By the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian Orthodox clergy had come to resemble a caste.Footnote 1 Despite official disapproval, positions were passed down from father to son or other male relatives, a system that worked in lieu of a pension scheme. Entry into the clerical estate from outside was virtually impossible from 1770 because the seminaries were only open to the sons of clergy: the once-prevalent system of clerical election had become defunct by the beginning of the nineteenth century.Footnote 2 Exit from the estate was undesirable since it led to assignation to the tax-paying (and conscription-liable) categories of the population. ‘The clergy [was] the most rigid, most hereditary of all the eighteenth-century estates’, Gregory Freeze reminds us: ‘Its social bonds were extraordinarily taut, shackling not only clerics but also their families to the estate, permitting few to leave and almost none to enter its ranks.’Footnote 3 ‘It almost functioned as an ethnicity’ notes Laurie Manchester.Footnote 4
Although there was a great deal of economic differentiation between clergy, they possessed a relatively homogenous culture, with distinctive value systems and behavioural patterns that ‘provided an alternative pool of identities and precepts to the culture of the nobility, Russia's ruling class’.Footnote 5 This subculture was a product of education within the church schooling system and ‘a dynamic attempt by the Church to create a clerical life style, at once respectable and pure of secular failings’.Footnote 6 It also had material attributes, such as commonalities in dress that immediately identified the wearer as belonging to the realm spiritual.Footnote 7
The clergy's caste-like nature was dented by the Great Reforms of the 1860s, which sought to alleviate financial pressures on priestly families by allowing otherwise superfluous sons to receive a prestigious secular rank and enter into newly emerging professions. By the same token, other social estates gained the right to enter the priesthood. Although this has sometimes been considered as marking the pastorate's professionalisation, the opening of the estate caused a considerable brain drain as clergy and their sons fled to more remunerative careers: this, in turn, led to degradation of the priesthood's academic quality.Footnote 8 Consequently, the state reversed some of the reforms, ending the brief window of opportunity to join the clergy from without.
None the less, there was an alternative route into the clerical estate, one that brought people with vastly different social, educational and cultural experiences into the clergy: the edinoverie priesthood. Edinoverie was the result of an attempt to bring Old Believer ‘schismatics’ into the Russian Orthodox Church (and thus under government surveillance) by allowing converts to maintain their distinctive liturgical rituals. The clergy of this movement had to deal with distinct rules and regulations that rendered them a unique subgroup. One of the most important of these distinctions was that edinoverie priests were elected by their parishioners: as such, this clergy did not have to go through the Church's educational system or come from a priestly family. Although never numerous (a very rough estimate would suggest they made up 800–1,000 of 102,682 clergy in 1897),Footnote 9 a study of their path into the clerical estate, their roles and their cultural, socioeconomic and professional distinction from the regular clergy will serve to complicate pre-existing historiographical depictions of the imperial Russian Orthodox priesthood, which typically focus on the estate's homogeneity.Footnote 10
The successes, failures and experiences of the edinoverie clergy should be seen in the context of the attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church towards intraconfessional diversity.Footnote 11 As an imperial institution, it was neither ethnically nor linguistically homogenous: the assimilation of the Ukrainian and Georgian Orthodox Churches (in 1686 and 1811, respectively), combined with intensive missionary activity in the Baltic, Volga and Siberian regions in the nineteenth century, left it with a diverse flock. The need for clergy who could speak native languages and understand local living conditions was broadly understood, if only for the sake of missionary utility. However, such clerics were generally kept from leadership roles: there was also the fear that these priests could ‘be agents of reverse influence by interpreting Christian doctrines in their own indigenous manner’.Footnote 12 Russification and the rise of nationalism on the empire's peripheries towards the end of the nineteenth century also encouraged what Paul Werth has called the ‘ethnic fragmentation of Orthodoxy’.Footnote 13 As it was incorporated into russifying strategies, the Church grew ever more circumspect towards alternative Orthodoxies, although its missionary techniques, institutions and priorities paradoxically helped to generate them.
Old Belief presented an alternative and alluring vision of Orthodoxy to the Russian population, the ethno-linguistic core of the Church's flock. This vision presented the laity with a controlling voice over their clergy and a repudiation of secular government interference in religious life. Suspicion of the Old Believers and anxiety over their challenge to ecclesiastical authority conditioned the Church's response to the edinovertsy, converts who were allowed not only to keep the Old Believer rite but their peculiar form of lay-clerical relations. This suspicion was embodied in a series of rules and restrictions aimed at protecting the Orthodox confession from any possible proselytisation. However, these rules ultimately exacerbated feelings of religious difference between the Orthodox and the edinovertsy, with the latter jealously guarding their privileges and wary of episcopal oversight. This found its reflection in the composition and condition of the edinoverie clergy. When combined with the material hardships that both they and their Orthodox counterparts faced, the result was a state of competition between the two.
Ultimately, the inability to fully co-opt the edinoverie clergy into the clerical estate demonstrates the limits to the elasticity of the imperial Church and the Orthodox confession. The edinoverie priesthood continually sat at its periphery because of its Old Believer origins, its Old Believer rituals and its Old Believer lay-clergy relations. The Church understood the need for clergy with ‘insider’ experience of the schism: at the same time, however, it was mostly reluctant to sponsor or spread an alternative version of Orthodoxy even for the ethnically and linguistically Russian edinovertsy. This study, then, shows how and why the Orthodox confession and clerical caste failed to integrate the edinoverie clergy, thus rendering them almost perpetual clerical outsiders.
