The Old Believers and the Schism (Raskol)

In the mid-seventeenth century, Patriarch Nikon’s reforms to bring Russian liturgical books and practices into conformity with contemporary Greek usage provoked the deepest and most enduring division in the history of the Russian Church: the Raskol. Those who rejected the reforms — the Old Believers (staroobryadtsy) or Old Ritualists — were anathematized by the Great Moscow Council of 1666–1667 and subjected to centuries of persecution, yet survived in priestly and priestless branches that endure to this day. The Moscow Patriarchate lifted the anathemas only in 1971.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Russian context)

Nikon and the Reforms (1652–1666)

Nikon (born Nikita Minin, 1605–1681) was consecrated Patriarch of Moscow in 1652. Energetic, learned, and convinced of the universal mission of the Russian Church, he set out almost immediately to correct what he and a circle of Greek-influenced advisers regarded as accumulated errors in Russian liturgical books and ritual — divergences from the practice of the contemporary Greek Church (Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual, and Reform, ch. 1; Britannica, “Nikon”).

The decisive historiographical point, argued at length by Paul Meyendorff, is that Nikon’s reform was not a return to ancient sources. The Greek service books taken as the model were themselves seventeenth-century editions, many printed in Venice; in numerous cases the older Russian usages were closer to the early tradition than the “corrected” Greek forms Nikon imposed. The reform was thus the transposition of one contemporary practice onto another, carried out with an abruptness that turned a question of ritual into a rupture (Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual, and Reform, esp. Part Two).

Nikon had emerged from the Zealots of Piety (revniteli blagochestiya), a circle of reform-minded clergy gathered around Stefan Vonifatiev, the tsar’s confessor, in the late 1630s and 1640s. Its members — including Ivan Neronov and the archpriest Avvakum — sought moral and liturgical renewal. The circle fractured when Nikon, elevated to the patriarchate, pursued a Grecophile program its traditionalist members regarded as a betrayal of Russian Orthodoxy itself (Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist, ch. 1).

Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich (reigned 1645–1676) initially promoted Nikon and granted him the title Velikii Gosudar (“Great Sovereign”), but the two broke over Nikon’s claims to authority encroaching on the tsar’s. Nikon withdrew to the New Jerusalem Monastery in July 1658 and was finally deposed to simple monk by the council of 1666, while his reforms were upheld (Britannica, “Nikon”; “Raskol”).

What Actually Changed

The reforms touched the most visible and tangible elements of worship — which is precisely why they were felt as an assault on the faith itself. The principal changes, as catalogued in the scholarship (Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual, and Reform, pp. 66–68; Crummey, Old Believers in a Changing World, p. 39), were:

  • The sign of the cross: made with three fingers (troeperstie, signifying the Trinity) rather than the older two (dvoeperstie, signifying the two natures of Christ). This became the single most charged marker of the division.
  • The spelling of the name of Jesus: the corrected “Иисус” (Iisus, with a doubled initial vowel) replaced the old “Исус” (Isus).
  • Liturgical books: roughly four hundred pages of corrections were made to the Sluzhebnik (service book), with the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom most heavily affected.
  • The number of prosphora at the proskomedia was reduced from seven to five.
  • The direction of processions: changed from sunwise/clockwise (posolon) to counter-sunwise.
  • The number of alleluias: the triple alleluia replaced the older double.
  • The Creed: the word “истиннаго” (“the true Lord”) was dropped from the clause on the Holy Spirit, and the conjunction in “begotten but not made” was altered.

Old Believers also retained the eight-pointed cross and a fuller regime of prostrations. To the reformers these were corrections of error; to their opponents they were the dismantling of the form in which the Russian land had received and kept the faith (Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual, and Reform, Part Two; “Old Believers,” OrthodoxWiki).

Archpriest Avvakum

The most formidable leader of the resistance was the archpriest Avvakum Petrov (c. 1620–1682). Repeatedly arrested, exiled to Siberia, and finally confined in an earthen prison at Pustozersk in the far north, Avvakum composed there his Life (Zhitie), written in successive redactions around 1672–1675. Vivid, colloquial, and intensely personal, it is widely regarded as the first work of Russian autobiography (Britannica, “Avvakum Petrovich”).

