Unity in Faith?: Edinoverie, Russian Orthodoxy, and Old Belief, 1800–1918

By J. M. White

The little known history of an attempt to end a religious schism in imperial Russia, and the questions it raised about church and state.

Established in 1800, edinoverie (translated as “unity in faith”) was intended to draw back those who had broken with the Russian Orthodox Church over ritual reforms in the seventeenth century. Called Old Believers, they had been persecuted as heretics. In time, the Russian state began tolerating Old Believers in order to lure them out of hiding and make use of their financial resources as a means of controlling and developing Russia’s vast and heterogeneous empire.

However, the Russian Empire was also an Orthodox state, and conversion from Orthodoxy constituted a criminal act. So, which was better for ensuring the stability of the Russian Empire: managing heterogeneity through religious toleration, or enforcing homogeneity through missionary campaigns? Edinoverie remained contested and controversial throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as it was distrusted by both the Orthodox Church and the Old Believers themselves. The state reinforced this ambivalence, using edinoverie as a means by which to monitor Old Believer communities and employing it as a carrot to the stick of prison, exile, and the deprivation of rights.

In Unity in Faith?, James White’s study of edinoverie offers an unparalleled perspective of the complex triangular relationship between the state, the Orthodox Church, and religious minorities in imperial Russia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780253052520

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1.Ritual and the Origins of Edinoverie

2.Edinoverie Transformed, 1801–1855

3.A Step to Orthodoxy No More, 1865–1886

4.Crisis, Reform, and Revolution, 1905–1918

5.Lived Edinoverie, 1825–1917

Conclusion: Decline, Disappearance, Reinvention

Appendix A: The Rules of Metropolitan Platon, September 27, 1800

Appendix B: Replacements for the Rules of Platon, 1917–1918

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FROM THE SUNNY TERRACES OF Florence to the icy streets of Ekaterinburg, from the hustle and bustle of Moscow to the sleepy university town of Tartu, researching and writing this book has taken me on a winding journey across Europe. Along the way, I have had the good fortune to encounter immensely helpful fellow travelers: I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to thank some of them by name.

First, I must thank Professor Steve Smith, my supervisor for four years at the European University Institute, for his practical and professional advice. I also thank the members of my PhD examination board for their suggestions and criticisms: Simon Dixon, Boris Kolonitskii, and Irina Paert. I am further obliged to Irina for her support at the University of Tartu, where I have been able to gather some materials on edinoverie and Old Belief in the Baltic. It also behooves me to offer gratitude to the anonymous peer reviewers for their in-depth evaluation of this book and the staff at Indiana University Press for their assistance.

Second, I must thank the many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances I have made at Ural Federal University: without them, I would never have been able to make Ekaterinburg my home over the past few years. I have to single out Aleksandr Palkin for helping me come to the Urals in the first place, for the numerous conversations we have had on the subject of edinoverie, and for the many, many occasions he has bailed out this rather hapless Englishman as he navigates life in Russia. Sergei Sokolov and Andrei Keller also deserve mention for their advice, support, and assistance.

Third, a great many of my friends from all over the world have either read through various versions of this book or provided invaluable moral support: I am especially obliged to Octavie Bellavance, Robrecht Declercq, James Hassell, Graham Hickman, Matthew Powles, Trond Ove Tøllefsen, and Andrea Warnecke.

Fourth, this book would not have been possible without the assistance and professionalism of archivists, librarians, and university administrators in Italy, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In Moscow, Father Evgenii Sarancha rendered invaluable assistance in the gathering of valuable materials.

Last, but by no means least, I thank my father, Stephen, my mother, Nadine, and my grandmother, Barbara, for all the time, effort, and money they poured into my education and upbringing. This book is for you.

This book was written with the financial support of the Russian Science Fund (RNF), project no. 18-18-00216.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS EDINOVERIE?

