What Was the Old Believers’ Schism?
The Old Believers’ Schism — known in Russian as the Raskol — split the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century. It began when Patriarch Nikon revised the liturgical books and rituals of the Russian Church to match contemporary Greek Orthodox usage. Traditionalists who rejected these changes, the Old Believers, broke away from the official Church rather than abandon the old rites. The division this opened within Russian Orthodoxy has never fully closed, and it left a deep mark on the religious, cultural, and economic life of Russia.
Historians have read the Raskol at several levels simultaneously: as a theological dispute about ritual correctness; as a cultural conflict between Muscovite tradition and the Westernizing influence of Nikon’s Greek contacts; and as a social divide, since many Old Believers were artisans, merchants, and Cossacks who had long-standing grievances against the church hierarchy and the Muscovite court.
Background of the schism
By the seventeenth century, more than six hundred years had passed since the Christianization of Rus in 988, and in that time Russian Orthodoxy had drifted from its Greek parent. Though Russian liturgical and theological practice was Byzantine in origin, it had evolved on its own, accumulating usages that no longer matched those of the Greek Church.
A reform movement arose in response. Convinced that centuries of copying had introduced corruptions into the Russian service books, the reformers wanted the texts revised against contemporary Greek models. Many prominent churchmen backed the cause — among them the future patriarch Nikon, at that time metropolitan of Novgorod.
The reforms of Patriarch Nikon
Everything changed in 1652, when Nikon became patriarch of Moscow. Ambitious and domineering, he used his office to impose a comprehensive liturgical overhaul: the sign of the cross was to be made differently, the spelling of “Jesus” was altered, the number of prostrations was changed, processions were to move in a different direction, and a host of other customs were revised.
Although the new patriarch cast these measures as a restoration of authentic Greek practice, and many senior churchmen endorsed them, a fierce traditionalist backlash followed. To those who came to be known as Old Believers, centuries of devotion had made the Russian rites sacred in themselves; tampering with them was a dangerous novelty that threatened to defile the true faith.
No one embodied that resistance more than the archpriest Avvakum (1620-1682), the movement’s leader and its most celebrated martyr. A fiery and gifted defender of the old ways, Avvakum left behind an autobiography — the Life of the Archpriest Avvakum — that ranks among the masterpieces of Russian literature.
The persecution of the Old Believers
Having endorsed Nikon’s reforms, the state treated those who refused them as dangerous heretics. Old Believers faced exile, prison, torture, and death, with the harshest repression falling in the 1660s and 1670s; persecution persisted, in one form or another, until the end of the imperial era.
Resistance found its most famous expression in the Solovetsky uprising of 1668-1676, when the monks of the Solovetsky Monastery, on its island in the White Sea, rejected the new service books and held out for years against the government’s attempts to impose them. The fortress fell in 1676 — a defecting monk betrayed it to the besiegers — and most of the surviving defenders were put to death.
In the decades after Solovetsky, despair drove some communities to an even more desperate form of protest: mass self-immolation. Convinced that the Antichrist’s reign had begun and that the end of the world was at hand, Old Believers across the Russian north — at Paleostrovsky Monastery, in the Pudozh region, and elsewhere — chose collective death by fire over submission to the reformed rites.
The development of the Old Believer community
Persecution scattered the Old Believers but did not destroy them; their communities endured and in places thrived. Fleeing to Russia’s remotest corners — the forests of the north, the steppes of the south, Siberia — they founded settlements where the pre-Nikonian traditions lived on, and over time they built an organized religious life of their own, with bishops and priests to sustain it.
Two main branches eventually emerged. The Popovtsy, or “priested” Old Believers, came to accept clergy who had been ordained within the established Church and built a relatively institutional religious life around them. The Bezpopovtsy, or “priestless,” denied that any valid priesthood could still exist; their communities were more decentralized and lay-led, with elders providing guidance and the sacraments celebrated without ordained clergy.
The legacy of the schism
The Raskol tore a lasting rift in Russian Orthodoxy — one that endures after more than three centuries — while the outcast communities created a remarkable heritage of devotional literature, icon painting, and communal life. Old Believer merchants and manufacturers, concentrated in Moscow and along the Volga, also became a significant force in the growth of Russian commerce and industry.
For the Russian state, the schism set a fateful precedent. By crushing the Old Believers with force, the government showed how far it would go to impose religious uniformity, and the pattern of state control over religious life that this established colored church-state relations for the rest of the imperial period. Paradoxically, the persecution also nurtured a counter-tradition: the Old Believers kept alive a habit of dissent that fed into Russian religious and political thought in the empire’s final decades.
The schism’s effects are still felt. Old Believer churches, monasteries, and institutions remain part of Russia’s religious landscape, and the official Church has never fully settled the question of its relationship to them. How to judge the Raskol and its legacy remains a live debate in Russian religious and intellectual life.