Old Believers as Bearers of Russian National Identity

Based on the Works of Solzhenitsyn

About three and a half centuries ago, in the 17th century, the Russian Orthodox Church was shaken by a powerful schism, triggered by a well-known church reform carelessly carried out by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and Patriarch Nikon. The Church split into two irreconcilable factions—Old Believers and New Believers.

One of the thinkers who examined Old Belief in the context of the religious mentality of the Russian people and the spiritual development of Russia was the renowned writer, philosopher, and publicist Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008).

A significant intellectual contribution of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, beyond his literary works and journalistic articles, which cover a broad range of social phenomena, is his analysis of the socio-political and spiritual condition of Russia in his time.

The past of our country cannot be considered separately from the history of the Orthodox Church, as any reevaluation and analysis of Russia’s historical paths will be incomplete if the religious factor, an integral layer of Russian culture, is ignored. Therefore, in addressing the pressing problems of Russia and its society, Solzhenitsyn invariably engaged with the history of Russian religiosity.

The primary value of Solzhenitsyn’s reflections on Old Belief lies in the fact that he does not see the most significant undermining of the religious foundation of the Russian people as occurring in 1917, when the Bolsheviks came to power after a state-led armed coup, implementing a religious policy that in no way sought to strengthen or expand religious communities. Instead, according to Solzhenitsyn, the true "beginning of the end" of the most sacred period in Russian history—commonly referred to as Holy Rus’—was the very church reform of the 17th century. He develops this theme in several of his articles and letters.

Solzhenitsyn defines the essence of Old Belief as the preservation of the religious psychology and ecclesial way of life of Orthodox Christians from the era of Ancient Rus’, up until the 17th century. At the same time, he links the church reform to the onset of spiritual decline in Russian society, emphasizing the loss of what he calls "pre-schism religiosity," which, in his view, was the original, pristine Orthodox faith in its purity and spiritual depth. However, in his assessment, the theological justification for the actions of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (the Quietest) and Patriarch Nikon was merely an attempt "to introduce minor formal corrections and thereby maintain spiritual unity with fallen Byzantium" .

Solzhenitsyn, without paying much attention to the external aspects of worship (rituals), continually emphasizes that Old Believers are soundly Christian and fully Orthodox members of the Church of Christ, having neither erred in the spirit of doctrine nor deviated in a single letter of the law. The first "Old Believers" of the mid-17th century, he argues, are worthy of admiration because "they lacked the pliability of spirit to accept the hasty recommendations of dubious itinerant Greek patriarchs… They preserved the two-finger sign of the cross, with which our entire Church had been crossing itself for seven centuries".

Particular attention is given by Solzhenitsyn to the moral and ethical character of the Old Believer. He stresses that the old traditions of Christian asceticism, once deeply embedded in the culture of Ancient Rus’, are still alive today within the functioning of Old Believer communities:

"I observed our most ancient branch of faith in their services and conversations in the churches of Moscow—and I bear witness before you to their astonishing steadfastness in faith (and, even more so, in resistance to state oppression), to such a preservation of Russian countenance, language, and spirit as can no longer be found anywhere else...".

In religious and social terms, Solzhenitsyn regarded the Old Believers as "brothers, co-believers, and compatriots". The cultural significance of contemporary Old Belief lies in the fact that this society, represented by several concords, still possesses a strong immunity against globalization, which erodes the national and cultural uniqueness of any people, making life uniform, spiritless, and faceless. Solzhenitsyn describes the enduring Old Believer culture in the following terms:

"One must see these remaining Old Believers—their strength, their conviction, their self-sacrificing night-long prayers (which we are no longer capable of), their courage in life… how they have preserved their national appearance, their folk character, and hear their unaltered, original Russian speech.".

Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn clarifies the terminological issues surrounding Old Belief. From the context of the primary sources, it is evident that he employs the term Old Belief rather conditionally and even reluctantly, aligning with the self-perception of Old Believers themselves. They have consistently emphasized that terms like Old Belief and Old Ritualism are relative, having entered common usage in the Russian language but serving merely for confessional identification. The distinguished contemporary leader of Old Belief, the late Metropolitan Andrian Chetvergov, accepted the term Old Ritualism, but, as he stated, "this is a forced agreement. The term itself emerged during the time of Catherine the Great, was legally established by Nicholas II, and reflected the position of the official Church and the attitude of secular society. However, we consider ourselves to be the original Russian Orthodoxy, we see ourselves as the Russian Orthodox Church, but in order to maintain self-identification, we are compelled to call ourselves the Old Ritualist Church".

Solzhenitsyn takes an even sharper and more categorical stance regarding the name Old Believer, stating, "I would not only refrain from calling ‘schismatics’ but would even hesitate to call ‘Old Believers,’ for in doing so, we, the rest, would at once expose ourselves as merely New Believers.".

The statements of Metropolitan Andrian and Solzhenitsyn reflect an objective scholarly perspective on the development of Old Belief in Russia. Until the mid-18th century, Russian religious terminology did not include the concept of ritual, meaning that the term Old Ritualist could not have existed before that historical period. In official documents and everyday speech, Old Believers were called "heretics," "schismatics," and later "sectarians." Solzhenitsyn denounces the illogical and unjustified nature of such degrading labels applied to Christians who had preserved the old church tradition, placing his argument into the mouth of one of the characters in his epic novel The Red Wheel:

“They believe as they were once taught at the baptism of Rus’—and why, then, are they called schismatics? Suddenly they are told: ‘Your forefathers, your fathers, and you yourselves have all believed wrongly until now, and we will change it… Yesterday they cursed the three-fingered sign of the cross; today, only the three-fingered sign is correct, and the two-fingered is cursed… But to the indifferent and the self-serving, it costs nothing at all to accept this—curse it one way today, reverse it tomorrow. But those in whom truth beats—that is who refused, that is who was destroyed, who fled into the forests.”

Thus, Solzhenitsyn presents a precise moral and ethical critique of the consequences of church policy in the second half of the 17th century. In his 1974 letter to the Third Council of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, he makes bold critical remarks regarding the condemnation of longstanding liturgical traditions:

"Even today, at Sergiev Posad, amidst a gathering of believers, an unceasing liturgy is offered over the relics of St. Sergius of Radonezh—yet the liturgical books by which the saint himself prayed, we burned upon pitch-fed pyres as if they were devilish."

For Solzhenitsyn, the Orthodox ideal of Old Belief is embodied in the era of St. Sergius of Radonezh—a time of great Christian charisma in Rus’, when everything, quite literally, breathed with prayer and faith.

Solzhenitsyn sees the ideal of Russian religiosity in the pre-Petrine spiritual culture. The seven centuries of Orthodoxy in Rus’ produced a unique and distinctive form of Russian Christianity. The national soul absorbed the patristic dogmas in accordance with its own worldview and perception of existence. Over time, the native national identity and the ecclesiastical traditions inherited from Byzantium and Bulgaria organically merged into a unified civilizational monolith known as Russian Orthodoxy. This was reflected both in church culture—such as iconography and architecture—and in religious psychology, attitudes toward God, and church life. It can be said that Christianity in Rus’ acquired a new, previously unseen cultural and mental form. As a result, even today, in the study of ecclesiastical history and engagement with the world of Orthodox Christianity, the national element remains significant—a folk, even "pagan" (in the best sense of the word) mentality.

Solzhenitsyn, citing V.O. Klyuchevsky, argues that the most characteristic expression of the religious behavior of the Russian people in that era was repentance:

"“In the distant past (before the 17th century), Russia was so rich in movements of repentance that it stood out as one of the leading Russian national traits. In the spirit of pre-Petrine Rus’, there were impulses of repentance—more precisely, religious repentance—on a mass scale: it began in many individual hearts and merged into a torrent. This is likely the highest and truest path of national repentance".