On January 12, 2013, a peculiar liturgy was held in the Uspenskii cathedral in the heart of the Moscow Kremlin. The five hundred worshippers who attended to have Metropolitan Iuvenalii (Poiakov) administer the sacraments crossed themselves with two fingers rather than the customary three. The hallelujahs were sung twice rather than thrice. Monophonic chants were performed rather than the usual polyphonic singing with its distinctive baroque elements.¹ This was a liturgy performed in the ancient style of the Russian Orthodox Church, and it was the first such divine service seen in the Uspenskii cathedral in over 350 years. In the mid-seventeenth century, the old rituals had been expelled from the churches of Russian Orthodoxy, along with their adherents, the Old Believers. It took until the twentieth century for the Church to go back on its liturgical prohibition, after much blood was spilled and pain caused in its enforcement. The long road the old rites have taken back to acceptability has its beginning in edinoverie.

The question of what edinoverie is lies at the heart of this book. There is no easy answer, since many clergymen, Old Believers, government officials, and secular observers provided definitions frequently at variance with each other. Given how alien the term is to the English-speaking world, I offer a provisional definition that can guide the reader through the following discussion. Edinoverie translates approximately as the united faith or unity in faith. It describes a settlement formulated in 1800 whereby Old Believers were allowed to keep their distinctive rituals and elements of parish management on conversion to Russian Orthodoxy so long as they conceded the Church’s legitimacy and authority. The settlement was defined by sixteen conditions written principally by Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) of Moscow. Those living according to the rules of Platon were called edinovertsy. By the end of the imperial era in 1917, the edinovertsy probably numbered no more than 350,000 and were scattered in roughly three hundred parishes across the empire.²

The Old Believers were a diverse and diffuse group who rejected liturgical reforms in the 1650s and thus had left the flock of the Russian Orthodox Church. These reforms, introduced by Patriarch Nikon (Minin) and confirmed by the Great Moscow Council of 1666–1667, made several ritual changes: the sign of the cross was to be performed with three fingers rather than two, the name of Jesus was to be spelled slightly differently, people were to proceed around their churches clockwise rather than counterclockwise, and so on. The council anathematized those who refused to accept the changes, and since heresy was a capital crime in early modern Muscovy, the Old Believers found themselves subjected to intensive and violent persecution.³ Since no bishops joined Old Belief, they also lost access to a priesthood that was unquestionably part of the apostolic succession, forcing them to embark on a series of less-than-satisfactory replacements. By offering the Old Believers priests who would serve by the old rites so long as they declared their loyalty to the emperor and the Church, edinoverie offered a solution to this continual problem. It also had the virtue of bringing Old Believers under the direct supervision of the Church and thus the state. As such, edinoverie can be understood as an attempt to instrumentalize Old Believers without legitimizing Old Belief itself, something the Russian Orthodox Church and, to a lesser extent, the confessional imperial state could not countenance.

Throughout edinoverie’s existence, it was contested from nearly every conceivable direction. The servitors of the Church, viewing the old ritual with contempt and suspicious of the converts’ motives, maintained a distance between themselves and the edinovertsy. The edinovertsy themselves were routinely dissatisfied with the provisions given to them by Platon and campaigned either for extensive alterations or complete reformulation. Much of the liberal and radical intelligentsia condemned it as a false half measure given in lieu of full toleration: as one character in A. F. Pisemskii’s 1869 novel People of the Forties comments, Throughout Russia, this edinoverie is only fog and lies for the government’s sake.⁴ And the Old Believers relentlessly castigated their former coreligionists as traitors and government stooges. All of these reasons offer an initial explanation as to why edinoverie failed not only to end the schism but also to provide a convincing demonstration of unity in faith.