Election and education
In 1800 Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) of Moscow (1737–1812), at the urging of the emperor Paul i, forged a uniate movement to entice Old Believers into the Orthodox Church: this was edinoverie, the united faith. The Old Believers had been in schism since rejecting the ritual reforms of Patriarch Nikon in the 1660s: persecuted for their adherence to the old rites (the most emblematic of which was the two-fingered sign of the cross used when blessing oneself or others), they fled abroad or into areas of Russia where the State and official Church touched but lightly.Footnote 14 Since no bishops joined the movement, the question of how to ordain new clergy arose, leading to a division into priestly and priestless groups by the end of the seventeenth century.Footnote 15 The priestly made use of clergymen on the run from the Orthodox Church, while the priestless employed lay preceptors who performed the sacraments of penance and baptism.
It was only under Catherine the Great that the state undertook a thorough effort to tolerate Old Belief, largely for the sake of its considerable financial and human resources. Platon (Levshin), along with other hierarchs, matched Catherine's more indulgent attitude with a theological equivalent: while they continued to regard the pre-Nikonian rituals as erroneous, they suggested that ritual should not divide the Church. Therefore, an acceptable solution was to allow Old Believers to continue using their rites when they ‘rejoined’ Orthodoxy.Footnote 16 This was the offer embodied in edinoverie in 1800. In exchange for joining the Church, converts from Old Belief could observe the old rituals, as would the priests of their new parishes.
Edinoverie was most successful during the reign of Nicholas i (1825–55), who launched ‘a period of religious persecution without parallel in the final century and a half of the Russian Empire’ against Old Belief.Footnote 17 The vast majority of edinoverie parishes were brought into existence between 1827 and 1864, when their number rose from 25 to 223 (increasing only to 278 by 1897). Generally speaking, however, edinoverie was a failure. Since it fell far short of the full legitimisation and political rehabilitation desired by the Old Believers, only a small number joined. This, in turn, meant that the state regarded edinoverie as a washout, since it had not brought the ‘schismatics’ back under their administrative purview. As for the Church, it regarded the edinovertsy with suspicion, fearing that they sought to proselytise among the Orthodox. This was the justification for a host of rules in the 1800 settlement that isolated the edinovertsy from the rest of the Church. The peripheral position of edinoverie had a considerable impact on the lives of its clergy, undermining their assimilation into the rest of the clerical estate.
The rules of Metropolitan Platon, as the settlement of 1800 was known, contained several conditions directly applicable to the edinoverie clergy. Rule 6, for instance, placed edinoverie clergy directly under the jurisdiction of the bishop: in other words, the diocesan consistory and high-ranking Orthodox priests would have no authority over them. This rule was routinely flouted (as its reiteration in 1845 attests), despite the fact that interference from Orthodox bodies or agents irritated edinoverie parishioners, ever eager to defend the privileges that Platon had bestowed.Footnote 18 For instance, one edinoverie priest in Krivoluche (Viatka diocese) refused to allow his Orthodox dean to inspect either his church or his registers in 1847 because his parishioners insisted that he only take orders from the bishop.Footnote 19 As far as the clergy were concerned, the most consequential of the points was rule 2. Platon stated:
By [our] indulgence, the second article in all its force is allowed: priests will be placed by the election of the parishioners and on the review and judgement of the bishop. However, their previous priests, who are fugitives and traitors of the Church, their consciences, and their ranks, will not be placed in such [edinoverie] churches.Footnote 20
This established clerical election, although it came with quite a substantial caveat for the priestly Old Believers: their fugitive priests were excluded from holding edinoverie priestly positions. This was a recipe for future clashes. Priestly Old Believer converts generally preferred to elect their prior pastors, but prelates were understandably circumspect about individuals who had already flouted church and secular discipline once before. However, since community conversions could hinge on the choice of priest, this rule was obeyed only lackadaisically, especially during the reign of Nicholas i, when the desire to convert as many Old Believers as possible outweighed suspicions about the new edinoverie priests.
None the less, struggles between bishops and convert communities over the selection of questionable clerics never disappeared, either leaving an enduring source of dispute or repelling potential converts. In 1878 an Old Believer bishop and his flock in Orenburg desired to convert to edinoverie if their former prelate was ordained as a edinoverie priest. However, because he had fled from his place of exile in Vologda, the Orthodox bishop judged him to be untrustworthy and refused his candidacy, complicating the conversion of one hundred Old Believers.Footnote 21 Of course, on some occasions edinoverie communities were happy to accept the decision of the bishop, perhaps because there was no obvious candidate or for fear of splitting the parish into rival groups.
