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Penance and the Priestless Old Believers in Modern Russia, 1771–c.1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Irina Paert
Irina Paert*
Affiliation:
University of Wales, Bangor
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Extract

The epidemic of bubonic plague that spread in Russia between 1770 and 1772, claiming about 100,000 lives, was perceived as a divine punishment by many ordinary Russians. In 1771, Moscow witnessed popular riots, which were partly caused by the unwillingness of ecclesiastical authorities to allow Muscovites to venerate the icon of the Mother of God placed above the St Barbara Gates in the Kremlin and which was believed to have miraculous powers against epidemic. In order to stop the spread of the infection, the Moscow authorities established sanitary cordons around the city. In such an atmosphere of social crisis the Old Believers, a conservative current of Russian religious dissent, articulated popular fears and proposed a solution to these. The Old Believer merchants had received permission from the government to set up quarantine hospitals and cemeteries on the borders of the city. This led to the emergence of two Old Believer centres in Moscow in the suburb of Lefortovo: Rogozhskoe, that belonged to the priestly Old Believers, and Preobrazhenskoe, belonging to a branch of the priestless Old Believers, the Theodosians (fedoseevtsy).

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 40: Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation , 2004 , pp. 278 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 Alexander, John T., Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster (Oxford, 2003)Google Scholar.

2 Freeze, G., ‘Institutionalizing Piety: the Church and Popular Religion, 1750–1850’, in Burbank, Jane and Ransel, David L., eds, Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington, IN, 1998), 228 Google Scholar.

3 We can judge the scale of conversions from the growing number of Old Believers in Moscow: if in the 1760s there were only several dozen, in the 1790s there were about 1,000 living in Preobrazhenskoe and several thousands of men and women associating themselves with Old Belief in the Lefortovo district of Moscow.

4 On the early history of religious dissent see Pascal, P., Awakum et les débuts du raskol. La crise religieuse au XVUe siècle en Russie (Paris, 1938)Google Scholar; Crummey, R. O., The Old Believers and the World of the Antichrist: the Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694–1855 (Madison, WI, 1970)Google Scholar. For a revisionist interpretation of the Schism as having little to do with the Nikonian reform see Michels, Georg Bernhard, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, 1999)Google Scholar.

5 Sapozhnikov, D. I., Samoszhiganie v russkom raskole (Moscow, 1891)Google Scholar.

6 Old Believers drew examples from die ancient Church and the monastic practice of non-ordained men and women to minister Baptism and Penance. See A. and S. Denisov, Pomorskie otvety (Moscow, 1909). For the interpretation of the priestless Old Believers’ history and beliefs see again Crummey, Old Believers and the World of Antichrist.

7 Almazov, A. I., ‘Tainaia ispoved’ v Pravoslavnoi Vostochnoi Tserkvi’, Zapiski Imperatorskogo Novorossiiskogo universiteta 65 (1895), 25 Google Scholar.

8 Kliuchevskii, V. O., ‘Dva vospitaniia’, in idem, Sochineniia, 9 vols (Moscow, 1990), 9: 12–16 Google Scholar.

9 Smirnov, S., Drevtierusskii dukhovnik: Izsledovanie po istorii tserkmmago byta [The Old Russian Confessor: A Study in the History of Church Life] (Moscow, 1913; repr. Farnborough, 1970), 215 Google Scholar.

10 A large number of Old Believer penitential manuals (epitimiiniki) can be found in the manuscript departments of the state libraries in Russia, such as Russian State Library, the Library of the Academy of Science, the Urals University Library [hereafter UrGU].

11 The ritual of ‘confession to the earth’ is mentioned in Church records against the Strigol’niki heresy, £.1350–14505. Smirnov commented on the origin of this ritual (which unfortunately he did not describe in detail) and characterized it as ‘dual-faith’, consisting of a syncretism of the pagan and Christian beliefs of the Russian folk. See Smirnov, , Dreimerusskii dukhounik, 255–83 Google Scholar.

12 Almazov, ‘Tainaia ispoved‘, 115.

13 Biblioteka akademii nauk [The Library of the Academy of Science: hereafter BAN], MS Chuvanova 6, fol. 340. N. Pokrovskii, ‘Spory o ispovedi i prichastii u staroverov-chasovennykh vostoka Sibiri v XVIII v’ in Kul’tura slavian i Rus’ (Moscow, 1998), 526.