THE BALANCING ACT

The story of edinoverie is fundamentally one of how four different groups (the edinovertsy, the Church, the state, and the Old Believers), each with different and often conflicting interests, interacted with one another over the course of several centuries in the context of an expanding and modernizing empire. Of central importance is the relationship between church, state, and schism, where religious toleration on the one hand and confession building on the other played central roles. The Russian state was a confessional state: it was officially Orthodox and frequently lent its support to the Church. It was a criminal offense to convert away from Orthodoxy or to encourage others to do so. The supreme power of the autocracy was held to be divinely ordained, a fact clergymen propounded from their pulpits. In other words, the Church offered ideological support to the state, while the government protected the confessional interests of the Church.

However, this mutually beneficial relationship was far more complex and contested than it appears at first glance. First, there was the question of the proper relationship between church and state. Since the reforms of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century, when the Russian Orthodox patriarch had been replaced with a collegial Holy Synod intrinsically connected to the state system, the Church had lost a substantial degree of its institutional autonomy.⁵ Repeated infringements of the ecclesiastical domain laid the foundations for conflict between clergymen and the imperial government. As these infringements became more invasive from the first half of the nineteenth century onward, some in the Church began to question whether imperial sponsorship was worth the concomitant loss of autonomy. The subordination of the clergy to state goals reduced their social prestige and moral authority among the flock, contributing to defections to Old Belief, various sectarian groups, or, later, irreligious philosophies and social movements. However, while the Church certainly felt the weight of state interference ever more keenly as the sun set on the Russian Empire, it remained reliant on government support against other faiths. The Church was, therefore, in the paradoxical position of both resenting and demanding a close bond with the state.

Second, the Russian Empire was not a religiously homogeneous state. An enormous range of Christians and non-Christians were subjects of the tsar. Even Orthodoxy itself was not unified, divided as it was between several national traditions (Russian, Ukrainian, and Georgian, to name but three).⁶ How was this heterogeneous mix to be governed? The question becomes especially vexing when we consider the vast territory in question and the deficit of sufficiently educated administrative staff. The answer, as Paul Werth has argued, lay in the creation of the multiconfessional establishment, a loose and ever-shifting series of arrangements with religious elites whereby toleration and institutionalization were offered in exchange for securing the loyalty and state obligations (tax, conscripts) of the particular people in question.⁷ This system of management was flexible, allowing for the state to alter the degree of tolerance offered or to switch its support to different groups depending on the demands of a particular context: In short, toleration was good for empire.⁸ However, there was an inherent contradiction between the tolerance of the multiconfessional establishment and the state’s commitment to the Russian Orthodox Church. Shouldn’t an officially Orthodox government ensure that all of its subjects subscribe to the one true faith? Might not religious homogeneity be a surer path to stability than the tolerance of heterogeneity? The state was trapped in a constant dialectical swing between the multiconfessional establishment and a missionary impulse.⁹

Old Belief, which explicitly rejected the authority of the Church and its claim to canonical legitimacy, further complicated this already difficult matter. Unlike the empire’s Buddhists or Muslims, for instance, the Old Believers were ethnically and linguistically Russian: when they proselytized, they tended to do so among the Russian population in both core territories and ethnically fragmented borderlands. They were also numerous: 10–20 percent of the Russian population were Old Believers in 1900.¹⁰ Some of them even proposed that the tsar and the government were either the Antichrist or his servants. It was, therefore, difficult to slot the Old Believers into the multiconfessional establishment. However, Old Belief commanded significant human and financial resources that the thinly stretched state could use to its benefit. In addition, the persecution waged for much of the first century of the schism’s existence had not been particularly efficacious: its principal results had been to drive the Old Believers into exile or underground, where the hand of the bureaucracy could no longer reach them. Would not a measure of tolerance allow the state to make better use of these errant subjects and, perhaps, eventually enlighten them with regard to their grievous errors? Between 1667 and 1905, the Russian state could never conclusively make up its mind one way or the other.