This was no idle anxiety. Clerical elections frequently led to enduring and fractious contests that exacerbated pre-existing social and religious divides. One of the most notorious such conflicts occurred when Father Simeon Shleev attempted to oust Archpriest Nikolai Kastorskii, the head priest of the Nikolskaia church in St Petersburg, between 1905 and 1907. The struggle became so intense that Kastorskii's supporters reported to the police that Shleev had failed to say prayers for the tsar, a political crime.Footnote 22 In Warsaw diocese, six psalmists came and went in the course of two years because of the parishioners’ ‘party behaviour’.Footnote 23 There were protests following a 1911 clerical election held in Kazan's edinoverie church of the Four Evangelists, with petitioners alleging that the dean had allowed non-parishioners to vote, thus fixing the election.Footnote 24
It was not unheard of for communities to choose Orthodox priests. A factor here was knowledge of the pre-Nikonian ritual compact vital to edinoverie liturgical life. For instance, in 1890 parishioners of the new Sosedno church (Petersburg province) acquiesced to Metropolitan Palladii (Raev's) choice of Father Simeon Zhemchuzhin, an Orthodox priest with some knowledge of the old rite.Footnote 25 Such knowledge was not commonplace among the regular clergy. Of Orthodox priests in edinoverie parishes in Shadrinsk and Verkhoture uezdy (Perm province) in 1891 and 1893, 33 per cent and 62 per cent, respectively, had not served in edinoverie parishes as psalmists or deacons before becoming priests: as such, they had little to no experience with old rite liturgies.Footnote 26 Ignorance of these rituals (or active hostility towards them) could quickly put a parish and its priest at odds with each other. This was demonstrated very early in edinoverie's history. Father Andrei Andreev, an Orthodox priest, was appointed to the Petersburg Sretenskaia parish on 11 December 1800: he quickly evinced disdain for serving by the old rite, with the Synod receiving complaints from the edinovertsy and a petition from the priest himself asking to be sent back to a regular parish.Footnote 27
By the end of the nineteenth century, there were efforts to end the practice of placing Orthodox priests in edinoverie parishes: a Tomsk missionary congress in 1898 decreed that ‘the majority of edinoverie priests from the Orthodox are completely unacquainted with the peculiarities of the edinoverie church singing and also with the liturgical rituals’.Footnote 28 This ruling might have been to the liking of many priests, since in some dioceses transfer to a edinoverie parish was regarded as a punishment. M. N. Suslova refers to a case in Tobolsk diocese where an Orthodox priest was disciplined for a misdemeanour by transfer to a edinoverie parish: she also found more than forty petitions asking the bishop not to inflict a similar fate.Footnote 29 In Perm diocese, the consistory seems to have regarded edinoverie parishes as an unfortunate burden for Orthodox clergy, transferring them to regular parishes after about seven years as a reward for their ‘heavy ascetic act [podvig]’. One Orthodox priest in this eparchy was so desperate to leave his edinoverie parish that he was willing to accept a psalmist position (a severe demotion) in a regular church.Footnote 30
The unpopularity of edinoverie parishes derived from the fact that they were typically quite small and therefore poor. The Troitskaia, Uspenskaia and Sviato-Dukhovskaia churches (created in Nizhnii Novgorod province between 1830 and 1855) had only 272, 117 and 331 parishioners respectively upon foundation: this was far too few to sufficiently maintain their priests.Footnote 31 In contrast, wealthy urban edinoverie churches could attract Orthodox applicants, as can be seen from the welter of interest in an empty spot in Kazan's edinoverie temple in 1911, which carried the high annual salary of 700 roubles.Footnote 32
While bishops placed some priests into edinoverie parishes, the main route for most was clerical election. This was the foundation of the edinoverie priesthood's distinctive social character, especially in new parishes. Unlike for their Orthodox counterparts, a church education was not required: indeed, some edinoverie parishes disliked it if their priests had been to the seminary. The edinovertsy of Vysk in Perm diocese protested against the bishop's choice to send them a seminarian in 1843 as they preferred their priests to be psalmists ‘who had learned from the Psalter alone’.Footnote 33 In an 1893 case in Tambov diocese, the bishop noted that the loyalty of the edinovertsy was proven by the fact that ‘they have even accepted a priest from [among] the seminarians’.Footnote 34 Since edinoverie priests elected from their own communities did not go through the formative experiences of a clerical childhood and seminary education, ecclesiastical culture could be quite alien to them. This was particularly so for parishes formed from priestless Old Believers. If they chose to elect one of their own, then it was quite likely that he would lack knowledge not only about the unique clerical culture and its markers but also experience in performing the key rituals: one such priest in Nizhnii Novgorod had to constantly read ‘books, journals, and scholarly theological essays’ in order to learn about the liturgy.Footnote 35
A wonderful illustration of the alienation of edinoverie from clerical culture is furnished by Pavel Smirnov, a priestless spasovets who converted along with some of his community in 1892.Footnote 36 After being chosen by his fellows and receiving a letter from the missionary Ksenofont Kriuchkov (1842–1909), Smirnov set out to Novgorod's episcopal palace to be ordained:
I knocked again on the door in order to be heard. Suddenly an alarmed man came running up to me: ‘Who is making such a racket, why are you here?’. ‘I have come to the bishop to be ordained as a priest.’
The man looked at me from head to toe with a suspicious gaze. It must have been the first time he had seen such a creature: I was in an Old Believer caftan, an old peasant hat, simple boots, and with a knapsack in my hands: in a word, the purest rural provincial peasant.
He looked at me and said, ‘Wait here.’ Then he returned and took me with him. I went to the bishop, prayed, accepted his blessing, and gave him the letter from Father Ksenofont.
The bishop read the letter, sat me in a chair, and began to ask how I had lived in the schism, why I had joined the Orthodox Church, and other such questions. I, of course, told him all the details and cited to him many texts from the Scriptures about the illegitimate separation of the schismatics from the Church, and how, through knowledge of the Scriptures, it was clear that bishops were placed in [the Church].
