Old Believer Familialism #

By Kiril Mikhailov

When comparing Old Belief with other Orthodox confessions, the first thing that stands out is its familialism. All forms of traditional spirituality tend to gravitate toward traditional social structures and patriarchal ways of life—but for Old Belief, this was almost the central issue of its confession of faith [14: 79]. Everyone is familiar with the famous Old Believer merchant dynasties: the Morozovs, the Bugrovs, the Tretyakovs. But the issue runs deeper: why did the capital accumulated by the first Old Believer entrepreneurs remain for so long confined within the bounds of family and kin—even failing to extend to the level of the community?

Anyone familiar with the history of Orthodoxy (especially Orthodox missions) will confirm that the citadels of Orthodox Christianity have always been the monasteries. It was the monks who served as apostolic pioneers, carrying the Word of God even to India and China. It was in the monastic libraries that Orthodox theology was first formed, later to be refined at councils of the higher clergy, which from the fifth century on was composed almost entirely of “black” (i.e., monastic) clergy. The monk, having renounced all worldly things for the sake of the Lord and His Church, unburdened by the cares and obligations of daily life—such a man was the true warrior of Christ, according to the highest ideals of Christian asceticism. Thus, throughout its history, it was the monastics who drove Orthodoxy both “outward” and “inward.”

But when we look at the earliest figures of the Old Believer movement, we see a different state of affairs. Many of them—including some of the most prominent defenders of the Christian tradition—were married: Protopope Avvakum, Deacon Feodor Ivanov, Protopope Loggin of Murom, Protopope Ioann Neronov. In contrast, their opponents, the New Ritualists, were predominantly monastic. The famous Life of Avvakum vividly depicts his tribulations as he wandered in exile. Moreover, Avvakum’s children actively participated in his missionary work—for example, by distributing proclamations during a brief period when the authorities’ stance toward this great apostle of the Orthodox tradition grew milder [7: 269]. It was for his children that Avvakum petitioned the Tsar [13: 19]—though it remains unclear whether he meant his biological children or the many spiritual children whom he managed to nurture with words even from prison.

After the Great Moscow Council, which declared the Old Believers to be criminal offenders, a migration began of those who preserved the ancient piety into remote regions that would later become the peripheries of the Russian Empire: Siberia, the Far East, the Caucasus, and the Baltics. Yet this migration almost always had a familial character—setting the Old Believers apart both from the American Protestant pioneers, who shared their zeal and piety, and from the quasi-Orthodox Russian sectarianism that grew stronger by the 19th century (such as the Skoptsy, the Khlysts, the Stundists, etc.). Old Orthodoxy itself eventually split into two major currents: the priestly (popovtsy) and priestless (bespopovtsy) movements. The priestless, due to the lack of clergy able to perform the sacrament of marriage, were unable to marry [3: 150]. Accordingly, a “dynastic” priestless movement was impossible.

However, first, the issue of “clergy-less” marriage was so vital within the priestless movement [12] that it became the basis for many of the most significant internal divisions and debates within that stream of Old Belief. Second, even among those priestless factions that denied the very possibility of marriage, unique methods of “continuing the lineage” were developed—for example, by founding orphanages and boarding schools for abandoned children, a cause taken up by the notable Fedoseevsky figure Ilya Kovylin. As a result, after the deaths of priestless entrepreneurs (among the wealthiest of whom was Kovylin himself), their capital did not go to some abstract “community,” but to a very concrete cohabiting group, bonded by shared life, prayer, and labor—in effect, a family, albeit not a genetic one.

Moreover, it was precisely in the priestless tradition that unique “family monasteries” were invented—for instance, at Vyg. These coenobitic communities have almost no parallels in Christian history, comparable perhaps only to certain neo-religious communes of the 20th century.

As for the priestly Old Believers, nearly all the regions where they settled—such as Vetka, Irgiz, the Nekrasovites, or the Yaik Cossacks—were blood-related enclaves. Entire Old Believer regions (especially in the cases of Polish Vetka and Austrian Bukovina) were territories populated by what was essentially a single extended family.

For example, the Austrian Old Believers reached such a high level of economic self-organization and prosperity that they impressed even Emperor Joseph II, who granted his Lipovan subjects a number of exclusive privileges [18]. These very Belokrinitsa Old Believers would later play a key role in the history of Old Belief itself, by restoring the traditional three-rank church hierarchy after Metropolitan Ambrose joined the Old Believer community [6].

Because the family possesses numerous social mechanisms of self-organization, it was able to mobilize and preserve its members during difficult times. This gave the priestly Old Believers an advantage over both the priestless (with their complex and tangled approach to the family question) and the black clergy of the official Synodal Church, which opposed Old Orthodoxy. This resilience led to the preservation of Old Believer way of life and confession in those parts of Russia to which they had been exiled (e.g., the Caucasus or the Volga region), even after two government-led destructions of Vetka following its incorporation into the Russian Empire. Moreover, as researchers have noted, Vetka was inevitably resettled after both of these “destructions.”

