For more than two centuries, starting from the end of the 17th century, the Ural region was one of the largest centers of the Old Believers, having not lost this importance by the beginning of the 20th century. Despite all the efforts of the missionaries of the official Orthodox Church, the Perm province, as before, occupied one of the first places in the Russian Empire in terms of the number of Old Believers. According to the 1897 census, 95,174 Old Believers lived on the territory of the Perm province, while 31,986 lived in the Tobolsk province, and 22,219 and 15,850, respectively, in the Orenburg and Ufa provinces adjacent to the Perm province from the west. Adherents of the "ancient piety", according to this census, made up about 3% of the total population of the provinces, but since the distribution of the Old Believers across the region was uneven, in some areas the proportion of the Old Believer population was higher, and in others - much lower. Historically, mining settlements, as well as settlements lying on the way from the European part of the country to Siberia and the Far East, became the main Old Believer centers.

As the main reason for the significant increase in the number of Old Believers in the first decade of the 20th century. representatives of the Orthodox Church most often referred to the policy of tolerance proclaimed by the Manifesto on April 17, 1905, stating that with "such freedom" their missionary work would no longer be successful. Pointing to the growth in the number of "called Old Believers", the local church authorities no longer concealed and did not underestimate these data, as before, but on the contrary, for a more impressive illustration of how, under favorable conditions, "the schism is swallowing up the Orthodox population more and more", probably could somewhat "round off" the data on the number of the Old Believer population, as was done in the report of the Perm diocesan missionary for 1913. Missionaries in 1913 noted the growth of the Old Believer population in Osinsky, Kungursky, Krasnoufimsky, Yekaterinburg, Verkhotursky, Kamyshlovsky counties by 2–4 times compared with the data of the statistical committees that conducted the census in 1897.

The increase in the number of the Old Believer population after 1905 occurs to a greater extent due to the legalization of that part of the Old Believers who, before the declaration of freedom of religion, was considered formally belonging to the official Orthodox Church. According to the requirements established in 1905, everyone who wished to apply for the transition to the Old Believers had to submit separately. However, in exceptional cases, collective petitions were also granted. Very unusual was, for example, a petition filed in 1908 by 137 peasants from the village. Katarach of the Shadrinsk district of the Perm province. These peasants, who are listed as Orthodox, petitioned to be allowed to return to the "faith of the fathers", that is, to the Old Believers. In the process of their exhortation, it turned out that the parents of many of them in 1887 "evaded schism", accompanying their decision with a petition to the Ekaterinburg Spiritual Consistory with a request to consider them officially Old Believers. The case was transferred from the consistory to the Synod, and there its consideration was delayed. The peasants, without waiting for official permission, began to baptize their children “according to the priestless rite” and later turned not to the church, but to the mentor, but the local priest still considered them at his church, and not without some benefit: after all, all parishioners, and consequently, they, too, were obliged to fulfill the office of church watchmen. It was this circumstance - the desire to get rid of the guard service - that became the main reason for initiating in 1908 that same petition for exclusion from Orthodoxy. After conversations with the missionary, the peasants confirmed their desire to convert to the Old Believers, referring to the Decree on religious tolerance. As a result, in the reports of the local dean for 1913, out of all the inhabitants of the village. There were only 92 Katarachs attending the official Orthodox Church, all the rest were attributed to the Old Believers-bespriests.

The transformation of Beglopopov’s consent (Sofontievites) into Bespopov’s (or, as the chapel missionaries were also called, the “Starikovsky sense”) took place in the context of the struggle against the “schism” that the government of Nicholas I launched from the beginning of the 30s. 19th century Under the threat of deprivation of social and economic rights, most of the Yekaterinburg merchants, leaders of the beglopopov society of the Old Believers of the Siberian Territory, in 1838 joined the Edinoverie. However, the hopes that ordinary Old Believers would follow the example of the leaders did not come true. Because of the persecution by the authorities of the fugitive priesthood and the collapse of the organization of the fugitive priests, they switched to non-priestly practice. Thus, the Nikolaev repressive policy in relation to the Ural Old Believers was not crowned with success, since it only led to a change in its organization: the decentralized world of non-priest communities of chapels replaced the beglopopov society. Part of the Trans-Ural peasant communities, under the influence of M. I. Galanin and his associates, switched to bespriest practice as early as the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

Let us single out a set of reasons why the Old Believers of the Urals and Trans-Urals switched to the priestless practice.

