Old Belief and the Traditions of Popular Rule. -Isaev

By Yury Isaev Historian of Old Belief in the Moscow Region On January 31, 2020, a roundtable was held in Moscow titled “Constitutional Reform in the Russian Federation,” in which representatives of the Old Believer community participated—historians, legal scholars, and experts. The occasion for the roundtable was the constitutional reform underway in the Russian Federation. At the event, our contributor Yury Isaev presented a report titled “Old Belief and the Traditions of Popular Rule.”

Causes of Alienation

I would like to touch upon two events in Russian history that, in light of the recent constitutional initiatives of our government, are once again becoming relevant and drawing public attention. The first is the Zemsky Sobor of 1613, at which the first Grand Prince from the Romanov dynasty—Mikhail—was elected. This council was in fact an embodiment of the democratic, veche-based traditions that had long existed in Rus’. The Sobor was not a body representing a particular party of that time, nor was it the mouthpiece of only the privileged estates. It was an all-estate body called to determine the will of the entire people. But what I would like to highlight is what made this Sobor especially interesting for us Old Believers, who likewise preserved a traditional democracy in church governance and communal life. What is particularly interesting is that after the death of Mikhail, who had been elected at that Sobor, there was no clear consensus in Russian society regarding the next ruler. In hindsight, it may seem obvious to us that the son took the place of the father in the same dynasty. But for many people of that time, it seemed far more logical and just to convene another Sobor to choose a new ruler—and there was no certainty that this would be another Romanov. Alexei Mikhailovich, who wished to preserve and strengthen his power and pass it on to his heirs, had to expend considerable effort in order to impose his particular vision of the future upon society. These efforts, in turn, shaped Romanov Russia into what we now know it as:
    • It was necessary to weaken the old boyar elite and form and elevate a new elite that would owe its status solely to the ruler. It is from this time that the Great Russian nobles in the elite begin to be replaced by representatives from the western borderlands.
    • It was necessary to turn the Church into an obedient, monarch-controlled organ. Under the Romanovs, we see how the reformed Church is completely transformed into a government department, managed by secular officials.
    • It was necessary to secure a place in European markets, where Russia—or more precisely, the ruling dynasty—could at that time only appear as a supplier of cheap raw materials.
Cheap, because it had to compete with raw materials produced by slaves in the New World. Hence the renewed interest in the grain-producing lands of Ukraine. Hence the intensification of serfdom, which gradually turned Great Russian peasants into actual slaves. Hence, too, the desire to strike a blow against the proto-national ideology represented by Russian Old Orthodoxy—to erase its distinctiveness, its uniqueness, that which offers a basis for dignity and pride and transforms subjects not into slaves without history or a past, but into true citizens, participating in the governance of their own destiny. If Zenkovsky called Russian Old Belief the most vivid and powerful spiritual movement of the 17th century, then many Russian thinkers—beginning with Kelsiev, Herzen, and Shchapov—saw in Old Belief a popular protest against the Romanov reforms that had begun to re-archaize Russian social life. It was a protest against the formation of the Russian Empire as a peripheral empire—an empire in which its own elite renounced national identity and colonized its own people. It is no coincidence that in many monuments of Old Believer thought, the very power usurped by the Romanov elite was judged to be anti-Christian power—the power of the Antichrist. Thus, in losing its original democratic traditions—most vividly embodied in the form of the Zemsky Sobor—and in allowing the power-hungry of a particular dynasty to usurp authority and increasingly concentrate it in their own hands, the Great Russians lost not only freedom, dignity, history, and faith, but, according to Old Believer priestless writers, found themselves in an entirely different ontological reality—one deprived of grace. To translate this into the modern language of social philosophy: we are speaking of the phenomenon known as alienation—of the transformation of man from a subject of history into an object acted upon by history. And the most powerful protest against this alienation—this alienation of the people from power, from the ability to freely govern their own lives and fate, from the land they till and the products they produce, from the history, tradition, and culture that once formed personal dignity—was Old Belief.