However, we must not imagine that the policy of the Russian state toward Old Belief was decided unilaterally. The Church constituted a significant pressure group, capable of influencing change or, on occasion, resisting it. Old Belief itself was in constant flux, forever splitting into new concords whose beliefs and institutional arrangements could be more or less congenial for the state. For example, as Thomas Marsden has shown, the formation of the Belaia Krinitsa hierarchy, an independent Old Believer episcopate, in the Austrian Empire in 1846 raised the specter that Old Belief might become a tool for hostile foreign powers: in consequence, Nicholas I raised the tempo of his persecution of Old Belief.¹¹

Old Believers also possessed a considerable amount of economic clout in the Russian Empire, which they often sought to translate into social acceptability and civic power. As such, they repeatedly tried to gain recognition from the imperial state. Edinoverie was a way that they could gain that recognition, but it came at a dire cost: they had to recognize the legitimacy of the detested Nikonian Orthodox Church and the authority of its episcopate. For this reason, edinoverie remained an unpopular route for most Old Believers.

Edinoverie, the fourth party with whom we are concerned, was a child of the state’s continually wavering and contested policy. It was born in the late eighteenth century, a period when several tsars, starting with Peter III and ending with Alexander I, decided on a more enlightened course toward the Old Believers: if the question of ritual difference was set aside, then the state could bring the Old Believers back under the aegis of the Church and, therefore, back under administrative surveillance. Edinoverie’s character was utterly transformed when Nicholas I launched a harsh policy of repression against the Old Believers, becoming an alternative to prison, exile, or property loss. The relatively favorable stance that Alexander II’s government took in relation to religious freedoms briefly turned edinoverie into a fashionable topic of debate in both ecclesiastical and lay circles: what did it mean to allow more than one ritual compact into the Church? What reforms of edinoverie were required to make it effective in the more liberal environment of the 1860s and 1870s? Then, finally, the conclusive emancipation of Old Belief and its inclusion into the multiconfessional establishment following the Edict of Toleration in 1905 engendered a crisis in edinoverie’s raison d’être: Was it nothing more than an implement of state-backed coercion or did it have some other value for the Church? Could it be a bridge where Old Believers and Orthodox could meet to discuss their views and, perhaps, edge toward mutual reconciliation?

Studying edinoverie provides a unique window into the complicated nexus of issues surrounding the Old Believer schism, the state, and the Church. It demonstrates how a missionary idea, rising in the atmosphere of enlightened absolutism in the late eighteenth century, was subsequently transformed as the policies of the imperial center changed in reaction to the emergence of new ideas and shifts in the character of Old Belief. But this is not all, for if the purpose of edinoverie was in a state of constant flux, did this not also signify that the meaning of edinoverie for both the edinovertsy and the Church was also perpetually changing?

RITUAL AND CONFESSION: QUESTIONS OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY

The vector of study suggested above is state-centered, indicating that the evolution of edinoverie owed a great deal to government policies decided in St. Petersburg. This is certainly the case, but it is very far from the whole story. The relationship between edinoverie and the Church is just as important and, indeed, consumes much of the subsequent narrative. The principal question here is why did the Church, from the central authorities to the clergy and missionaries on the ground, continually subject edinoverie to a significant level of hostility and suspicion? How and why did this attitude evolve? What did it feel like to be the object of this sustained contempt and how did it shape edinoverie’s institutions and notions of identity? These questions are distinct from, although connected to, the questions we raised above and, therefore, require a substantially different approach. Here, we must consider the meaning of religious ritual, especially in terms of its consequences for confessional identity.

The question of ritual and identity has not been well studied in the case of Russian Orthodoxy in the imperial era, although several scholars have considered rites in the context of community building or in relation to the enchanted world of the peasantry.¹² Thus, I take my primary direction from the body of literature surrounding the Protestant and Catholic reformations in early modern Europe. Historians have argued that, as the differences and competition sharpened between Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic confessions in various parts of Europe, certain rituals took on greater importance as signifiers of denominational belonging: furthermore, the need to propagate these rituals and ensure that they were performed and understood in correspondence with the guiding doctrines of each confession contributed to the development of more extensive church bureaucracies.¹³ Thus, rituals played an important role in processes of confession building, helping churches sharply delineate their flocks from competitors and extend their moral and bureaucratic surveillance: rituals became confessionalized.