In one celebrated passage, Avvakum recalls his wife Anastasia Markovna’s response when, amid the hardships of exile, he asked how long their sufferings would last:

“‘Will these sufferings go on a long time, Archpriest?’ And I said, ‘Markovna, right up to our very death.’ And so she sighed and answered, ‘Good enough, Petrovič, then let’s be getting on.’” (trans. Kenneth N. Brostrom, Archpriest Avvakum: The Life Written by Himself, Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1979)

Of the journey into Siberian exile he writes:

“Later they exiled me to Siberia with my wife and children. And of our many privations on the road there is too much to tell, but maybe a small portion of them should be mentioned. The Archpriestess had a baby, and we carried her sick in a cart to Tobol’sk.” (trans. Brostrom, The Life Written by Himself, 1979)

Avvakum was burned at the stake on April 14, 1682 (Old Style), at Pustozersk, together with three companions, for “great blasphemies against the royal house” (Britannica, “Avvakum Petrovich”). He is venerated as a holy martyr among the Old Believers.

The Great Moscow Council of 1666–1667

The schism was sealed by the Great Moscow Council, which opened in November 1666 and continued into 1667. Convened by Tsar Alexis, it did two seemingly paradoxical things: it deposed Nikon personally (December 1666), exiling him to the Ferapontov Monastery, while upholding and confirming his reforms. Ioasaph II was elected patriarch in his place (Great Moscow Synod, Wikipedia; OCA, The Orthodox Faith, vol. III).

The council carried unusual pan-Orthodox weight because two Eastern patriarchs participated in person — Paisius of Alexandria and Macarius of Antioch — alongside envoys of Constantinople and Jerusalem. It anathematized the old rites and the old books, anathematized all who adhered to them, and condemned the Stoglav Council of 1551, which had earlier dogmatized the older Russian usages (such as the two-fingered sign). Old Believer leaders who refused to recant were defrocked, anathematized, and imprisoned or exiled (Great Moscow Synod, Wikipedia, citing Meyendorff, pp. 66–68; Moscow Sobor of 1666–1667, OrthodoxWiki).

Persecution

The anathemas inaugurated more than two centuries of intermittent persecution, which Old Believer memory absorbed into an apocalyptic reading of history: the official Church and state had become the dominion of Antichrist (Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist).

  • The Solovetsky (Solovki) Monastery siege (1668–1676): the monks of this great northern monastery refused the new service books. A government siege beginning in 1668 dragged on for eight years; the monastery fell in January 1676 after a defector revealed a hidden entrance, and most of the surviving defenders were executed. (Casualty figures vary across the largely encyclopedic sources; the broad outline — an eight-year resistance ending in massacre — is firm. Solovetsky Monastery uprising, Wikipedia.)
  • Boyarynya Feodosia Morozova (1632–1675): a wealthy noblewoman and patroness of Avvakum, arrested in November 1671 for her loyalty to the old rite, imprisoned in an earthen pit at Borovsk, where she died of starvation in 1675. [Disputed: her death is dated to November 2, 1675 in the hagiographical Life tradition; the Wikipedia infobox gives December 1, 1675 — the year and cause (starvation) are not in question.] She became an icon of the resistance, immortalized in Vasily Surikov’s monumental painting Boyarynya Morozova (completed 1887; State Tretyakov Gallery), which depicts her on a sledge, hand raised in the two-fingered sign of the cross (Feodosia Morozova, Wikipedia; Tretyakov Gallery Magazine).

Priestly and Priestless Branches

The anathemas left the Old Believers with a structural crisis: only one bishop, Pavel of Kolomna, had joined them, and he died c. 1656 without consecrating successors. Without bishops, there could be no ordinations — and so no future priesthood. From this dilemma came the fundamental division of the movement:

  • Popovtsy (“priestly”) accepted “fugitive priests” who defected from the official Church, regarding their orders as valid. They long sought a bishop of their own.
  • Bespopovtsy (“priestless”), at councils held in the Novgorod region in 1692 and 1694, concluded that grace had departed the visible Church entirely — that the reign of the “spiritual Antichrist” had come. They abandoned a sacramental priesthood altogether, retaining only those mysteries a layman could administer (Baptism and Penance) under lay preceptors (nastavniki) (Bespopovtsy, Wikipedia; Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist).

The priestly Old Believers resolved their crisis in 1846, when Metropolitan Ambrose (Amvrosii, 1791–1863), a Greek hierarch and former Orthodox Metropolitan of Bosnia-Sarajevo, joined them and established the Belokrinitsa (Belaya Krinitsa) hierarchy in Bukovina, then under Austrian rule. [Disputed: sources date the functioning hierarchy variously to Ambrose’s reception in 1846 or to the first new Old Believer episcopal consecrations in 1847–48.] (Ambrose of Belaya Krinitsa, Wikipedia.)

