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TH E C RIS IS O F RELIGIO US TOLER ATION
IN I MPER IA L R U SSIA
 OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS
The Oxford Historical Monographs series publishes some of the best
Oxford University doctoral theses on historical topics, especially
those likely to engage the interest of a broad academic readership.

Editors
P. CLAVIN J. DARWIN J. INNES
J. McDOUGALL D. PARROTT S. SMITH
B. WARD-PERKINS J. L. WATTS W. WHYTE
 The Crisis of Religious
Toleration in Imperial Russia
Bibikov’s System for the Old Believers,
1841–1855

THOMAS MARSDEN

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
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# Thomas Marsden 2015
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2015
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
In memory of Ronald and Marion Hope
 Acknowledgements

I researched and wrote my doctoral thesis while holding the Peter Storey
Scholarship at Balliol College. The present book thus owes its existence to
Mark Storey, who was responsible for setting up the scholarship, to the
University of Oxford Faculty of History, and to Balliol College, which also
provided additional funding for research trips. I am enormously grateful to
them all for their generosity. I would also like to thank the British
Academy and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Univer-
sity College London—the work of turning the thesis into a monograph
was completed during my first year as a British Academy Postdoctoral
Fellow at SSEES. I am thankful to John Watts and to the Oxford
Historical Monographs Committee for their consideration of my thesis
in the first place, and for their patience in awaiting the delivery of the final
manuscript.
I have been assisted in my research by the excellent facilities and ready
expertise of numerous research institutions. In particular I should like to
thank the staff of the Russian State Historical Archive, the Russian
National Library, and the Institute of Russian Literature in St Petersburg;
the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow; and the Bodleian
Library, the British Library, and the UCL SSEES library. In addition, I am
grateful to the Russian National Library, to the Institute of Russian
Literature, and to the State Historical Museum (GIM) for granting me
permission to use, as illustrations in this book, materials found in their
collections.
My research and writing have benefited from the good advice and kind
encouragement of numerous people. As my supervisor throughout my
graduate studies, and more recently my advising editor, Katya Andreyev
has been a constant source of positivity and scholarly direction. I am
especially grateful to Martin Conway, who has been incredibly generous
with his time and expertise to guide me towards a better understanding of
the significance of my findings, while ensuring that I did not ignore the
wider European context, and that I kept moving when progress stalled.
Many thanks are also due to Simon Dixon whose support over the past
few years has been invaluable both to the completion of this monograph
and to the further development of the research that is contained within it.
The feedback of those named above, and of Julia Mannherz, Gregory
Freeze, and Fiona Whitehouse, who have all closely read and commented
viii Acknowledgements
on drafts of this book, have helped to make it a better work, though its
shortcomings are, of course, down to me alone.
Finally, I thank my friends and family. Liz Hall, my grandfather Bill
Marsden, and my grandparents Ronald and Marion Hope are not here to
see the publication of the book, but at various stages of its preparation they
provided such support, without which it could never have been com-
pleted. I am similarly indebted to Phil, Tony, and Sally, my grandmother
Molly, my parents Marion and Martin, and to Hazel.
 Contents

List of Illustrations xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Note to the Reader xv

Introduction 1

I. O R I G I N S OF TH E C R I S I S: 18 4 1 – 52
1. The Belaia Krinitsa Hierarchy 33
2. The Preobrazhenskoe Cemetery 56
3. The Beguny Commission and the Statistical Expeditions 83

II. THE CRISIS U NFOLDS: 1 853 – 5 5

4. Bibikov’s System 121
5. The Failure of Legality 148
6. The Crimean War and the Domestic Enemy 169
7. The Offensive against the Capitalist-Fanatics 190
8. The End of Bibikov’s System 213
Epilogue 244
Conclusion 255

Selected Bibliography 261

Index 271
 List of Illustrations

1. I. S. Aksakov v gruppe chlenov komissii po delam sektantov. Neizvestnyi

litograf po risunku A. V. Popova 1850 g.. Otpechatano v Iaroslavskoi
Gubernskoi tipografii, Institut russkoi literatury (Pushkinskii Dom)
Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (IRLI RAN), Muzei, И.18055 32
2. Portret Dmitriia Gavrilovicha Bibikova (1830-e gg.). Neizvestnyi
litograf, Otdel estampov, Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, NLR:
Э ЛадГП/5-б591 120
 List of Abbreviations

ARCHIVES

GARF Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii

IRLI Institut Russkoi Literatury (Pushkinskii Dom) (Rukopisnyi otdel)
NART Natsional’nyi Arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstana
RGIA Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv
RNB Rossiiskaia Natsional’naia Biblioteka (otdel Rukopisei)
TsIAM Tsentral’nyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Moskvy

ARCHIVAL NOTATION

f. fond (collection)
ek. ekspeditsiia (department)
op. opis’ (inventory)
d. delo/edinitsa khraneniia (file number)
l., ll. list, listy (leaf; leaves)
ob. oborot (verso)

PUBLISHED WORKS

Kel’siev, SPS V. Kel’siev, Sbornik pravitel’stvennykh svedenii

o raskol’nikakh, 4v. (London, 1860–2).
Mel’nikov, PSS P. Mel’nikov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii P.I. Mel’nikova
[Andreia Pecherskago] 7v. (St Petersburg, 1909).
PSZ Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii: sobranie vtoroe,
66v. (St Petersburg, 1830–84).
Sbornik Mel’nikova Sbornik v pamiat’ P.I. Mel’nikova, Deistviia Nizhegorodskoi
Gubernskoi Uchenoi Arkhivnoi Komissii, ix, 2v. (Nizhnii
Novgorod, 1910).
SP Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola, 2v. (London, 1863).
SZ Svod zakonov rossiiskoi imperii poveleniem gosudaria
imperatora Nikolaia Pervago sostavlennyi, 15v.
(St Petersburg, 1835, 1842, 1857).
 Note to the Reader

In most cases I have used the standard Library of Congress system of

transliteration, with the exception of the names of individuals and places
that are well known by their English equivalents; for example Emperor
Nicholas, rather than Nikolai, and St Petersburg, rather than Sankt-
Peterburg. All dates are given in the Old Style Julian Calendar, thirteen
days behind the New Style Gregorian Calendar that was used in Western
Europe.
 Introduction

The political history of the last century of Imperial Russia tells of a

succession of tsars—three Alexanders and two Nicholases—struggling,
and ultimately failing, to preserve their divine, absolute, and imperial
power within a European world whose peoples were increasingly denying
their governments the use of such epithets. The tsars’ resistance to political
reform was so great that their inhabitation of Europe’s long-nineteenth
century can seem a matter of doubt. Were they and their governments not
relics from the age of the ancien régime who, in turning their backs to the
west after the defeat of Napoleon, shut themselves off from the course of
its history? Of course they could not; and their struggles are most manifest
in their attempts to give the autocracy the modern foundations that could
keep it standing in the modern age. In contrast to the westernizing reforms
of the eighteenth century, these were not just the personal projects of the
autocrat, but were undertaken by a modernizing bureaucracy or in col-
laboration with an educated elite who sensed, and feared the consequences
of, their isolation from the peasant population which constituted the
majority of the Empire’s inhabitants. That these efforts never gathered
the necessary momentum to ensure the regime’s survival or peaceful
transformation was due to the vagaries of a system rooted in personal
power—the capacity of which for innovation was, in any case, structurally
and ideologically limited.
It was limited by the mixture of traditional and modern upon which the
tsars hoped to preserve their divine, absolute, and imperial power. To face
the challenge of popular sovereignty, they had increasing resort to the idea
that they were divinely anointed to rule.1 This bound them to the official
state Church, whose worldly power and spiritual authority had been
consistently undermined since Peter I had, in the cause of secular ration-
ality, divided the civil and religious realms—confining the activities of
churchmen to the latter realm, while ensuring their subordination to the
former.2 In the nineteenth century, the general trend was to further

1
Engelstein, Slavophile Empire (Ithaca, 2009), pp. 8–11.
2
Dixon, The Modernisation of Russia (Cambridge, 1999), p. 140.
2 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia
exclude the Church from the civil sphere. Thus inhibited, there was also a
large proportion of the Empire’s subjects who the Orthodox Church
could not claim as its own: Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Bud-
dhist, Animist, and Shamanic communities characterized the outer
reaches of the Empire, while in the historic Russian heartlands the
prevalence of the dissent of the Old Believers created a national religious
divide comparable in significance to the greatest in Europe.3 Neither
state—imbued with ideas of secular rationality—nor society—to whom
the Church was either completely alien or to whom its weaknesses were
glaringly apparent—could be united on the basis of the regime’s religious
foundations.4
The tsars’ absolute power, then, had to rest on the primacy of the state
as an instrument of the imperial will. Here, too, a modern challenge
confronted the regime in the form of constitutionalism; the arbitrariness
of the autocratic state being the most constant charge of its opponents. In
response the regime tried to demonstrate that the rule of law was com-
patible with unlimited autocracy. Nevertheless, as the tsars continued to
see the value of the law in its ability to enhance their personal power, the
inevitable development of a legal consciousness among an increasingly
professionalized bureaucracy, and within an infant civil society, could not
but prove limiting if the regime was to retain its pretensions to modern
European legality. Moreover, in the act of state-building that was required
to implement the rule of law—even in its most arbitrary sense as an
extension of the tsar’s personal will—an independent bureaucratic ethos
was born. The tsar thus came to share his absolutism with the bureaucrat
who sought new forms of legitimacy that did not necessarily correspond to
the interests of the autocratic imperial polity, and which aroused new
antagonisms in society.
Yet the growth of the state, and its ever greater intrusion into the lives of
its subjects, was the only way to maintain the tsar’s imperial power at a
time when nationalism was shaking Empires and forming nations. So,
while state-building and nation-building often went hand-in-hand, in
Russia the one dominated and retarded the other.5 The regime attempted
to rejuvenate the old bonds of dynastic loyalty by injecting them with
nationalist content: as the century progressed it identified itself more

3
The revelations of the statistical expeditions of 1852, examined in Chapter 3, can be
compared to the 1851 census of religious worship in Britain. Both seemed to show the
greater vitality and growth of dissent in comparison to the state religion. Norman, ‘Church
and State since 1800’, in Gilley and Sheils (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain (Oxford,
1994), pp. 272–82.
4
Hosking, Russia: People and Empire (London, 1997), pp. 236–45.
5
This is the argument of Hosking, Russia, pp. xix–xxv, and passim.
 Introduction 3
closely with the Russian people.6 However, as it continued to restrict
popular political participation, to avoid both the demand for popular
government and the disintegration of the Empire, nation-building could
only remain a superficial statist endeavour imposed upon the population.
It could not provide the mass support that was needed. Instead, these
feeble attempts demonstrated that it was impossible ‘for a traditionalist,
conservative regime to equip itself with an ideology in the modern sense of
the term.’7
This book is about the peculiar mixture of traditional and modernizing
impulses that made up Russia’s autocratic government in the nineteenth
century, and how their interaction prevented it from finding solutions that
could unite state and society behind the autocracy. Rather they led it to
exacerbate divisions and engender crises; threatening the very powers whose
preservation had become the tsars’ sole rationale. This is what happened in
the case of religious toleration and the Old Believers. From being an act of
imperial discretion or ‘condescension’ (sniskhozhdenie)—to grant indul-
gence to the superstitions of an ignorant population—the toleration of
Old Belief emerged in Russia in the 1840s as a question of legal right under
the European influence which borders could not restrain. Without accept-
ing modern liberal principles, which might threaten its political powers, the
regime could not concede toleration on this basis. It therefore redefined and
reinforced traditional religious policies and prejudices on the basis of
modernizing impulses which not only excluded a liberal solution but
demanded new heights of persecution. In the short term this led to crisis
when, in 1853, a new ‘system’ was introduced by Nicholas I’s authoritarian,
but modernizing, Minister of Internal Affairs Dmitrii Bibikov to determine
the government’s policies towards the Old Believers. In the long term, it
made Old Belief one of Russia’s most pressing internal political questions.
It remained so until 1905 when full religious toleration became a platform
in the programme for revolutionary change.
That the toleration of the Old Believers should be a separate dilemma
from the toleration of the other non-Orthodox faiths of the Empire was a
result of the unique position of Old Belief from the perspectives of
political legitimacy—religion, law, and nation—that have been outlined
above.8 First, in claiming to be the true bearers of Russian Orthodoxy, the

