local diocesan bishop.

12. At the head of the parishes stand the parish councils, where representatives from the clergy and laymen enter under electoral representation.

12. In edinoverie churches and monasteries, the old singing and old form of service must be strictly kept: the heads of the monasteries and the clergy of the churches must not allow changes to the old order.

13. All clerical places in edinoverie 13. In common celebratory services, held with parishes are occupied according to by the mutual agreement of Orthodox and the election of the parish community, edinoverie parishes, the singing is performed with confirmation of the edinoverie by the order of each parish alternately. bishop. 14. Since the books and rituals used by the edinovertsy in the liturgy are Orthodox, transfer of the Orthodox to edinoverie churches and conversely the edinovertsy to Orthodox churches can be performed without obstacle. Note: Edinoverie parishes with churches can be transferred to the jurisdiction of the Orthodox bishop and perform the liturgy by the order blessed by the Council of 1667 and, conversely, Orthodox churches and parishes can be transferred to the jurisdiction of edinoverie bishops and perform the service by the old books when 4/5 of all the parishioners with full voting rights request this.

14. The reassignment of edinovertsy to Orthodox parishes and equally of Orthodox to edinoverie parishes can be performed without obstacle since the books and rituals used by the edinovertsy in the liturgy are also Orthodox. Persons converting from edinoverie parishes to Orthodox ones and from Orthodox to edinoverie ones must not be subjected to constraints. Note: In cases of requests of no less than 4/5 of parishioners, edinoverie parishes with churches can be reassigned to Orthodoxy and have the liturgy by the order blessed by the Council of 1667 established in them. Conversely, Orthodox churches and parishes can be reassigned to the jurisdiction of the edinoverie bishop and the service can be performed by the old books.

A ppen di x B Rules confirmed by the second national edinoverie congress, July 23–28, 1917.1

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Establishment of the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, February 22, 1918.2

15. In common divine services, arranged 15. Upon marriage, when one of the betrothed is a by mutual agreement, the singing is edinovertsy and the other Orthodox, marriage performed according to the rite of is performed in either the edinoverie or this or the other parish alternately. Orthodox church by mutual agreement. 16. Upon marriages, in those cases where one of the betrothed is a edinoverets and the other Orthodox, the marriage is performed by mutual agreement in either the edinoverie or Orthodox church.

16. Children of the edinovertsy, upon entering into Orthodox schools, and children of the Orthodox, studying in edinoverie schools, can without obstacle observe the regulations and customs of their parishes.

17. Children of the edinovertsy, upon entering into Orthodox schools, and, conversely, the children of the Orthodox, studying in edinoverie schools, may without obstacle observe the rituals and customs of their parishes.

17. Where it is found to be possible, open special basic and high-level classes and pastoral schools for the education of students in love and adherence to the old way of life (without insult to the general church ritual) in edinoverie churches and communities for the preparation of pupils and candidates to the ranks of clergy and to acquaint them with that which is necessary to carry the struggle to the schism.

18. The edinovertsy and the Orthodox 18. Edinovertsy are not free from payments to the should not cause factions or strife common needs of all the Russian Orthodox for the contents of different rituals Church, edinoverie clergy in local educational and different books because such establishments and diocesan charitable differences do not relate to the institutions. essence of faith. Let both dwell in peace, love, and unity as a flock of the one holy, ecumenical, and apostolic Church of Christ. 19. For edinoverie parishes that announce the desire to have edinoverie bishops and demonstrate sufficient means to support them and their chancelleries, with the agreement of the diocesan bishops, cathedras of edinoverie bishops are established in the dioceses of Petrograd (Okhtensk with the residence of the bishop in the city of Petrograd), Nizhnii Novgorod (Pavlov with the residence of the bishop in the town of Pavlov), Ufa (Satka with the residence for the bishop in the Zlatoustovskii Voskresenskii edinoverie monastery), and Tolbolsk (Tiumen with the residence of the bishop in the city of Tiumen).

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Note s 1. Vtoroi vserossiiskii sezd pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev (edinovertsev) v N. Novgorode 23–28 iulia 1917 goda. (Petrograd: Sovet vserossiiskogo sezdov pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev, 1917), 79–80. 2. Sobranie opredelenii i postanovlenii sviashchennogo sobora pravoslavnoi Rossiiskoi tserkvi 1917–1918 gg. (Moscow: Izdanie sobornogo soveta, 1918), 3–5.