Conversely, periods when religious coexistence was championed saw a decline in the relative importance of ritual and their classification as adiaphora, things indifferent. While there were several periods in the sixteenth century when the concept of adiaphora was applied to ritual issues in an attempt to quell confessional division,¹⁴ it assumed a crucial importance, at least in the spheres of high theology and state administration, after the Thirty Years’ War. Neither Catholicism nor Protestantism had been unambiguously victorious despite all the devastation unleashed, and so some monarchs began to seek a degree of confessional reconciliation for the sake of civil peace: adiaphora were a necessary theological component of this policy.¹⁵ This is not to say that rituals ceased to be sharp dividing lines between various confessional identities, especially among the majority of lay believers. Rather, it is to suggest that there was a shift in rarefied intellectual circles in terms of the relative value of rituals and their meaning. At least theoretically, rituals themselves were not grounds for religious division: in other words, the link between ritual and doctrine, between external action and internal belief, was severed.

It is not my intent to suggest that there is a one-to-one equivalency between so-called confessionalization in Western Europe and the way in which ritual’s importance was heightened in late Muscovite and early imperial Russia.¹⁶ What I would like to suggest is that there are certain parallels in the question of rituals and their institutionalization that can prove instructive when we consider the Russian Orthodox Church and the schism with the Old Believers. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, the Church began to strengthen its institutions: as Georg Michels and Alfons Brüning have shown, it frequently did so in order to combat Old Belief and spread the recently reformed rituals among the clergy and general population: "Major impulses in this reform period came from confrontation and adaption processes: from the struggle with the Old Believer’s [sic] separatism on the one hand, and from the incorporation of the metropolitanate of Kiev and Left Bank Ukraine, finally accomplished in 1686, on the other."¹⁷ This necessarily heightened the significance of ritual as a marker both of one’s belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church and of one’s adherence to the Church’s doctrinal truth and legitimacy. The rituals of the schism were thus portrayed in the blackest of colors: they were not simply wrong but signifiers of Arianism, the first and most despised schism in the history of the established Christian Church.¹⁸

However, with the acceptance of the pre-Nikonian rituals required for the creation of edinoverie, the Church could no longer stipulate that they were symbols of heresy. Nor could they argue that the reformed rites were the only possible signifiers of doctrinal rectitude and belonging to the Orthodox confession. The ritual border of the Orthodox confession thus entered into flux, and the ability of external action to represent internal belief was compromised. However, two important caveats must be made at this early point. First, we must note that the process was incomplete: much of the Church continued to regard the old ritual as imperfect or even quasi-heretical as late as 1917. Indeed, it was only in 1971 that the Church unquestionably acknowledged the full legitimacy of the old rituals. Second, it is necessary to consider that the initial acceptance of the old ritual was made rather unwillingly in the face of state pressure: as Catherine the Great and her immediate successors rolled out greater toleration to the Old Believers in the hope of instrumentalizing them, the Church was required to find a way of translating this policy into theological terms and helping the state achieve its goals while also maintaining its own interests and prerogatives intact.

These two factors, confessional anxiety about the old rituals and the need to react to state demands, shaped church policy toward edinoverie for much of the latter’s existence. From one perspective, the leaders of the Church were anxious about letting the old ritual and its adherents into the Orthodox confession for fear of creating an Old Believer fifth column. The rules of Metropolitan Platon, edinoverie’s foundational document, took a contradictory approach to this problem. The 1800 settlement sought to assimilate the edinovertsy into mainstream Orthodoxy by enlightening away their prejudiced attitude toward the Nikonian rituals, but it also isolated them from the rest of the Orthodox flock, quarantining their potentially infectious schismatic rites with a series of administratively distinct institutions and proscriptions. However, the goal of assimilation fundamentally contradicted why edinoverie would be attractive to the Old Believers (that they could practice the old rituals in a legal way) and gave polemicists sufficient ground to argue that edinoverie was nothing more than a trap to destroy the old rites: meanwhile, the isolation of edinoverie served to incubate the old rites through their institutionalization while also perpetuating a sense of religious difference between the edinovertsy and the Orthodox.

