The Old Believers and Praying for the Tsar in Seventeenth-Century Russia

Abstract

The opposition of Old Believers to the tsarist state assumed a number of forms: self-immolation; open rebellion; and flight to the periphery of the empire and beyond.1 Another manifestation was non-praying (nemolenie) for the tsar, but this has received comparatively little attention in the literature. Recent Russian scholarship has cast some new light on the issue2 but, in the absence of extensive evidence of liturgical practice in Old Believer communities, much remains obscure. What exactly was meant by ‘non-praying’, and did it have the same meaning in the seventeenth century as it had in the eighteenth century and subsequently?