First, runaway priests were always in short supply. Old Believer parishes were very large, often at the right time the priest was not around, and some liturgical functions were taken over by the laity. A stable practice was created to do without a priest. In addition, the priests who converted from Orthodoxy to the Old Believers did not, as a rule, have high moral qualities, and in conditions of an acute shortage of personnel, moral flaws usually worsened. Exacting to the moral character of their shepherds, the peasants were more and more inclined to reject such priests.

Secondly, the merchant class, which was the pinnacle of the Ural fugitives, who determined the life of consent and led the fugitive priests, was looking for a compromise with the government. In the reign of Catherine and Alexander, there was a gradual softening of government policy and a compromise became possible. The bulk of the Old Believers - the peasants - did not support the conciliatory policy of the top and were radically disposed. Internal contradictions in Beglopopov's agreement intensified. The consequence of this was the transition of the peasants-Old Believers to bespriest practice, which took place in the Trans-Urals earlier than in the mining Urals.

Thirdly, at this time there is a social stratification of the village. The emerging rural petty bourgeoisie seeks to take control of the inner life of the religious community, and this is easier to do when the community is self-governing and independent.

The final decision to refuse further reception of the “Nikonian” priests was made at the Tyumen Cathedral on November 13, 1840, because “... and to this day they are strictly persecuted, we leave them. And for that matter we elect the rulers-priests, who are allowed by this cathedral to fulfill the requirements and needs of the laity; as if our ancestors had abbots with us, but they obeyed the priests of the government. But now we completely deny them. Thus, the correction of the needs passed to the mentors-old men and tutors, elected by the community. The old people acted as laymen, they did not have the right to read the prayers that the priest was supposed to say during worship and during the performance of the sacraments. But, even moving on to priestless practice, the doctrine of the consent of the chapels continued to deny the dogma of the complete suppression of the true priesthood after the reforms of Patriarch Nikon.

To resolve the most important issues, the chapels, as well as their predecessors, the fugitives, convened a council, to which representatives from the communities were delegated, both mentors and other laity. Usually, wealthy Old Believers took care of organizing such meetings; delegates held their meetings in their spacious city houses. The role of the chairman of the meeting was often performed by mentors or trustees of secular communities, but the most influential was the opinion of the skete elders (as in former times, in the 18th - first half of the 19th centuries), who were necessarily invited to the cathedral. This continued, presumably, until the 1880s, when the differences in views between the radical peasant communities (mainly Trans-Urals) and the moderate urban commercial and industrial circles of the chapels again made themselves felt. In 1884, at the council, the people of Yekaterinburg were able to achieve the resolution they needed on a new search for the priesthood, despite the fact that it contradicted the arguments of the supporter of priestlessness, the most authoritative of the Chernorizians - Fr. Nifont, with whose opinion the peasant delegates agreed. The fact that the role of the skitniks invited to the Ural cathedrals has decreased is also evidenced by the further practice of holding such meetings: the Chernoriztsy were present at the council of 1908 and at the congress of 1911, but they no longer participated in the discussions, giving up the leading role to representatives of secular communities.

Nevertheless, despite the decrease in the ideological role, forest dwellings retain their social and cult significance. Ural "factory dachas" in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. are still a haven for many skete settlements.

In the forests of the Visimo-Shaitansky plant, according to missionaries, at the beginning of the 20th century. there were 11 sketes along the rivers Shaitanka, Sulem, Bushan. Not far from Nizhny Tagil, near the river. Shumikha, beyond the Spruce Mountain, there was a hostel of 18 skit women, headed by Efimiya Ivanovna Kondratieva, a peasant widow from the village of Pryanichnikova, Verkhoturye district. The skitnits had two huts: one was reserved for a prayer room (four living rooms and two pantries), in the second they set up a barn for several cows, a hayloft and a small closet where various utensils were stored.