‘Good,’ he said, ‘if it pleases God, you will be a priest, let us pray.’ We prayed. ‘Only now’, he said, ‘the matter is thus: tomorrow I leave to review the diocese for an entire month, you have not arrived in time. Did you really not read about this in Церковные ведомости [Church Gazette]?’Footnote 37
‘No. Truth be told, this is the first time I have heard about this Церковные ведомости.’Footnote 38
Smirnov was bewildered when the bishop's steward came to fit him for clerical vestments: ‘I did not even know that a priest needed a cassock.’Footnote 39 Since he only had a month to learn the rudiments of service before his ordination, it is improbable that this world became any more familiar. Such short periods seem to have been typical: in 1850 the edinoverie hieromonk Avtonom (Ankudinov), priest of a new parish in Daugavpils, was trained by the bishop of Vitebsk during a visit lasting only a few days. As both Smirnov and Avtonom had previously been priestless preceptors with no experience of performing most of the sacraments, such was hardly adequate preparation.Footnote 40
Convert status and lowly origin did not necessarily hamper interaction with church institutions. Father Ioann Shleev, a convert peasant from priestless Old Belief, had startling success in his home diocese of Simbirsk, being praised by the Synod and his bishop in 1882 for his missionary work. Moving to Nizhnii Novgorod in 1888, he continued to be rewarded by successive prelates. His career was capped in 1904 when he became the dean for the Pavlovo district.Footnote 41 Ioann's priestless roots evidently did not disqualify him from having a career blessed with accomplishments.
It might be assumed that inclusion into the clerical estate had an integrative effect on edinoverie priests, as their sons received the right to a church education. The impact of the seminaries on edinoverie children remains uncertain. On the one hand, this schooling inculcated little knowledge about the peculiarities of edinoverie service, since these institutions were entirely geared towards preparing Orthodox students. Certainly, reformers complained in the early twentieth century that seminaries robbed edinoverie children of their piety and directed them away from edinoverie parishes.Footnote 42 On the other hand, the seminaries were notorious for doing little to prepare pupils for the realities of parish life: this knowledge was gained from service as psalmists, which, for edinoverie seminarians, would surely happen in their fathers’ churches or in edinoverie monasteries. Indeed, these cloisters performed an important service by preparing priestly candidates for old rite liturgies: in Viatka in the 1830s, the diocese's first edinoverie priests were dispatched to the Voskrenskie edinoverie monastery in Irgiz to be trained.Footnote 43 According to the teacher S. I. Matveev, all the novices in the Zlatoutskovskii edinoverie monastery in Ufa diocese were boys learning the old rite in preparation for the priesthood.Footnote 44
It was in the interests of both fathers and the Church itself to keep the sons serving in edinoverie parishes. For the former, establishing a priestly dynasty in a particular parish meant provision for them and other family members in their dotage, while for the latter it ensured a continual supply of qualified and verified edinoverie priests. As for edinoverie clerical daughters, there is no published or archival record of their education, required roles or marriage patterns.Footnote 45 It seems reasonable to assume that the clergy adopted similar strategies to their Orthodox counterparts, marrying them off to other priests in case a son-in-law were required to take over the parish.
In theory at least, the edinoverie clergy who attended the seminary were more integrated into the clerical estate, having gone through the same educational establishments to presumably emerge equipped with a seminary certificate and knowledge of the mores of the clerical estate. None the less, schooling within the Church does not seem to have eased the alienation of the two most notorious edinoverie priests in the empire's history, the excommunicated Ioann Verkhovskii (who benefited from a seminary education) and the radical reformer Simeon Shleev (who not only attended the seminary but also the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy).Footnote 46 Both took umbrage at edinoverie's ‘mistreatment’ as a ‘non-Orthodox confession, tolerated only for a time’.Footnote 47 While these are extreme examples, there is some evidence to suggest that stereotypes about second- and third-generation edinoverie clergy existed in church circles, such as the accusation made in Миссионерское Обозрение [Missionary Review] that all such clergy were sybarites ‘for whom it is uncomfortable to rise [early in the morning] to perform matins’.Footnote 48
When we turn to the quantitative data about edinoverie priestly schooling, we see that integration through education was limited. Of forty-three ordained edinoverie clergy (priests and deacons) in Nizhnii Novgorod from between 1870 and 1905, eleven, or 26 per cent, had only experienced home schooling while ten had seminary education and seventeen had attended lower level church schools.Footnote 49 In 1911, in Perm, there were thirty-three ordained edinoverie priests on whom there is educational information: eleven had not received any formal education, including the dean. Seven (21 per cent) had received church schooling and fourteen (42 per cent) had been educated in state schools: only one was a seminary graduate.Footnote 50 Therefore, 75 per cent of the edinoverie clergy had been educated outside of the clerical schooling system. In Viatka, in 1912, 84 per cent of the Orthodox clergy had at least some seminary education but none of the edinoverie clergy had.Footnote 51 Of the eighty-seven ordained edinoverie servitors in Tobolsk between 1874 and 1915, 56 per cent had some church schooling but only 20 per cent had attended the seminary.Footnote 52 However, in St Petersburg in 1899, only three of ten edinoverie clergy had not been to the seminary.Footnote 53
Evidently the educational level of the clergy showed considerable regional variation but in general was quite low. This data also indicates that much of the edinoverie clergy continued to receive education outside the clerical estate, a consequence of the persistence of electing converts from Old Belief. Furthermore, the general poverty of edinoverie parishes, a consequence of their small size, reluctant parishioners and inadequate salaries, had a deleterious effect on their ability to attract high-quality candidates.