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INDEX

Academy of Sciences, 66n30 adiaphora, 6–7, 9, 25 Aksakov, Ivan, 38 Aksentov, Petr, 124 Akumin, Pavel, 192n92 Albitskii, A. G., 117, 133, 134 Aleksander (Paulus), archbishop, 202 Aleksandr Nevskii monastery, 199 Aleksandrov, Dmitrii. See Serafim (Aleksandrov) Alekseeva, S. I., 74 Aleksei, tsarevich, 130 Aleksei Mikhailovich, tsar, 26 Alexander I, 5, 10, 53–56, 64, 150 Alexander II, 5, 59, 72, 73–75, 79, 194n129 Alexander III, 74 All-Russian Edinoverie Congress: First, 129; Second, 116, 131–132, 144n135, 149, 223–227; Third, 201 All-Russian Missionary Congress: First, 105; Third, 158; Fourth, 125, 126, 128, 141n59; Fifth, 132 almshouse, 71, 104, 161, 162, 165, 174 Ambrosios (Pappa-Georgopoli), metropolitan, 60, 75 America. See United States Amvrosii (Podobedov), bishop, 36, 66n25 anathemas: abolition, 33, 80, 88–89, 124, 127–128, 197n190, 202–203, 217; debates, 209; explanation, 87, 90; Great Moscow Council, 26–27, 37–38, 86–88, 127,

197n189; Macarios III, 26–27, 37–38, 127; reinterpretation, 37–38, 86, 88–89, 211; still in force, 172, 217; Stoglav Council, 25; Tikhon, 199 Anatolia, 87 Andrei (Ukhtomskii), bishop, 10, 110, 124, 130, 131, 132, 201, 212n4 Anglican Church, 89, 210 Ankudinov, Artamon. See Avtonom (Ankudinov), hieromonk Anna, empress, 29 Anna of Kashin, saint, 130, 145n143 Antichrist, 4, 32, 76, 174, 183 antimensia, 38, 57, 168, 194n129, 218 Antioch, 26, 127 Antonii (Khrapovitskii), archbishop, 10, 110, 121, 124, 129–130, 132, 143n108, 149, 200–201 Antonii (Pavlinskii), bishop, 90 Antonii (Shutov), archbishop, 164 Antonii (Vadkovskii), metropolitan, 107, 110, 111, 125 Antonin (Granovskii), bishop, 143n112 Apollos (Beliaev), bishop, 81 apostasy, 17, 34, 35, 45, 54, 58, 59, 95, 105, 107–109, 136, 138n10, 149, 172, 175, 184, 210 Arianism, 7, 20n18 Arius, 178 Arkadii (Fedorov), archbishop, 61, 62 Arkhangelsk, 122, 124, 158, 175, 188n13 Armenian Gregorianism, 210

263

264

I n de x

army, 133, 149, 200 Arsenii (Stadnitskii), archbishop, 135 Astrakhan, 29 Astrov, P. A., 135 Australia, 210 Austrian Empire, 5 Avdeeva, Nadezhda, 161 Avtonom (Ankudinov), hieromonk, 59, 61, 155 Avvakum (Petrov), 205 Balkans, 32, 94 Baltic, 87, 179 baptism, 32, 74, 93, 108, 153, 179, 180, 183, 189n39, 219 Batalden, Stephen, 10 beglopopovtsy, 54, 55, 151, 196n161. See also Old Belief: priestly Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy, 4, 12, 57, 60, 71, 72, 75–77, 80, 87, 94, 96n4, 107, 109, 115, 124, 131, 143n108, 151, 162, 164, 170, 172, 174, 175, 176, 183, 186, 205. See also Old Belief: priestly Belarus, 203 Belev, 56 Berlin, 94 Biisk, 195n140 Blagoveshchenskaia church, 159 Bolshevism, 200, 212n5 Bolshoe Murashkino, 165–167 books: choral, 119, 195n140; educational, 47n15, 166, 194n119; erroneous, 38, 84–85, 89, 218, 220, 221; illegal, 193n102; liturgical, 28; metrical, 40, 41, 42, 179; pre-Nikonian, 34, 38–39, 84–85, 117, 161, 164–165, 167, 169–171, 182, 218, 223, 226, 227; printed by edinoverie typography, 193n101; seized, 57, 64, 66n30, 67n44, 72, 169, 185, 193n103 Bratskoe slovo, 81 Brotherhood of St. Petr the Metropolitan, 81, 165, 193n108 Bruess, Gregory, 34 Brüning, Alfons, 7 Buddhists, 4, 30 Bukovina, 57, 60, 87 burial, 69n58, 177 Burkhanism, 214n38