According to Solzhenitsyn, such was the spiritual life of Russian Orthodox Christians before the Petrine period in national history.

Indeed, forms of repentance in pre-schism Russia took on a character incomprehensible and unbearable to us today. It is known that during the national repentance at the time of the early 17th-century Time of Troubles, fasting was imposed even on infants and domestic animals.

However, the changes that followed, particularly those concerning the Church—the very soul of the nation—altered the course of religious life. Under the guise of changes to "rituals," the fundamental religious foundations of the people's faith were shaken, and, as later became clear, even the very essence of Orthodoxy itself. Church life became increasingly formalized. The fear of God was replaced by fear of the state and authority. Repentance ceased to be a way of life in Christ and took on a juridical form.

It cannot be said that in pre-reform Rus’ human passions, which have always harmed true worship, were absent. Even then, there were individuals willing to trample upon the faith of the people for personal gain and political advantage. But after the church reform and the transformations under Peter I, the substitution of "the divine with the human" took on a global and universal scale and became institutionalized.

The historian and philosopher Fyodor Melnikov offers compelling observations:

"…Priests were required to report to the civil authorities about any 'premeditated crimes' revealed to them in confession… Priests became informers and detectives, and confession turned into an instrument of surveillance… The sacrament of confession became a police institution, or a branch of the gendarmerie, and the priest—the most dangerous secret agent, granted extraordinary powers and authority".

True Christian repentance—a transformation of the mind—remained confined to monastic cells before sacred icons and ceased to be the inspiring driving force of society. Solzhenitsyn aptly observes:

"But from the time of Nikon’s and Peter’s soulless reforms, when the eradication and suppression of the Russian national spirit began, repentance too began to fade, and this capacity of ours dried up".

Solzhenitsyn calls the Nikonian-Petrine reforms soulless, which is entirely justified, above all, because Patriarch Nikon’s actions (to move closer to the specific focus of this study) were not met with approval by the masses. The soul of the people resisted these foreign values, which fractured society and undermined culture. It is therefore unsurprising that the implementation of the reckless church reform became possible only through the use of force against believers.

Solzhenitsyn suggests that, in place of a living faith, a low-quality substitute for repentance was introduced—one grand and ceremonious, capable only of creating the illusion of spiritual nourishment but devoid of inner substance. This easily obtained and quickly replenished surrogate is akin to modern food additives:

"The entire Petersburg period of our history—a time of outward grandeur and imperial arrogance—led the Russian spirit ever further away from repentance".

In his article The Russian Question at the End of the 20th Century, Solzhenitsyn states that one of the causes of the church reform was Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich’s reverence for Western culture, which manifested in his determination "not to fall behind in any way with Western influences, to hastily conform, even in the revision of liturgical books".

It has long been known that the first influences of European civilization, imposed from above and damaging to spirituality and tradition, gained particular strength not under Peter I but under Alexei Mikhailovich. The imitation of Western life under the Quietest took on a pathological form, as detailed in B.P. Kutuzov’s work The Church Reform of the 17th Century as an Ideological Sabotage and a National Catastrophe. Kutuzov offers the following assessment of the tsar:

"Tsar Alexei bows before the 'miracles of Western culture,' about which he has a truly fantastic notion. To him, foreign lands are nothing less than a 'realm of sacred wonders' and limitless possibilities".

Thus, the church reform inflicted significant harm on Russian spirituality. The refined faces of saints painted by Theophanes the Greek and Andrei Rublev were relegated to the past, replaced on church walls by dubious semi-secular depictions by the artist Simon Ushakov. The otherworldly znamenny chant, sung in unison, gradually disappeared from liturgical practice, replaced increasingly by the monotonous partesny style. The eight-pointed cross was supplanted by the four-pointed one, and the majestic two-finger sign of the cross was reduced to a mere pinch.