Clerical education was a fundamental tenet of discussions on edinoverie reform in the early twentieth century. Following the edict of toleration on 17 April 1905, the Petersburg priest Simeon Shleev (1873–1921) launched an ambitious renovation scheme, one that aimed to preserve edinoverie's distinctive ritual and electoral arrangements from both real and imagined Orthodox efforts to assimilate it while also centralising, institutionalising and homogenising the movement.Footnote 54 As the situation stood in 1905, there were no exclusively edinoverie forms of education, at least on the secondary or tertiary levels. Most parish churches possessed schools, two of which in Ekaterinburg diocese offered ‘additional classes with the aim of exclusively preparing sacristans for edinoverie churches’.Footnote 55 For Shleev and his associates, higher levels of edinoverie education were required in order to prevent regular Orthodox seminaries from ‘corrupting’ future priests, to raise the quality of the edinoverie clergy and to subject them to a uniform curriculum.
The concrete results of the reform plans were two high schools, one founded in St Petersburg in 1908 and the other in Moscow in 1911.Footnote 56 Plans for an ‘ecclesiastical school’ (basically a edinoverie seminary) were put forward to the Local Church Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1917–18, but they failed in the face of sustained opposition.Footnote 57 Efforts were also made throughout the last pre-revolutionary decade to try and improve the singing of both edinoverie clerics and choirs: the form of Old Believer chant practised was not only considered an important marker of edinoverie identity and a potent missionary tool, but was also difficult to learn without instruction, since medieval Russian musical notation was used. Roving semi-regular singing classes were the proposed solution to this problem in 1912, but it is difficult to ascertain whether these ever actually took place.
Finances and parishes
Perhaps the greatest affliction of the imperial Russian Orthodox clergy was their dependence on payments from parishioners for various religious services. This had the consequence of both impoverishing them and reducing their authority.Footnote 58 The Holy Synod was acutely aware of this difficulty, especially since it impeded the clergy from performing their important role as government agents. However, salaries from the state budget were only slowly and incompletely extended across the empire from 1829 onwards.Footnote 59 What is more, these payments were insufficient to liberate the clergy from their reliance on emoluments. Other measures taken to ease the lot of the priests were scarcely more effective: ordering parishioners to provide clerics with vicarages and plots of land or creating special guardianships to source money for wages did nothing to reduce dependence on the laity.Footnote 60 The execrable consequences were legion: financial squabbles between clergy and laity soured their relationships; the educated clergy were forced to undertake agricultural work that detracted from religious services and reduced their prestige; it enforced the need to pass positions from father to son, thus perpetuating the clerical caste; and clerical sons fled the estate for more profitable pursuits as soon as restrictions were lifted in the 1860s.
For the edinoverie clergy, clerical election made a dismal situation even worse: they were dependent on their parishioners not only for their livelihoods, but also for their very positions. In edinoverie parishes, ‘the priest is nothing, his parishioners everything’.Footnote 61 The burden of expectation from the state and the episcopate was also greater. Although all priests were required to monitor Old Belief and other non-Orthodox religious groups, edinoverie priests were usually directly employed as missionaries as they were experts on Old Believer texts and rites. It was for this reason that Nicholas i selected Timofei Verkhovskii, priest of the Milovskaia Petersburg parish, to conduct long missionary expeditions in the Chernigov region between 1845 and 1848.Footnote 62 Instructed to act as a missionary in the Mustvee parish of Estland province in 1844, the Riga edinoverie priest Emelianov excused himself by arguing that ‘I absolutely cannot go 300 versta [320 kilometres] from Riga to visit them and cleanse their consciences with the confession and administration of the Holy Sacraments because I am occupied every minute of every day of the entire week with teaching.’Footnote 63 Even after the Church's mission was placed on a more organised basis in 1884 with the introduction of paid specialist missionaries, edinoverie priests were still called upon to fulfil a proselytising role. In 1891 the local missionary in Verkhoture uezd was the priest of a edinoverie parish: however, he was so occupied with parish affairs that he could scarcely spend time on the mission and so was removed in 1893.Footnote 64
Thus, as one church journalist put it, ‘the unpaid edinoverie clergy are between two extremes. Required to insist strictly that the edinovertsy fulfil their religious duties, they risk being left without any means to live: in being indulgent to the weakness of their parishioners and in satisfying their arbitrary requirements, they risk trampling on church rights and civil laws’.Footnote 65 In a dramatic case, Fr Bystrotokov in Omutninsk (Viatka) found himself confronting particularly truculent convert parishioners who demanded in 1851 that he declare:
1. anathema on the Orthodox Church and call all [these] Christians, together with their bishops, heretics: [the priest should] refuse blessings from these bishops; 2. [the priest should] refuse to recognise St Mitrofan of Voronezh as holy; 3. [the priest should] refuse to allow in the church shchepotniki, beard shavers, and those in German clothes, including even the priest's wife and children and the managers of the factory; 4. the priest [should] not be confessed by Orthodox priests and in general have no contact with them; he [should] not keep Orthodox books and [should] forbid his children from playing sacred songs on their gusli.Footnote 66
If Bystrotokov had complied with these requests, he would have been guilty of blasphemy.