14 Dnevnye dozornye zapisi O raskol’nikakh, 2 vols (Moscow, 1885), 1 (part 1–2): 171–2.

15 Almazov, Tainaia ispoved’, 47.

16 Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka [Russian State Library: hereafter RGB], MS Egorova 1330, fols 255–6.

17 Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka [Russian National Library: hereafter RNB], MS Titova 2293, fols 150–66. After 1847 a police officer lived permanently on the territory of the Preobrazhenskoe community. The police reports, based on personal observations and rumours, were sent to the Governor-General of Moscow with the aim to provide evidence of Old Believer criminal activities and moral misconduct. This evidence was eventually used for the suppression of Preobrazhenskoe in 1853.

18 Ibid., fols 150v-171v.

19 Mel’nikov, P. (Andrei Pecherskii), Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 7 vols (Moscow, 1909), 7: 232–3 Google Scholar.

20 Livanov, , Raskol’niki i ostrozhniki, 3 vols (St Petersburg, 1872), 2: 37 Google Scholar.

21 Ibid., 182–3.

22 Natsional’nyi arkhiv Respubliki Karelii [National Archive of the Republic of Karelia: hereafter NARK], fol. 9, op. 1, d. 304/2950,1. 1.

23 RGB, MS Egorova 1044, fol. 325.

24 RGB, MS Egorova 1052, fol. 162.

25 Ibid.

26 RGB, MS Egorova 1869, fol. 223.

27 RGB, MS Egorova 2066, fol. 24V.

28 Ural’skii Gosuniversitet [The Urals State University: hereafter UrGU], MS XVII 119p, fol. 32V.

29 Old Believers also dwelt on the idea that vows of the bride and the bridegroom constitute the essence of marriage as a sacrament, basing this thought on the seventeeth-century canon law collection (Kormchaia Kniga) by Petr Mohila, that was written under the influence of Tridentine canon law. See Pavlov, A. S., 50ia glava Kormchei knigi (Moscow, 1887), 51–6 Google Scholar.

30 For more on the debate on marriage, see Paert, I. K., ’Gender and Salvation; Representations of Difference in Old Believer Writings from the Late Seventeenth Century to the 1820s’, in Edmondson, Linda, ed., Gender in Russian History and Culture (Basingstoke, 2001), 29–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also my book. Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia (Manchester, 2003).

31 UrGU, MS XVII 119p, fols 16v-17.

32 UrGU, MS XVII 119 p. fol. 5.

33 RGB, MS Egorova 1044,1. 120,1. Nil’skii, Semeinaia zhisn’ v russkom rakole (St Petersburg, 1869), 292.

34 Dnevnye dozornye zapisi, 2 (part 3–7): 47–8.

35 UrGU, MS XVII 119p, l. 17.

36 Dnevnye âozomye zapisi, 1: 171. For a similar situation in a different context, see in this volume the essay by Graeme Murdock, ‘Did Early Modern Calvinists Have a Guilt Complex?’, 138–58, 156.

37 RGB, MS Egorova 13 54, fols 148–49.

38 Popov, N., Materialy dlia istorii bespopovshchinskogo soglasiia (Moscow, 1870), 87 Google Scholar.

39 Smirnov mentions evidence of foreign travellers to Muscovy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See Smirnov, , Drevnerusskti dukhounik, 169 Google Scholar.

40 On the medieval Russian instances of ‘distribution’ of penance see Smirnov, Drevnerusskii dukhovnik, 188–9.

41 Evidence from oral history interviews, taken in 1998–9 in the Russian Urals.

42 See, for example, Tsvetnik (Moscow. Preobrazhenskoe, c.1909).

43 See, for example, Fedotov, G., Stikhi dukhovnye (Moscow, 1991), 105–17 Google Scholar.

44 This is an oral version of the repentant thief from the Byzantine ‘beneficial tales’, known in Russia among Old Believers from medieval collections such as the Prolog. On the original story in Greek, see John Wortley, ‘Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell in Byzantine “Beneficial Tales’”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001), 53–69, 63. Many thanks to Barbara Crostini for drawing my attention to this source.

45 Freeze, G., ‘The Wages of Sin: the Decline of Public Penance in Imperial Russia”, in Batalden, S. K., ed., Seeking God: the Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia (Dekalb, EL, 1993), 53–82 Google Scholar.

46 Almazov, Tainaia ispoved’ v Pravoslavnoi Vostochnoi Tserkvi’, 24–5.