6
See Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy (Ithaca, 2002), pp. 124–5.
7
Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia (New York, 1984), pp. 147–8.
8
There are numerous works exploring toleration in relation to the sects and foreign
faiths. These include: Etkind, Khlyst (Moscow, 1998); Engelstein, Castration and the
Heavenly Kingdon (New York, 1999); Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation (Washington D.C.,
2004); Breyfogle, ‘The Historical Parameters of Russian Religious Toleration’, The
National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (July, 2001), 1–34; Stanislawski,
4 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia
Old Believers posed the greatest challenge to the authority of the ruling
Church.9 It would not countenance the existence of two competing
Orthodoxies and looked upon the Old Believers as members of its flock
who had temporarily fallen into heresy. The autocracy could not, then,
grant Old Belief established status without alienating the Church and
compromising its own claims to rule by divine decree. Secondly, while the
Old Believers lacked the established legal status of the Empire’s foreign
faiths, they were granted a degree of civil and religious acceptance that was
denied to the smaller, and more radical, dissenting sects. They thus
constituted the only large proportion of the population whose relationship
to the state was not defined by law. Finally, the vast majority of the Old
Believers, the number of whom were estimated to be between one and
twelve million in the mid-nineteenth century, were ethnic Russian peas-
ants. Their presence was the most notable schism in the popular nation
with which the regime increasingly sought to identify.
Bibikov’s system—whose origins, implementation, and failure are the
subjects of this book—aimed at nothing less than the eradication of Old
Belief—the existence of which uniquely obstructed the development of a
unified state and nation under the God-given authority of the tsar. In
his system, state-building and nation-building briefly coalesced in an
unprecedented attempt to bind together autocrat, state, and people. It
demanded not passive obedience, but conscious acceptance of the regime
through a neo-absolutist insistence that the divinely ordained pretensions
of the tsar be universally recognized. It introduced a series of laws that
criminalized the Old Believers’ way of life and deprived them of their
civil and economic rights. These were accompanied by innovations that
allowed the state to intrude into the lives of its subjects as never before.
Lastly, it centred the might of the Empire in the Russian heartlands,
requiring that religious unity be enforced among ethnic Russians on the
moral grounds of protecting the national spirit. The result was a period
of religious persecution without parallel in the final century and a half of
the Russian Empire. It was introduced with a fervour and arbitrariness
that aroused such discontent among the Old Believers, and such con-
demnation from within government, that it could not last. Bibikov and
his system were abandoned shortly after the death of Nicholas I in
February 1855.

Tsar Nicholas I and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1983); Werth, Margins, and ‘The Emergence of
“Freedom of Conscience” in Imperial Russia’, Kritika, 13.3 (2012), 585–610.
9
For the Church’s constant fears about Old Belief, see Freeze, The Parish Clergy
(Princeton, 1983).
 Introduction 5
Its duration of only two years—coming within the most reactionary
period of the century’s most reactionary reign—may explain why
Bibikov’s system has never been adequately examined or explained.10 It
was implemented in the utmost secrecy, its existence known only to a
select number of officials. Soon after it was revoked, the government
began to look upon the system as an embarrassing aberration which was
all but written out of official histories. The historian of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs (MVD), I. Varadinov, devoted a whole volume to the
treatment of religious dissent (which came under the MVD’s jurisdiction),
yet he declined to go into details about the cases of the 1840s or 1850s,
writing that, as these investigations went beyond the normal sphere of the
Ministry’s actions, they would ‘not be completely understandable to us.’11
Nevertheless, he acknowledged that a change had occurred. From 1841—
the year in which Bibikov’s famously progressive predecessor Lev Perovskii
became Minister—the government had, he argued, begun to look upon
Old Belief as a political rather than a religious phenomenon.12 Based on
the conclusions of Perovskii and his officials, Nicholas I met with Bibikov
in February 1853, and together they decided that Old Belief was not a
sickness of the Church but a sickness of the state. This was the interpret-
ative shift that led to the initiation of Bibikov’s system. The bureaucrats
of the MVD who went on to implement it accused the Old Believers
at various times of being socialists, communists, and conspirators who
plotted the assassination of the tsar and awaited revolution. Having
rejected the idea that they were motivated by religious feeling, Bibikov
prosecuted the most prominent Old Believers as political criminals who
sought to undermine the state.
In the age of religious toleration, the association between religious
divergence and political sedition has often been made in the cause of
policies of intolerance. In the years after the Restoration, the idea that the
English dissenters’ rejection of the established church concealed a more
sinister aversion to the civil powers and the monarchy drew strength from
their historical connection with the parliamentarian cause.13 In France, in

10
There are two studies devoted to the politics of Old Belief in this period and these
have not adequately recognized the fundamental shift that occurred with the introduction
of Bibikov’s system, nor utilized the documents that could explain it. Vasil’evskii, Gosu-
darstvennaia sistema (Kazan’, 1914) and Ershova, Staroobriadchestvo i vlast’ (Moscow,
1999). Pyzhikov’s recent study of Old Belief touches on many of the episodes that are
examined in this book; however, he does not examine their relation to the policy changes
that occurred. Pyzhikov, Grani Russkogo raskola (Moscow, 2013).
11
Varadinov, Istoriia, v.8 (St. Petersburg, 1863) pp. 2–3.
12
Varadinov, Istoriia, p. 57.
13
Marshall, John Locke (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 442–9.
6 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia
the early decades of the nineteenth century, both liberals and conservatives
who sought to restrain the Jesuits made use of an anti-Jesuit myth rooted
in history that associated the order with anarchy and regicide. The
acceptance of this conspiracy theory served to reconcile its propagators
with the revolutionary past and to engage with broad modern-day dilem-
mas.14 In Russia too, a past in which religious and political conflict were
interwoven was utilized to create a contemporary image of the Old
Believers that was moulded more by the features of modern revolutionary
threats than by historical continuity. The accuracy of this image in its
relationship to the real aspirations of the Old Believers, political or
otherwise, is not the subject of this book. The aim is to explain why the
bureaucrats of the MVD saw a new relevance in the Russian Orthodox
schism, raskol, that had originated exactly two hundred years before the
implementation of Bibikov’s system, and why they presented the modern-
day schismatics, raskol’niki, in such threatening political terms. It is
necessary, however, to briefly examine the history of Old Belief, in order
to show that the image of the Old Believers that lay behind the crisis of
religious toleration did not correspond to the objective reality, but was
partially rooted in a distant past.

THE ORTHODOX SCHISM

In the 1650s Patriarch Nikon, supported by Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich,

attempted to increase the prestige of Russian Orthodoxy by initiating a
series of reforms to restore Russian liturgical practice to its original purity.
Assisted by Greek and Ukrainian clerics, Nikon sought to eradicate
mistakes and innovations that had crept into the Russian prayerbooks
over the course of centuries. The changes he introduced were mainly
ritualistic in character, affecting the practices of worship such as the
method of making the sign of the cross and the number of alleluias said
during the praising of the Lord. Nikon’s opponents accused him of
innovation and associated the new practices with foreign influences.
This gave seemingly minor changes a huge importance; they represented
the fall of the Russian Church to the heresy of the west. No longer could
Moscow be viewed as the third Rome, or claim to fulfil the word of God
on earth. The reforms thus led to schism. Those who attempted to
preserve the pre-reform practices were anathematized in 1667, they were
denounced as raskol’niki, schismatics, and heretics. They saw themselves,

14
Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth (Oxford, 1993), pp. 56–65; 311.
 Introduction 7
however, as Old Believers, the true bearers of Russian Orthodoxy in its
original form.15
Condemned by Church and state, and fiercely persecuted by both, the
first decades of the schism saw the Old Believers take part in a number of
violent uprisings in which they joined forces with the regime’s political
opponents. Even then, however, the mood of the dissenters was primarily
eschatological, not political, and rather than seeking to confront their
persecutors they fled and found support among the peasantry—
establishing dissenting communities in the wilderness. They believed
that, with the fall of the true Church in Russia, the reign of the Antichrist
had begun, and they were now living in the last times. When they came
into contact with the forces of the state, their most militant response
tended to be self-immolation. Their apocalyptic expectations could not,
however, last interminably and the Old Believers began to adapt their
beliefs to the prospect of a more permanent existence on earth.16
This adaptation split the Old Believer movement into two distinct
branches: the priestly, popovtsy, and the priestless, bespopovtsy.17 The
eschatological beliefs of the Old Believers were most strongly preserved
among the bespopovtsy. Their teachings gave permanent shape to a Church
existing in the last times. It could not, they argued, have a clergy for, with
the fall of the Orthodox Church, a true clergy had ceased to exist. They
therefore rejected those rites that required a priest: communion and
marriage, and their spiritual elders taught celibacy. The idea that the
reign of the Antichrist had begun remained an important part of their
faith. They sought to preserve their separation from his world through
rituals of purification, and most significantly through their refusal to
continue the Orthodox custom of saying prayers for the tsar. They argued
that to do so was against the will of God since, consciously or not, the tsar
worshipped the Antichrist and fulfilled his will.
This dogma brought the unwanted attentions of the secular powers and
the most frequent accusations of political disloyalty. As the bespopovtsy
adapted to a worldly existence, however, this ‘political’ teaching came
under increasing pressure. From the 1730s, the Old Believer leaders began

15
For a detailed history of Nikon’s reforms, see Kutuzov, Tserkovnaia reforma (Moscow,
2003). For an English language history, see Michels, At War with the Church (Stanford,
1999). An excellent introduction to the complex cultural, theological, and social world of
the Old Believers is Crummey, Old Believers in a Changing World (DeKalb, 2011).
16
Robert Crummey has examined this process among the bespopovtsy of northern
Russia. Crummey, The Old Believers and the world of the Antichrist (Madison, 1970).
17
The question of priests became crucial once the initial generation of clerics who
opposed Nikon’s reforms had died out. The only bishop to have joined the dissenters was
killed in captivity before he could ordain further priests.
8 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia
to compromise with the state over the question of prayers.18 Although this
led to new divisions, by the last decades of the eighteenth century, the
most successful branches of the bespopovtsy—the Fedoseevtsy and the
Pomortsy—had modified their beliefs. They stipulated that their followers
must say prayers for the tsar, although in a modified form, and rather than
rejecting marriage altogether they permitted various forms of partnership
among their followers.19
The popovtsy made even less likely political dissidents, although their
relative proximity to official Orthodoxy ensured that the Church per-
ceived them as a still greater threat. Among them, the eschatological
teaching of the early Old Believers was increasingly insignificant. Rather
than recognizing the need to adapt the Church to the last times, they
sought to give the old faith a permanently established basis. This required
the fulfilment of all the old Orthodox rituals, and most importantly it
demanded a functioning clergy. Without a bishop to ordain priests, the
popovtsy could only obtain clerics by persuading those who had been
ordained in the Orthodox Church to join them. In order to justify their
use of these ‘fugitive priests’, it was decided that the fall of the Church had
not been so severe as previously thought. This decision not only eased
the Old Believers’ consciences in their use of the priests, but also enabled
them to say prayers for the tsar in the usual manner.20 They hoped that
he might grant their faith official recognition under the supervision of
the state.21