Bushkovitch, Paul, 31 Bushnell, John, 16 Calvinist, 6, 210 Campbell, Elena, 73 candles, 158 Caspian, sea, 163 Catherine the Great, 8, 18, 24, 29, 30, 42, 54, 153 Catholic, 6, 27, 30, 173, 210 cemeteries, 60, 69n58, 160, 177 census, 186n4 chapel, 23, 52–53, 55, 57–60, 64, 65n2, 68n46, 68n50, 69n65, 72, 113, 160, 162, 174, 176–178, 185, 207 charity, 111, 115, 158, 227 chasovennoe, 68n54, 174 Chechnia, 177 Cheliabinsk, 132, 156 Cheremshan monastery, 163 Chernigov, 35, 58, 91, 108, 150, 162, 177, 184 Chernoe Selo parish, 159, 176, 202 Chervlennaia, 177 Chonsko-Makarev monastery, 163 chrismation, 180, 181 Churikov, Ivan, 111 Circular Epistle, 76–77, 174 clerical election, 11, 39, 106, 112, 114, 120, 121, 154, 191n79, 206, 209 clerical estate, 156, 189n54 Coleman, Heather, 124 confession, sacrament, 41, 56, 83, 85, 149, 159–160, 179, 181, 190n55, 220 confessionalization, 7, 20n16 consistory, 11, 12, 28, 35, 40, 59, 60, 78, 82, 92, 107, 115, 126, 152, 156, 169, 180, 181, 182, 189n39, 190n58 Constantinople, 86, 94 conversion: campaigns, 9, 53, 210; crime, 3, 68n49, 177; decriminalization, 105, 124; edinoverie to Old Belief, 12, 109, 172; edinoverie to Orthodoxy, 41, 164; insincere, 2, 34–35, 46, 64, 91, 154, 169, 185–186; Old Belief to edinoverie, 23, 53–54, 59–60, 62–63, 68n53, 71, 73–77, 78–79, 81, 96n4, 149, 162, 169, 174–178, 197n188, 207; Orthodoxy to edinoverie,

I n de x 41, 61–62, 81–84, 91, 94, 108, 181–183, 191n83; narratives, 99n58, 183; process, 179–180; terminology, 17. See also apostasy Cossacks, 29, 34, 59, 63, 162, 163, 177, 187, 191n78, 197n187 Council of 1667. See Great Moscow Council Council of Nicaea, 127 Council of the All-Russian Congress of Old Believers, 115 Council of the All-Russian Congresses of Orthodox Old Believers, 115, 131, 132 Cox, J., 42 Crimean War, 183 Crummey, Robert, 16 Daugavpils. See Dinaberg De Simone, Peter Thomas, 16, 172, 207 Dimitrii (Sechenov), metropolitan, 30 Dimitrii of Rostov, saint, 28 Dinaberg, 61, 67n39 Dixon, Simon, 54 Dnieper, river, 33 Dobrianka, 58 Dobrovolskii, archpriest, 168 Dobrozrakov, Timofei, 166 Don, 34, 99n56, 163, 175, 189n39, 191n78 donations, 109, 122, 153, 157, 158, 165, 193n105, 215n42 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 73, 81 Dribintsev, Grigorii, 119, 202 Dugin, Aleksandr, 10, 15, 205 Duma, 129, 139n16 Edict of Toleration, 5, 18, 105, 108–109, 113, 122, 125, 136, 137, 175 edinoverie: assimilation, 8–9, 41, 46, 61, 64, 85, 86, 88, 95, 106, 126, 184, 210; bishops, 12, 77, 90–92, 95, 106, 110, 113–114, 123–125, 127–128, 135, 137, 199, 201, 205, 206, 223–227; “blessed churches,” 63, 70n75; congresses, 21n30, 116, 120, 124, 125, 128, 129, 131, 149, 168, 174, 201, 226; deans, 40, 60, 62, 108, 152, 156, 166, 167, 191n79; deacons, 76, 166, 168, 218; integration, 9, 35, 73, 83, 92–95, 125, 126, 133, 185, 186; isolation, 8–9, 41, 61, 73, 136, 151; missionary role, 5, 61–62, 72, 77, 106,