The second bloody chapter in Old Believer history came under the Soviet regime. The Old Believers of Siberia, the Far East, and Kazakhstan, when confronted by an aggressively atheistic government, attempted to resist. But after that resistance was crushed, a true Old Believer odyssey began. They began migrating to China. In Manchuria, entire Russian enclaves were formed—often the first and only human settlements to cultivate those fertile lands. This chapter in their history has been thoroughly illuminated by the Primorye-based historian Professor Yulia Argudyaeva in her numerous publications [1][2].

After the rise of the communists in China in the 1950s and the renewed persecution of religion, the Old Believers began to flee from China—to Australia, South America, and later to certain U.S. states and Canada. This migration, too, was marked by its familial nature: as a rule, the migrants shared a single surname, common property, and a treasury built from joint labor or the sale of communal assets. This familialism allowed the Old Believers not only to preserve their faith in foreign lands, but even to this day to maintain the Russian language, customs, and worldview—making them a subject of great interest for anthropologists studying the survival of traditional communities in the modern world.

All major financial decisions were effectively made at family councils. These councils also determined when and where to migrate, whom to send out as scouts to reconnoiter new lands and assess political conditions. It was likewise at such family councils that urgent theological questions were resolved—for example, the acceptance of the Belokrinitsa hierarchy’s priesthood, or the election of new priests from within their own ranks.

Even urban Old Believers—whose communities, we should note, arose relatively late, after the initial persecutions had lessened—lived in separation from others, forming their own slobody (settlements). Later, with the rise of factories—some of which were located within these Old Believer slobody—the entire labor process was often carried out exclusively by members of a single family [9: 24][15].

To be fair, it was precisely urban Old Believers who, in the Soviet period, came under particular assault, and the source of this pressure was not so much the anti-religious policies of the Communist Party as it was the Soviet way of life itself. By gradually drawing women into the workforce, relocating workers into mass housing complexes, using kindergartens and compulsory schooling as tools of socialization, the Soviet authorities achieved unprecedented success—far beyond what any previous persecutors of Old Orthodoxy had managed. For thoughtful Old Believers, this was a clear sign that they must withdraw from the cities and return to a closed, rural life. But the most farsighted Old Believer leaders had foreseen this threat within communist doctrine itself, rejecting it not only by emigrating to China, but also through active participation in the White Guard movement, forming entire Cossack regiments complete with their own military chaplains—Old Believer priests. This resistance delayed the establishment of Soviet power in Siberia and the Far East even until the end of the 1920s.

Wherever Old Believer diasporas settled—whether in Brazil or Alaska—they were always more prosperous and socially stable than the native population. Migration—an ordeal that often delivers fatal blows to the self-organization of any community—was, in the Old Believer world, successfully navigated. As a result, today’s Old Believer communities—for example, in the United States—are among the most stable and well-rooted.

What is the secret behind Old Believer familialism? Undoubtedly, it lies in the traditional mindset inherent to the Old Believers [22]. At the time of the Schism, it was clear to Avvakum and his companions that the issue was not merely theological innovation, but a grand-scale social modernization—an annihilation of the Russia in which they had lived, which had shaped them, and in which they had hoped to continue their existence. The Old Believers foresaw the collapse of traditional clan-based social bonds and their replacement by new, politically oriented ones: a world in which a person’s being would be determined either by the urban environment (which provided him personally with work) or by the rural one (which was entirely dependent on the personality of the landowner, who wielded power over both the land and the destinies of its inhabitants). In this “new” Russia, the family ceased to be a means of survival—it gradually turned into an anachronism. And even where familialism retained some relevance in village life up to the 20th century, as a basis for communal farming, it was entirely dependent on land redistributions triggered by the death of the landowner, or by his debts and decline.

The traditional society—seen by Old Believers as the normative condition of human life—is based on a strict determinism and differentiation of social relationships. This includes caste-like structuring of society, a clear division between male and female activities, and distinct behavioral models appropriate to adults, youth, and the elderly. As a result, the family community was a universal method of survival, harmony with nature, and economic productivity. For the Russian person, the family was a cosmos—a space of self-actualization and a way to comprehend the universe [5: 275]. Living and laboring for the glory of God, the Old Believer found himself not under some abstract concept, but within a very real familial circle, wholly dependent on the actions of each individual member. By working for the sake of the family-community, the Old Believer served God—and the fruits of that labor bore witness both to personal piety and to the truth of Old Orthodoxy itself [8: 50].

The maximization of Russian feudalism—marked by the unprecedented tightening of serfdom under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich—on the brink of the transition to capitalism, demanded that the political leaders of the 17th century create a new kind of state: an empire that regarded every citizen as a direct subject of the sovereign, as his property, available for use in conquest-driven wars or in possession-based manufactories and trading posts. This entailed the inevitable decline of the old estate-representative state, in which numerous intermediate layers of subordination stood between the citizen (as an economic unit) and the sovereign: the family, the clan, the community, and so on. This was the economic precondition for the Church Schism—the need for a new state ideology (at the time, an ecclesiastical one) that would be consciously shaped by the will of the “upper class” and that would break radically with traditionalism, since it was precisely the communal and familial social levels that hindered the use of individuals as economic assets.