On the other hand, edinoverie priests could alienate their parishioners by charging too much for key rites. In 1844 a Don dean reported a edinoverie priest for his ‘greed for profit’, which had led him to ‘take exorbitant payment for the performance of rites – especially for marriage and baptism’.Footnote 67 The secular and ecclesiastical authorities were cognisant of the problems inflicted by priestly poverty, so state salaries were often given to edinoverie clergy. For instance, in the parish of Irginsk (Ekaterinburg), the priest received 300 roubles a year from the local authorities, although only from 1841, six years after the creation of the parish.Footnote 68 But such payments were too low to solve the problem: as the Third All-Russian Missionary Congress declared in 1897, since ‘better maintenance of edinoverie priests could influence the improvement of the parishes themselves’, wages of 600 roubles for priests were required.Footnote 69
The financial variation of the regular Orthodox clergy also characterised the edinoverie priesthood, and for much the same reason. Urban priests with ornate churches in city centres counted among their parishioners wealthy merchants. Rural priests, in contrast, would find themselves serving indigent peasants. No doubt the richest edinoverie churches in the empire were those in St Petersburg. The grandiose Nikolskaia church was so wealthy that its four clergy lived on the 28,000 roubles derived annually from interest on church capital, supplemented by the rent received from two apartment buildings.Footnote 70 Elsewhere the picture was bleaker. In Perm, the clergy of the Sredne-Egvinskoe parish received 220 roubles in donations in 1910, along with 340 roubles in rent from its landholdings and the provision of housing for each priest.Footnote 71 A new parish in Arkhangelsk diocese received only 25 roubles in donations in 1895, making its clergy entirely dependent on state stipends.Footnote 72
In order to create financially viable parishes, the Synod often had to assign people to the parish who lived quite some distance away from the church. This meant a great deal of travel for both clergy and parishioners, making clerical supervision far more difficult. In 1842 two edinoverie priests of the Nizhnii Tagil parishes reported travelling 6,174 versta (around 6,568 kilometres) in a year between them.Footnote 73 Most unfortunate were the parishioners of the Blagoveshchenskaia church in Tobolsk, constituted by sixty-three different settlements as remote as 485 versta (517 kilometres) away.Footnote 74 As this example also shows, urban clergy had groups of parishioners scattered in the surrounding countryside. For the priest of the Tomsk city church, this created several problems: he did not possess the funds to travel and his urban parishioners ‘always look on travel to village parishes with great dissatisfaction and even petulance’ because they supported the church materially while the rural groups did not.Footnote 75 The Ekaterinburg Spasskaia parish (founded 1804) initially had parishioners as distant as Tiumen and Tomsk, necessitating months of travel, a situation worsened by the fact that the Orenburg and Tobolsk diocesan authorities forbade the Ekaterinburg edinoverie priests from entering their territories in 1825.Footnote 76 Finally, the fact that the edinoverie clergy were numerically insignificant and unevenly scattered across the country could prove an obstacle to conversion. The luckless Petr Podgornyi, a peasant who spent from 1826 to 1843 in a monastic prison in Irkutsk for spreading priestless Old Belief, sought conversion to edinoverie to secure his release: however, as there was no edinoverie priest in Irkutsk, he had to travel to Tiumen, a distance of roughly 3,000 kilometres.Footnote 77
Trying to free oneself from poverty via promotion was also quite difficult, since very little in the way of a career path existed for the edinoverie clergy. In 1845 the position of edinoverie dean (благочинный) was created, partially as a solution to the recurring problem of parishes and priests refusing to deal with either consistories or Orthodox deans: such individuals were usually made archpriests (протоиерей). They were supposed to be ‘a mediator or, more correctly, a guide for reciprocal spiritual connections between representatives of the holy hierarchy and members of the edinoverie flock’.Footnote 78 Essentially, they were in charge of inspecting all parishes within a church district (округ) and relaying information between the bishops and the parish priests. Firstly, however, not all dioceses created districts for edinoverie parishes: Penza, with its twelve churches, did not found any until 1905.Footnote 79 Secondly, the position brought with it a great many additional responsibilities, but no supplement to one's salary. Thirdly, as the demands of edinoverie reformers made clear, bishops continued to appoint Orthodox priests to these positions.Footnote 80
The few other pathways to social and professional advancement open to Orthodox priests were generally closed to their edinoverie counterparts. Edinoverie's low numbers and geographical spread meant that few regiments required a edinoverie chaplain. Only following the massive mobilisation in 1914 was the edinoverie hieromonk Nifont attached as chaplain to the sixty-eighth Borodinsk infantry regiment.Footnote 81 A edinoverie episcopate was not created until 1918: although open only to monks, widowed clergy could take monastic vows. This was the case with the first edinoverie prelate, Simeon Shleev, who took the tonsure and was made bishop of Okhta (Petrograd) on 3 June 1918.Footnote 82 However, being a hierarch in the militantly atheist Soviet regime was as much a liability as it was a prestigious advancement.