RELIGIOUS TOLERATION

As it became clear that the Old Believers did not seek to undermine the
state, the early years of fierce persecution gave way to a more regulated
repression under Peter I. His division of the religious and civil spheres
enabled him to make allowance for the fact that the Old Believers’
enterprising communities could play a beneficial economic role, and he

18
Crummey, The Old Believers, pp. 159–83.
19
Gur’ianova, Krest’ianskii antimonarkhicheskii protest (Novosibirsk, 1988), pp. 17–76.
See also the rules of the Fedoseevtsy in Moscow and Riga. Podmazov, ‘ “Pravila Pauluchchi”
kak istoricheskii istochnik’, in Ivanov (ed.), Rizhskii Staroobriadcheskii Sbornik (Riga,
2011), pp. 50–8.
20
Subbotin, Istoriia tak nazyvaemago Avstriiskago ili Belokrinitskago Sviashchenstva
(Moscow, 1895), pp. i, 7–39; Mel’nikov, Kratkaia istoriia drevlepravoslavnoi (staroobriad-
cheskoi) tserkvi (Barnaul, 1999), pp. 13–157.
21
This was the common appeal of the popovtsy’s petitions, see, for example, from the
Ekaterinburg Old Believers in 1838. SP, pp. 195–8.
 Introduction 9
introduced a system in which registered Old Believers could practise their
faith in return for paying a double poll tax.22 This system was abandoned
under Catherine II who, guided by the ideals of the enlightenment, looked
upon the Old Believers not as a subversive element but as the victims of
superstition.23 The Old Believers were now granted the same general
rights as all the subjects of the Empire. Although this did not amount to
full religious freedom—as previously, only registered Old Believers were
free to practise their faith without harassment, and the law still prohibited
the building of chapels or open manifestations of faith—the new condi-
tions of tolerance encouraged the dissenters to assert themselves through-
out the Empire. The number of registered Old Believers increased
dramatically. They appeared in the cities, taking advantage of the new
freedoms to establish a notable presence in trade. They requested and
received permission to build chapels and, as a result, the focus of their
spiritual life shifted from the concealment of the Empire’s borders to its
interior.24
Most important in this regard was the foundation in Moscow of the
bespopovtsy Preobrazhenskoe Cemetery, belonging to the Fedoseevtsy
branch, and the Rogozhskoe Cemetery of the popovtsy. Called cemeteries
due to the circumstances of their establishment in the 1770s at the time of
the Moscow plague, they were in reality much more than this. Chapels
were built to serve the cemeteries and around them monastic communities
developed. Over the following decades, Old Believer settlements formed
around these religious centres, populated by thousands. By the beginning
of the nineteenth century, they were the spiritual, social, and economic
foci for rapidly expanding communities, and had become the most influ-
ential religious centres of the two most successful branches of Old Belief in
Russia. To the outside world they were symbols of the increased civic
acceptability and religious power of Old Belief.25 They represented the
modus vivendi that had developed between the Old Believers and the state.
By the first decades of the nineteenth century, indulgence or ‘condes-
cension’ had been established as the government’s official attitude towards

22
Crummey, The Old Believers, pp. 58–70.
23
de Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great (London, 1981), pp. 516–17;
Dixon, Catherine the Great (Harlow, 2001), pp. 79–80; Paert, ‘ “Two or Twenty Million” ’,
Ab Imperio, 3 (2006), pp. 80–2.
24
The official number of dissenters grew from 42,972 in 1764 to 827,721 in 1826.
Paert, Old Believers: Religious dissent and gender in Russia, 1760–1850 (Manchester, 2003),
p. 61; ‘Schislenie raskol’nikov’, in Mel’nikov, PSS, vii, p. 392.
25
On the Rogozhskoe cemetery, see Mel’nikov, PSS, vii, 204–49; Iukhimenko, Star-
oobriadcheskii tsentr za Rogozhskoi Zastavoiu (Moscow, 2005); The foundation and growth
of the Preobrazhenskoe cemetery is described in Popov, Materialy dlia istorii (Moscow,
1870); and Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazhdanstvo (Moscow, 1955), pp. 455–88.
10 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia
the religious dissenters. Alexander I described this form of toleration as ‘an
unalterable law’—one which lay at the heart of the regime’s modern
European identity.26 Even the Church realized that it could no longer
agitate for persecution on the basis of religious truth alone.27 Nevertheless
such a toleration was not backed up by firm principles of religious
freedom; rather, in the case of the Old Believers, it was understood as
the endurance of a temporary evil rooted in popular ignorance, which
would die out with the spread of enlightenment.28 For all of Catherine’s
and Alexander’s indulgence towards the Old Believers’ spiritual needs,
they did not countenance giving Old Belief established status on its own
terms. Thus, while the Old Believers’ religious structures had become
increasingly open and organized, the inability of the government to
rethink Church–state relations meant that their faith could only be
integrated into the state through the medium of the ruling Church’s
authority.29
This led to the contrivance of edinoverie—the unified faith—a propos-
ition that allowed the Old Believers to have their own churches if they
appealed to the ecclesiastical authorities to supply them with a priest. The
church would come under the authority of the Orthodox hierarchy, but
the priest would carry out his duties using the pre-Nikonian liturgical
books. Edinoverie was not, however, an attractive prospect for the Old
Believers who were not prepared to place themselves in the care of the
Church that branded them heretical.30 Once within its power they could
have no hope of preserving the faith of their ancestors. As a result,
edinoverie made little headway after it was officially approved at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. It would, however, become increas-
ingly significant as the regime’s attitude towards Old Belief changed once
again, and the conditional endurance that had been granted to the
dissenters’ religious organizations began to be withdrawn.

26
SP, 1, pp. 44–6.
27
See a report prepared for the Over-Procurator of the Holy Synod in the 1830s. It
recognized that ‘intolerance of the raskol does not correspond to our present convictions
according to European monarchical principles.’ ‘Filaret Drozdov—Mitropolit Moskovskii,
1782–1867’, Russkaia Starina, 51 (August, 1886), pp. 292–4.
28
On the distinction between these types of toleration, see Zagorin, How the Idea of
Religious Toleration came to the West (Oxford, 2003), pp. 1–13.
29 For a more detailed analysis of the shortcomings of Catherine’s toleration, see

Riazhev, Prosveshchennyi absolutizm and I.D. Bochenkova, ‘Gosudarstvennaia politika v

otnoshenii staroverov v poslednii chetverti XVIII—nachale XIXv’ (Moscow, Candidate
thesis, 1999).
30
The most detailed history of edinoverie is S-ii, Istoricheskii ocherk edinoveriia
(St. Petersburg, 1867).
 Introduction 11
This turn against the principles of toleration has generally been located
in the last years of Alexander I’s reign. Just as he abandoned his plans for
political reform, and looked with new suspicion upon the westernizing
influences he had once encouraged, so he became more susceptible to the
conservative arguments of the Church about the harm of the Old Believ-
ers, and began to rescind the freedoms with which he had previously
favoured their communities. In this way, it has been argued, he set off a
repressive trend that would gain momentum in the hands of the more
famously reactionary Nicholas I.31 There is much truth in this interpret-
ation. The measures which Alexander introduced in the last years of his
reign—increasing supervision over the Old Believers and limiting their
civil rights—certainly helped to shape the religious politics of his younger
brother. This has led, however, to the false impression that the religious
policies of Nicholas I merely followed the inexorable logic of events that
had been set in motion in the early 1820s. In this interpretation, the final
excesses of Bibikov’s system merely appear as the denouement of a policy
introduced some three decades earlier.32
Alexander I’s turn against toleration has, however, been exaggerated,
and it was during the reign of Nicholas that the fundamental shifts, which
have so far been overlooked, occurred. Religious toleration was an import-
ant part of Russia’s modern identity. It was deeply, if awkwardly, embed-
ded in the values of the central agencies and the governing elite, and it
should not be assumed that the autocratic regime could shrug it off with
ease. Alexander’s restrictive measures demanded that more attention be
turned towards the harmful social and moral consequences—considered
civil crimes—that were attributed to the Old Believers’ faith. They were
not directed against the beliefs themselves. The idea that the Old Believers
should not be persecuted for reasons of faith remained sacrosanct. Indeed,
towards the end of his reign, in 1822, Alexander introduced the measure
of indulgence that most offended the Church: he ordered the authorities
to allow fugitive priests to serve the popovtsy.33 Just before he died,
new directives were being prepared by the Committee of Ministers to
ensure that the Old Believers were not persecuted for carrying out their
religious rites.

31
The arguments for Alexander I’s turn away from toleration can be found in
Vasil’evskii, Gosudarstvennaia Sistema, pp. 5–16; Pera, ‘The Secret Committee on the
Old Believers’, in Bartlett and Hartley (eds.), Russia in the Age of the Enlightenment
(London, 1990), pp. 222–41; Paert, Old Believers, p. 187; and Nichols, ‘Old Belief
Under Surveillance’, in Michels and Nichols, Russia’s Dissident Old Believers (Minneapolis,
2009), pp. 183–95.
32 33
Paert, Old Believers, p. 225. SP, 1, pp. 52–3.
12 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia

NICHOLAS I

Nicholas confirmed this as law in 1826, and in 1832, with the publication
of the Digest of Laws, the idea of toleration was given a still firmer
foundation as one of the ‘Fundamental State Laws.’ At the same time,
the formula which was to serve as the general rule for the Old Believers’
toleration for the rest of the century appeared for the first time.34 Even the
provincial secret committees, established from 1831 to coordinate the
authorities’ dealings in the affairs of the raskol’niki, that are generally taken
as evidence of Nicholas’s determination to suppress the Old Believers,
were intended, rather, to ensure the consistent application of the law. The
committees were sometimes introduced in defence of religious toleration;
a response to the misplaced zeal of the local powers.35
Yet, that the accession of Nicholas I did lead to the increasing
restriction of the Old Believers’ religious life is not in doubt. Unlike
his predecessors, he refused to indulge their spiritual needs. This meant
that their unofficial religious organization, which had not been legally
sanctioned, was newly vulnerable. Nicholas immediately abandoned
Alexander’s permissive attitude to the fugitive priests, and extended the
long-standing prohibition on building chapels to making repairs to those
already in existence. As the popovtsy’s supply of priests and chapels
diminished, so edinoverie was placed before them as the only means of
satisfying their needs. It was also enforced on some of the largest Old
Believer monasteries, which fell foul of the new restrictions in the 1830s
and 1840s.
At work were two trends which have long been associated with Nicholas’s
rule: the urge to regulate the operations of the police state, and to
reassert the alliance between Church and tsar. One inclined towards the
west: the creation of an educated bureaucracy that was guided by secular
laws. The other to native tradition, and a path rooted in the Orthodox
faith.36 The urge to regulate and define by law threatened an Old Believer
organization that had thrived under the unofficial indulgence of the
imperial powers; while Nicholas’s attempt to re-sanctify the autocracy—
an endeavour that derived from a deep personal piety—precluded legal

