This book is about an unprecedented attempt by the government of Russia’s tsar Nicholas I (1825–55) to eradicate what was seen as one of the greatest threats to its political security: the religious dissent of the Old Believers. The Old Believers had long been reviled by the Orthodox Church, for they claimed to be the guardians of true Orthodoxy; however, the civil authorities often regarded their populous and industrious communities favourably. This changed in the 1840s and 1850s when a series of remarkable cases demonstrated that restrictions upon the dissenters’ religious freedoms could not ... More

This book is about an unprecedented attempt by the government of Russia’s tsar Nicholas I (1825–55) to eradicate what was seen as one of the greatest threats to its political security: the religious dissent of the Old Believers. The Old Believers had long been reviled by the Orthodox Church, for they claimed to be the guardians of true Orthodoxy; however, the civil authorities often regarded their populous and industrious communities favourably. This changed in the 1840s and 1850s when a series of remarkable cases demonstrated that restrictions upon the dissenters’ religious freedoms could not suppress their capacity for independent organization. Finding itself at a crossroads between granting full toleration, or returning to the fierce persecution of earlier centuries, the government increasingly inclined towards the latter course, culminating in a top secret ‘system’, introduced in 1853 by the Minister of Internal Affairs Dmitrii Bibikov. The system’s operation was the high point of religious persecution in the last 150 years of the tsarist regime. It constituted an extraordinary experiment in government, instituted to deal with a temporary emergency. Paradoxically the architects of this system were not churchmen or reactionaries, but the most progressive representatives of Nicholas’s bureaucracy. Their abandonment of religious toleration on grounds of political intolerability reflected their nationalist concerns for the future development of a rapidly changing Russia. The system lasted only until Nicholas’s death in 1855; however, the story of its origins, operation, and collapse throws new light on the religious and political identity of the autocratic regime.