The Old Believers of Yekaterinburg: Number, Social Status, and Religious Identity

Abstract

This paper discusses the impact of regional and local migration on the Yekaterinburg Old Believer community with reference to Beglopopovtsy (or Chasovennye from the 1840s) between the 18 th and early 20 th centuries. The analysis of numbers and class composition carried out with reference to censuses and materials reflecting the population’s natural migration shows that the Old Believer community grew gradually though unevenly. During the 3 rd census (Rus. ревизия ) of the early 1760s, there were about one thousand Old Believers (one third of the population of Yekaterinburg). During the period of toleration between the 1780s and 1820s, the Assumption and St Nicholas Chapels were formed, and by the end of Alexander I’s reign, there were almost 1500 Old Believers most of whom were either merchants or petty bourgeois. The communities shrank due to the inculcation of Old Belief in the 1830s–1850s, leading to the number of Old Believers decreasing to only some percent. Later on, the number of the urban Old Believers grew again due to the migration of peasants during the post-reform time. The latter influenced the class composition of the parish, especially among youth with peasants making up the majority of them in the early 20 th century. Most Old Believers owned accommodation which was a beneficial factor for the adaptation of the new members of the community who had no houses of their own. The cartographic visualisation of the religious landscape connected with the history of the urban Old Believer communities of the Beglopopovtsy (Chasovennye) helps localise them in the space of Yekaterinburg between the 18 th and early 20 th centuries and reveal the independence of the community with its two chapels, the structure of the parish and the clergy, its preference for same-religion marriages, and its own cemetery.