A New Zemsky Sobor and the Ideas of the Popular Intelligentsia

The second event in our history is the Constituent Assembly of 1918—the first freely and nationally elected body tasked with forming the foundation of the young Russian Republic. A little over three centuries had passed between these two events. It is interesting to note that the majority of votes in the Constituent Assembly went to the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (over 60%). If we add to this the votes cast for other neo-populist parties—such as the Popular Socialists and others—we see a crushing victory for the neo-populist forces. Soviet historiography worked hard to minimize the historical significance and memory of populism (narodnichestvo) in our society. Yet this movement is associated with many remarkable developments. Among its ranks we find the great peasant poets: Yesenin, Klyuyev, Razumnik Ivanov; poets of the Silver Age: Blok, Andrei Bely; the writer Alexander Grin; Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky; Stepnyak-Kravchinsky; Vladimir Korolenko; the great economist Nikolai Kondratiev; the world-renowned sociologist Pitirim Sorokin; the founder of peasant studies Alexander Chayanov; the prominent French anthropologist Deniker; and… such well-known 19th–20th century scholars of Old Belief as Kablits and Prugavin. Old Believers always evoked strong interest among the narodniki (populists). Herzen met with the ataman of the Nekrasovites and with representatives of the Belokrinitsa hierarchy. Prugavin developed an entire research program dedicated to the study of Old Believer communities. Some narodniki even tried to integrate into Old Believer communities and nearly became nachetchiki (lay theologians and readers of spiritual literature). The narodniki regarded the Old Believers as the Russian narodnaya intelligentsia—a people’s intelligentsia—which, on its own native ground, was able to develop critical thinking and form an original attitude toward the state, the official church, freedom of conscience, history, and so on, while also creating distinctive forms of communal life that enabled survival and independence from the state. The revolutionary narodniki were especially drawn to the revolutionary spirit of Protopope Avvakum and Boyarynya Morozova. The Life of Avvakum was a desk-side book for many, just as Surikov’s painting inspired perseverance in times of hardship. Unlike the Marxist social democrats, the narodniki did not wish to impose some Western idea of socialism or the “correct” social order on the people. Instead, they sought answers to these questions in the midst of the people themselves—in the social forms of grassroots organization that had taken shape over centuries, such as peasant communes, the spiritual centers of Old Believer communities, and artisan cooperatives (arteli). The Old Believer movement of the 17th century, born of grassroots resistance to the violent tyranny of the church and state hierarchy of the time—against the living Christian tradition and indigenous Russian culture—was from the beginning a popular, democratic, and liberating movement:
    • In defending their own right to pray and believe “according to the old ways,” the Old Believers were also compelled to advocate for general freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, and to oppose the merging of church and state interests. They stood for freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly.
    • Having entered into polemics with the Nikonian hierarchs, the Old Believers became pioneers of Russian critical thought—thought that was popular and indigenous, not tied to Western models. Their arguments in these debates and their own investigations took on a truly scholarly, rational character.
    • They studied and carefully preserved alternative chronicles (such as the Tver Chronicle and the Rogozh Chronicle) that contradicted the official versions and told the story of the destruction of the democratic, veche-based centers of medieval Rus’ by the centralizing power of Moscow, which “bends horns for goats and believes not in tears.”
    • In various spiritual treatises (upovaniya), they developed a unique interpretation of how persecuted Christians should relate to worldly power and the church hierarchy that had submitted to it—as to anti-Christian, Antichristic powers with whom any interaction should be avoided as much as possible.
    • In fleeing from the state, the Old Believers created new forms of communal life and church self-governance: from councils and the election of priests and spiritual leaders by the whole community, to fully functioning communes in spiritual centers and unique, hidden forms of stateless life right under the nose of the state, as with the beguny (“runners” or fugitives).
    • A unique form of communal capital was created, which, within a short historical span, gave rise to Russia’s light industry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—an industry that rivaled the best Western products in terms of quality.
Unfortunately, the communal form of ownership gave way to the appropriation of capital by the families that managed it, rather than to more modern communal and democratic economic forms—cooperatives and arteli. One might speculate that if traditional Old Believer democracy had extended into the economic sphere of Old Believer activity, then perhaps there would have been no October Revolution at all. Much was created and formulated—much that sharply distinguished our spiritual movement from the bureaucratic officialdom of the Russian Orthodox Church, and made it a true and attractive popular alternative to the top-down, state-imposed religion, the “lords’ faith,” hated by the majority of the tax-paying population.