34
It stated that the ‘raskol’niki should not be persecuted for their opinions of faith, but
are forbidden to corrupt anyone into the raskol or commit any impertinence against the
Orthodox Church.’ SZ (1835), v.14, z.46.
35
See cases in Kharkov and Vitebsk, 1845–6. RGIA, f.1473, op.1, d.27, ll.108–9,
243–4.
36
Wortman, Scenarios of Power (Princeton, 1995), v.1, pp. 380–1.
 Introduction 13
solutions that might stabilize the position of the Old Believers but would
threaten the integrity of the Church.37
It may not seem surprising that this resulted in new excesses of perse-
cution. The urge to regulate by law was tempered by Nicholas’s deter-
mination that the law would not impede the moral or political rights of the
autocracy. On the most important matters, he showed little inclination to
follow the legal order or to create new laws via the established consultative
process. Instead, he ruled by secret committee and personal adjutant: a
method that might have the same end of regulation, but which opened the
way to whatever arbitrary means were deemed necessary to achieve it.38
So, when it proved difficult to regulate the Old Believers’ organizations by
lawful means alone—in part due to the legal foundations that Nicholas
had given to toleration—new solutions were sought and applied.
As to the notion of the Old Believers’ political dissidence, this has
rightly been associated with the development—in correspondence to
Nicholas’s own faith in his divine calling, and due to the need for an
ideological response to nationalism—of an ‘Official Nationality’ that
defined religion through a political prism.39 The famous trinity of ‘Ortho-
doxy, Autocracy, and Nationality’, which was devised by the future
Minister of Public Instruction Count S.S. Uvarov (1786–1855) in
1832, was a hollow political faith which valued nationality (narodnost’)
and Orthodoxy by their commitment to, and therefore according to their
legitimization of, the dynastic autocratic order.40 Under its influence, the
rejection of the ruling Church could be seen both as a denial of the tsar’s
legitimacy, and as a reason to look upon the Old Believers as a group who
must be excluded from the national body.41 When the revolutions of
1848 brought further resort to the traditional idea of ‘Holy Rus’ as a
means to distinguish its path from that of the west, Nicholas became ever
more susceptible to those officials who sought promotion by presenting
Old Belief as a dangerous political threat.42 His statesmen, meanwhile,

37
On Nicholas’s personal piety and attempt to surround the autocracy with a religious
aura, see Wortman, Scenarios of Power, pp. 385–9; and Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official
Nationality (Berkeley, 1959), pp. 83–91, 226.
38
Lincoln, Nicholas I (London, 1978), pp. 76–92.
39
On Official Nationality as a response to western nationalism, see Engelstein, Slavo-
phile Empire, pp. 1–11; Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla (Moscow, 2004), pp. 337–74.
40
Hosking, Russia, pp. 146–8.
41
On the relationship between Official Nationality and the government’s increasing
intervention into the lives of the Old Believers see: Ershova, Staroobriadchestvo, pp. 9, 133;
Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, p. 224; Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla (Moscow, 2004), p. 366;
Paert, Old Believers, pp. 184–6.
42
For cursory arguments along these lines, see Ershova, Staroobriadchestvo, pp. 139–40,
and Crummey, The Old Believers, pp. 211–15.
14 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia
began to translate into practice the sacred principle of autocracy which was
entailed in the Official Nationality.43 Bibikov’s system therefore appears
to be the obvious corollary to the obscurantist backward state that
emerged in the 1850s. The final absolutist and arbitrary lashings out of
a regime that had outlived its time.44 It was then that the foundations of
toleration finally collapsed: ‘condescension’ was abandoned and the dis-
tinction between investigating civil crimes and investigating matters of
faith broke down.
Even if this provided a full explanation, Bibikov’s system would still be
worthy of analysis for enhancing our understanding of the operations of
the tsarist government as it was gripped by a sense of emergency in the
years between the outbreak of revolution in Europe and the conclusion of
the Crimean War. It demonstrates how Nicholas’s statesmen could exploit
the crisis to accumulate extraordinary power, and how the repressions
suffered by the Empire’s population from the regime’s attempt to detect
and eradicate sedition extended far beyond the well-known ordeals of
educated society.45 It shows, too, the pervasiveness of the autocrat’s
personal arbitrary power and how this interacted with the notions of law
that his urge to regulate had instilled in the bureaucracy; and, in particular,
how the insistence on this power’s religious foundations prevented the
establishment of a stable secular legality. In these respects, Bibikov’s
system has contemporaneous parallels in the reactionary governments
that came to power throughout Europe in the early 1850s.46
Bibikov may have swam with the reactionary tide upon which the
juxtaposition of the Orthodox autocracy to revolution exerted its pull;
however, his system was not dictated from above. One should not too
readily assume a direct correlation between the official ideology and
practical policy, which would exaggerate both the power and the purpose
of the autocrat.47 As others have shown, the regime was not equipped for

43
Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, p. 42.
44
This description of the last years of Nicholas’s reign is based on the analysis of Richard
Wortman. Wortman, Scenarios, v.1, p. 402.
45
These are described in detail throughout the literature concerning Nicholas’s reign
and have done most to shape perceptions about his era. For example, Nicholas’s Secret
Police, the Third Section, is often presented as the epitome of Nicholas’s arbitrary rule. Its
significance is analysed in Monas, The Third Section (Cambridge, Mass., 1961); Squire, The
Third Department (Cambridge, 1968).
46
For example in Prussia and Austria: Gillis, The Prussian Bureaucracy in Crisis,
1840–60 (Stanford, 1971); Axtmann and Kuzmics, Authority, State and National Character,
the Civilizing Process in Austria and England, 1700–1900 (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 106–8.
47
As Stanislawski has shown in the case of the Jews at this time, Nicholas’s prejudices
did not automatically translate into law. Stanislawski, Tsar Nicholas, pp. 8–15.
 Introduction 15
ideological rule.48 Indeed, I shall argue in this book that there was no
simplistic unity in the minds of officials in this period that associated
religious diversity with political dissent. On the contrary, insofar as
government agencies operated according to a common discourse, it was
secular, rational, and pragmatic. This bound the autocrat to the expect-
ations of a modern bureaucratic ethos, which included the observation of a
lawful order and the division of the civil and religious spheres: the idea that
the Old Believers undermined the divine foundations of the autocracy was
not sufficient to change this. Therefore Bibikov’s system was never
accepted by the majority of Nicholas’s officials and it led to virulent
divisions at the highest levels of his government.
Nor can it be explained by the reassertion of the link between altar and
throne. The Church, it is true, consistently resisted granting freedoms to
the Old Believers, and attempted to persuade the government of the
importance of prosecuting dissent: reminding the regime of the Orthodox
foundations to its rule, and emphasizing the moral, political, and social, as
well as the religious, deviance of the dissenters. Nevertheless, throughout
this period the government generally took the initiative in measures
relating to the raskol.49 As Nicholas’s reign progressed, ecclesiastical figures
found it increasingly difficult to defend their participation in discussions
concerning the regime’s policies towards the Old Believers. The Special
Secret Committee that determined Bibikov’s system excluded the Church
altogether.
The crisis of religious toleration that marked the end of Nicholas’s reign
derived not primarily from the dying spasms of the unmitigated traditions
of absolutism, but from newborn forces that struggled to realize them-
selves within a backward-looking political structure. These were not the
autocracy’s arbitrary impositions of modernity: the attempt to give cen-
turies’ worth of imperial orders the form of a legal code, or to bind all the
Empire’s subjects to the tsar with a unifying myth that stressed his divine
and popular qualities; they were the dynamic and progressive forces of
state-building and nation-building that were unleashed by these imposi-
tions. These transformed the hollow political faith of Official Nationality
into an ideology capable of mobilizing a number of influential intellectuals
and bureaucrats into innovative and radical action. At this time, when
meaningful political and social reform was impossible, their most notable
attempt to unify the state and the people took place in the sphere of
religion.

48
Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia, pp. 147–8.
49
Smolitsch, Istoriia Russkoi Tserkvi (Moscow, 1997), v.2, pp. 145–64.
16 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia

STATE-BUILDING

Nicholas wanted his orders and laws—the distinction was meaningless to

him—to be regularly and consistently applied, and the measures he took
to ensure this led to the emergence of an educated and specialized
bureaucracy.50 Of course, the degree of success was variable and where
it gave rise in some instances to an ethos of legality that did little more
than reinforce a slavish devotion to the traditional formalities and hier-
archies of the bureaucratic order, in others it generated a commitment to
progress: the search for an abstract and perfect future state that would
guarantee the justice and order to which the Emperor’s laws must surely
aim. In fact, both these results of the autocrat’s attempt to strengthen the
foundations of his authority could lead to its limitation. As suggested
above, the ethos of legality, however unprincipled, led to expectations
that could restrict the Emperor’s arbitrary will. This direction was espe-
cially significant in protecting the domains of personal power in the
Empire’s fragmented bureaucracy—in particular those of the provincial
Governors and Governor-Generals—against innovation and reform.51
Meanwhile, the commitment to the state’s perfection partially supplanted
a notion of service that had rendered it above all a duty to the monarch.
Its aim should not only be the fulfilment of the autocrat’s laws but the
achievement of a greater congruity between his laws and conditions
within the Empire. The accumulation and presentation of a monopoly
of expertise about these conditions thus became the means to sway
autocratic policy towards the interests of a modernizing bureaucracy.52
This direction tended to promote the importance of administrative unity
and reform and was thus fundamentally opposed to the first. It was
represented by the Ministries—which acquired a more impersonal, cen-
tralizing identity—above all by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD),

50
Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia, pp. 155–6.
51
The fragmented nature of the provincial administration is described in, Starr, Decen-
tralization and self-government in Russia (Princeton, 1972), pp. 3–52; Robbins Jr, The Tsar’s
Viceroys (Ithaca, 1987), pp. 1–20; Cherkesov, Institut general-gubernatorstva i namestni-
chestva (St. Petersburg, 2001), pp. 65–140; Lysenko, Gubernatory i general-gubernatory
(Moscow, 2001), ll.61–81.
52
On the development of bureaucratic absolutism in place of autocracy, see Rosenberg,
Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience (Cambridge MA, 1968),
pp. 18–19 and passim. For tendencies in this direction in Russia, see Lincoln, In the
Vanguard of Reform (DeKalb, 1982), pp. 50–69; Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform (Cambridge
MA, 1981), pp. 2–12; Gentes, Exile, Murder and Madness in Siberia (London, 2010),
pp. 4–18.
 Introduction 17
where it reached maturity with the arrival of Lev Perovskii as Minister
in 1841.53
It was from this point that the question of Old Belief began to be talked
of as a matter of state importance. While their policing belonged primarily
to the MVD, the raskol’niki fell under the jurisdiction of a number of
competing agencies. In order to achieve greater coordination between
these disparate powers, Nicholas established a Secret Committee for the
Affairs of the Raskol’niki at the beginning of his reign which met every few
months to reach consensual decisions, in accordance with the necessary
laws, on how to proceed in the most important cases of religious dissent.
The Committee was consistently attended by the Ministers of Internal
Affairs and State Domains, The Chief of the Third Section (Nicholas’s
secret police), the Over-Procurator of the Holy Synod, and the presiding
ecclesiastical member of the Synod. From the 1830s, similar committees
were established at a provincial level.54 The committees aimed towards
legal consistency; however, the fact of their existence indicated the absence
of state unity, the obstacles to administrative reform, and the awkward
areas of overlap between the civil and the ecclesiastical domains. For the
MVD, pursuing a centralizing and rationalizing agenda, they could only
become a source of frustration which prevented it from determining its
own policies in this area.
Old Belief became an important political question in the 1840s in its
relation to the struggles of the MVD to wrest itself free from a fragmented
and unwieldy bureaucracy. Its cause may have been secular and rational-
izing but, as Sheehan has argued in the case of Germany, secularization did
not destroy religious awareness but ‘turned religion into a problem to be
debated, an issue to be resolved, a loyalty to be mobilized or manipu-
lated.’55 As the MVD sought to adapt its practices to conditions in the
Empire, so it looked beyond the idea that the Old Believers were a
mistaken proportion of the population deserving of compassion, and
beyond its duties to protect the Orthodox Church, and tried instead to
understand them as part of the force of the state.
Throughout Europe, modernizing bureaucracies sought to identify and
label legal anomalies and replace patriarchal models of government with
the rational consistency of the law. Where religious organizations resisted