Edinoverie (1800)

A partial reconciliation came through edinoverie (“unity of faith” or “co-religionism”), instituted in 1800. Under terms approved by Emperor Paul I on October 27, 1800, and shaped by Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) of Moscow, edinoverie parishes were permitted to retain the pre-Nikonian rites and old books while receiving canonically ordained clergy and submitting to the Holy Synod. It was, in effect, an Old-Rite presence in communion with the official Church. [Disputed: Platon’s governing rules are described in some sources as “eleven points” and in others as sixteen articles.] Edinoverie drew a minority of Old Believers into communion but was regarded with suspicion by many on both sides (Edinoverie, Wikipedia; White, Unity in Faith?).

The 1971 Lifting of the Anathemas

The most significant act of reconciliation came in the twentieth century. The Local Council (Pomestny Sobor) of the Russian Orthodox Church, meeting under Patriarch Pimen at the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, on June 2, 1971, adopted an act abolishing the anathemas pronounced on the old rites and their adherents. The council declared the old rites “salvific” and “of equal honor” (ravnochestnymi) with the new, and annulled the anathemas of the 1656 and 1666–1667 councils, pronouncing them “as if they had never been” (yako ne byvshie) (1971 Local Council, Wikipedia; act text at drevo-info.ru).

The act’s practical effect was limited. [Disputed: the Moscow Patriarchate presents the 1971 act as a full annulment removing the canonical barrier to reconciliation; Old Believer commentators (e.g., en.rpsc.ru) note that it was a unilateral act, that most Old Believer communities did not return to communion, and that the historical wound it addressed remains largely unhealed in practice.]

Old Believers Today

Estimates of Old Believer numbers worldwide range from roughly one to two million, the imprecision reflecting the difficulty of counting active adherents versus those of Old Believer heritage (Old Believers, Wikipedia). The principal bodies are:

  • The Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church (ROORC), the largest, continuing the Belokrinitsa hierarchy, with its seat at Rogozhskoye in Moscow (priestly);
  • The Russian Old-Orthodox Church (Novozybkov hierarchy), priestly, organized in the twentieth century;
  • The Ancient Orthodox Pomorian Church (Pomortsy), the largest priestless body, strong in the Baltic states;
  • The Lipovan Old-Rite Church in Romania.

Old Believer communities survive across Russia (Perm, the Altai, Mari El, Komi, and elsewhere) and in a far-flung diaspora: the Lipovans of the Danube Delta in Romania; communities in Oregon (Woodburn) and Alaska (Nikolaevsk) in the United States; and migrant settlements in South America (Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina) and the Baltics (Old Believers, Wikipedia; Lipovans, Wikipedia). Often the most conservative custodians of pre-Petrine Russian culture — in dress, chant, and iconography — the Old Believers remain a living rebuke to the assumption that ritual is a matter of indifference.

See Also

References

  • Crummey, Robert O. The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694–1855. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970.
  • Crummey, Robert O. Old Believers in a Changing World. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011.
  • Meyendorff, Paul. Russia, Ritual, and Reform: The Liturgical Reforms of Nikon in the 17th Century. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991.
  • Avvakum Petrov. Archpriest Avvakum: The Life Written by Himself. Translated by Kenneth N. Brostrom. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1979.
  • White, James M. Unity in Faith? Edinoverie, Russian Orthodoxy, and Old Belief, 1800–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
  • “Nikon,” “Raskol,” and “Avvakum Petrovich.” Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nikon ; https://www.britannica.com/event/Raskol ; https://www.britannica.com/biography/Avvakum-Petrovich
  • “Great Moscow Synod,” “Old Believers,” “Bespopovtsy,” “Solovetsky Monastery uprising,” “Feodosia Morozova,” “Boyaryna Morozova (painting),” “Ambrose of Belaya Krinitsa,” “Lipovans,” “1971 Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church.” Wikipedia (used to locate underlying sources).
  • “Old Believers.” OrthodoxWiki. https://orthodoxwiki.org/Old_Believers
  • The Orthodox Church in America. The Orthodox Faith, vol. III: Church History (seventeenth century). https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/church-history/seventeenth-century/russia4
  • Act of the Local Council of 1971 on the abolition of the anathemas. Text at drevo-info.ru. https://drevo-info.ru/articles/26676.html
  • Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church (Belokrinitsa). English-language statements. https://en.rpsc.ru/