De Simone , Peter T. The Old Believers in Imperial Russia: Oppression, Opportunism and Religious Identity in Tsarist Moscow (review)

Abstract

SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 176 De Simone, Peter T. The Old Believers in Imperial Russia: Oppression, Opportunism and Religious Identity in Tsarist Moscow. The Library of Modern Russia. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2018. xvi + 263 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £69.00: $95.00. Peter T. De Simone’s study of the Rogozhskoe Cemetery community is a welcome addition to the literature on Old Belief in tsarist Russia. Founded on the outskirts of Moscow as a burial site for the city’s ‘priested’ Old Believers (popovtsy) during the outbreak of plague in 1771, Rogozhskoe became an important centre of Old Belief in the empire as a whole, partly because of the wealth of the Old Believer merchants who provided generous funding for the community’s sacred spaces and charitable institutions. De Simone traces the history of the community through four chronological periods. In its first decades, Rogozhskoe benefited from Catherine II’s relatively tolerant policy towards Old Belief, and its prestige was enhanced in the aftermath of the Napoleonic occupation of Moscow in 1812, when the community’s merchants made important contributions to the rebuilding of the city. With the appointment of the ultra-Orthodox Filaret (Drozdov) as Metropolitan of Moscow in 1821, however, pressure came to be exerted on the Rogozhskoe Old Believers to convert either to official Orthodoxy or to Edinoverie (‘Unity of Faith’), the state-sponsored movement which preserved the old rite while recognizing the authority of the Holy Synod. Legislation from 1822 onwards restricted the ability of Old Believers to recruit priests from the official Orthodox Church, and this encouraged the Rogozhskoe community to support the establishment in 1846 of an Old Believer hierarchy at Belaia Krinitsa, in Austrian Ukraine, that could ordain priests and bishops for the popovtsy in Russia. The timing, however, turned out to be unfortunate. The outbreak of the European revolutions in 1848, followed by the Crimean War and the Polish insurrection of 1863, understandably raised the Russian government’s suspicion of a religious movement whose hierarchy was based abroad. It also weakened the Old Believers’ claim to represent a true Russian identity; and since Old Belief had arisen in the seventeenth century largely as a protest against Greek influence on Russian Orthodoxy, it was particularly ironic that their new Metropolitan, Amvrosii, was Greek. After 1846 Rogozhskoe claimed to be a central institution of Old Belief as a whole, although not even all of the priested Old Believers recognized the legitimacy of the Belokrinitskaia hierarchy. Perhaps surprisingly, the accession of Alexander II in 1855 and the introduction of his ‘Great Reforms’ brought relatively few benefits to the Old Believers. In 1856 the Rogozhskoe community was falsely denounced for having illegally celebrated the Divine Liturgy (the Eucharist). This led to the sealing REVIEWS 177 off of the altars of its Nativity and Intercession cathedrals, preventing their use for religious services. It was only at Easter 1905, against the background of the developing revolution, that the altars were re-opened, on the eve of Nicholas II’s decree on religious toleration. De Simone’s account of the history of the Rogozhskoe community provides a detailed and illuminating picture of many aspects of the lives of the Moscow popovtsy, including the architecture of their cathedrals, the activities of their charitable and educational institutions and the growth of merchant dynasties such as the Morozovs and the Riabushinskiis. The author has made good use of archival materials, although his attitude towards his sources is somewhat uncritical, producing a highly sympathetic picture which sometimes verges on the hagiographical. De Simone focuses on the relationship of the Rogozhskoe community to the state and the official Orthodox Church, while largely ignoring its position in the broader spectrum of Old Belief. He says little about the attitude of the Rogozhskoe priested community to its priestless counterpart, the Moscow Preobrazhenskoe Cemetery community, nor to other priestless and priested communities throughout the Empire. Many of the more radical groups considered the Moscow popovtsy to be hopelessly compromised, not least by their swearing of the oath of loyalty to Alexander III after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. It is not too surprising, therefore, that the authorities were mistrustful...