THE THEME OF THE ISSUE: OLD BELIEF: THEMES, APPROACHES, METHODS
The author examines aspects of life in Russian society during the reign of Emperor Alexander III in the light of the state policy implemented towards the Old Believers. The article is carried out primarily using the example of the Syzran district of the Simbirsk governorate — due to its convenient location in terms of trade and navigation, this administrative unit provided Old Believers of different persuasions with ample opportunities for communication with each other and strengthening their position. The highest approval of May 3, 1883 of the Opinion of the State Council “On the Granting of Certain Civil Rights and the Performance of Spiritual Ceremonies to Schismans” was caused by the desire to better understand the “schism” and was intended to promote, first of all, the development of trade and industry. The new law also required a more responsible approach to the organization of the life of the Old Believers from both the state bodies of the Simbirsk governorate and the Old Believers themselves, which encountered considerable difficulties of various kinds, strengthening mutual distrust. Officials, secular and clerical, not only monitored the observance of the schismatic communities and their individual representatives of the provisions and restrictions established by law. They also identified, recorded and systematized facts and trends, generally characteristic of the Old Believers of the province and typical of the Syzran district (for example, the predominance of the Pomor Tolk and the rise of Syzran itself, as one of the Old Believer icon‑painting centers of the Volga region). Based on the above, the study was carried out on the information that has come down to us about the peculiarities of the interaction of the Old Believers with each other and with the Orthodox of the “dominant Church” in various spheres of public life under the conditions established by the Supremely approved Opinion of the State Council of May 3, 1883.
The article raises the question of a “new” stage in the Sovietization of the religious sphere in the USSR in the post‑war years. If before that there were repressive and punitive methods against believers of all confessions, then in the process of the Great Patriotic War the state began a specific “dialog” with church associations of all directions. This is revealed on the basis of regional archival materials of the Astrakhan region. In particular, trends in the interaction between the Old Believer communities and the local administration are investigated. These empirical data are given in the context of characterizing the processes of “sovietization” of these religious communities. The peculiarities of this stage of “adaptation” in the activities of various consciences of the zealots of “ancient piety” are shown. The registration of the Popovites of the Belokrinitskaya Church, as well as the Philippovites‑Popovites took place in the regional center. At the same time, the main mass of Old Believers of these directions, as well as the Bespovtsy‑Philippovtsy‑Fedoseevites, lived in several families in many districts of the Lower Volga region. Realizing that the documentary information of the Commissioner for Religious Affairs under the Council of Ministers was of an external, administrative nature, we will demonstrate both the formal manifestations of the above interactions and the specifics of confessional otherness in the circumstances of the atheistic socialist society of the region.
The article examines the form of the relationship between text and drawing in the Old Believer illustrated miscellany of the 18th century, which presents hagiographic and prologue articles describing the martirdom of early Christian saints. Consistently arranged drawings of various sizes to the stories of early Christian ascetics allow one to “read” the entire course of the plot, covering it in detail, episode by episode. The analysis of the visual language of the miscellany showed an important stage in the development of Russian miniatures, when the image becomes not just an addition to the text, but begins to be formed according to the rules of the text and tell its own story in the drawings. Drawn plot stories consisted of separate illustrative fragments and, together with the text, represented a single narrative space. Such a pictorial principle is characteristic of the development of not only book miniatures, but also other types of folk culture of the 18th‑19th centuries (the design of the hagiographic icon with separate images‑brands, the art of Russian drawn popular print pictures), for which similar types of combining text and drawing are also relevant. The presence of such a form of illustrated stories in the manuscript, in which individual illustrative fragments merge into a single narrative space, works to more fully reveal the plot. Using the example of an 18th century miscellany, we have the opportunity to trace the process of the emergence and development of this form, which became quite widespread in the Old Believers’ book culture in the second half of the 19th century.
The article deals with the works of Luka A. Grebnev, a famous figure of the Old Believers of the Vyatka region in the late 19th — early 20th centuries, one of the leaders of the Fedoseyev community. He is known as the organizer of Old Believer printing houses. Grebnev was an expert in singing notated with kriuki and prepared proposals for its reform in the 1920s. He organized a school in the Staraya Tushka village for the children of Old Believers, where they were taught literacy and kriuki singing. Grebnev also created icons from metal, copied and designed books. Icon painting took a significant place in his work. This article introduces into scientific circulation two handwritten books, copied and designed by L. A. Grebnev, which show the stages of his development as an icon painter. The first book is the “Icon‑painting original,” obtained during an аrchaeographical expedition to Vyatka by researchers of the Library of the Academy of Sciences. This book was copied by 12‑year‑old Luka and contains his first sketches of icon fragments. The second book, designed already by an adult artist, is the Canon miscellany with six miniatures of the icon‑painting type from the private collection of V. V. Smirnov. If the “Icon‑painting original” has a direct indication of the creator’s name, then determining the authorship of the Canon miscellany required evidence. It was established by comparative analysis of the book’s copyist script and several manuscripts from the collection of the Laboratory of Archaeographic Studies Ural Federal University, which belonged to Grebnev’s hand.
