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Reviewed by:
  • Old Believers in a Changing World
  • Lucien J. Frary (bio)
Robert O. Crummey , Old Believers in a Changing World (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011). 267 pp. Index. ISBN: 978-0-87580-650-1.

Since the collapse of communism, the study of religious movements in the Eastern Orthodox world has reasserted itself. For the first time in more than half a century, Russian scholars became free to explore the spiritual dimensions of the past, as enthusiasm for religiosity replaced the long-defunct Marxism-Leninism piety. The rekindling of interest resulted in a flowering of scholarship on the history and culture of the Old Believers, the conservative offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church that emerged sometime after the mid-seventeenth century. The rise of Old Believer studies is a most welcome event for students of Russian history, early modern history, popular religious culture, and the history of Christianity in general, and reflects the renewed appreciation of Orthodoxy's significance in the history of the region.

The present volume summarizes current research trends and suggests ways of employing interdisciplinary techniques and literatures to understand the largest "schismatic" movement in Russian history. Robert Crummey, the doyen of North American students of this phenomenon, has collected eleven separate essays into an enlightening synthesis of a crucial aspect of Russia's religious heritage. Divided into four thematic sections, "Historiography and Theory," "Seventeenth-Century Origins," "Eighteenth- and Nine teenth-Century Communities," and "Old Believer Life and Scholarship in the Late Twentieth Century," the book begins with a sympathetic yet balanced definition of its topic. A diverse and complex group of devout Christians, the Old Believers (staroobriadtsy) consider themselves the last purely Orthodox Christians on the planet. Crummey refers to staroobriadchestvo as "the groups of Eastern Orthodox Christians who have defined and identified themselves by their rejection of certain liturgical practices of the post-Nikonian Russian Orthodox Church" (P. 6). The movement emerged during the 1660s and early 1670s when polemicists began to criticize the Nikonian reforms and champion the traditional Russian liturgical practice as the only authentic version of Christian expression. Because of their conviction as the last faithful remnant of Christ's teaching, Old Believers scrutinized their beliefs in relation to the official Russian Orthodox Church with deep determination and energy. Tending to live apart from mainstream society, their vision is both eschatological and apocalyptic. [End Page 413]

Until recently, scholarly and polemical writing on Old Belief has tended to fall into two general categories: the works of ecclesiastical historians and those of the populists. The first category, emerging in the second half of the seventeenth century, focuses on the liturgical, polemical, and canonical aspects of the movement that divided the Russian Orthodox Church. 1 Beginning in the 1850s, a new approach (the second category) turned to the political, social, and economic circumstances in which Old Belief developed. Scholars of this school, led by A. P. Shchapov, considered the movement to be a form of democratic opposition to the administrative constraints imposed by the state. 2 Each school of scholarly discourse brought with it particular insights and advantages, yet the dialogue between them remained minimal. Meanwhile, in the West, the few publications on Old Belief eschewed monocausal explanations. Pierre Pascal, for example, saw Old Belief as a clash between irreconcilable visions of Christianity, while Serge Zenkovsky viewed it as a complex spiritual movement for religious renewal. 3 Now, in the early 2010s, the study of Old Belief is in position to synthesize these hierarchies of explanation, based on an infusion of new archival sources as well as new approaches and analytical tools from other disciplines. As Crummey [End Page 414] points out, Old Belief was not an entirely sui generis movement; historians need to engage with the enormous literature on other popular and nonconformist religious movements to best understand its meaning and historical significance.

Several remarkable features of the new work being done by Russian and Western historians of Old Belief reflect an intermingling of research from across the globe and the infusion of research methods from other disciplines. For example, the study of Old Belief represents an excellent avenue to test the boundaries of routine categories such as "elite" and "popular...

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