A Missed Historical Opportunity

But… perhaps the next step was never taken: the step that would require forever condemning servility to rank (chinopochitanie) and violence. Despite the veneration of Metropolitan Philip, who was murdered by Malyuta Skuratov, Ivan the Terrible was never unequivocally condemned; and despite the unambiguous question in the Pomorian Answers—“Did Christ command that people be burned with fire?”—no one raised the issue of those representatives of the pre-schism church who, though to a far lesser degree than the Nikonians, used similar methods to suppress dissent. They should not have settled for the remote “bear corners” wrested over time from the anti-Christian state and its hypocritical pseudo-church. They should not have accepted this humiliated position, this accidental compromise, as something eternal rather than temporary. They should not have let the fire of struggle die down or allowed thought to grow stagnant. They should not have abandoned their grand, universal mission. To remain a living movement—a living tradition—it is necessary to respond to the pressing questions of the present age, without fear of offending the powerful and the wealthy. One must help people solve urgent problems, offering practical models for collective survival and a just, free life. So it was in the first centuries of Christianity, and so it was after the Russian Schism of the 17th century. The first Christian community, which opposed a solid foundation of horizontal structures of mutual aid and the strength of personal conviction and faith in the divine principle within each person, undermined and eventually destroyed the centralizing, despotic Rome. It flourished centuries later in the form of religious orders, guilds, and craft associations in the medieval cities of Europe—cities much closer in spirit to the urban and veche-based traditions of ancient Rus’ than to the despotic Horde-like copy that came later. During times of persecution, the Old Believers had the opportunity to rekindle the liberating fire of the first persecuted Christians—and perhaps lay the foundation for a new Christian democratic—perhaps even socialist—period of history, comparable to the early European Middle Ages, before they were trampled by Catholicism and absolute monarchy. The Old Believers of the 19th and early 20th centuries needed to respond to the longings of Russian society—not only by offering a democratic and genuinely popular alternative to the official ideology of the Russian Orthodox Church, but also by proposing real, functional models of economic democracy. After all, the capital originally belonged to the communities, not to capitalist families. But this did not happen. We know how brutally the Morozov strike was suppressed—one of the main reasons for which was the dismantling of Old Believer democracy within the factory and the demand to work on feast days. And the actions of Timofey Morozov were never condemned. Unfortunately, Old Belief—once a socially, intellectually, and spiritually vital movement of the 17th–18th centuries—gradually became more and more confined to dealing with its own internal issues and the growth of its private capital. The more it assimilated into and was grafted into the fabric of Romanov Russia, the more it lost its influence in the eyes of the people. Sincere, idealistic, and maximalist young people in the second half of the 19th century—even those from popular or Old Believer backgrounds (like the well-known Yegor Sozonov)—were no longer turning to the “schism” or the sketes, but to the socialists, where they saw a greater correspondence with the spirit of Christ’s teaching—not only in contrast with the hypocritical official “Orthodoxy,” but even more so than in the Old Believer communities who were the heirs of the rebellious Protopope Avvakum, whose writings always stirred great interest in these circles. The educated youth, inspired by the deeds of Feodosiya Morozova and the hieromartyr Avvakum, went into the midst of the people, bringing not only their democratic ideals—ideals for which, like the first Old Believers, they were gladly prepared to suffer and die—but also real medical assistance, literacy, legal help, and arbitration in disputes with local landowners and church officials who exploited the ignorance of the common folk. From this very people’s midst, they drew precise and scientific descriptions of the people’s condition, their needs, aspirations, and potential for development—most succinctly captured in the slogan Land and Freedom (Zemlya i Volya). A slogan which peasant Russia overwhelmingly supported during the elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1918. It so happened that Herzen, Kelsiev, Shchapov, and an entire generation of populists and neo-populists tried to do for the Old Believers what the later Old Believers themselves no longer had the fire or resources to do: to formulate a Russian people’s idea. A people’s idea—not a nationalist or statist one. A democratic idea—one of love for the people and popular rule—not one of the brutal subordination of the people’s interests to the baseless claims of an inhuman “Antichrist” state. The narodniki wanted to unite and bring to the entire Russian people the original revolutionary impulse of Avvakum, Razin, Pugachev, the disgraced streltsy, the fugitives fleeing to Guslitsy long before the Old Believers, the humiliated and trampled yet proud and free Novgorodians—to translate all this into modern language and turn it into a shared heritage, even a real program of action—a political platform. And in a sense, this program came to fruition in the platform of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which received the majority of votes in the first free and nationwide elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1918. And before the Bolsheviks usurped power, there was a solid hope that Russia would move in this direction. The peasant commune—still largely Christian—was alive; the cooperative and artel movement was on the rise; there was broad enthusiasm for socialist ideas, interpreted more in their populist rather than Marxist sense. Even the very fact of the Nikonian Church’s separation from the state and the establishment of the principle of freedom of conscience could have allowed Old Belief not only to reclaim thousands of co-religionists who had been forcibly driven into edinoverie and Nikonianism, but also to transform the entire religious life of the country in the spirit of democracy and populism. Yes, Old Belief was no longer a leading social force at that time, but it could still have become one of the important sources of positive change in the country. Unfortunately, the decayed Romanov despotism and intolerance were ultimately replaced not by the populist democracy envisioned by the Socialist-Revolutionaries—who had won the majority of votes in the Constituent Assembly—but by a new, youthful, pseudo-revolutionary despotism: the commissar-rule of Bolshevism, with its own brand of intolerance toward differing views, perspectives, and religious beliefs. By crushing the Constituent Assembly—once again, as had happened so many times before in history—by trampling on popular rule, the Bolsheviks not only continued Russia’s legacy of state despotism and statist idolatry, but gave birth for the first time to something new: the total state, the totalitarian state, striving for complete control not only over the bodies but also the souls of its subjects.