The fact that edinoverie parishioners were often converts potentially meant lower pay, additional duties and poor working conditions for the clergy. As already noted, edinoverie parishes generally lacked parishioners, especially immediately after conversion. Nor was there always an appropriate building for new parishes to use as a church, which often meant services were held in private homes, as was the case for Ksenofont Kriuchkov following his conversion.Footnote 83 The wait for permission, funds and building materials to establish a church could reach extremes: the Gorskino parish (Perm province) was founded in 1848, but a church was not built until 1864.Footnote 84 Equally, many edinovertsy who converted did so not out of conviction but because of external pressure applied by the government. Once conversion had been attained, the new priest had to confront people who were either actively or passively hostile to attending church. In Viatka, the edinoverie dean Shutov declared that ‘it is difficult to convince [parishioners] that they should take the required rites from their edinoverie priest, let alone discuss getting money for them’.Footnote 85 Simply put, the edinoverie clergy had to compete with remaining Old Believer officiants: one Viatka group baptised their children exclusively ‘through the wench Anna Mikhailova Shuliateva’. Indeed, the only reason that they went to the edinoverie church was to marry, a typical Old Believer strategy for legitimising their marriages following the state's prohibition in 1839 of ‘schismatic’ matrimony.Footnote 86
Thus, not only did the edinoverie clergy receive less money from emoluments, but they also had the difficult task of coping with recalcitrant parishioners. An example of how challenging this could be is provided by Father Samuil Belopukhov. In 1844 he attempted to lecture the tradesman Riabov for marrying off his under-aged daughter in a civil (and thus illegal) wedding: going to their house, he
found a large gathering of schismatics and edinovertsy who had been at the celebrations and were continuing the marital customs in a not entirely sober disposition. During my exhortations to Riabov and his daughter Aleksandra, the schismatic serf Stefan Trofimov Dmitriev, who was sitting at the table, made prejudicial remarks that should not have been made in the hearing of a priest in disgust at my questions and exhortations: he uttered obscene words and, finally rising from the table, took me by the collar. I was barely able to push him away.
He was then ignominiously thrown out onto the street.Footnote 87
Fraught relationships with parishioners were engendered not only by confrontational exhortations, but by the requirement to perform the old rite in accordance with lay demands. This was tricky, since the pre-reform rituals had no ideal, standardised blueprint: different edinoverie communities brought with them different traditions. ‘A new priest enters into a edinoverie parish’, Bishop Serafim (Aleksandrov) of Polotsk told the Local Church Council in 1918, ‘and he, not knowing the local customs and singing, begins, through lack of knowledge, to change and destroy that which has existed, perhaps, since the very beginning of edinoverie, from 1800, and thus causes arguments and strife in the parish.’Footnote 88 This concern did not emerge from Serafim's febrile imagination. Father Ioann Zvezdinskii, arriving in Moscow from Tver diocese in 1878, tried to introduce the practice of administering the sacraments with three holy spoons (lzhitsy) rather than one. Georgii Vozdvizhenskii, another priest at the same church, ‘considered it contrary to his duty and his conscience to allow this innovation’, thus spawning an acrimonious battle between the supporters of the two priests.Footnote 89 It is no wonder that Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) allegedly once said that it was ‘easier to manage a whole diocese than one edinoverie parish’.Footnote 90
Another financial problem rooted in edinoverie's origins as a convert movement became apparent after the edict of toleration in 1905: this new law not only legitimised Old Belief in the eyes of the state, but also permitted converts to return to their former religion from Orthodoxy. At least one priest suffered from the edict's financial ramifications. Father Korotov in Stavropol diocese was demoted in 1917 for performing under-age marriages and concealing this by forging his registries: he claimed that he was reduced to such criminal actions by the defection of most of his flock to Old Belief in 1906, which had brought impoverishment.Footnote 91
The edinoverie priesthood's troublesome economic situation also undermined incorporation into the clerical estate. The rules of Metropolitan Platon carefully policed the boundaries between Orthodoxy and edinoverie. On the one hand, movement from the latter into the former was not only possible but also encouraged. As stated in the rule's second attached opinion, it was hoped ‘that with time God will enlighten those who join and that they will come to agree that in nothing will they be different from the Church’. On the other hand, however, under rule 5 those ‘officially registered as Orthodox’ were not permitted to join edinoverie. This ignored the fact that many Old Believers took church sacraments in order to avoid potential repression: as such, they were officially considered Orthodox. Note the effort by 400 Old Believers in the town of Belev (Tula province) to form a edinoverie parish in 1807: this was rejected ‘because all the noted parishioners, although calling themselves Old Believers, are marked in the confession registries given by the parish priest as attending confession and thus are among the Orthodox’.Footnote 92
Even when rule 5 was somewhat relaxed,Footnote 93 bishops proved reluctant to allow Orthodox ‘conversion’ or ‘enumeration’ into edinoverie, usually describing this in condescending terms. As the Kazan consistory told one group of Orthodox seeking membership of edinoverie in 1876, ‘they must go from strength to strength in Christian life and strive for Christian perfection: they cannot go backwards and return to a state of infancy’.Footnote 94 So, if these ‘in-name-only’ Orthodox parishioners wanted to become edinovertsy in order to practise their old rituals in a legally permissible way, they were out of luck, and it was the duty of edinoverie priests to tell them so. But this duty did not align with the economic rationale of this clerical stratum. They desired conversions so as to increase the money that they could expect for ritual services: ‘here’, one writer asserted, ‘the interests of the [edinoverie] clergy are contrary to the interests of the Church itself’.Footnote 95 This very same motive undermined any hope that the priests would guide the edinovertsy towards ‘full’ Orthodoxy.