265

115–118, 123–124, 127, 136, 155, 160, 163, 173–176, 204, 205; monasteries, 71, 122, 161, 162–163, 177, 193n109; 202, 227; mutual aid fund, 143n99; numbers, 2, 13, 53, 56, 71, 74, 84, 109, 149–152; priests, 9, 11, 18, 38, 40, 52, 53, 56, 58, 59, 62, 67n39, 68n49, 68n50, 74, 78, 82, 84, 85, 93, 105, 109, 110, 117, 119, 124, 129, 152–160, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 175, 180, 181, 184, 189n39, 191n83, 192n92, 205, 225, 227; quarantine, 41, 46, 56, 83, 95, 176, 186; reform, 2, 5, 9, 17, 18, 61, 62, 64, 72–73, 75, 77, 79, 82, 84–86, 90, 91, 95–96, 106–107, 111–112, 115–121, 123, 125, 130–132, 135–136, 162, 163, 172, 174, 186, 208, 209; schools, 83, 119, 152, 159, 165–167, 158, 174, 184, 227 education, 27, 28, 29, 35, 53, 54, 73, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 131, 154, 156, 165, 167, 189n54, 197n190, 227 Ekaterinburg, 55–56, 59, 63, 67n44, 68n49, 70n72, 99n48, 130, 144n135, 150, 152, 159, 168 elder, 81, 110, 122, 129, 152, 158, 183, 192n84, 202, 209 Elionka, 126 Elizavetgrad, 34 Elpidifor (Benediktov), bishop, 61 Emelianov, Dorofei, 160, 173, 180 eparkhialki, 119 Ermolaev, M. K., 139n16 Estland, 159, 176 Estonian Republic, 202 Eucharist, 167, 180, 181, 183 Eugenios (Voulgaris), archbishop, 49n56 Evgenii (Sakharov-Platonov), bishop, 90 Exhortation to the Schismatics, 30, 31, 76 exile, 4, 5, 29, 30, 33, 53, 54, 57, 59, 78, 175, 177, 201, 208 Filaret (Drozdov), metropolitan, 28, 42, 61, 62, 69n65, 76–77, 87, 90, 151, 162, 171, 194n119 Filaret (Gumilevskii), bishop, 91 Filaret (Malyshevskii), bishop, 91 Filaret, hierodeacon, 76 Filippov, Tertii, 87–89, 94, 95, 103n131 Flavian (Gorodetskii), metropolitan, 120 Frederick William III, 210

266

I n de x

freedom of conscience, 13, 110, 124, 131, 185 freedom of ritual, 26, 32, 88, 95 Freeze, Gregory, 29, 42, 54, 211 Gapon, Georgii, 111 Gavriil (Petrov), metropolitan, 23, 33–34 Gedeon (Krinovskii), bishop, 30 Gedeon, archimandrite, 162, 192n92 Georgia, 32 Georgian Orthodox Church, 19n6, 132 German (Osetskii), bishop, 177 Gnusin, Sergei, 55 Gomel, 163, 192n94 Goviadin, G., 119 Great Fair, 162 Great Moscow Council, 2, 26, 88, 128, 226 Great Reforms, 73, 75, 111, 148, 208 Grigorii (Postnikov), metropolitan, 63, 77, 100n68 Griniakin, Nikita, 130 guardianship, 158, 190n70 heresy, 2, 7, 10, 25, 28, 19n3, 54, 86, 168, 173, 174, 178, 208, 211 Herzen, Aleksandr, 96n4 Hours, 28, 167 Iakubino, 158 Iaroslavl, 109, 125–126, 176 icons, 52, 57, 64, 67n44, 72, 108, 130, 162, 164, 166, 174, 176, 205, 207 Ilarion (Alfeev), 205 Ilarion (Troitskii), archimandrite, 133, 134 Innokentii (Borisov), bishop, 91, 93 Investigation of the Schismatic Faith, 28 Ioann (Kartushin), archbishop, 143n108 Ioannikii (Rudinev) bishop, 165, 166 ioannitsy, 111 Iona (Kapustin), bishop, 70n72 Iordanskii, Aleksei, 156, 190n55 Iosif (Petrovykh), bishop, 124 Iosif, patriarch, 166, 169 Irgiz, 54, 60, 68n53, 71 Irkutsk, 68n49, 78, 177 Isidor (Nikolskii), metropolitan, 78 Iureva, Ekaterina, 161 Iuvenali (Poiakov), metropolitan, 1

Ivan the Great bell tower, 170–171 Ivanovskii, Nikolai, 84, 126 Jassy, 49n49 Jerusalem, 49n49 Judas, 178 Kamchatka, 91 Kasilov, T. I., 176 Kastorskii, Nikolai, 154 Kaurkin, Radislav, 15, 42 Kazan, 59, 63, 70n71, 82, 93, 105, 110, 112, 154, 161, 169, 180, 181, 194n129 Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy, 84, 99n52, 110, 193n103 Kazan episcopal council, 93–94, 95, 126 Kazantsev, G. M., 80, 99n48 Kelsiev, Vasilii, 96n4 Kerzhensk, 122, 201 Kharkov, 193n109, 197n188 Khobarov, Mikahil, 66n30 Khristorozhdestvenskaia church, 202 Kiev, 7, 91, 120, 132, 192n93 Kirill (Gundiaev), patriarch, 14, 203–204 Kirill (Smirnov), bishop, 135 Korotkin, V. P., 182 Korotkov, priest, 109 Kostroma, 110, 150, 157 Kremlin, 1, 96n4, 170, 171 Kriuchkov, Ksenofont, 155, 176, 183, 189n44 Kronshtadt, 111 Kropyvnytski. See Elizavetgrad Kursk, 115, 117 Kuş, lake, 87 Kuzminki, 182 Kuznetsov, N. D., 133, 134 Latgale, 202 Latvia, 202 Lavrentii (Kniazev), bishop, 131 Lebedev, E. E., 149 Legatov, I., 124 Leipzig, 94 Lenin, Vladimir, 200 Leningrad, 202 Leonid (Krasnopevkov), bishop, 83 Levintova, Ekaterina, 203

