Paradoxes of the Old Believer Movement

Abstract

The growth of interest in religion among the Russian people since the fall of the communist regime is usually looked at from only one angle the revival of the Orthodox Church. This has a certain logic to it from the personal, cultural, ideological and national viewpoints. However, the picture most people, including newspaper columnists and the secular authorities, have of spiritual life in Russia has become extremely one-sided. Normally, when people speak of a return to religion or to the Church, they are now referring exclusively to the Orthodox Church. In the religious sphere as such, the main task is to recover the past. However, this has turned out to be a crude process incapable of fully reproducing the spiritual and cultural diversity of prerevolutionary Russia. Returning to 'the faith of our grandparents' sometimes turns out to mean returning to the faith of grandparents who are strangers to us: people can lose touch with their family traditions. One traditional alternative to Orthodoxy for most Russians, but one that attracts very little attention today, is the Old Believer movement. According to prerevolutionary statistics 10 per cent of Russians called themselves Old Believers that was about 16 million people. This figure is indeed probably too low, since after long years of persecution the 'ardent devotees of ancient piety' would be inclined to conceal their faith rather than advertise it. Before the Revolution Old Believers were influential in many areas of national life. The biographies of prominent Old Believers at the turn of the century showed that they were wealthy, well known and successful in their chosen professions. They were a distinctive type, with a culture completely different from that which had developed in the mainstream of Russian life. Most of the well-known Old Believers the Ryabushinskys, Guchkovs, Morozovs, Shibayevs, Sheloputins, Soldatenkovs, Bugrovs and Ostroukhovs were rich merchant families. Among all the wealthy of Russia the Old Believers were noteworthy for their involvement in social work, charitable activity, patronage, local government and popular education, and for technically and socially innovative projects in the economic sphere. Many of them were leading religious activists; others applied their great energies to artistic or scientific work. These renowned prerevolutionary Old Believers start to give us an idea of the scale and extent of the religious, economic, cultural and social activities of the followers of this 'traditional creed'. They were life's true householders, strong in faith, with a great deal of common sense and a strong sense of responsibility. So where then has this strong, prosperous and healthy element in Russian national life disappeared to? Where is the Old Believer element in the spiritual life of modem