In 2-3 versts from this settlement there was a skete in which the schemist Anisya Reshetnikova lived, separated from the women's hostel. Relatives from the village helped her to put up a cell. Gorbunovo, located next to the Nizhny Tagil plant. Many local residents, when they went for berries or hunting, often visited Anisya, bringing her food. There was a separate "small" cell for guests in the skete. The skitnitsa herself sometimes went “out into the world” to raise money and hire workers to repair buildings. But, despite such “famousness”, it was not easy for an “uninitiated” person to find Anisya’s hermitage: “In the middle of the forest, in a swampy area, there is a small clearing that can be seen only when you come out of the forest to it. This clearing ... is fenced with a low pole fence. In the northern part, the spinning fence is a little fenced off and here is the entrance to the clearing. When entering through this gate, on the right side there is a small shed in which moss is stacked. Then there is a path, which, passing by a spring, leads to the cells ... Around the cells, all over the clearing is a damp place overgrown with grass ... Part of the clearing between the gates and the cells is dug up under a ridge on which grow beans, carrots, cucumbers ... ".

In 1912, near the village of Bolshaya Laya, nuns of the skete of Metropolitan Alexandra and Elizaveta settled from near the village of Kedrovka, Kungur District, Perm Province. Previously, near the village of Kedrovka, there was a male skete of Fr. Nifont and the women's skete of Metro Theodora and Zinaida. In 1882–1883 both sketes moved to the forests near the village. Isetsky Yalutorovsky district of the Tobolsk province. Then, after the death of Fr. Nifont, in 1890, one part of the male skete moved even further to the east - to the Tomsk taiga, the second, led by Fr. Ignatius, remained near Isetsky, and the nuns with m. Alexandra returned near the village of Kedrovka.

There is information about sketes in other districts of the Perm province. The most numerous after the resettlement in the 1880s. skete of Fr. Israel on the river Nyaz, on the border of Yekaterinburg and Krasnoufimsk districts. In 1901–1902 Through the efforts of the Sungulsky skete, which had existed until 1921-1923, the Sungulsky skete was revived through the efforts of the small Kasli skete, the M. Fekla and Elena. At 12–15 versts from the Nevyansk plant there was a hermitage of the Nionila metro station, in which about 20 old women lived. Many desert dwellers lived in 1914 in the Cherdyn district, along the upper reaches of the river. Pechora, Unya, Kolva and their tributaries.

Some forest settlements, although they were called sketes, were rather small settlements where individual families moved. Such “monasteries” were in the forest dacha of the Nizhny Tagil plant, where, for example, near the Uchinsky swamp, not far from each other, peasants of the Perm district Fedor Rukavishnikov and Nikolai Zhelnin lived with their wives and children, doing beekeeping. Similar solitary settlements were also arranged in the Cherdyn forests, where the settlers were engaged in farming and hunting.

The proximity of some sketes to settlements ensured, if necessary, the help of local chapel-laymen, however, this proximity contained a danger: from time to time the sketes were robbed. For example, in the autumn of 1911, a series of thefts took place in the settlements near Nizhny Tagil: a gang of intruders from the factory artisans took out various things and almost all the winter supplies from the storerooms of the skitniks during September-December.

At the end of September 1911, the skete of Zakhary Komarov, who was absent at that time, was the first to "receive a visit" at the end of September 1911. Only the novice Elisha was in the hut, from whom they took 4 rubles, a fur coat, a bag of cranberries, flour, cereals, 8 pounds of honey and several books - in total, about 100 rubles. Immediately after the incident, Fr. Zakhariy tried through his acquaintances in the factory village to find at least something from the stolen library and buy it back. In this way, he was able to return two books, and the fate of the others remained unknown.

Having received no rebuff, the robbers continued the "enterprise" they had begun. They usually arrived late in the evening, asked to stay and then, having penetrated the premises and intimidating the owners, carried out property and demanded money. Only in the case of the women's hostel, the raiders had a hard time. On their first visit, on October 21, the wanderers locked themselves in the hut, where the living rooms and the prayer room were located, and the barn was indicated as a place for the arriving “travelers” to spend the night. From there, the thieves took out several arshins of canvas and some utensils, but, apparently, there was nothing special to profit from, and the raiders, according to their subsequent confession, first of all expected to find large sums of money in the sketes. The behavior of the robbers became so impudent that the inhabitants of the skete, in order to prevent the cows from being taken out of the barn, had to resort to weapons. They “loaded an old cannon with gunpowder and fired a shot into the air, Alexandra Fedorovna Starikova fired, then the peasants did not take the cows and went to the barn,” and meanwhile the wanderers sent messengers to the nearest village. Three hours later, a resident of the village of Bobrovka, Vasily Evgrafov, still found crooks in the skete, who, seeing him, grabbed a pillow that fell under their hands and left.