I n de x litany, 11, 168, 169 Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1917–1918, 132–136, 149, 186, 204, 205, 223–227 Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1971, 7, 202 Lutheran, 6, 25, 210 Lutheran consistory, 13 Lvov, Vladimir, 131 Lysogorskii, N., 42 Macarios III, patriarch, 26, 127 Maikop, 110, 126 Makarii (Bulgakov), metropolitan, 61 Marakulin, Vasilii, 117 Mariia Nikolaevna, tsarevna, 195n140 marriage, 41, 59, 60, 74, 78, 83, 85, 90, 108, 153, 161, 175, 179, 181, 189n39, 195n140, 219–220, 227 Marsden, Thomas, 4, 16, 53 Maslov, Ilia, 204 Mefodii (Smirnov), bishop, 34 Mennonites, 138n11 merchant, 23, 59, 75, 67n43, 68n46, 72, 80, 115, 157, 161, 165, 173 metallurgy, 66n30 Michels, Georg, 7, 29 Michelson, Patrick, 114 Mikhail (Semenov), bishop, 143n112 Mikhailovskaia sloboda parish, 15 Milov, Ivan Ivanovich, 23 Milovskaia church, 23, 78, 190n70 Minin and Pozharskii, 131 missionaries: academics, 85; academy department, 193n103; congresses, 64, 105, 125, 126, 132, 141n59, 157, 158, 183; expeditions, 81; impulse, 4; lectures, 89; movement, 105, 106; Orthodox, 6, 81, 94, 96, 105, 110, 117, 124, 127–129, 130, 132, 136, 159, 175, 180, 184, 205; reform, 124; secret, 55–56, 78; state participation, 57, 58, 75. See also edinoverie: missionary role Modest (Strelbitskii), 166 Mogilev, 69n57, 163 Monophysite, 9 Moscow, 28, 36, 59, 73, 77, 81, 83, 94, 104, 115, 119, 124, 128, 129, 150, 161, 162, 164, 165, 170, 177, 197n190, 201, 202

267

Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy, 73, 81, 143n101 Muir, Edward, 25 multiconfessional establishment, 4, 5, 10, 13, 30, 36, 44, 46, 54, 56, 63, 77, 80, 105, 107–108, 138n11, 206, 210 Muscovy, 2 Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic, 202 Muslim muftiate, 13 Muslims, 4, 30, 110 Mustvee. See Chernoe Selo parish Nazarii (Kirillov), bishop, 144n130 Neofit (Sosnin), archbishop, 70n72 neopaganism, 214n38 Nicholas I, 5, 8, 9, 18, 39, 53–54, 57–65, 67n39, 72, 73–74, 91, 148, 150, 152, 164, 185, 186, 195n140, 207, 208 Nicholas II, 107, 125, 129, 209 Nikephoros (Theotokis), archbishop, 34, 35 Nikodim (Rotov), metropolitan, 202–203 Nikodim of Starodub, 33, 42, 49n53, 162 Nikolaev, 152 Nikolaeva, Natalia, 177 Nikolaevskii monastery, 162 Nikolskaia church, 110, 130, 152, 157, 202 Nikolskii, Dmitrii, 180–181 Nikolskii monastery, 81, 92, 105, 161, 162, 165, 177, 193n109, 202 Nikon (Minin), patriarch, 2, 26, 32, 38, 84, 124, 168, 203 Nilskii, Ivan, 84–85, 87–89, 162 Nizhnesaldinsk, 68n50 Nizhnii Novgorod, 54, 73, 83, 108, 122, 131, 144n130, 150, 161, 162, 165, 181, 183, 184, 201, 227 Nizhnii Tagil, 52, 66n30, 159, 161, 174, 201 noble, 192n84 Novets, 109 Novgorod, 155, 188n13 Novocherkassk, 92 novoobriadtsy, 17, 130 Novorossiia, 33 ober procurator, 58, 63, 74, 85, 92, 104, 129, 131, 149, 150, 171 October Manifesto, 165