53
Perovskii immediately aroused discontent for seeking control over the local powers
and for his contempt for bureaucratic formalism. Shcherbakova and Sidorova (eds.), Rossiia
pod nadzorom (Moscow, 2006), pp. 325–6; Korf, Zapiski (Moscow, 2003), p. 446.
54
On the nature and spread of the secret committees, see Varadinov, Istoriia, v.8,
pp. 372–3; Vasil’evskii, Gosudarstvennaia sistema, p. 23.
55
Sheehan, German History (Oxford, 1989), p. 555.
18 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia
definition they were labelled states within states.56 In the case of the Old
Believers the tensions were particularly high because Old Belief was not
recognized as a religion. There could be no established order for its
supervision, and since estate and family rights were granted according to
the completion of recognized religious rituals—recorded in parish
registers—so the Old Believers’ civil life was a source of administrative
chaos.57 This gave rise to the idea that the Old Believers used the
condescension of the government to commit crimes and civil abuses. It
did not help that the dynamics of the relationship between the dissenters
and the authorities inclined towards concealment and dissimulation.
The MVD responded by sending trusted officials—bypassing the local-
authorities—to gather exact and accurate information (izvestnost’) in the
areas that were most affected by Old Belief. This was part of the Russian
government’s turn towards the provinces of the 1840s. The exact infor-
mation that could be found there was seen not only as a means of total
control, but also as the essential prerequisite for progressive reform.58 It
was in these endeavours that a number of enlightened bureaucrats gained
the necessary experience to shape the Great Reforms of Alexander II.59
Yet, it was in this same process that the state began to intrude as never
before into the lives of the Old Believers and to demand with ever more
forceful insistence their conversion to edinoverie or Orthodoxy.60
The suspicions of civil abuses paled into insignificance before the
unprecedented discovery of the secret religious life of the Russian people
that met the MVD’s investigators of dissent.61 As elsewhere in Europe, the
bureaucracy was shocked by a level of cultural diversity that threatened its
capabilities of state formation.62 Moreover, investigation suggested
that Old Belief did indeed serve to conceal intolerably subversive and

56
Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth, pp. 216–21.
57
On dissenters’ registration, see Werth, ‘In the State’s Embrace?’, in Kritika, v.7.3
(2006), 446–57.
58
See, for example, Evtuhov, Portrait of a Russian Province (Pittsburgh, 2011),
pp. 11–12; Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia, pp. 158–9.
59
Lincoln, Vanguard.
60
Lincoln has recognized the importance of a series of pioneering ‘statistical expeditions’
carried out in 1852 by ‘some of the Ministry’s most able officials.’ The primary goal of these
expeditions was to obtain more accurate statistics about the number of Old Believers.
Lincoln, Vanguard, pp. 118–21. These expeditions and later efforts to gather statistics
about Old Belief are described in Paert, ‘ “Two or Twenty Million” ’, pp. 75–97.
61
Recently historians have turned attention to the level of cultural heterodoxy that these
officials would have encountered. Freeze, ‘The Rechristianization of Russia’, Studia Slavica
Finlandensia, 7 (1990), 101–36; and Chulos, Converging Worlds (DeKalb, 2003).
62
Werth, Margins, pp. 5–6. See, for example, the policies of the French government in
the Rhineland. Rowe, From Reich to State (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 118–22.
 Introduction 19
uncontrolled activities such as flight, desertion, and unsupervised burial.
As it was spread throughout the Empire, and as it was everywhere
unknown, the quest to gather exact information about the raskol gained
momentum from these discoveries and—having a similar function to
banditry and vagrancy in southern Italy—extended the reach of the
central powers.63 Bibikov’s system, which was implemented by an extra-
ordinary Temporary Government, was the most remarkable realization of
this centralizing agenda; however, it is also testament to the inherent
weaknesses of the Russian state. For financial and structural reasons it
could not countenance the kind of institutional creations that might have
replaced the government’s reliance on the clergy for civil registration; and
the intransigence of Church and autocrat prevented any innovations that
might have placed the Old Believers’ communities on a more established
basis. In the absence of these options, the search for a solution inclined
more and more towards measures of administrative repression.
This is what generated the ever-growing emphasis on the political threat
carried by Old Belief. As the MVD sought to extend its reach over the lives
of the population, so it appropriated theories that made supervision, and
if necessary repressive measures, essential. Because its primary means of
centralization was to rely on a small number of officials to circumvent the
regular bureaucratic apparatus, the nationalist intellectuals who developed
these theories could gain substantial influence if they entered state service.
Once there they served the interests both of the state and of their own
social group, promoting the expertise of the latter as the means to solve the
dilemmas of the former. In this way they helped to shape the priorities
of the state-building agenda, and created the conditions for nationalism
and statism to develop in tandem.64 Bibikov’s system was the manifes-
tation of this joint development. Its arbitrary and repressive excesses, and
its subsequent collapse, indicated the impossibility of sustaining this
development upon stable foundations. The state was not powerful or
united enough to underpin a political programme based on the ideal of
national unity, while this ideal was not strong enough to replace, or
even to be formulated independently from, the political priorities of the
autocratic empire.65

63
Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy (London,
1988), pp. 71–90.
64
About the relationship of statism and nationalism in the development of the unitary
state, see Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Oxford, 2001), pp. 52–3.
65
On the need for nationalism to be underpinned by a powerful state, and for the state
to embrace the idea of congruity between polity and nation, see Gellner, Nations and
Nationalism (Oxford, 2006), especially John Breuilly’s introduction pp. xx–xxx.
20 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia

NATION-BUILDING

In the development of nations and nationalist movements, intellectuals

have been responsible for creating or packaging a national identity which
is then utilized by politicians.66 Feeling their political impotence, they
have turned to culture to take the leadership in the moral work of
preserving the character of the volk. They perceive this character as
being under threat from external hegemonic forces, and promote its
survival, and their own class interests, by declaring it to be the basis of
the strength of the state. So they imagine the unified nation-state long
before it comes into existence.67 Conditions in Russia in the 1830s and
1840s were ripe for such a cultural turn: the exclusion of the educated
public from political participation inclined them towards philosophy,
ethnography, and history; while their hostility towards a Germanized
bureaucracy, and their anxiety about their alienation from the peasant
narod, made them susceptible to romantic notions of the unique cultural
unity and destiny of nations. Most famously this gave rise to the philoso-
phy of the Slavophiles, but they were participants in a nascent nationalist
movement that provided a broad platform for intellectual cooperation of
moderate conservatives to progressive liberals. To an extent this move-
ment drew strength from the Official Nationality—which encouraged the
exploration of Russia’s historical path in contrast to that of the west.
However, as Nicholas Riasanovsky has shown, in contrast to the dynastic
tool of legitimization, this unofficial nationality cast the Russian people
‘not merely as obedient pawns but as bearers of a great future.’ Identifying
the force of the state in narodnost’, rather than autocracy, it envisaged the
possibility of reforms to improve the life of the masses and unleash their
creative potential.68
Russian nation-building was therefore split between the bureaucratic
and the demotic, between a chauvinistic attachment to the autocratic
state, and a populist concern for social progress.69 In the last years of
Nicholas’s reign, the Slavophiles and the organs of unofficial nationality
were suppressed, despite their evident loyalty to the regime. Yet, even at
this time, the rift was not absolute. The need for a more specialized and
better educated bureaucracy led, in the 1840s, to the emergence of a new

66
Miroslav Hroch, referred to in the Russian context in Hosking, Russia, pp. xxiii–xxvi.
67
Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation, especially pp. 8–16, 77–108.
68
Riasanovsky, Nicholas I, pp. 137–40.
69
Hosking, Russia, pp. xxiv–xxv; Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions in Imperial Russia
(Oxford, 1994), pp. 73–5.
 Introduction 21
breed of official: young, well-educated, and committed to the service of
the people.70 Their presence was particularly notable in the MVD which,
under Perovskii’s leadership, became the agency of choice for the educated
and ambitious.71 Here the determination to uncover the true conditions
in the provinces supported, and became dependent upon, the interpret-
ation of the national culture and character that was simultaneously being
undertaken by intellectuals.72 This enabled reconciliation between the
state and the intelligentsia in pursuit of the national sciences of ethnog-
raphy and statistics.
The characters and contributions of the ‘enlightened bureaucrats’ who
personified this reconciliation are the subjects of W. Bruce Lincoln’s
masterful book, In the Vanguard of Reform. The present work is indebted
to his analysis of this self-consciously progressive group who possessed an
exalted sense of their abilities and mission, and found in state service,
despite their dislike of the reactionary regime and its outdated laws, a path
to meaningful political activity.73 Lincoln has focused on the enlightened
bureaucrats’ search for social justice, and so assessed their impact in the
light of Alexander II’s Great Reforms. From this perspective, the 1840s
and early 1850s appear as a period of preparation in which, Lincoln has
argued, they had still not found the means to convert information into
positive policies.74 It was, however, these same individuals who provided
the ideological basis for Bibikov’s system, and who, in its implementation,
reached the summit of legislative and administrative power. It is an
important episode in the growing influence of the enlightened bureaucrats
and, given its divergence from the usual emphasis upon their liberalizing
impact, it is one that requires explanation. In this case, their reconciliation
with the regime was not dictated by the search for social justice alone. It
reveals their importance as the intellectual bearers of the unifying national
idea—a future-orientated policy that could only be realized in association
with a strong state.75

70
Pintner, ‘The Russian Civil Service on the Eve of the Great Reforms’, Journal of Social
History (1975), 55–68; Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chi-
cago, 1976); Lincoln, Vanguard.
71
Lincoln, Vanguard, pp. 34–42.
72
Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia, pp. 158–9. On the importance of this devel-
opment in provincial cities, see Evtuhov, Portrait, pp. 11–18, and passim.
73
Lincoln, Vanguard, pp. 39, 69–88. Their mentality is also discussed in Richard
Wortman’s examination of the officials of the Ministry of Justice. Wortman, Development,
pp. 217–23.
74
Lincoln, Vanguard, pp. 105, 137–9.
75
Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation, pp. 78–81; Raeff, Political Ideas and Institutions,
pp. 66–7.
22 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia
To reconcile with the regime was the means to reconcile with the
people. To continue to study Russia and the Russians under the auspices
of the state was the means to construct it on national foundations. Thus
could the distinctiveness of the narod be preserved, and the gulf between
them and the Europeanized elite be overcome. These were the conditions
that the enlightened bureaucrats set upon Russia’s modernization. While
they believed in social and scientific progress, they looked to the past—
before Peter I had split the nation with his westernizing reforms—for their
models of cultural unity. But, to paraphrase Ernest Gellner, their nation-
alist ideology was a ‘false consciousness’: it claimed to defend a popular
culture rooted in history but led, in the pursuit of homogeneity, towards
the imposition of a new high culture.76 In the national imaginings of these
intellectuals Russian Orthodoxy loomed large. The supposed religious
indifference of the elite, and the foreign aesthetic that had been imposed
upon the churches in their subjection to the state, were signs of its cultural
betrayal. In contrast, an ethnographic and historical understanding of the
Russian narod as a people defined primarily by their religiosity served not
only to distinguish them from the materialistic and political west, but to
give the idea of a revitalized Church huge cultural significance in its
potential ability to unite the divided nation. The national awakening of
the intellectuals thereby coincided with what Marc Raeff has described as
the first theological and religious renaissance in modern Russian history.77
Both churchmen and laymen participated in the burgeoning academic
societies and journals that were beginning to elaborate the Russian
national spirit.
In certain respects, Old Belief was a form of popular national con-
sciousness that preempted the cultural turn of the elites by more than a
century. The Old Believers’ rejection of Nikon’s reforms led them to reject
Europeanizing trends in which they found evidence for the fall of Ortho-
dox Russia, and they set out to preserve the fashions, icons and religious
texts of the pre-Nikonian era.78 So, in the 1830s and 1840s, when
intellectuals began to search for the creations of a purely Russian culture,
they encountered the valuable collections of Old Believer merchants, and
when they considered the tragedy of the pious narod, who had been
estranged by the secularizing and westernizing excesses of state and soci-
ety, they found its most tangible manifestation in the self-imposed separ-
ation of the Old Believer communities. To an extent this engendered a