In addition, the same gang visited the lodges of Rukavishnikov and Zhelnin. At night, at the first one, they locked the door to the living quarters of the hut from the outside and pulled food supplies out of the passage. In the second case, they drove everyone in the house into one of the rooms and took out all the property from the living quarters, from the attic and from the hallway: 30 pounds of flour, grain, barley groats, clothes, books and 40 kopecks, which they found from two sons Zhelnin. He did not report the robberies to the police, "because it was not ordered by scripture."

The final "raid" on the desert dwellers was the second visit, in early December, to the women's hermitage under the Spruce Mountain. The robbers again could not penetrate into the main hut, but this time they immediately dragged into their sleigh all the good that caught their eye. Skitnitsy again resorted to an already tested means: they began to shoot from the "gun". The robbers left, taking with them harness, flour and a lot of clothes - fur coats, dresses, shawls, sheepskins, etc. It was this acquisition that contributed to the capture of the attackers. A day later, the police bailiff in Nizhny Tagil became aware of the robbery “by secret means”. He, on his own initiative, since there were no statements from the victims, established surveillance in the market and two hours later detained a woman who had come to sell an “old-style” fur coat. She turned out to be one of the relatives of the robbers, so it was not difficult to conduct further investigation. All members of the gang were arrested and then, on the basis of the testimonies given by the victims, they were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

However, the capture of these thieves in the forest settlements did not become much calmer. In August 1913, one of the cells in the same forest near the Nizhny Tagil factory was again attacked. Two wanderers lived in it, separated from the large dormitory of Kondratiev. The perpetrators, the Perepelkin brothers, wishing to get "gemstones" from ancient icons, came to the skete under the guise of hunters. However, they could not get down to business right away, because soon after them guests, the Old Believers Fedyunins, came to the schema women, who “as well-known persons” were arranged for an overnight stay in a room with icons in a “large” cell. Having waited for the Fedyunins to leave early in the morning, the Perepelkins killed both pilgrims and removed the decoration from the "deity". However, having examined the “stones” on the way back and realizing that they were simple pieces of glass, they threw their prey into the swamp and returned home. The killers were found thanks to the testimony of the Fedyunins, who heard piercing screams from the side of the skete, returned and, having found the dead women, reported to the police.

Such incidents again and again led many desert-dwellers to the idea of moving to more secluded places along the path previously taken by many settlers to Siberia.

At the beginning of the XX century. the most literate people in the secular communities, the scribes, had great authority among the chapels of the mining Urals. They knew relatively deeply the texts of Holy Scripture, the works of St. fathers and church rules, mastered the methods of conducting polemical conversations, defending the doctrine of their consent was a professional activity for them.

One of the most famous chapel clerks in the Urals was Afanasy Trofimovich Kuznetsov (10/24/1879 - 06/07/1938). His father was a craftsman at the Nizhny Tagil plant. Having studied "divine literacy" at home, and also having received 6 classes of secular education, Athanasius at the age of 25 was recognized as a connoisseur of Holy Scripture and an excellent orator. When describing one of his first conversations with the "Austrians" - Fr. Vasily Syutkin and the bookkeeper A. D. Tokmantsev - on the Merry Mountains in June 1903, the Yekaterinburg missionary noted: “The relatively still young Kuznetsov is so experienced in polemics that in competitions about faith ... he put the apologists of the Austrian consent in an unrequited position,” and The impression of one of the chapels was stated as follows: “... [Kuznetsov, minister of the Nizhny Tagil chapel. Although Kuznetsov is young, he conducted the conversation brilliantly. This will be the second Konovalov. The mention of Saratov's Spasovite, the blind Andrei Afanasyevich Konovalov, was not accidental. From the end of the 1890s. the chapels of the Urals and Siberia, despite belonging to a different accord, often invited him for interviews with "Austrians" and missionaries. “Which of the Ural Old Believers now does not know Konovalov!” - exclaims one of the listeners of his conversation with the "Austrian" on May 6, 1903 in the Lysva plant. It was from A. A. Konovalov that Afanasy Kuznetsov learned polemical techniques, eventually becoming one of the best non-priest scribes. Fate has prepared for him both loud fame and serious trials. After one of the conversations with a missionary in Shadrinsk district, he had to spend some time in prison because his speech was assessed as "blaspheming the Orthodox Church." The conclusion prevented A. T. Kuznetsov from taking part in the First All-Russian Congress of Chapels in September 1911, and he had to limit himself to a short written greeting. After his release, Afanasy Trofimovich began to devote most of his time to the affairs of the Assumption Brotherhood established at the congress, but he did not disregard the controversy, especially since the congress elected him a teacher at the brotherhood. With his participation in 1915, the magazine "Ural Old Believer" began to be published. Thanks to his "Historical Essays on the Ural Old Believers", published on the pages of this publication, A. T. Kuznetsov also became known as a historiographer of chapel consent.

