Old Believers in the Tsarist Empire

Old Believers have long been on my list of interesting groups I should like to investigate more fully when the time allows. Robert Crummey's scholarship going back decades has been one of the relatively few sources in English, but recently we had another book published: Peter T. De Simone, The Old Believers in Imperial Russia: Oppression, Opportunism and Religious Identity in Tsarist Moscow (Bloomsbury, 2019), 288pp. This is a paperback version, released at the end of last year, of a book previously published in 2018.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

'Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth.' So spoke Russian monk Hegumen Filofei of Pskov in 1510, proclaiming Muscovite Russia as heirs to the legacy of the Roman Empire following the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. The so-called 'Third Rome Doctrine' spurred the creation of the Russian Orthodox Church, although just a century later a further schism occurred, with the Old Believers (or 'Old Ritualists') challenging Patriarch Nikon's liturgical and ritualistic reforms and laying their own claim to the mantle of Roman legacy. While scholars have commonly painted the subsequent history of the Old Believers as one of survival in the face of persistent persecution at the hands of both tsarist and church authorities, Peter De Simone here offers a more nuanced picture. Based on research into extensive, yet mostly unknown, archival materials in Moscow, he shows the Old Believers as versatile and opportunistic, and demonstrates that they actively engaged with, and even challenged, the very notion of the spiritual and ideological place of Moscow in Imperial Russia.Ranging in scope from Peter the Great to Lenin, this book will be of use to all scholars of Russian and Orthodox Church history.