Old Believers in a Changing World: Polish Narratives of World War ll

Twelve—The Novosibirsk School of Old Believer Studies

Twelve The Novosibirsk School of Old Believer Studies The aim of this chapter is to explore the innovative research agendas and publications of the Novosibirsk school— Nikolai Nikolaevich Pokrovskii and his colleagues and students—on the history of popular religious movements, in particular the Old Belief. This undertaking forces us to examine many interrelated issues. To begin with, Pokrovskii’s work provides a fascinating example of the creative possibilities and limitations faced by gifted and open-minded scholars in the last decades of the Soviet period. Moreover, tracking the writings of the Novosibirsk group into the post-Soviet years shows us to what extent its members’ scholarly approaches, methods, and vocabulary did—or did not—change after the fall of the Communist regime. The Novosibirsk experience takes us in several other directions as well. The school was self-consciously regional; its members published work on many aspects of Siberian history. The region was enormous—from the Urals to the Far East and even, for a time, Alaska. Even more important is the fact that the Novosibirsk school required its members to study regional issues in close connection with problems in the rest of Russia and, on that basis, offer an independentanalysisofthelatter.Theschool’sheavyconcentrationontheOld Believers, however, makes excellent sense given the dissenters’ large numbers and strong influence on local society, politics, and culture. In addition, there is 168 O l d B e l i e v e r s i n a C h a n g i n g W o r l d probably much truth in the widely held assumption of the time that, in the last decades of Soviet power, scholars who did their research and published their findings on the periphery of the Soviet Union had greater creative freedom than their colleagues in Moscow and Leningrad. The achievements of the Tartu school of cultural semiotics are an obvious case in point. The work of the Novosibirsk school raises once again the fundamental interpretative issues in the history of popular religion in Russia—and all premodern societies, for that matter. First, to what extent did religious convictions and modes of thought drive movements of religious dissent? And to what degree were movements of religious protest ultimately expressions of oppositiontopoliticaloppressionorsocialinequality?Second,aremovements of religious opposition such as Old Belief the creation of dissident religious elites? Or do they mainly reflect the convictions of ordinary laypeople or even the marginal and dispossessed members of society? There are no neat solutions to either of these dichotomies. But each historian must continually keep them in mind. ThestudyofOldBeliefhasalonghistory,particularlyinRussiaitself.Before 1917, the voluminous literature on the Old Believers could be divided roughly into two categories. Scholars and popular writers who examined the history and political potential of the peasantry tended to see Old Belief as a nominally religious form of resistance to the tsars and to view its adherents as potential converts to the revolutionary cause (I will call this the populist approach). From the point of view of the official Orthodox Church, the Old Believers represented the resistance of uneducated believers and their self-appointed leaders to the authority of the hierarchy and clergy, the reformed liturgy, and contemporary currents of Christian learning and practice in Russia and elsewhere. The work of both schools of thought has retained much of its value. The populist approach studied the Old Believers in their economic, social, and institutional context and emphasized their relationship to movements of opposition to the ruling order, including the mass revolts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For their part, the Orthodox scholars—in some instances, specialists on missionary work among dissenters—took Old Believer liturgical practices, doctrinal statements, and forms of organization seriously, if only to refute them.1 FormuchoftheSovietperiod,Russianscholarshadlittleornoopportunity to study Old Belief or any other religious traditions on their own terms. For several decades, the only important works on the subject—Pierre Pascal’s classic study of Avvakum and his world, and Serge Zenkovsky’s monumental history of Old Belief, for example—were published in other countries.2 In The Novosibirsk School of Old Believer Studies 169 the 1950s and 1960s, study of the movement experienced a renaissance in Russia thanks largely to Vladimir Ivanovich Malyshev (1910–1976), founder of the collection of Old Russian manuscripts (the Drevlekhranilishche) in the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) in St. Petersburg. Beginning in1949MalyshevorganizedfortheinstituteannualfieldexpeditionstotheFar North of European Russia. Building on his earlier experience working alone, he...