What Is to Be Done?

These days, there are sometimes voices in Old Believer circles expressing the view that today both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Old Believers have similar, even identical, goals in relation to the Russian state and society—and that we ought to “join forces,” do some “common work,” labor together for the common good… and so on and so forth. But the rhetoric of Old Believers speaking from the podium is often nearly indistinguishable from that of Pobedonostsev at the turn of the last century. The general rightward shift of society is also reflected in our soglasiya and upovaniya. Today, we are not creating any distinctively original sociopolitical thought of our own; instead, we merely reproduce the same ideological mush that dominates Russian society: “traditional values,” patriotism, statism, nationalism, geopolitics, neo-Stalinism… In other words, all that same ideological chewing gum that has been produced by the Romanov and then Soviet propaganda machines for four centuries. Or else, conversely, we adopt the current Western discourse—with its built-in social Darwinism, post-Protestant bourgeois values, and cult of individual enrichment and consumption. I believe we must now begin the difficult and painstaking work of reflecting on our own historical path. Today we must become, at once, Old Believers and scholars of Old Belief, the people and the populists. We must begin translating our distinctive ideas into the language of modern social philosophy. We must learn how to generate from our tradition and history modern, meaningful social and political concepts that are distinct both from the official rhetoric of church and state, and from contemporary Western ideologies, whether of the left or right. We must remember once more the disasters brought upon us and our people by unlimited despotic power, the deification of the state, the intolerance of rulers, and their refusal to heed the people’s aspirations. We must also recall the disasters caused by attempts to forcibly transplant Western forms and methods into our society—bending the people to fit foreign models—whether in the Petrine, Stolypin, Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, or Perestroika-Yeltsin variants. We must develop our own political and, no less (and perhaps even more) importantly, economic views and demands—based on the principles of true popular rule, self-governance, mutual aid, and community (cooperation). Especially since part of this work has already been done for us by our 19th-century thinkers and researchers, including leaders of the cooperative movement of that time.