In the course of disputes over strict observance of the rules of true Orthodox life in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. inside the chapel agreement, insignificant rumors stood out: “Klimentovtsy”, “Mikhailovtsy” and “Porfiryovs”, - the name of which came from the names of their founders. “Klimentovtsy” (followers of the monk Clement (Klimont) from the skete near the village of Bolshiye Galashki, Verkhotursky district, Perm province) were not numerous - no more than two dozen people. The separation occurred due to the ban by Clement to keep samovars, lamps, and wear colorful clothes in the houses. According to the missionaries, the teachings of Clement differed from those of the chapels also in eschatological views: according to him, the Antichrist had already reigned in the world in the form of the idol of Samora, that is, a samovar. Therefore, in such end times, one should not be recorded in any civil books and pay taxes. An influential follower of this trend was the Yekaterinburg merchant Grigory Vladimirovich Blokhin, who, using commercial connections, tried to attract chapels to his side. Shartash. On January 1–2, 1903, in the village of Bolshie Galashki, the cathedral of chapels discussed the doctrine of a new kind. The “Klimentovites” cited many extracts as proof of the truth of their views, but they could not convince the assembled representatives of the communities from nearby industrial settlements (more than 100 people were present). The chapels decided: "since they [Clementists] separated without a council of sins for the sake of wine, they are subject to canonical eruption." Clement refused the subsequent offer to leave his "misconceptions", and the split took place completely. However, the "Clementine faith" did not receive wide distribution. In the memoirs of the local Old Believers, the monk Clement remained a loner, who “separated himself from the rest and led a more strict lifestyle.”

In 1902, the “Mikhailovites” - supporters of Deryabinnikov Mikhail Illarionovich, separated from the “Klimentovites”. Reproaching the "Klimentovites" for the fact that many old women in their sketes have personal belongings and money, Mikhail called such a life a "robber" assembly and declared that he was separating from it. Deryabinnikov was a supporter of the greatest possible distance from the world. At the already mentioned Galashkinsky Cathedral, it was he who initiated the decision not to accept for prayer parents whose children study in zemstvo schools.

The “Porfirians”, of whom there were even fewer than the “Clementists”, separated from the chapels because of their special opinion about the rite of baptism: they believed that true baptism could only be performed in running river or spring water, and all those baptized in a different way should have been baptized. It is obvious that the “disciples of the Porphyry” had doubts about the need to rebaptize the chapels. To clarify the situation, in 1909 they invited an active figure in the consent of the “baptized” from the village of Nizhny Tagil to Nizhny Tagil. Tolby of the Nizhny Novgorod province Alexander Mikheevich Zapyantsev. Having entered the course of the matter, Zapyantsev answered the question “on what basis should those coming from the chapels be baptized?” extended message. It followed from his reasoning that baptism in this case was necessary because of the former practice of receiving fugitive priests, “because their priests were appointed from the servants of the Antichrist and were received illegally, and did not act according to the rules of the holy fathers.” It is not known whether the “Porfirians” accepted his arguments, but such views were not supported and widely disseminated in the Urals.

In some Siberian conciliar resolutions there are references to the "Zavyalov heresy" of the late 19th - first quarter of the 20th centuries, whose supporters introduced elements of the rejected "priestly" practice during marriage.