There was thus competition between the edinoverie and Orthodox clergies: the former encouraged the conversions of ‘in-name-only’ Orthodox parishioners in order to increase payments while the latter were set against it because it reduced their incomes. In Tiumen a long-running case (1837–50) involved the edinoverie priest Georgii Popov. Performing rites for ‘Orthodox’ parishioners, he earned for himself the loathing of his colleagues, who orchestrated a mass petitioning campaign against him. Despite repeated fines, he continued his practice until the bishop finally lost patience and sent him for a twenty-year spell in the Suzdal monastery prison.Footnote 96 Orthodox jealousy could also serve as a pretext to limit the development of edinoverie. In the town of Spasskoe (Nizhnii Novgorod diocese) in 1897–8, the edinovertsy were planning a church in the central square large enough for 800 individuals. Its size and the visibility of its proposed location led the Orthodox priests to complain that ‘the parishioners of the Orthodox church are inclined to edinoverie by their love of the old rituals: a sumptuous edinoverie church … will attract Orthodox parishioners, who through their visits may easily deviate to edinoverie’: this was a threat to ‘the integrity of the parish’.Footnote 97
This was a disastrous concoction. For financial reasons, the edinoverie clergy were less able to police their flocks, potentially willing to disregard the rules of Platon, and in a state of competition with their counterparts. Orthodox priests, for their part, had reason to fear the opening of edinoverie parishes and their expansion. Not only did this prevent the assimilation of the edinoverie clergy into the general clerical estate: it also stymied the assimilation of edinoverie into Orthodoxy in overall terms.
The problems of the edinoverie priesthood did not die with the collapse of the imperial regime in 1917. In the Mustvee (formerly Chernoe Selo) parish in the newly independent Republic of Estonia, Father Aleksandr Alekseev (from outside the clerical estate and in his sixties) not only continued to suffer from the same troubles that had burdened him in the past, but also had to deal with new woes inflicted by the post-war order. The tiny parish was in severe decline: there were 467 parishioners in 1920, but only 251 in 1922. The Estonian government seized the church's land in 1921, leaving Alekseev dependent on a salary of 120 marks.Footnote 98 This grim situation was worsened by the damage done to the vicarage during the German occupation, so severe that it was ‘completely impossible’ to live there: the priest was forced to rent rooms to the local authorities to get them to cover the renovations. Finally, a dispute with the parish council over the payment of taxation in 1921 escalated to such an extent that one party attempted to remove Alekseev from his position.Footnote 99 In Soviet Russia, things were even worse, as clergy were arrested, parish property seized and churches closed. None the less, collectively the edinovertsy still had enough strength to hold a third national congress in 1927, where the issue of clerical education was discussed: it was resolved to petition the government for a ‘pastoral school’ in Moscow to train priests.Footnote 100 This was all in vain. A few years later, the Stalinist terror effectively wiped edinoverie off the map, along with its priests.
This article has demonstrated that the nineteenth-century clerical estate was less homogenous than many scholars have assumed. It is common knowledge that the regular ‘white’ clergy was differentiated into several groups. The military and court clergies, for instance, experienced very different lives from that of the parish priest: the same was true of urban and rural priests. None the less, they were still almost always the sons of clerical fathers and had almost certainly passed through the Church's schools and seminaries. The edinoverie clergy, in contrast, was distinguished by social origins, culture, legal arrangement and education, as well as in terms of everyday service and economic position.
This was due to their convert origins. The Church's educational system had the theoretical potential to integrate the edinoverie priesthood into the clerical estate, but this process was complicated by edinoverie's peripheral position on the edge of the Orthodox confession, characterised by a host of privileges, limitations and peculiarities. Clerical election, for instance, made factionalism a frequent occurrence in edinoverie parishes, gave the clergy a distinct educational profile and further indentured the clergy to the whims of parishioners: this, in turn, made following the orders of the diocesan and synodal authorities all the trickier. The clergy's financial position, when combined with the strictures of the rules of Platon against Orthodox ‘conversion’ into edinoverie, undermined estate integration, since it could establish competition and rivalry between the two sets of clergy.
When all these factors are taken together, it is clear that edinoverie priests never successfully entered into the world of the Orthodox clergy. In the early twentieth century, Simeon Shleev's reform efforts, which defined edinoverie's value precisely in terms of its peripheral position, necessarily appealed to the movement's priesthood, leading many of them to back a reform scheme that would have increased edinoverie's distinction from ‘official’ Orthodoxy by providing the former with its own leadership, schooling system and even newspaper. Integration failed due to the nature of edinoverie, a ‘confessionally engineered’ convert movement whose origins lay in ‘schismatic’ Old Belief. Its principal aim was a pragmatic one, to bring the Old Believers back under the supervision of the government without having to recognise their movement officially. However, the Church and the Orthodox priesthood remained suspicious and even hostile towards the old rite, the edinovertsy and the edinoverie clergy. Fearful of edinoverie becoming a fifth column for Old Belief, they rigidly asserted the protections created by Metropolitan Platon in 1800, even though these mechanisms exacerbated perceptions of confessional difference and even competition. The alternative vision of Orthodoxy represented by edinoverie and its clergy dwelt all too awkwardly in the Church: this contributed to edinoverie's limited appeal, its numerical insignificance and, thus, the ease with which it was extinguished in the early Soviet period.