268

I n de x

OGPU, 201 Okhtensk, 227 okruzhniki, 76, 124 Old Belief: attitude to ritual, 9–10, 19n12, 26, 60, 86, 88–89, 124, 133–134, 167, 170–171, 211; community, 60, 113, 151, 207; confession building, 20n17; emigration, 87; general characteristics, 4–5, 151; heresy, 28; legalization, 5, 36, 55–56, 73, 77, 80, 91, 105–108, 113, 122, 134, 136, 206–207; origins, 2, 26–27, 32; persecution, 5, 18, 27, 31, 39, 53, 57, 58–60, 64, 71, 94, 150, 177–178, 207; priestless, 17, 23, 32, 54, 59, 60, 61, 68n49, 68n54, 71, 73, 76, 80, 81, 109, 155, 161, 162, 172, 174–177, 179, 182, 183, 196n154; priestly, 17, 23, 32, 33, 39, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59–60, 75–76, 151, 170, 174, 180, 185; research subject, 15–16; reunification, 78–79, 124, 132, 136, 204; secret committee, 55–56, 65n2, 90; toleration, 29, 30–31, 33, 44, 54, 72–74, 85, 107–108; transnationality, 101n94; terminology, 17; trips to the Near East, 32–33, 49n49, 60 Old Believer Theological and Pedagogical Institute, 113 Old Catholics, 89, 102n105, 210 Old Church Slavonic, 118, 119, 121, 166, 167, 194n119, 221 Old Ritual in the Past and Present, conference, 205 Olonets, 188n13 Omsk, 191n71 Orenburg, 150, 175 Orthodox Confession of Faith, 27 Orthodox Old Belief, 16, 134, 178, 186 Oxford Movement, 210 Paert, Irina, 13, 16, 55, 150, 200 Pafnutii (Ovchinnikov), 71, 76, 96n4, 170–171 Paisos, patriarch, 26 Palkin, Aleksandr, 15, 29, 67n44, 172 Palladii (Raev), metropolitan, 157 Parfenii (Levnitskii), bishop, 104 Patriarchal Center of the Old Russian Liturgical Tradition, 203 Paul, emperor, 10, 23, 31, 35–36, 39, 42, 104–105

Pavel (Lednev). See Pavel Prusskii Pavel (Volkov), bishop, 201–202 Pavel Prusskii, 73, 77, 80–82, 89, 92, 96n4, 99n58, 104–106, 136, 164, 177, 183, 185, 202, 209 Pavlov, 227 Pavlova, Olga, 15, 42 peasant, 6, 61, 66n30, 68n49, 113, 155, 161, 181, 182 penance, 32, 220 Penza, 150, 153, 176, 193n106, 193n110 People of the Forties, 2 Perm, 61, 65n2, 70n72, 78, 104, 109, 150, 156, 157, 160, 172, 179, 190n55 Peter III, 5, 29, 31 Peter the Great, 3, 10, 28–29, 42, 47n15, 57, 112, 116, 117, 136 Petr (Losev), bishop, 104 Petr (Mohyla), metropolitan, 27–28 Petrograd, 199, 212n4, 227 Petrograd Soviet, 133 Petrov, Grigorii, 143n112 Pichugin, L. V., 172–173, 196n161, 197n189 Pilgrimage, 192n93, 209 Pisemskii, A. F., 2 Pitirim, bishop, 28 Pivovarova, N. P., 59 Platon (Levshin), metropolitan: alleged duplicity, 79–80; confession builder, 35, 41, 53, 91; exhortation, 30–31; prayers for, 104; preacher, 31; reluctance for edinoverie, 14, 34–36; writing the rules, 2, 23, 36, 37–44, 208 Platonites, 148 Pobedonostsev, Konstantin, 74–75, 85, 91–92, 94, 96, 105 Podgornyi, Petr, 66n49 Poduruev, Andrei, 161 Pokas, 161 Pokrovskaia church, 159 Pokrovskii convent, 161 Polianskii, Ioann, 127 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 87 Polotsk, 150, 158, 191n79 Polunov, Aleksandr, 75 pomortsy, 172, 179. See also Old Belief: priestless Old Belief

I n de x Potemkin, Grigorii, 33, 35, 42, 162 Pozdeeva, I., 113 Pravda pravoslaviia, 118, 121–122 Pre-Conciliar Commission, 125, 126, 128 Preobrazhenskoe cemetery, 30, 54, 55, 61, 69n65, 71, 72, 161, 162, 177, 197n186 priestless Old Belief. See Old Belief priestly Old Belief. See Old Belief prison, 5, 53, 55, 57, 59, 68n49, 76, 78, 178, 200, 201, 208, 210, 212n4 prosphora, 69n57, 167 Protasov, Nikolai, 58 Protestant, 6, 27, 30, 31, 210 protivookruzhniki, 76 Provisional Government, 133 Prussia, 80 Prussian Church Union, 210 psalmists, 154, 158, 165, 190n55 Psalter, 28, 166, 167, 190n55, 193n101 Rabotki, 182, 183 Raevskii, Mikhail, 166 Rasputin, Grigorii, 18, 129 relics, 131 Renovationist schism, 200 Riabukhin, Ioann, 117, 123 Riazanov, Andrei, 181 Riazanova, Praskeva, 180–181 Riga, 150, 160, 173, 180 ritual freedom. See freedom of ritual Robson, Roy, 16, 113 Rogers, Douglas, 16, 179 Rogozhskoe cemetery, 30, 61, 69n65, 71, 107 Rogoznyi, Pavel, 131 Romania, 87 Romano-Borisoglebsk, 176 rules of Metropolitan Platon: abolition, 18, 77–78, 83, 85, 125, 131, 136; amendment, 18, 61–62, 73, 82, 83, 85, 95, 162; anathemas, 37–38, 86, 88; assimilation, 43, 106, 114, 126; contradictions, 8–9, 43–44, 46, 61, 62, 78, 81, 83, 95, 149; creation, 18, 23, 36–37; dissatisfaction, 2, 43, 56, 60, 63, 78, 123, 171; failure to remove, 8, 62, 81–82, 96; in practice, 18, 148–149; isolation of edinoverie, 73, 160; ritual institutionalization, 39, 92, 134, 171, 184;