The problem of the unification of the rites of baptism, communion, marriage, repentance, without the solution of which it was impossible to prevent divisions in societies, the chapels discussed in 1911 at the First All-Russian Congress, held in Yekaterinburg. Many of the participants came only to consider these ordinances. It was possible to immediately come to a consensus on only one issue: it was recognized that the sacrament of repentance does not require a priest, it can be performed by monks and simpletons, that is, "any worthy person chosen for that." Consideration of all other issues was not easy: the participants in the discussion, referring to the Holy Scriptures, often drew directly opposite conclusions. After many hours of debate, it was established how the rites of baptism and marriage should be performed. The question of communion turned out to be the most difficult, it was generally decided on the plane of “to be or not to be”. The fact is that for more than half a century the chapels had no priests from whom it would be possible to receive spare Gifts for communion. In many societies, the holy Gifts left by the former priests have run out, but even those who have not yet run out of them, for example, the chapels of the Kyshtym factory, doubted their truth and the legitimacy of receiving such Gifts from the common people. Readers D. K. Serebryannikov (from Nevyansk) and A. E. Arapov (from the Verkhneivinsky plant) insisted on the right to accept the preserved Gifts, as well as on the possibility of allowing communion with epiphany water instead. The exchange of opinions did not lead to anything, and the decision of this issue was postponed until the next council.

Disagreements among the chapels also appeared in relation to the “Regulations on the Old Believer Communities” published on October 17, 1906. Many people doubted the benefits of the opportunity provided by the “Regulations” to register a community with the provincial administration (and thus obtain the rights of a legal entity), expecting that information about the presence of a community could subsequently do a disservice, for example, it would not allow to avoid harassment by the authorities if the policy in attitude of the Old Believers will become more rigid. The controversy between the supporters of the legal status of the community and the so-called "opponents of the community" was serious, but both sides invariably remained unconvinced. The already mentioned Afanasy Trofimovich Kuznetsov spoke in defense of the registration. In the magazine "Ural Old Believer" he published a number of articles exposing the delusions of the "anti-communalists". Emphasizing the great importance of the right of official organization of communities and “the acquisition of legal and ecclesiastical rights by the Old Believers in this way”, which was guaranteed by the “Regulations”, he nevertheless noted that “however, there were also such people who see in the community nothing more than sin and apostasy from the faith of the fathers. The "anti-communists" substantiated their position in several paragraphs of the decision of the cathedral, which took place in the village. Gorbunov of the Verkhotursky district on January 13–15, 1912, A. T. Kuznetsov mentions that among the “inspirers” of the rejection of the registration of communities at the cathedral were the hermits Sergius, Varlaam, Efrosin and Kliment. In the mining Urals, the decision of the Gorbunovsky Cathedral was completely in tune with the mood in the Nizhny Tagil community. In the Tomsk province, "anti-communist" tendencies were even stronger.

The problem of literacy and education was perceived ambiguously among the Ural chapels. The group of the most active figures (self-name - "Old Believer intellectuals"), which included scribes and the most literate parishioners of large factory and urban communities, advocated the establishment of separate Old Believer educational institutions and special training for teachers. The idea of "raising literacy among children, the arrangement and equipment of Old Believer schools for this purpose" was also discussed at the All-Russian Congress of Chapels and was generally supported. Among the supporters of schools, the main stumbling block was the different understanding of the content of the educational program. It seemed to many that the traditional course of teaching writing, reading, divine literacy, which in former times was entrusted to the "craftswoman", was enough. Of course, the Old Believers sometimes sent their children to zemstvo schools to receive any professional skills, but still such an education was considered unsatisfactory (“they don’t teach psalters, canons, or hook singing”) and was not welcomed everywhere. Dissatisfaction with the zemstvo schools remained even when some of the subjects (most often the Law of God) were taught by teachers from the Old Believers. Thus, Vasily Andreyevich Laskin, rector of the village of Yar, Kamyshlov uyezd, expressed his concerns at the congress: “Our zemstvo has built a ten-thousand building for a school. Our teacher is now one of our Old Believers. Things are going well. Only here is the trouble: they tell the children that the earth is spinning, but the sun is standing. We don't like it." And one of the representatives of the community from the Shadrinsk district said: “We don’t want a brotherhood, a community, or a school. We doubt all of this."