76
Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, p. 119.
77
Raeff, Understanding Imperial Russia, pp. 154–5.
78
For this political and cultural significance, see Cherniavsky, ‘The Old Believers and
the New Religion’, Slavic Review, 15 (1966), 1–39.
 Introduction 23
new sympathy for the Old Believers, whose stubbornness no longer
appeared to be a matter of superstitious ignorance but rather a sign of
the agency of the people in opposing what was alien to them. However, at
the same time, it made Old Belief into a problem that demanded inter-
pretation and resolution as a consequence and perpetuation of Russia’s
national disunity.
While reforming the social order, or the structure of the laws and the
state, remained distant dreams, healing the Russian Orthodox schism was
a politically legitimate and pursuable goal for the intellectuals who entered
state service. Their mentality demanded action, and so they gave the
problem disproportionate significance as the means by which national
reconciliation could be achieved.79 In so doing, by their own logic, they
put the symptom before the cause. They saw in the success of Old Belief a
sign that the state had failed the narod, yet without the possibility of wide-
ranging reforms they aimed towards eradicating the raskol on the basis of
their moral authority alone, as the interpreters of the popular spirit. This
presupposed a fundamental ideal of Russianness that moved the Old
Believers, and to which the enlightened bureaucrats could appeal. When
it transpired that this ideal did not exist, neither among the dissenters nor
among the population at large, Old Belief was transformed from symptom
to cause. A scapegoat for the failure of the nationalist ‘false consciousness’
to bring about a general rapprochement was found in the Old Believers’
perverted nationality that led the people astray.80 This was a persuasive
theory for the enlightened bureaucrats due to the radical guises in which
they encountered Old Belief, and due to its apparent prevalence in the
spiritual heartlands of the ethnic Russian lands: in Moscow and in the
historic provinces of the upper Volga where the key investigations were
carried out. Urgent measures now seemed unavoidable to them if religion
was not to make the fissure between educated society and the people
implacable and irreversible.
These took such a draconian form in part because, in their urgency,
the enlightened bureaucrats unwittingly politicized Old Belief by
endowing it with their own ideas about how the governing elite had
betrayed the people. However, without the hope of the reforms that
might disarm its appeal, the intervention of the authoritarian state
appeared to be the only means to stem its destructive force. Therefore,
like the German liberals from the time of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, these

79
On this mentality, see Wortman, Development, pp. 217–18.
80
On the elite’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories due to their alienation from the
people, see Hosking, Russia, p. 141.
24 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia
Russian intellectuals compromised their progressive principles in the
cause of national unity.81
The ideological foundations of the resulting system echoed an absolut-
ist past and presaged a totalitarian future. Unable to articulate the idea of
national unity independently from the existing political order, Bibikov’s
policies demanded that the Old Believers’ be recognized as politically
criminal for not accepting the divine nature of the tsar’s power. The
crime was, however, framed not in terms of its denigration of the royal
person, but according to the romantic notion that it perverted an idealized
popular spirit.82 This demanded a new right for the state to act, by
emergency measures, to enforce a moral conscious unity. Bibikov’s sys-
tem, while anomalous in the century, thus foreordained the notion of the
Soviet man by which the regime concerned itself not only with the
population’s external obedience but with their internal beliefs.83 It was
an ominous indication of the intolerance and arbitrariness that could
result from the cooperation of the state and the intelligentsia.
The disastrous consequences of this cooperation came from the fact
that the modernizing impulses towards state intervention and cultural
homogeneity were stymied by a political and social structure that was
resistant to change. Both administrative modernizers and enlightened
bureaucrats lacked respect for the laws as they stood, and they attempted
to impose a new type of government—efficient, pervasive, and responsive
to popular needs—irrespective of them. Yet, if this rendered their efforts
anachronistic within the wider tsarist polity, they were not altogether so in
relation to social and economic conditions. It has been argued that statism
and nationalism arose in response to the novel mobility of industrial
societies; and although the Russian Empire did not experience large-
scale industrialization until late in the nineteenth century, neither did it
remain statically feudal until the Emancipation edict of 1861.

81
Schwan, ‘German Liberalism and the National Question in the Nineteenth Century’,
Schulze (ed.), Nation Building in Central Europe (Leamington Spa, 1987), pp. 65–6. There
are further parallels between Bibikov’s system and Bismarck’s Kulturkampf of the 1870s.
Both came from the confluence of the concerns of public opinion that saw a religious
minority as inimical to their notions of national progress, with the sovereign’s fear of
revolution, which transformed these concerns into political action. Ross, The Failure of
Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (Washington, D.C., 1998), p. 5.
82
This idea was also present in the development of German romantic nationalism.
Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation, pp. 84–8.
83
This opposes Peter Holquist’s view that until the Soviet Union the Russian regime
was only interested in the maintenance of external order. Holquist, ‘Information is the
Alpha and Omega of Our Work: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context’,
Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997), 415–450,421. Andrei Zorin has noted the potential
similarity of Official Nationality to the idea of the Soviet man in relation to the Old
Believers. Zorin, Kormia dvuglavogo orla, p. 366.
 Introduction 25

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE

By the 1840s, large, mobile proto-industrial populations were discernible

in the provinces; and powerful capitalist dynasties emerged in the cities.84
These developments drove the centralizing state into provincial towns in
an attempt to understand their uncontrolled economies.85 It also pro-
voked a reaction from intellectuals who, while accepting the need to
participate in modernity, saw in the destabilizing impact of western
materialism a threat to the Russian people’s spiritual uniqueness.86 They
gave new attention to the merchant class as the potential carriers of
popular culture into the modern age.87 Here lay the defining conditions
of the crisis of toleration, for the Old Believers possessed an entrepreneur-
ial ethic—founded on the social self-sufficiency and traditions of mutual
aid to which persecution had given rise—that gave them a leading position
among the new economic forces.88 As culprits were sought to explain the
state’s lack of control over the people, and the intellectuals’ lack of
connection with them, so the association of Old Belief and commercial
activity served to demonstrate how capitalist development could under-
mine the possibility of national harmony. What sets apart the policies of
religious persecution between 1853 and 1855 from any other period in
Imperial Russia was that they were directed not against figures of religious
authority, but against a social elite: the merchants and industrialists of
Old Believer society. Their primary target was a group of individuals
who had come to be seen as a dissenting plutocracy, ruling from Russia’s
ancient capital.
Long before Bibikov’s system, the Rogozhskoe and Preobrazhenskoe
cemeteries in Moscow were stunning manifestations of the independent

84
Ernest Gellner links industrialism to the development of nationalism and statism.
Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. On the illusory nature of the picture of feudalism in the
Russian provinces, and the emergence of the new capitalist type in the 1840s and 1850s, see
Evtuhov, Portrait, pp. 103–10, and Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia (Cambridge,
1981), pp. 22–3.
85
Statistical studies of the town economies were central to Perovskii’s and Bibikov’s
modernizing methods. Varadinov, Istoriia, v.3.2, pp. 703–6; v.3.3, pp. 6–7, 33.
86
On the ambivalent attitude to modernity in nationalism, see Jusdanis, The Necessary
Nation, pp. 100–1.
87
Merchants received similar attention elsewhere in the search for cultural homogen-
eity. Rowe, From Reich to State, pp. 122–3.
88
Much has been written about the importance of the Old Believers as an avant-garde in
the emergence of Russian capitalism. See, for example, Ryndziunskii, Gorodskoe grazh-
danstvo; Blackwell, ‘The Old Believers and the rise of private industrial enterprise in early
nineteenth-century Moscow’, Slavic Review, 24 (1965), 407–24; Gerschenkron, Europe in
the Russian Mirror (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 1–61; Evtuhov, Portrait, pp. 76–9.
26 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia
creativity of the people when empowered by merchant wealth. Upon its
completion in 1792, the Rogozhskoe Pokrovskii Church was one of the
largest places of worship in the Empire. It was the second of three
gloriously decorated churches to be built on the site by the first decade
of the nineteenth century. The chapels of the Preobrazhenskoe Cemetery
were more modest, but the adjoining male and female compounds were
surrounded by high, turreted and towered walls that resembled those of
the Kremlin. It was, however, in the 1830s and 1840s, when some of
Russia’s most powerful industrialists could be counted among the Pre-
obrazhenskoe and Rogozhskoe guardians, that they reached the peak of
their influence as the national centres of Old Belief. The factories of their
prominent patrons served to attract a peasant labour force (and new
parishioners for the cemeteries’ churches) from all corners of the Empire.
The attention that Nicholas I’s government gave to restraining their
corrupting religious power, only revealed the resilience of the Old Believ-
ers’ secret organization. The investigations that attempted to uncover this
organization in the late 1840s and 1850s made remarkable discoveries
about its capabilities, and its economic and civil self-confidence. To an
extent Bibikov’s system was introduced to deal with the new threats that
were thereby revealed. While the danger of the Old Believers was certainly
exaggerated in these years, the threats were novel and genuinely subver-
sive. The origins of the crisis of religious toleration are thus to be found
not only in the proactive modernizing agendas of state-building and
nation-building, but in their mobilization as a reaction to the Russian
population’s autarkic modernity.

OVERVIEW

The extraordinary events and unprecedented investigations that engen-

dered the crisis are the subjects of the first part of this book. Chapter 1
examines the political reverberations of a watershed moment in the history
of Old Belief. Driven to despair by the government’s attempts to deprive
them of fugitive Orthodox priests, the popovtsy leaders supported an
attempt to establish an Old Believer episcopate in Austrian Bukovina.
This was achieved in 1846 with the approval of the Austrian government.
Nicholas was convinced of Old Belief ’s religious illegitimacy, but the
search for religious freedom became a matter for his political concern
when it entered into international affairs. Against a backdrop of European
revolution, the Old Believers’ foreign connections led the autocrat to
demand active measures.
 Introduction 27
A new approach to the regime’s policies of toleration was also
demanded by the MVD, for the legal anomalies of Old Belief frustrated
its state-building agenda. As shall be seen in Chapter 2, these frustrations
intensified in the 1840s and began to focus on the Preobrazhenskoe
Cemetery. The attempt to subject the Moscow centre, and hence the
bespopovtsy, to general resolutions tested the limits of toleration; however,
in the absence of fundamental change—which was prohibited on one side
by the Church and tsar, and on the other by the regime’s modern
European pretensions—establishing state control proved to be elusive.
Rather, a new obstacle to control emerged in the shape of dissenting
merchants and their ability to defend their rights. In the light of these
failures, the MVD was attracted to ideas that made establishing control a
matter of political necessity.
Chapter 3 shows how these were provided by the enlightened bureau-
crats, whose theoretical ideal of the narod collided with reality when they
were sent out to the provinces in the early 1850s to investigate Old Belief.
The investigations were initiated by the discovery of the beguny—a radical
branch of Old Belief whose teaching that the tsar was the Antichrist
required its followers to disobey the laws and live a life of concealment.
The results of the investigations were statistical revelations about the
number of Old Believers that revolutionized the understanding of Russia’s
spiritual landscape. Confronted by a faith that nourished hatred towards
Orthodox society, and the possibility that it was spread among the vast
ranks of secret raskol’niki, the enlightened bureaucrats created a sense of
national political emergency.
Part Two is the story of the conception, implementation, and failure of
Bibikov’s system from 1853 to 1855. It revolves around a central paradox:
how a set of policies that were based on the modern ideas of the unified
state and nation ultimately foundered because they could only be realized
by anchoring themselves to traditional notions of absolute power and
divine authority that were no longer accepted by state or society. It reveals
a limited autocracy that was bound by its pretensions towards law and
secularity, and that could not find either a conservative or progressive basis
for political stability.
Chapter 4 describes the dual nature of Bibikov’s system. As a response
to a political emergency—the perversion of the national spirit—and a
social and legal anomaly—a state within the state—it provided an extra-
ordinary means to eradicate Old Belief as a problem that could not be
dealt with through the usual legal order; however, from the outset its
instigators declared their intention to implement the system in complete
secrecy according to existing laws and without violating the division
between the civil and religious spheres. The impossibility of reconciling
28 The Crisis of Religious Toleration in Imperial Russia
these two sides became apparent in the attempts to bring the Preobraz-
henskoe and Rogozhskoe cemeteries under control, which are examined in
Chapters 5 and 6.
Chapter 7 asks why Bibikov’s system was characterized by a hostility
towards trade and industry that culminated in a law, promulgated in
October 1854, prohibiting Old Believers from registering into merchant
guilds. It concludes that there was a significant anti-capitalist dimension to
both nationalist thought, and to the controlling ambitions of the state,
that was inflamed by the economic strength of Old Belief. This strength
was the cause of the law’s demise, for both the dissenters and influential
statesmen rose in protest against it. The opposition of the latter, which led
to fierce political fighting and the collapse of Bibikov’s system after
Nicholas’s death, is the subject of Chapter 8. In part these battles reflected
the desire to put an end to the previous reign’s authoritarian excesses, and
impose legal norms upon Alexander II; however, the modernizing
impulses that lay behind the system provoked the most reactionary figures
to become the champions of religious toleration and legality.
The events described in this book were perhaps the most significant acts
of religious repression in Russia in the nineteenth century. They had a
decisive impact upon the social, economic, cultural, and religious history
of Old Belief. Despite its short duration, Bibikov’s system was responsible
for the arrest, imprisonment, and exile of hundreds of Old Believers, and
the forced conversion of thousands more. The reign of terror of Bibikov’s
agents in Moscow and in the provinces became the stuff of Old Believer
folklore; and its destructiveness was witnessed in the dissolution or con-
version of churches, monasteries, and hermitages throughout Russia.
But this book is primarily an examination of how state policies were
formed and implemented. While there has been an attempt to determine
the impact of the government’s measures where possible, there has been
neither the time nor the space to undertake a detailed analysis of how they
effected the dissenters’ lives.89 Nor have I examined how the crisis of
toleration was reflected in relations more generally between the Old