269

rule one, 37, 39; rule two, 39, 153–154; rule three, 38, 39; rule four, 38; rule five, 40, 41, 61, 62, 82, 84, 86, 94, 125, 126, 157, 178, 181, 185; rule six, 40, 152; rule eight, 38; rule nine, 41, 50n81; rule eleven, 40, 82, 84, 85, 181; rule twelve, 40; rule fifteen, 39, 168–169; rule sixteen, 39, 171; first attached opinion, 180–181, 221; second attached opinion, 38–39, 62, 86, 156, 164, 170, 182, 184, 207, 221; support for, 42, 63, 81–82, 114, 126, 202; translation, 217–221; violation, 11 Rumiantsev, P. A., 33 Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, 200 Ruzhinskaia, I. N., 150 Ryzhkov, Ivan, 165 Rzhev, 69n58, 159 Sabler, Vladimir, 104 sacrament, 1, 11, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 40, 41, 45, 61, 80, 82, 84, 85, 93, 111, 149, 158, 160, 170, 179–184, 218–220 saints, 116, 120, 199 Samara, 175 Sarajevo, 60 Sarancha, Evgenii, 15 Saratov, 78, 126 Satka, 227 Scarborough, Daniel, 74, 122 schools: monastery, 163; Orthodox, 75, 119, 156, 164, 122, 227; state, 156. See also edinoverie: schools sectarianism, 3, 53, 54, 110, 111, 112 seminaries, 28, 35, 78, 119, 154, 156, 189n54, 190n55, 201 Senatov, V., 128 Serafim (Aleksandrov), bishop, 127, 132–136, 146n175 Serafim (Glagolevskii), metropolitan, 55 Serebrovskii, Vladimir, 184 serfdom, 73, 183, 206 Sergeev, Ivan, 182 Sergeev, Nikolai, 181 Sergiev, Ioann, 111 Sergii (Stragorodskii), archbishop, 129, 201, 202 Sevastianov, Leonid, 205, 214n42

270

I n de x

Shakhov, N. M., 146n175 Shestov, Ivan, 165–167 Shevzov, Vera, 12, 120 Shkinev, F. A., 182 Shleev, Grigorii, 134 Shleev, Simeon: anathemas, 127; background, 110; comparison with other reformist trends, 111, 113, 115; criticism of the rules of Platon, 42, 56, 125; election as bishop, 199; first edinoverie congress, 130; history of edinoverie, 123; jubilee speech, 105; leadership, 128–129; local church council, 132–136; meeting the Belokrinitskaia hierarchy, 124, 132; mission and missionaries, 126–128, 209; murder, 199, 212n5; music, 118; Orthodox Old Belief, 186; ousting senior priest, 128, 154; parish life, 120; petition, 113–114, 128, 201; personality, 129; press activities, 121–122; post-Soviet influence, 10, 21n31, 204–206; reform plan, 18, 105–107; ritual standardization, 115–118; second edinoverie congress, 131–132; schools and seminaries, 119; statistics, 150 Shunin, A., 205 Shuvalov, P. A., 171 Siberia, 159, 177 Sibiriachikha, 161 Simagin, G. I., 116 Simbirsk, 90 Simon (Shleev), bishop. See Shleev, Simeon singing, 1, 58, 118–119, 152, 161, 167–168, 171, 226–227 Skvortsov, V. M., 168 Sling, 28 Smirnov, Pavel, 155, 176 Smirnov, Stefan, 179, 202 Society for Moral-Religious Enlightenment, 111 Society for the Admirers of Spiritual Enlightenment, 87, 209 Soldatov, Aleksandr, 205 Solunskaia parish, 158 Somovki, 181 Soviet Union, 14 Sozh, river, 192n93