From another perspective, the state compelled the Church not only to allow the old ritual but also to create a firm display of unity in order to make edinoverie seem like a genuine and attractive option to potential Old Believer converts. However, government policies made this difficult for the Church to realize. The reign of Nicholas I saw edinoverie used as, in the words of one Russian historian, a mechanism of state coercion.¹⁹ Old Believers were either directly or indirectly forced into edinoverie in huge numbers. This changed the character of the movement. Before the 1830s, its impact had been limited; under Nicholas, edinoverie not only became much larger but also was more directly incorporated into a system of persecution, a fact that pushed it into crisis once this system was dismantled. No less problematic was the fact that Nicholas’s actions basically justified ecclesiastical suspicions of edinoverie: it was now certain that there were many among the edinovertsy whose loyalty to the Church was at best dubious. As such, there was hardly any will to remove the safeguards that Platon had imposed.

Therefore, it took until the 1880s before the Synod made steps to resolve this basic problem: they decided to move away from both isolation and assimilation and toward integration, the idea that the edinovertsy should be integrated as much as possible into the Orthodox confession while still being permitted to use their old rituals. However, at this point it was too late: the course of edinoverie’s development had been determined by the dynamic between assimilation and isolation inherent in the rules of Platon. By the time the Synod was ready to more or less wholeheartedly embrace edinoverie, some among the edinovertsy were beginning to agitate for greater levels of autonomy in order to protect their distinctive ritual order from the allegedly assimilative tendencies of the bishops and their subordinates. They seized upon the chaos following the 1905 revolution to launch a comprehensive reform scheme, one that had as its goal the creation of a much more independent and united edinoverie.

This brings us to the question of edinoverie identity: did such a thing ever exist? In chapter 5, I consider the social and institutional life of the edinovertsy, examining precisely how the dynamics inherent in the rules of Metropolitan Platon and some other state policies served to isolate edinoverie from the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church. The evidence considered suggests that nothing like a distinct edinoverie identity evolved before the end of the nineteenth century; even then, it was largely limited to a few small circles that formed around reformist edinoverie clergy and was generally contested. While the edinovertsy were on the receiving end of a great deal of hostility from the Old Believers, the massive conversion campaigns launched by Nicholas I ensured that much of the movement was populated by those whose defection to edinoverie was motivated more by government pressure than by conviction. Thus, many continued to act in ways that suggest that they maintained a greater affinity with their roots than with their new home in the Church.

However, if we move from the level of actual identities on the ground toward the notions of identity being developed in central church bodies, we discover that edinoverie had a greater impact. Now that ritual form had no clear connection with confessional identity, the Church had to find a new way to clearly distinguish itself from the Old Believers, a process that began in earnest in the 1870s. However, this also meant redefining what Old Belief was from an Orthodox perspective. Secular and church intellectuals thus began to turn toward the idea that it was the attitude toward rituals, and not the rituals themselves, that set apart the Orthodox from the Old Believers. The Orthodox, through the acceptance of edinoverie, were obviously ritually tolerant: they understood rituals as adiaphora (srednoe delo in Russian, a middling matter). The Old Believers, on the other hand, could no longer be condemned as Monophysite heretics on account of their rituals, as the Church had done in the first half of the eighteenth century: instead, they were castigated for being ritually intolerant. They, it was alleged, did not understand the true meaning of rites since they held them to be immutable and thus akin to dogmas. This allowed for a whole range of epithets to be applied to the Old Believers: they were fanatical, unenlightened, uneducated, or adherents of ritual worship (obriadoverie). On the level of theology and central policy, edinoverie caused a gradual shift in the definition of Orthodox identity and a concomitant reevaluation of Old Belief.