89
There are many excellent and detailed recent regional studies of the social and cultural
history of Old Belief, both published and unpublished. These include: I.S. Nagradov,
Staroobriadcheskii mir Kostromskoi gubernii (II chetvert’ XIX—nachalo XX vv.) (Kostroma,
2008); V.V. Mashkovtseva, Konfessional’naia politika gosudarstva po otnosheniiu k staroo-
briadtsam vo vtoroi polovine XIX—nachale XX veka (na materialakh Viatskoi gubernii) (Kirov,
2006); N.V. Prokof’eva, ‘Staroobriadchestvo verkhnego Povolzh’ia v kontse XVIII—
nachale XX vv’ (Candidate dissertation, Iaroslavl’, 2001); A.A. Vinogradov, ‘Staroobriadtsy
simbirsko-ul’ianovskogo povolzh’ia serediny XIX—pervoi treti XX vv’ (Candidate disser-
tation, Ul’ianovsk, 2010); S.A. Obukhovich, ‘Staroobriadchestvo Samaro-Saratovskogo
Povolzh’ia vtoroi poloviny XIX—nachala XX v: vklad v ekonomiku i kul’turu kraia’
(Candidate dissertation, Moscow, 2008).
Other documents randomly have
different content
 Leur attitude ne m'était pas très-hostile. Ce jour-là on devinait
qu'ils ne tenaient pas absolument à voir la maison brûler, mais ils ne
se sentaient pas le courage de s'opposer à un ordre de la Commune.
Ils semblaient dire : Tirez-vous de là comme vous pourrez ; ici
chacun joue sa peau, défendez la vôtre. Tout ce que nous pouvons
faire, c'est de ne pas nous en mêler. Ils craignaient de passer pour
suspects et tremblaient devant ce chiffon de papier qui représentait
la Commune.
J'avisai alors des gardes nationaux habitant le voisinage ; je leur
fis comprendre que l'incendie de cette maison était l'incendie du
quartier, et que ce qu'ils possédaient serait naturellement détruit. En
effet, la rue du Roule, qui forme encoignure avec le magasin de
Henri IV, est formée de vieilles constructions, de maisons petites,
enchevêtrées les unes dans les autres et qui auraient brûlé d'autant
mieux jusqu'à la dernière qu'il était défendu sous peine de mort de
jeter un seau d'eau sur une maison incendiée.
Parmi ces gardes nationaux j'en remarquai deux qui semblaient
plus énergiques que les autres. Je les pris à part :
— Alors vous êtes décidés à vous laisser brûler?
— C'est vrai que c'est embêtant ; mais qu'est-ce que vous voulez
que nous y fassions?
— Il faut se défendre ; la vie d'un homme aujourd'hui ne pèse
pas une once ; vous avez des armes ; envoyez une balle dans la tête
ou un coup de baïonnette au premier qui s'avancera pour mettre le
feu ; le second réfléchira avant de risquer l'aventure.
Le sinistre gredin qui voulait nous brûler n'osait rien dire. Je
sentais qu'il avait peur de perdre la partie et l'enjeu était sérieux. Je
profitai de son hésitation ; je montai la tête de mes hommes, et ils
finirent par me dire :
— C'est entendu, le premier qui approchera recevra son affaire.
Je les plaçai devant la porte.
— Restez là et ne bougez pas. Tenez seulement un quart
d'heure, je me charge du reste.
 Je sentais bien que je venais d'obtenir un simple répit.
L'incendiaire s'était glissé dans la foule, et j'allais avoir sur les bras le
rebut de cette canaille.
Je courus le quartier et je fus assez heureux pour mettre la main
sur un commandant d'état-major, homme qui semblait bien élevé et
qui n'était point ivre.
— Colonel (il sourit de la façon la plus gracieuse), venez donc me
dégager, on veut brûler mon ambulance.
Je me gardai bien de dire que c'était la maison voisine ; en pareil
cas on ment avec un aplomb superbe. Du reste j'avais flatté sa
vanité en le traitant de colonel ; il était à moi.
— Brûler votre ambulance! c'est absurde ; je ne veux pas de
cela.
Je fis venir les officiers et le porteur de l'ordre communeux, qui
était en train d'exciter la foule. Appuyé par le commandant qui
entrait tout à fait dans mon plan de résistance, je me fis écouter. Je
représentai à ces brutes qu'il était odieux de songer à brûler une
ambulance renfermant leurs frères, qui avaient versé leur sang pour
leur cause, etc.
La vérité, c'est qu'en fait de blessés je n'avais qu'une quarantaine
de matelas sauvés du pillage des maisons voisines et un pauvre
diable qu'ils avaient entraîné de force et qui s'était dit blessé pour
leur échapper.
Je n'ai pas besoin d'ajouter qu'ils ignoraient entièrement cette
circonstance, car je n'avais laissé pénétrer personne dans ma
maison ; quand la porte s'ouvrait, et Dieu sait combien de fois ils
tirèrent la sonnette, j'étais toujours là pour en barrer l'entrée ; et
j'avais été assez heureux pour repousser toutes les réquisitions ou
perquisitions qu'ils avaient voulu me faire subir depuis la veille.
Le vent tournait de mon côté, j'étais maître de la situation. Dans
ces bagarres, un rien suffit pour vous perdre ou vous sauver ; si
vous ne dominez pas la foule, elle vous écrase. La majorité était
passée de mon côté et j'étais absolument disposé à m'en servir.
 Alors l'homme au papier composa et me dit :
— Je consens à ne pas mettre le feu, mais à la condition que tout
sera détruit et brisé dans la maison.
— Il y a une heure que vos amis sont là-haut, et vous devez
comprendre que sous ce rapport il ne doit plus rien rester à faire.
— Major, ajouta un capitaine, il faut que ces gens-là soient punis
(punis de quoi, mon Dieu!). Prenez tout le linge pour votre
ambulance, et le vin de la cave pour vos blessés.
— J'accepte avec reconnaissance, seulement pour l'instant j'ai
assez du linge qui est sur le trottoir, et comme le vin est dans la cave
je sais où j'en pourrai faire prendre si j'en ai besoin. Mais je crois
qu'il serait bon, maintenant que nous nous entendons, de faire
descendre les hommes qui sont dans la maison.
— Prenez deux gardes et faites évacuer.
Je montai, suivi de deux chenapans qui m'aidèrent à faire
déguerpir leurs camarades, et je fermai la porte de la rue. Je fis
porter à mon ambulance la literie et le linge qui jonchaient le trottoir.
Le tout fut mis en sûreté.
— Maintenant, capitaine, il nous faudrait un piquet autour de la
maison. L'homme au papier n'est plus là, mais il pourrait revenir
quand je serai parti.
— Combien vous faut-il d'hommes?
— Huit.
— Prenez-en cinq.
J'en ajoutai trois aux deux dont j'étais sûr, et je me permis de
donner la consigne. Les officiers me laissaient faire.
— Mes enfants, si vous ne voulez pas que vos familles rôtissent
cette nuit, il faut faire feu sur tout individu qui s'approchera pour
brûler la maison. S'il a un ordre écrit, envoyez-moi chercher, et nous
tâcherons qu'il ne soit pas exécuté.
— Major, soyez tranquille.
 Malgré cette assurance, moi et mes ambulanciers, — de braves
négociants de ma maison, MM. Morel, Raulin et Schevetzer — nous
exerçâmes une surveillance active.
Pour ce jour-là nous étions sauvés.
Un détail assez comique de l'expulsion que je fis des pillards qui
occupaient la maison.
Comme je descendais l'escalier, suivi de ces honnêtes citoyens
qui venaient de remplir leurs poches, un d'eux, grand drôle ayant
une certaine autorité sur la bande, me dit :
— Major, je veux qu'on me fouille. J'ai tout cassé, c'est vrai,
c'était pour le bien, mais je ne suis pas un voleur, et je veux qu'on
visite mes poches.
— Vous fouiller? vous! je le défends, vous êtes un honnête
homme, ces choses-là se peignent sur la figure, et je réponds de
votre probité.
Un instant après, comme je faisais enlever et transporter au loin
les débris de planches, de meubles et d'enseignes qui jonchaient le
trottoir, et dont on aurait pu, au moyen d'une simple allumette, faire
un feu de joie dangereux, je vis mon homme au milieu de la rue,
dans un cercle de gardes nationaux. Il avait quitté sa vareuse, son
gilet, et se disposait à quitter le reste, quand je m'approchai.
— Que faites-vous donc là?
— Je veux qu'on me fouille, me dit-il, avec la ténacité d'un
ivrogne.
— Qui donc fait ici à cet homme l'injure de douter de sa probité?
Je réponds de lui, c'est un honnête citoyen. Habillez-vous, personne
n'oserait vous fouiller.
Au fond je ne l'aurais pas juré, et c'était probablement la
première fois qu'on lui rendait un pareil hommage. Mais honnête ou
non, je venais de m'attacher un homme dévoué, et pour le moment
j'avais besoin de gens dévoués.
O ma bonne casquette d'ambulance, c'est à toi que je devais ce
résultat! Grâce au prestige que tu exerces sur des gens qui sentent
que dans un instant ils peuvent avoir besoin de chirurgien, j'ai pu me
faire entendre de ces brutes avinées, et sauver notre maison et celle
de mes amis!
Vers le soir, le misérable qui avait organisé le pillage amena sa
femme à l'ambulance, nous priant de lui donner l'hospitalité pour la
nuit. Je n'étais pas là, et n'osai ensuite la mettre dehors ; mais je
sentis que c'était un espion, chargé de rendre compte de nos
sentiments politiques, et de nous faire fusiller si les Versaillais
avaient été repoussés. Ces gens-là ne me pardonnaient pas d'avoir
fait échouer l'incendie de la maison.
 XII