Spaso-Preobrazhenskaia church, 169, 180, 194n129, 198n203 spasovtsy, 179 Sredne-Egvinskoe, 157 Sretenskaia church, 168 St. Aleksandr Nevskii Temperance Society, 111 Stalin, Iosif, 201 Starodub, 33, 34, 150, 151 Staroobriadets, 143n100 stauropegia, 144n127, 206 Stavropol, 109 step to Orthodoxy, 38 St. Gregory the Theologian Charitable Foundation, 214n42 Stoglav Council, 25 Stolypin, A. D., 63, 163 Stolypin, Petr, 108, 129, 138n13 St. Petersburg, 13, 52, 77, 107, 110, 115, 118, 128, 129, 140n34, 150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 165, 168, 188n13, 213n23. See also Petrograd, Leningrad St. Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy, 111, 143n101 Strickland, John, 117 Subbotin, Nikolai, 73, 75, 77, 81–83, 84, 91–93, 94–95, 96n4, 104–106, 125, 136, 165, 185 suffragan, 12, 70n72, 92, 104, 110, 135, 146n171. See also edinoverie: bishops superstition, 28, 29, 54, 153 Surer, Jan, 177 Suslova, L. N., 74, 157 Sveshnikov, Grigorii, 169, 180–181, 198n203 Sviazhsk, 194n129 Synod: appellate function, 126; authority, 34, 164, 169, 207; church-state, 3, 36, 45, 57–58, 74–75, 125; crackdown, 122; criticism of, 10, 78, 112, 114, 116, 120, 121, 172, 208; edict of 1722, 27, 30; flexible approach, 12; foundation, 28; reactive, 8–9, 14, 28, 56, 75, 85–86, 108, 111, 125, 138n16, 208–209; reform of edinoverie, 18, 75, 85–87, 90–95, 126, 130, 181, 185; rejection of Nicholas II, 130–131 Tallinn, 202 Tambov, 161, 190n55

I n de x Tauride, 33, 162 Ternovskii, F., 181 thirty-two Petersburg priests, 110–111 Thirty Years’ War, 6, 25 Tikhon (Bellavin), patriarch, 128, 199–201 Tiumen, 66n49, 227 Tobolsk, 74, 109, 150, 152, 156, 157, 159, 172, 227 Tolstoi, Dmitrii, 171 Tomsk, 64, 83, 150, 157, 159, 161, 176 Torzhok, 158, 159 Tovbin, Kirill, 204 townspeople, 49n53, 161, 162 Trabzon, 131 Troitskaia church, 71, 104, 164, 165, 170, 176 Troitsko-Nikolskaia church, 159 Trotsky, Lev, 200 Tula, 56 Tver, 145n143, 158, 159 Typikon, 218 typography, 128, 164–165, 169, 174, 184, 185, 193n105, 193n106, 193n109, 193n110, 201 Ufa, 13, 91, 163, 192n89, 199, 212n4, 212n5, 227 Ukhtomskii, Aleksei, 110, 118, 129, 168, 192n84 Ukraine, 7, 177, 203 Ukrainian Orthodox Church, 132 Uniate, 27, 46n3, 53, 54, 173, 210 Union for Church Regeneration, 110, 125, 200 Union of the Russian People, 125 United States, 14, 203, 210 Urals, 29, 162, 163, 201 Uralsk, 62, 63, 69n68, 76, 150, 161, 162, 163, 174 Urasov, 182 Uspenskaia church, 177, 197n186 Uspenskii cathedral, 1 Uspenskii monastery, 163 Uvarov, Sergei, 53

271

Valchikh, 109 Valuev, P. A., 80 Varmalei, 182 Vasilii (Luzhinskii), bishop, 61 Veniamin (Kazanskii), metropolitan, 199 Verkh-Iset, 202 Verkhovskii, Ioann, 21n31, 73, 77–80, 82, 84, 90, 91–92, 94–95, 96, 98n35, 99n48, 103n131, 105, 106, 129, 206, 209 Verkhovskii, Timofei, 58, 77, 89, 177, 184 Viatka, 59, 109, 115, 125, 150, 151, 156 Vienna, 94 Vinogradov, Ivan, 171 Virgin Mary, 52 Vitebsk, 59, 61, 155, 160 Vladimir (Bogoiavlenskii), metropolitan, 104, 129 Vladimir, 108 Volga, 110 Vologda, 175, 188n13 Volynia, 90 von Witte, Sergei, 107 Voronok, 108 Voskresenskii, A. M., 84–85 Vozdvizhenskii, Georgii, 170 Vsesviatskii convent, 193n109 Vyg monastery, 59, 71 Vysk, 190n55 Warsaw, 154, 168 Werth, Paul, 4, 21n25, 138n10, 209 World War I, 202 World War II, 201, 202 Wrangel, Petr, 200 Zhemchuzhin, Simeon, 157 Zlatoustovskii monastery, 163, 192n89, 227 Znamenka, 34, 35 Zvezdinskii, Ioann, 164, 170

Dr. James Matthew White is Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources and the Laboratory of Archaeographical Studies at Ural Federal University and Research Fellow at the University of Tartu.