In addition, there were obstacles of a financial or administrative nature. A delegate from the Petrokamensk factory in the Verkhoturye district spoke about his attempt to set up an Old Believer school with craft and agricultural departments. Zemstvo reacted favorably to the initiative, but offered the Old Believers to cover part of the costs, which they were unable to do. Because of this, the matter was upset, although the main reason for abandoning the school was the fear that “children, although there will be an Old Believer clergyman in school, will not be sufficiently taught Christian truths.” In the KarGAPKl volost, Shadrinsk uyezd, an application for permission to set up a school still could not pass through the proper authorities for two years.

Yet the biggest hurdles were doubts about the acceptability of state-run schools. “Schools require permission. This stops us. Because we doubt how it would [be] possible to open schools freely - that's another matter. It is necessary to subtract in the Holy Scriptures - whether they resorted to authority when opening schools in the old days.

A great deal of work to convince fellow believers in the usefulness and need for a comprehensive education was done by the staff of the magazine "Ural Old Believer", published in 1915-1916. They cited the following arguments: “It is time for all Old Believers to join the secular sciences and merge their strong faith with the light of scientific knowledge. Many church fathers themselves were brought up in secular sciences, and their faith did not fall from this, but, on the contrary, triumphed over the surrounding darkness ... Life requires great knowledge, without which it will soon be unbearable to work.

Soon after the congress of 1911 in Yekaterinburg, a school was established at the Nikolsky Church, in which 50 students and pupils could study at the same time. The training was conducted according to a 3-year program. The staff of the school included 2 teachers, a teacher of the law, a singing teacher and a watchman. The head of the school was the sister of Ignatius Krokhina, secretary of the council of the Nikolskaya community, Pelageya Seliverstovna Zagudaeva. Through the efforts of the parishioners of both city chapels, they managed to collect a good school library, which contained not only early printed psalters for studying church reading and writing, manuals and readers published for schools by the Ministry of Education, but also art albums, encyclopedic dictionaries, publications of the Pavlenkov Library, fairy tales by G. -X. Andersen, books by D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak, F. M. A. Voltaire, L. N. Tolstoy and N. V. Gogol. All in all, there were more than 100 titles of books and manuals in the library list of this school.

Another major educational institution for chapels in eastern Russia was a 3-class private lower school opened in 1915 in the village. Tyumentsevo, Barnaul district. More than 40 pupils and pupils studied there.

A year later, the construction of a "new hotbed of knowledge" was completed at the Chernoistochinsky plant in the Verkhotursky district of the Perm province. Obviously, thanks to the connections and authority of A. T. Kuznetsov, who agreed to supervise the construction, the Zemstvo "took over the costs" in the amount of about 30 thousand rubles. (although in 1912, after a petition for the construction of a school by the local Nikolsky and Ilyinsky parishes, the issue of allocating even 15 thousand to the school for the school remained open). "The first and best in the Urals and in the Urals in terms of size and amenities" the school was designed for 500 people. The opening of the school took place very solemnly, the Chernorizet Fr. Anthony (Pozdnyakov), mentor of the Upper Tagil community, gave a lesson to future students and their parents.

The opening of this school had a great influence on the determination of other communities to establish schools. Applications for the opening of schools were submitted by the chapels of the Lysvensky factory, Nizhny Tagil, Verkhneyvinsk, but the events that began in 1917 forced them to forget about these plans.

At the beginning of the XX century. in the composition of the Ural communities of Old Believers-chapels, the share of the merchant class is somewhat reduced. This is primarily due to changes in the legal status of the merchant class. Researchers note that since 1885, after the introduction of a system of proportional taxation of commercial and industrial enterprises, “the decline in the prestige of the guild organization of the merchant class” begins. Later, in 1898, the possession of merchant privileges was separated from the right to trade. According to the “Regulations on the state trade tax”, adopted on June 8, 1898 and entered into force on January 1, 1899, it was enough to acquire a trade certificate to engage in entrepreneurial activity. Persons interested in preserving or obtaining the class rights of the merchants bought the guild certificate additionally. Due to the optional registration in the guild to engage in commercial and industrial activities, the proportion of merchants among entrepreneurs has increased since the beginning of the 20th century. began to decrease, especially in young cities, where the traditional values of the merchants did not have time to take a firm place. However, in most of the old cities of Western Siberia, the merchant class, although somewhat reduced, still retained its economic and social positions. In the Urals, as in Siberia, the Old Believers among the urban merchants made up a significant proportion, but not as large as before. In addition, a number of influential figures in the chapel agreement over time were increasingly inclined to accept either the Orthodoxy of the official church (for example, I. M. Belinkov), or the Belokrinitsky hierarchy (F. A. Malinovtsev).