Later, some Old Believer writers came to understand this reality—such as the monk Evfimiy, Alexei Samoylovich, and the Denisov brothers. But at the moment of the Schism, the first preachers of ancient piety grasped, more intuitively than consciously, that traditional society was dissolving, and that new attempts were underway “from above” to construct a pyramidal society whose “quality” was defined not by daily piety but by loyalty to the tsar and his officials—including the now state-controlled Church.

An important trait of the Russian mentality, noted by V. O. Klyuchevsky, is sobornost’ (communal unity). According to the great historian, it was influenced by the vastness of Russian territory, the absence of crowdedness, and the lack of dependency on limited natural resources—as was common in Greece, the Balkans, and other originally Orthodox regions. Each community was largely autonomous, accustomed to resolving all matters—from economic to confessional—through self-organization. The Russian proverb “God is high above, and the tsar is far away” reflects this reality: official authorities did not play such a decisive role in arbitration, coordination, and regulation in the lives of ordinary people. What mattered more was the opinion of the elders—the most educated and experienced among them. Thus, communal (familial) leaders were the bearers and preservers of the core of social identity, which for the Russian people until the 17th century was unequivocally traditional Orthodox Christianity.

On the other hand, the vastness of Russian geography and its distance from the bustling political-religious life of Byzantium led to the preservation of certain aspects of Christian dogma, symbolism, and norms of Orthodox thought. For example, the use of the three-fingered sign of the cross (troeperstie), which from the 14th century quickly spread throughout nearly the entire Orthodox world, scarcely reached the Great Russians.

Thus, in Russia it was the community that preserved Orthodoxy. But unlike other Christian peoples, in Russia the community was almost exclusively familial, bound not only by shared activity, but also by genetic ties, heredity, and ancestral memory. Christian doctrine was layered upon this natural familial memory, giving rise to a conviction that came to permeate all future Old Believers—that ancient piety is not an ideology, but the norm of life. Therefore, to abandon it means falling into social anomie, the collapse of society as such, and ultimately the destruction of the individual—since his “value” had traditionally been determined at the family and communal level.

The Old Believers’ protest against the “disorderly new faith” was not ideological, but existential. In the words of the Old Believer philosopher Mikhail Shakhov:

“The destruction of ecclesial life and the abandonment of everyday traditions went hand in hand. Isolation from change, conservatism—these helped Old Believers preserve the legacy of traditional Russian culture and way of life from generation to generation.” [21: 157]

The trait that romantically minded seekers of spirituality sometimes reproach the Old Believers for—their preference for withdrawal over resistance—actually contributed to minimizing contact between adherents of ancient piety and the New Ritualists. It drove them to further entrench themselves in communal life, familialism, and kinship.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the rise of capitalism in Russia, this Old Believer characteristic led to a brief moment of triumph (70% of Russian capital was held by a few Old Believer dynasties), because enormous wealth had been amassed over the previous centuries within Old Believer families and had not been spent “outward.” A similar process, which enabled the transition of European Jewish communities from subjugated to dominant status, was vividly described by Walter Scott in Ivanhoe.

By the end of the 20th century, as the West began to move away from the idea of the regulatory role of the state, an era dawned in which communities that had managed to preserve traditional forms of cohesion—despite the corrupting influence of imperial-capitalist modernization—underwent rapid enrichment. As a result, in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Uruguay, and Australia, Old Believer communities demonstrated not only a high level of social and domestic well-being but also financial stability and adaptability to shifts in state economic policy [4]. Today, Old Believer communities in the United States, as bearers of strong “social capital,” are the focus of much interest from sociologists and anthropologists seeking to identify the causes of their resilience and prosperity—and to explore the possibility of applying their model to broader American society. In Russia, the primary research into the unique Old Believer economy is being carried out by V. V. Kerov [10], D. E. Raskov [17], and D. G. Podvoysky [16]. Significant attention is also devoted to this subject in the works of M. O. Shakhov [20], the leading specialist on the Old Believer worldview.

In summary: Old Believer identity from the very beginning was built on familialism, patriarchy, and communal life—and these traits are by no means retrogressive [11: 33]; rather, they belong to the natural order of things. Because of this, they ensured the survival of Old Orthodox communities, which have preserved not only their confession of faith into the present day, but also remarkable examples of Old Russian mentality, daily life, and culture. In the words of Fr. Valery Shabashov:

“Our Church fervently supports the efforts of the Russian government aimed at improving the quality of labor, at a vigorous struggle against drunkenness, drug addiction, and smoking. We fully endorse calls to strengthen labor discipline and the family as the fundamental cell of society and the state. In supporting the interests of the country, we stand against the rise in divorce, against fatherlessness, and against the decline in birth rates.” [19]

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