A Maximal Program

If what I’ve described above is primarily the task of our Old Believer intelligentsia and thinkers, then we as a whole face an even larger challenge. Right now, we are far from having a unified and coherent political position. The main reason is that we are not a unified whole—we do not have a Community. The Community: a single, autonomous, wide-reaching structure of mutual aid, built on the principles of cooperation and self-governance. One person can do nothing. But 100,000 people can do a great deal. One million rubles is a pittance in terms of the economy—but a billion is already real capital. The principle of cooperation is the principle of quantity inevitably becoming quality. Autonomy means maximum independence, including financial and economic, from both the state and individual private actors with their own interests. At present, we are completely dependent on the state in many areas. The main flow of funding and grants comes from the state. To take something for free is not very Christian, and to repay the state with certain “services” would be even worse. This is a matter of true independence. There is also another issue. Today, we often lack the resources to restore our spiritual centers, while at the same time, each of us constantly feeds from our own pockets an entire pack of external middlemen and parasites: the state, Sberbank, retail chains, various employers, and so on and so on. We inevitably and irreversibly lose and scatter the fruits of our labor: as profit for the capitalist employer, as retail commissions, as bank interest, etc. If we begin moving toward autonomy, we will begin preserving these resources within a unified Community, and we will be able to direct them as we see fit: building churches, schools, hospitals, offering targeted aid to disaster victims and large families, opening our own cooperative enterprises, banks, our own employment exchange with better conditions than the outside world, our own consumer societies and retail chains—plus, receiving personal dividends from all this collective economic activity. We will all gain a shared economic interest—the growth, success, and defense of our Community—which in turn means the prosperity and security of every one of us. We will be able to look to tomorrow with greater confidence, without fear of ending up on the street, jobless, without healthcare, drowning in debt, and with no protection or assistance. Even if, at the first stage, we were to create just a single united cooperative Old Believer bank—pooling all our individual shares and transferring all our savings from other banks into it—we would already have an immense financial resource and a unified common cause: the protection and development of this Common Old Believer bank. And this is not something unprecedented: the now-famous Raiffeisen Bank began in just this way—as a cooperative! I believe the most harmful of all modern myths about Old Belief is the myth of the Old Believer economic “miracle” and the fairy-tale Old Believer merchant-philanthropist. We believe in this fairy tale, sit and wait for some miracle-worker to arise and fix everything for us. We fail to understand that the pre-revolutionary capital was just as much the result of the collective labor of the entire Community, concentrated in spiritual centers like Rogozhskoye and Preobrazhenskoye, and later appropriated by people who were only supposed to manage those funds. So it was then, and so it must be now: everyone contributes their kopeck, and together that becomes billions. Only now, we can build it all with maximum transparency, using modern digital technologies for collective management and decision-making. Today, we can develop a legal framework to ensure that communal property becomes—in both fact and law—not the possession of a handful of clever opportunists, but the lawful property of everyone—of every member of the Community who holds a share. And management will be handled by hired managers, elected, supervised, and, if necessary, dismissed by the Community itself. Yes, there are far fewer of us Old Believers today than there were in the 19th century. But on average, we are wealthier than the peasants of that era. Our individual shares in community capital need not be so small. Once such a system begins to form, our ideological disputes will vanish: what does it matter what we call this model—cooperative capitalism or communal socialism? There is no sense in breaking each other’s noses over terminology when the core is a shared, functional, economic reality that benefits everyone—individually and collectively. I believe we must begin to discuss, study, and develop all of these questions and concrete proposals now. And in parallel, we must study current legislation and formulate a political program that reflects, as fully as possible, the economic interests of our Community. We must have a clear understanding of what needs to change in this country in order to create the most favorable conditions for the development of our autonomous Community and its cooperative economic institutions. And let our example become an example for all others in our homeland. Let communities of atheists, Muslims, Tolstoyans, whomever—let them arise. Together, we will transform our atomized, fragmented society into one marked by greater solidarity, mutual aid, and self-governance. source