Abstract
Reviewed by: James M. White, Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources, Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg, Russia
For many Russian and non-Russian observers, the Old Believers were and remain a great riddle. Often, they have been represented as the very embodiment of Russianness, whether in a positive sense (as uncontaminated repositories of a purely national tradition) or in a negative one (as fanatical and ignorant opponents of modernity). For some, their seventeenth-century revolt against the Orthodox Church and the Tsar made them the quintessential dissidents against the autocracy and potential allies in the struggle for national liberation (such was the view briefly entertained by Aleksandr Herzen). Others, meanwhile, looked on them as the conservative’s conservatives: monarchist, sober, reliable, productive and patriarchal, they were thought to be stalwart supporters of the imperial regime by both Prime Minister Petr Stolypin and early Soviet anti-religious agitators, a fact used to justify their enfranchisement and persecution respectively. The frequent silence of Old Believer representatives (they were forbidden from printing for much of their history) has encouraged others to view them as a blank slate on which to impose their own dreams regarding Russia’s national destiny.
The imperial state’s quest to know the Old Believers and fit them within an ideological schema in the 1840s is one of the major areas of investigation in Thomas Marsden’s book. The principal goal of this work is to contextualize and explain the mass persecution of Old Belief during the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855) in terms of state- and nation-building. Seeking bureaucratic rationalization, the state in this period deployed administrators and investigators charged with discovering the true nature and scale of Old Belief: they made the astonishing discovery that a large proportion of the Russian people obstinately lived lives entirely unregulated and unpermitted by the state and its official church. However, these same bureaucrats were among some of the most progressive elements in Russian society at the time, containing in their midst individuals who later became famed nationalist thinkers and writers (the Slavophile Sergei Aksakov, for instance). These men were motivated by the cause of national unity and initially studied Old Belief in the hope that the centuries-old schism could be healed, bringing the well-spring of piety represented by the Old Believers back to the nation. The radicalism with which the Old Believers held their beliefs and their sheer numbers dashed the hopes of these progressive bureaucrats and transformed the schism from a symptom of national disunity into a cause: they were thus fair game for the repression sought by the state in the name of administrative homogeneity.
This repression was spurred by two events: first, the 1846 establishment of the Old Believer Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy in Austrian Bukovina with the connivance of the Habsburg government confirmed for many the fundamental disloyalty of the schismatics. Second, the discovery of the beguny, radical priestless Old Believers who traipsed around the countryside with little regard for vagrancy laws, confirmed the threat the Old Believers posed to order and sound administration. In the early 1850s, under the auspices of Minister of Internal Affairs Dmitrii Bibikov, the principle of religious toleration typically maintained by the state was completely abandoned in favour of a full campaign of persecution that in particular targeted the Old Believer merchant communities, the alleged leaders of the schism. However, the assault proved short lived, provoking as it did considerable dissent within the state leadership.
This brief synopsis of the book’s central argument already suggests the considerable importance and originality of Marsden’s approach. Typically, the campaign against Old Belief under Nicholas I has been represented very much as the personal project of the tsar himself, with perhaps the ober procurator of the Holy Synod and the Orthodox Church riding on his coat tails. Certainly, the role of the tsar was crucial but, as Marsden shows, one of the most severe bouts of religious persecution in the history of the Russian Empire needs a wider and more structural explanation. By placing Old Belief at the centre of a complex nexus of contradictory principles, aims and ideals (religious toleration, state-building, nation-building, economic modernization, developing discourses of Russian national identity, etc.), Marsden reveals that the assault on the schism was marshalled by forces far beyond the person of the tsar and for a great many diverse political and philosophical reasons. In short, this book is a tour-de-force revision of a vital historical epoch in the development of the modern Russian state. Its observations far outstrip its somewhat modest title, and therefore it is an absolute must for those studying Russian religion, politics and society.
The completion of this review was supported by the grant of the Russian Federation for attracting leading scholars to Russian educational establishments of higher professional education, scientific institutions of the state academies of science, and the state academic centres of the Russian Federation (Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources, Ural Federal University). Agreement no. 14.A12.31.0004 from 26.06.2013.