The article examines liturgical singing manuscripts, notated with “kriuki”, from the library of the Old Believer community of the chasovennye denomination from the north of the Chelyabinsk region (the owners of the collection asked not to indicate the exact location of the chapel). The features of the studied manuscripts are identified, their origin is investigated, the source study potential is assessed, and archaeographical descriptions are published. In addition, a brief overview of the book collection as a whole is given, and the manuscripts notated with “kriuki” are analyzed in the context of the current state of church singing art in the community. We conclude that the books are monuments of the developed church singing culture of the women’s Sungul hermitage of chasovennye, which functionated in the region in the 1890s — late 1920s. At the same time, they are currently not involved in the liturgical practice of the chapel, since knowledge of “kriuki” has not been preserved there. It is noted that all three manuscripts came to the library from the chorister, a former pupil of the Sungul hermitage, who died in 2005, without having taught her fellow believers to sing from “kriuki”. The surviving manuscripts were partly composed and rewrititen by her and reflect character of her literacy, and also testify to the presence of literate singers in the late 20th century not only in the community under study, but also in Chelyabinsk, with which contacts were maintained.
The article deals with non‑verbal ways of reproducing and transmitting the Old Believer culture of desert‑dwelling, going beyond the study of book restoration as a purely technical operation. The studied case is a Siberian skete of Old Believer Wanderers founded in the 1830s and still active today, with its library of handwritten and printed books in Church Slavonic Cyrillic. The skete’s approach to managing its book collection and the methods of book restoration employed by its inhabitants are used as a tool for initiating peasants into the monastic tradition and are examined in the context of the social history of a taiga settlement. The visible traces of paper, binding, and cover repairs, as well as corrections and additions to prayer and didactic texts, are assessed in terms of their alignment with the symbolism of the Christian book and the skete dwellers’ self‑perception as guardians of the “territory of salvation” of ancient books and of the true faith. Methodologically, the study is based on the mediative approach to religion (B. Meyer) and the practices of analyzing the material and visual aspects of religious books (M. P. Brown, T. Lentes).
The article is based on the materials of the expeditions of 2020–2024 in the settlements of the Old Believers сhasovennye on the Yenisei in the Turukhansky and Yeniseisky districts of the Krasnoyarsk Territory. The analysis of hand‑drawn paintings “World Wide Web. The World Wide Web” (2010), “Part of the Bowl of Them” (2010), the Electronic Age manuscripts (2018), which were created in the monasteries of the Old Believers‑chasovennye on the tributaries of the Yenisei. The content of the poetic texts and hand‑drawn paintings echoes modern media sources. The chasovennye on the Yenisei doctrinally establish contacts with the world, but in the narratives they demonstrate their awareness of the achievements of modern civilization. The presented sources interpret the current problems of the development of the technical world: from the “digital concentration camp” to the world government. The images and the poetic text are didactic in nature and are designed to remind of the perniciousness of the modern information society and digital technologies, which act as guides to the “last times”. The stylistics of pictorial and poetic texts are based on the combination of ancient Russian traditions with modern narratives. The iconography uses the traditions of the ancient Russian book culture. The eschatological worldview offers a variant of sotereology when choosing a life strategy on a “narrow” path, dangers in the context of harmful technological achievements of a “wide smooth” path.
The article examines a series of documentaries about the Old Believers, the creators or consumers of which were the Old Believers.
The purpose of the analysis is to systematize genre specifics, identify a set of internal tasks, among which one of the leading topics is the commentary of prominent contemporaries, as well as typical film instruments borrowed from the classics of Russian documentary filmmaking and television reports.
The revealed series of documentaries suggests the intensification of Old Believer documentary filmmaking in recent years, the growing openness of the Old Believer community, and the gradual formation of its own film image of the Old Believers.
