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Mass suicides in late seventeenth-century Russia have typically been seen as desperate responses to Patriarch Nikon's liturgical reforms. Convinced of the imminent end of times ordinary men and women took their own lives rather than to succumb to the world of Antichrist. Michels argues that mass suicides can only be understood by probing into the specific religious, social, and administrative environments in which they occurred. He offers a comparative microhistory of self-immolations on both sides of the Russo-Swedish border with very different populations, one Finnish-Lutheran, the other Russian-Orthodox. Both scenarios had several features in common: apocalyptical preachers demonizing official church and religion; flight from village communities and isolation in remote locations; the preponderance of women and children; almost complete illiteracy; and a remarkable heterogeneity of motivations (ranging from enthusiastic embrace to passive obedience). The suicides occurred exclusively in peasant milieux traumatized by radical changes: the horror of the Swedish-Russian War (1656–1658); the fortification of the border (conscription, forced labor, and exorbitant taxes); church-led campaigns against paganism and traditional religious autonomies; and sudden integration into new administrative structures. Few of those who perished in the fires knew anything about Patriarch Nikon's liturgical reforms; as in the mass suicide of American cult members in Jonestown, Guyana (1978) many of the victims died involuntarily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the First World War, Russian Old Believer priests of the Belokrinitsa hierarchy served their coreligionists as military chaplains on the various fronts of the conflict. However, Old Belief, a series of schismatic groups which had broken away from the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century, had only been fully legitimized by the imperial state in 1905: prior to this, they had been subjected to legal disabilities and persecution. This was particularly true of the Belokrinitsa hierarchy, whose foundation in 1846 had required the support of a foreign power. In this article, I offer a brief narrative of the hierarchy’s long road to social and political legitimacy and place the establishment of a military chaplaincy in this context. The Russian Orthodox Church successfully managed to prevent the Old Believers achieving an official chaplaincy before 1914, questioning their loyalty and the nature of their religious beliefs. However, the hierarchy was able to use the crises caused by the First World War to persuade the government that their frontline priests deserved official inclusion in the structures that oversaw the religious needs of non-Orthodox soldiers. Finally, I consider the duties and experiences of these priests and whether they led to the development of professional consciousness. In sum, this article shows how a marginalized religious minority was able to use the context of war to gain a greater degree of inclusion within imperial Russian society and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines three different narratives about the origins of the Old Belief in Viatka that represent parallel, rather than mutually exclusive, viewpoints. It scrutinizes the historical accounts of a local Old Believer community, the official documents originating from the Viatka civil and ecclesiastical authorities, and, finally, contemporary scholarly works. Without privileging any of the three views, the article demonstrates crucial disparities in their understanding of what the Old Belief/"Schism" was. It becomes evident that the categories of "Schism" and Old Belief employed in scholarly studies should be reassessed in the light of the historical contexts they emerged and evolved in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the eighteenth century the Russian state carried out a policy of estate, civil-legal, economic, and confessional integration of Old Believers, as well as their return to Russia from abroad. This policy was first approved for the western and southwestern outskirts of the emerging New Russian region, and then the transfer of developed models to the central regions of the country occurred. Channels of social mobility were opened for Old Believers; fiscal marginalization was eliminated, as were a number of restrictions on civil rights; the official designation of “schismatics" and the mandatory labeling of external appearance were nullified; and extensive possibilities for participation in economic development were granted. On the whole, the program of estate, civil-legal and economic integration of Old Believers was implemented fairly successfully. A portion of the Old Believers from abroad returned to Russia. Deciding the question of the confessional integration of the Old Believers was more difficult. In this direction, various projects were developed by secular authorities at different levels, by the spiritual authority, and by individual groups of Old Believers. To achieve integration, the government partly rehabilitated the “Old Rite" in the 1760s. But recognition of an Old Believer confession autonomous from the ruling Church was unacceptable to the government, and particularly, to the spiritual authorities. The idea of the indissolubility of ethnic and confessional categories did not allow for another church, besides the official Orthodox one, for the Russian population. In New Russia's Elisavetgrad Province in the 1780s, the model of edinoverie integration of Old Believers was tested. By the end of the eighteenth century, an extremely limited model edinoverie was adopted on an empire-wide scale, which did not involve the confessional autonomy of the Old Believers. As a result of the low nationwide prevalence of edinoverie, the government was partially obliged to tolerate, at the administrative level, the existence of Old Believer worship, religious infrastructure, and Old Believer priests. But this status of Old Believer confessionalism was legally uncertain and unsustainable in practical terms. Accordingly, no solution to the problem of the confessional integration of Old Believers was found during the period under review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will analyze edinoverie reform in the early twentieth century. Edinoverie was a uniate movement that joined former Old Believer schismatics to the Orthodox Church. Its unique position between the Church and the schism led to a feeling of insecurity and alienation from the ecclesiastical administration among the edinovertsy: in 1905, this culminated in an attempt to reform the bases of edinoverie. A party of edinovertsy led by Father Simeon Shleev proposed an alternative vision of Orthodoxy wherein edinoverie's Old Believer legacy would be used to rejuvenate the Church and even Russia itself. However, like some of the other ecclesiastical reform movements with which Shleev's party was connected, edinoverie reform failed to come to fruition because of the hostile atmosphere of Church politics between 1905 and 1918 and the long-standing problems within edinoverie itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Kozheozero Monastery of the Epiphany was founded by the monk Nifont in the mid-16th century. Located in the impenetrable swamps west of the Onega River, it was one of the most remote religious houses in the Russian North and should have remained small in size and insignificant in cultural history. Yet it came to exemplify the complex and seemingly contradictory character of Muscovite religious life in the 17th century, when it attracted about a hundred seekers after solitude to a wilderness community where they found wooden churches surrounded by huts but also a rich sacristy, an extensive library, and an icon collection that reflected the fashions of the capital. Thanks to the support of the new Romanov dynasty, the long residence of the noted ascetic Nikodim, the brief abbacy of the future Patriarch Nikon, and the Moscow connections of the community's most well-known monk Bogolep L'vov, Kozheozero surprisingly grew into a significant literary and artistic center. The spread of Western cultural influence in court circles and major provincial centers has received considerable attention, but the achievements of Kozheozero demonstrate that the new trends also penetrated the most isolated areas of the Muscovite state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of the Vekhi ("Signposts") symposium in Moscow in 1909 was the literary event of the decade in Pre-Revolutionary Russia. Its critique of the radical collectivist traditions of the Russian intelligentsia in the name of "the primacy of spiritual life" was greeted with howls of condemnation from nearly every ideological camp. Contemporaries interpreted this appeal as turn away from the political struggle with autocracy toward mysticism and obscurantism. Historians have more charitably seen Vekhi as a way station in the ideological pilgrimage of its principal participants, Peter Struve, Nicholas Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov and Semion Frank, from Marxism through Liberalism toward more contemplative and ethereal realms of Idealist philosophy, Orthodox theology and imperialist nationalism. Both of these interpretative streams perpetuate the impression that Vekhi represented a drift from the practical to the spiritual, and that its message went, either deservedly or tragically, unheard and unheeded. It is argued here that Vekhi's philosophical discourse contained within it some very concrete social and economic prescriptions, and that its message in fact fell on at least some receptive ears. Vehki found an attentive audience among a small group of liberal industialists in Moscow, led by Pavel Riabushinskii. It served as a catalyst for the creation of an entrepreneurial group known as the Riabushinskii Circle, and opened the way for a remarkable collaboration between intellectuals and entrepreneurs that lasted until the Bolshevik Revolution, and culminated in Riabushinskii's "Utopian Capitalist" vision for Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]