There was one further consequence of this shift: it helped contribute to the rehabilitation of Old Belief both in secular society and in certain circles of the Church as the nineteenth century drew to its close. Changing views on the pre-Nikonian rite combined with growing criticisms of the Petrine Synodal order and a significant degree of intelligentsia sympathy for the persecuted schismatics to produce a new vision of Old Belief whereby it began to be conceptualized as an organically and authentically Russian form of belief, uncorrupted by the Western and secular influences ushered in by Peter the Great and his descendants.²⁰ Some leading edinovertsy, most notably Father Simeon Shleev, championed such a vision from an ecclesiastical perspective: joined by important clergymen like Archbishop Antonii (Khrapovitskii) and Bishop Andrei (Ukhtomskii), this image of Old Belief was used to criticize and condemn the Synodal Church, especially as its prestige began to dramatically dwindle in the last decade of the imperial regime. This incorporation of Old Belief into neotraditionalist Russian nationalism is an enduring legacy: today, the same narrative is being used by Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right political theorist.²¹

RITUAL AND AUTHORITY

Stephen Batalden has remarked that the capacity of the post-Petrine church and state to identify and label ‘heresy,’ as in the case of the Old Believer communities, was an indication that . . . prescriptive, hierarchical authority continued to be embedded in modern Russian religious culture.²² The toleration and legitimization of the old rites not only posed problems for the question of identity but also for the Church’s authority. Ritual functioned as a tool of the Church’s authority for demarcating the boundaries between Orthodoxy and heterodoxy, defining who was and who was not a member of the true faith. This became clear in the reign of Emperor Paul, whose desire to realize edinoverie regardless of the reluctance of senior hierarchs threatened the ability of the Church to define who became a member of the Orthodox confession and on what terms. This recurred in the early 1820s, when Alexander I almost made edinoverie redundant by nearly including Old Belief in the multiconfessional establishment. In other words, the desire of the state to utilize edinoverie and the legitimization of the old rite as a means for bringing Old Belief under official oversight encroached on the Church’s authority to define the membership of the Orthodox confession. The shape that edinoverie took in 1800 owes much to the fact that the hierarch responsible for its creation resented the emperor forcing his hand.

Given the justifiable distrust most Russian Orthodox clergymen felt toward edinoverie and its members, the leading personages in the Church were often hypersensitive about maintaining and extending its authority over the edinovertsy. This authority was both ritual and bureaucratic. The one new rite that the edinovertsy had to accept was the 1721 litany of thanks, which made explicit mention of both the Holy Synod and the diocesan bishop: acceptance of this prayer was a litmus test of loyalty, while omitting or altering it brought intense scrutiny and punitive actions. There were constant clashes over this liturgical formality because it pitted pure adherence to the old rite as a marker of identity against the Synod’s need to incorporate edinoverie into a hierarchical model of authority.

This can be seen in other sources of tension. The rules of 1800 and subsequent legislation underlined that the edinovertsy had both the right to elect their own priests and the right to be directly under the aegis of the diocesan bishop: these measures were supposed to entice Old Believers by offering a limited degree of communal autonomy. However, these rules were often violated: elections were ignored and consistories were called in to manage the edinovertsy. In many cases, this was not, as early twentieth-century critics claimed, an example of prejudice against the edinovertsy: rather, bishops sought to ensure that their authority was safeguarded through the extension of bureaucratic mechanisms and the selection of priests more amenable to oversight. This made sense given that the clergy were simultaneously the most important and the most vulnerable mechanism for control and supervision that the prelates had over the edinovertsy. Edinoverie priests, like their Orthodox counterparts, had to ensure their flock took the legally obligatory sacraments while also abiding by the rules of Platon and reporting any backsliding into the schism. At the same time, however, the lack of salaries and clerical election made them vulnerable to parish