The article demonstrates the processes of integrating traditional confessional communities into the modern Russian religious market using large‑scale infrastructural transformations on the example of a small ethno‑confessional group of descendants of the Nekrasov Cossacks of Imereti Bay, who migrated here from Turkey in the early 20th century. The main sources used are field observations and interviews conducted by the author among parishioners of the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church (Belokrinitskoe Congregation), as well as residents of the Sirius Federal Territory and the town of Primorsko‑Akhtarsk in the Krasnodar Region in 2020, 2023–2024. The article attempts to show how the radical intervention of the construction of the 2014 Olympic Games facilities led to a reassembly of social ties in the community, focusing it on establishing contacts with government structures, finding its place in state socio‑political projects and financial support from the government, and intensifying microeconomic activities related to the leap in the tourism business. Special attention is paid to the role of the influence of the new infrastructure on the rethinking of proselytizing activity by the Old Believers and the use of newly opened opportunities to attract neophytes, including at the cost of some concessions and the weakening of ritual practices significant to the Old Believers. This process, according to the author, testifies to the actual acceptance by the local community and its leaders of the fact of rational choice of religion and the inclusion of the Old Believer Church in the religious market, partially regulated by the state.
This article examines two problems — the process of mediatization of OldBelievers and the attitude of modern Old Believers to the categories of ritual purity and desecration using the example of discussions in online groups of social networks. The study is based on the analysis of the Old Believers thematic virtual communities. The theoretical basis was the concept of “deep mediatization” proposed by Andreas Hepp.
The main goals of the study were to analyze how relevant the concepts of ritual purity and desecration remain for modern Old Believers as well as to trace the process of mutual influence and transformations between the community of followers of the Old Faith and the media environment.
Considering the content of several Old Believer groups on the VKontakte website and Telegram channels, the author analyzes through which topics and spheres the categories of ritual purity and desecration manifest themselves, based on the statements of Old Believers in the virtual space. The use of the concept of deep mediatization and terminology proposed in the monograph “Deep Mediatization” by A. Hepp makes it possible to comprehensively analyze the process of entering the public space of a once very closed religious group. The article also touches the issues of self‑representation of modern Old Believers on the Internet, the influence of trends of globalization, commercialization and individualization, and the direction of religious development in a post‑secular society.
The article is devoted to the framing of “new technologies” in public statements by the head of the Russian Orthodox Old‑Rite Church (ROOC), Metropolitan Cornelius. The sources used are messages in the Russian media and materials published on the official website of the ROOC. Data was collected both manually and using one of the most complete and constantly updated databases of media messages, “Medialogia”. Using the optics of SST as a basis, the authors analyze the data corpus based on the four‑part framing model proposed by R. Entman. The study shows that Metropolitan Cornelius frames a number of significant technologies as neutral (for example, communication and information technologies), shifting the emphasis to the motivation and consequences of their use, while leaving others invisible. Negative framing in most cases refers not to the technologies themselves, but to other phenomena or events (for example, globalization), into which technologies are inscribed as constituent elements. In contrast to the “new” ones, “advanced technologies” are framed by the religious leader as part of the history and culture of the Old Believers.
DISCUSSION
On April 30, 2022, at the initiative of A. S. Agadjanian and his graduate student E. D. Protasov, an international round table “Modern Old Believership: Social and Anthropological Research” was organized at the Center for the Study of Religions at Russian State University of Humanities. The topics for discussion were recent and promising scientific research, new approaches in the study of Old Believers as a religious and cultural phenomenon, as well as various concepts concerning issues of identity, religious and social practices, discourses and texts of Old Believers. A discussion of one of the papers turned into a debate about the terminology: how to name the opponents of the church reform of the 17th century, what is the most correct way to call modern Old Believers and, accordingly, the adherents of the Russian Orthodox Church. Very interesting thoughts were expressed and then put in writing by Dr. Alexei Muravyev. Below we cite A. Muravyev’s text with the remarks of other participants in the discussion about the terms — Peter Chistyakov, Natalia Dushakova, Danila Rygovsky and Ilya Melnikov.
IN MEMORIAM
The article commemorates the outstanding Russian scholar Mikhail Yurievich Smirnov (1955–2025). An attempt is made to establish his place in modern Russian religious studies. The author considers the “post‑Soviet transition” as a context of M. Yu. Smirnov’s formation as a scientist. He also gives a general sketch of Smirnov’s scientific position, his understanding of religious studies as a “vocation and profession” (M. Weber). The views of M. Yu. Smirnov are analysed: 1) his early interpretation of the Christian doctrine of war and peace in the context of scientific atheism; 2) his philosophy of religion, in particular, his proposed distinction between religion and mythology; 3) his sociology of religion, his introduced concept of “religious‑mythological complex” and its application to the analysis of the religious situation in modern Russia; 4) his concept of the history of Russian religious studies; 5) his “sociology of religious studies” — his proposed analysis of the situation in contemporary Russian religious studies, the concept of “religious studies environment”; 6) his journalism, especially his analysis of the concepts of “secularism” and “freedom of conscience”, 7) his understanding of the relationship between religious studies and theology. The article concludes that M. Yu. Smirnov was adhered to the ideals of the Enlightenment as the basis of his scientific activity and journalism.
BOOK REVIEWS
ISSN 2073-7211 (Online)