Yet, for Solzhenitsyn, the greatest blow of the church reform was not in the alteration of rituals. The true catastrophe lay in the loss of the state's strategic spiritual and moral foundation—the unity that had been built upon the highest traditions of Christian sobornost’, and in the people’s growing inability to resist external pressures, particularly cultural ones. He writes:

"Our Time of Troubles in the 17th century… did not shake the moral foundations of the people, which remained intact. But the religious Schism of the 17th century had a much deeper and more irreversible effect. The Schism created that fateful crack, into which Peter’s cudgel later struck, beating down our customs and laws indiscriminately".

In his Letter to the Vestnik RHD, once again addressing the topic of Old Belief, Solzhenitsyn refers to well-known historical examples familiar to every schoolchild—times when the Russian state stood on the brink of national collapse and the loss of its independence. On numerous occasions, the people emerged victorious largely due to the unique power of pre-reform religion—Ancient Orthodoxy—which served as a real, active driving force of society, a force of faith and repentance. It is no coincidence that Solzhenitsyn refers to Rus’ before the church reform as Old Believer Rus’, which "for 250 years did not surrender to the Tatars and, by the initiative of the people alone, without rulers, was able to withstand the unprecedented trials of the Time of Troubles".

Solzhenitsyn also does not ignore the state of the post-reform church, which had become "official", acquiring the status of a state institution rather than a gathering of believers in the name of God. He observes the transformation of the Church, its desacralization, and its reduction to a mere governmental agency. Naturally, such a church was unable to sustain itself after 1917, when the change in power brought forth a militant atheist regime, placing everything connected with religion on the execution block. Regarding the role of the Church during the revolution, Solzhenitsyn speaks in far from flattering terms, emphasizing the failure of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and its complete spiritual decline:

"The Russian Church, in a fateful era for the homeland, allowed itself to become a submissive appendage of the state, failed to spiritually guide the people, and was unable to cleanse and shield the Russian spirit before the years of fury and turmoil arrived".

In his extensive article Obrazovanshchina, he makes similar observations about the state of the Russian Orthodox Church on the eve of the revolution, when it was under the supervision of the Synodal administration:

"Yet even with all this, a strong and authoritative Church could still have held the country back from the abyss. The Church was supposed to create an opposing spiritual force, to strengthen the people and society in resisting dissolution. But, still shaken by the senseless schism of the 17th century, it failed to do so. In the days of Russia’s greatest national catastrophe, the Church made no attempt to save or guide the country. The clergy of the Synodal Church, having for two centuries submitted to the imperial hand of power, lost its highest responsibility and abandoned its spiritual leadership over the people. The mass of the clergy had lost its spiritual energy, had grown decrepit. The Church was weak, ridiculed by society, its priests diminished in the eyes of their rural flocks. It is no coincidence that seminaries became breeding grounds for atheism and godlessness—where banned literature was copied by hand, underground meetings were held, and revolutionaries were born. How can one fail to notice that, in those painful days of the emperor’s abdication, not a single hierarch (nor a single priest) of the Orthodox Church, who daily offered mandatory prayers for the Sovereign, hastened to support or counsel him?".

Thus, bitterly acknowledging the creation of a puppet, politicized, and submissive church led by its hierarchs—where spiritual life, for the most part, had become merely formal, and worship increasingly resembled a bureaucratic transaction—Solzhenitsyn sees the collapse of the monarchy and the February-October events of 1917 as the ultimate consequence of the church reform and an unforgivable mistake—a spiritual fraud that had been corroding the Church for two and a half centuries. He argues that had the church reform not taken place, and had there been no subsequent blind and senseless persecution of the Old Believers,

"Lenin’s revolution would not have come into the world through Russia: in Old Believer Russia, it would have been impossible".

With this grim conclusion, our country entered the 20th century.

source