Le mercredi matin 24 mai, un de mes ambulanciers, M. Raulin,

était sur la porte vers six heures, lorsque passe un grand vieillard, la
barbe grise, l'œil creux, sans uniforme, et portant le képi fédéré.
— Vous ne vous attendiez pas à celle-là, dit-il avec un sourire, en
montrant les Tuileries qui flambaient.
— Ma foi, non, répond l'ambulancier ; je n'aurais jamais cru la
Commune aussi canaille.
— Aussi canaille! Ah! c'est comme cela, vous allez avoir de mes
nouvelles.
On me prévient de ce qui vient de se passer. Je cours après ce
vieux sauvage qui retournait à grands pas du côté de l'Hôtel de Ville,
et je cherche à savoir ce qu'il appelle « de ses nouvelles. »
— Citoyen, un de vos hommes vient de traiter la Commune de
canaille. Voici ma carte, — il me montra une grande carte verte qui
lui conférait un grade que je ne me donnai pas la peine de
constater ; — je vais à l'Hôtel de Ville, et dans une demi-heure votre
maison flambera.
Décidément, j'étais prédestiné à l'auto-da-fé.
— C'est impossible qu'il vous ait dit une pareille chose, vous
aurez mal entendu. C'est un bon citoyen, incapable de dire du mal
de la Commune.
 — J'ai parfaitement entendu, vous êtes des réactionnaires, et on
va faire votre affaire.
— Vous ne savez pas ce que vous dites, nous sommes des
ambulanciers, et on ne brûle pas une ambulance. — Et je
recommençai pour lui mon discours de la veille ; c'était de
l'éloquence absolument perdue.
— Je me fiche pas mal des ambulances! dans une demi-heure
vous flamberez, voilà mon dernier mot.
Je déployai toutes mes séductions pour apaiser cet atroce
vieillard, et c'était difficile, car il appartenait à la catégorie des
fanatiques. Après de longs et inutiles pourparlers, je lui dis :
— Sur l'honneur, avez-vous entendu le propos que vous attribuez
à mon ambulancier?
— Sur l'honneur, je l'ai entendu.
Quelle belle garantie pour moi que l'honneur de ce vieux
misérable! Du reste j'étais bien sûr de sa véracité.
— Alors c'est un traître qui m'a trompé, il faut qu'il soit puni ;
fusillons-le.
— A la bonne heure, vous êtes un vrai citoyen, nous pouvons
nous entendre ; fusillons-le. — Et son œil gris éteignit ses flammes.
— C'est entendu, il faut le fusiller, mais pas tout de suite, quand
tout sera fini ; vous comprenez que j'en ai besoin pour soigner mes
blessés.
La contestation recommença de plus belle, et j'eus toutes les
peines du monde à obtenir un sursis de vingt-quatre heures. Il
l'accorda enfin, c'est tout ce que je demandais, car je me disais tout
bas : Mon bon ami, dans vingt-quatre heures, ce n'est plus vous qui
fusillerez, ce sera nous.
Du reste, mon parti était pris ; si je n'avais pas pu le dompter, je
l'aurais fait entrer chez moi pour exécuter la sentence, je fermais la
porte, et il y a gros à parier qu'elle ne se serait jamais ouverte pour
lui. Avant tout, je voulais sauver moi et les miens.
 Pendant cette algarade, je constatai que le piquet que j'avais fait
placer pour garder la maison voisine, avait disparu. Les troupes
étaient changées. J'allai trouver un capitaine pour lui demander mon
piquet, lui disant les motifs qui nécessitaient sa présence.
— Eh bien, quand on brûlerait la maison, voilà-t-il pas! Vous
aurez de la chance si on ne brûle pas tout le quartier. Vous vous êtes
si bien conduits dans l'arrondissement!
Je trouvai épique la réponse de ce malfaiteur estimant que
c'étaient les honnêtes gens qui se conduisaient mal.
— Très-bien, si vous trouvez bon de brûler vos blessés, je n'ai
rien à dire, c'est votre affaire et je ne m'en mêle plus.
La porte de la maison menacée était ouverte, la concierge me dit
que les insurgés s'occupaient à la piller ; j'étais consterné. Les laisser
faire me semblait extrêmement dangereux, car depuis la veille
l'incendie était passé dans leurs habitudes, et ils auraient mis le feu
en se retirant ; les faire déguerpir me paraissait assez difficile, je
n'avais plus mon escorte de la veille pour me protéger, et ce jour-là
les fusils partaient seuls, surtout quand on devenait gênant ou
indiscret. Je montai l'escalier et trouvai les misérables en train de
faire des paquets des objets à leur convenance. Je pris un air très-
affairé et me mis à crier aux différents étages :
— Allons, citoyens, ce n'est pas notre place ici ; les Versaillais
arrivent. Descendons, vos frères vous attendent… etc.
Et je descendis l'escalier suivi de toute la bande, que l'annonce
des Versaillais impressionnait désagréablement. Je tenais la rampe,
le menton sur l'épaule, regardant en arrière si quelque canon de fusil
n'était point braqué sur moi. Enfin, lorsque j'eus gagné la rue sain et
sauf et que j'eus fermé la porte, je poussai un gros soupir de
satisfaction et de soulagement. Mon stratagème avait réussi, c'était
un grand danger d'évité.
La plupart de ces bandits emportaient leur butin, et pas un n'eut
l'idée, bien entendu, de demander à être fouillé.
Une heure après, une fusillade intense se fit entendre en face de
la maison. Les barricades étaient occupées et fonctionnaient avec un
tapage infernal.
Tout à coup survient une panique, on frappe à la porte, et je vois
apparaître l'homme au pillage de la veille, dont je savais alors le
nom : Michel, du 12e bataillon, demeurant rue Saint-Germain-
l'Auxerrois. Je savais également alors qu'il avait appartenu comme
commis au magasin de confection.
— On bat en retraite, cachez-moi.
— Je n'admets pas ici d'hommes armés non blessés ; vous avez
le temps encore de vous sauver ailleurs, partez. Cependant je vous
permets de revenir avec une balle dans le ventre.
Et je le mis à la porte.
— Mais vous ne voyez donc pas, dit-il en s'en allant, que tout
brûle?
Alors un spectacle terrible s'offrit à mes yeux. La maison qui fait
face à la mienne, le no 79, commençait à brûler ; les flammes
sortaient en hautes gerbes par les neuf fenêtres du premier. Or,
comme il était défendu sous peine de mort de lancer un seau d'eau
sur le feu, nous calculions combien de temps, à peu près, il faudrait
à cette maison, — occupée par un grand magasin de parfumerie et
par une maison de deuil, — pour flamber du haut en bas et pour
nous jeter sa fournaise en s'écroulant sur nous.
Il paraît que le truc du coup de fusil tiré par les fenêtres a du
bon, car c'est encore le prétexte qui fut invoqué dans ce cas. Peut-
être que l'homme au papier, qui tenait si fort à nous brûler la veille,
avait voulu utiliser son ordre de la Commune.
Voici comment les choses se passèrent après la comédie du coup
de fusil. Ils pénétrèrent dans la maison en enfonçant la porte, et
montèrent au premier chez un banquier. Ils signifièrent au peu de
locataires qui restaient de sortir de suite sans prendre la peine de
rien emporter, parce que la maison allait être brûlée.
Ils étaient, m'a-t-on dit, trois gredins ; l'un gardait la porte en
bas, les deux autres accomplissaient leur sinistre besogne.
 L'un d'eux amassait, au milieu des meubles, les papiers du
banquier, disposait méthodiquement ces éléments de combustion et
plaçait dessous une allumette. Pendant ce temps, l'autre écoutait
avec une parfaite indifférence les supplications des locataires affolés
qui le conjuraient, à genoux, de ne pas les ruiner. Pour toute
consolation, il leur disait : « Si dans cinq minutes vous n'êtes pas
partis, l'escalier sera en feu et vous grillerez tous. »
Il y avait dans la maison une jeune fille phthisique et presque
mourante, mademoiselle D…, qui ne pouvait quitter son lit ; sa mère
poussait des cris déchirants.
— Mais ma fille ne vous a rien fait, vous ne pouvez pas
cependant la brûler vive.
— Je n'y puis rien, il faut que la maison soit brûlée ; cependant il
est possible que je sauve la fille, mais à la condition que vous me
jurerez que, si je suis pris, vous me ferez obtenir ma grâce pour
vous avoir rendu ce service.
Stupide brute, qui croit mériter sa grâce parce qu'il s'arrête à son
onzième crime au lieu de compléter la douzaine!
La mère jura, bien entendu, et le misérable partit avec la jeune
fille sur son dos, et il exigea que la sœur de la mourante montât la
garde, armée de son fusil, à la porte de la rue jusqu'à son retour.
Nous recueillîmes deux des victimes dans notre ambulance. Leur
fortune était contenue dans un mouchoir noué par les coins. Les
autres n'emportaient que les vêtements qui les couvraient.
Nous étions réunis dans la cour, devisant assez tristement en
attendant le moment où l'incendie nous obligerait à nous enfuir par
les toits, car par la rue il n'y fallait pas songer : elle était sillonnée
par un véritable ouragan de projectiles. Les balles, les obus, les
boulets sifflaient, éclataient avec un tapage infernal, heurtaient la
porte, crevaient les devantures des magasins, en brisaient les glaces,
et cela depuis huit heures du matin jusqu'à cinq heures du soir.
Nous écoutions cette tempête avec une véritable indifférence ;
une seule chose nous préoccupait : le feu, car non-seulement nous
perdions beaucoup ou même tout par le feu, mais encore il nous
fallait exécuter, avec nos femmes et nos enfants, un voyage à
travers les toits. Et, malgré les explorations auxquelles nous, les
hommes, nous nous étions préalablement livrés, je n'avais vu bien
nettement que les dangers du voyage aérien, mais je n'en
connaissais véritablement pas l'issue. La seule possible, était une
étroite croisée fermée de deux gros barreaux de fer, et nous
manquions d'outils pour les faire sauter. Et encore après avoir réussi
à ouvrir cette voie, nous ne savions pas du tout où elle aboutissait.
Tout le monde avait fui ou se cachait dans les caves.
Chacun de nous avait fait son petit sac contenant ses valeurs et
ses objets précieux. Chacun était prêt à se l'attacher aux flancs, à
quitter pour toujours son foyer, et à courir sur les toits vers
l'inconnu.
Il y a quelque chose de bien profondément mélancolique dans le
dernier regard qu'on jette sur les meubles auxquels on dit adieu. A
chacun d'eux se rattache un souvenir, une habitude. On les
considère en quelque sorte comme des membres de la famille, et
l'argent ne peut remplacer les souvenirs.
De temps en temps, l'un de nous montait dans la maison pour
surveiller les progrès de l'incendie. On s'approchait des fenêtres en
rampant sur les parquets, de peur d'être aperçu des fédérés. J'avais
assez de la farce du coup de fusil tiré des fenêtres, je voulais en
éviter la troisième édition.
Le feu gagnait toujours ; la maison n'était qu'un immense brasier,
alimenté par les pommades et les essences du parfumeur, et qui
nous rôtissait à travers la rue.
Comme si nous n'avions pas eu assez de sujets de crainte, nous
constations, à droite et à gauche de notre maison, d'énormes
panaches de fumée colorée qui annonçaient d'autres incendies, et,
comme il nous était impossible de sortir pour nous assurer du point
précis où ils étaient allumés, nous redoutions d'être pris entre trois
feux.
Enfin, un cri retentit : Vive la ligne! Je ne sais si vous avez jamais
fait partie d'un groupe de naufragés ; mais, dans ce cas, rappelez-
vous la sensation que vous avez ressentie au cri de : Terre! quand
vous avez vu le rivage. C'est exactement avec le même bonheur que
nous entendîmes : Vive la ligne! car c'était pour nous le salut, c'était
l'extinction de l'incendie, c'était la mort de la Commune, c'était
surtout la revanche.

FIN
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