In the created conditions, as part of the Yekaterinburg Old Believer communities of chapel consent at the beginning of the 20th century. Peasants who moved to the city take the first place in terms of numbers (table).

The social composition of the parishioners of the Assumption and Nikolskaya chapels in Yekaterinburg
in 1912, pers. (according to metric books

Of the parishioners of both churches, 135 people (63.7%) were peasants, and most of those whose place of residence is indicated had already moved to Yekaterinburg for permanent residence in 1912, and only 20 peasants, living at their place of registration - in the village. Shartash, the village of Stanovoy, in Verkhneivinsky, Berezovsky, Byngovsky and other factories, periodically came to one of the city chapels (usually for the baptism of a child). According to books on the class affiliation of families, one can trace how individual members of a peasant family, having moved to the city, eventually passed into the bourgeois class: Vikul Ulyanov - one of the sons of the Shartash peasant Iosif Ulyanov, Evstigney Afanasyevich Burukhin - from the peasants of the Nizhneselsky volost of the Yekaterinburg district.

The increase in the number of peasants in these Old Believer communities is associated with the all-Russian processes of resettlement of peasants in the city that began in the post-reform period. In the “Regulations on duties for the right to trade and other crafts”, published on January 1, 1863, two years later, in 1865, an additional 25th article was introduced, which stated that merchant certificates can be acquired by persons and not of a merchant rank . The researchers note that in this way, when granting trading rights, the principle of class was somewhat limited. Upon the adoption in 1870 of the new City Regulations, otkhodnik peasants, moving to the city to engage in trade or handicraft, on the basis of purchased trade certificates, received the right to take part in city self-government. Thus, class differences between the peasants and the rest of the townspeople became minimal, and in 1898, as already noted, a serious incentive for wealthy entrepreneurs to move from the lower classes to the merchant class was almost completely eliminated. For the Old Believer peasants who moved to live in the city, another circumstance was favorable: in a new place they were included in the community of the same faith, belonging to which often meant belonging to a community permeated with common economic ties.

The second largest class category among the parishioners of the Nikolskaya and Uspenskaya Old Believer chapels were philistines. In 1912, 68 Yekaterinburg philistines (32% of parishioners) were recorded in registers of births. Almost all of them permanently resided in Yekaterinburg, and only 1 person lived in the city of Kamyshlov.

As already noted, the merchant class among the Old Believers-chapels by the beginning of the second decade of the 20th century. decreased. Of all the parishioners of these churches, registered in the parish registers in 1912, merchants accounted for only 2.4% (5 people), of which three (the Shcherbakov family, headed by Grigory Gordeevich) lived in Yekaterinburg, and the rest were visitors, from Berezovsky plant (Vasily Savvich Boytsov) and from the city of Kamyshlov (Lydia Aleksandrovna Shcherbakova).

At the end of XIX - beginning of XX centuries. The Shcherbakovs are the most famous merchant surname among the Old Believers-chapels of Yekaterinburg. Old Believer Luka Grigoryevich Shcherbakov with household members (wife Tatyana Timofeevna, son Gordey 42 years old, daughter-in-law Anna Paramonovna, grandson Grigory 10 years old and granddaughter Ekaterina 7 years old) in 1855 is listed in the "List of Yekaterinburg schismatics of the bespopovshchina sect" among other 155 families. Over time, the Shcherbakovs took the place of trustees of the Nikolskaya (“big”) chapel, next to the prominent family of merchants Tarasovs. The famous Yekaterinburg Cathedral of 1884 was arranged in the Shcherbakovs' house, and in 1901 A. A. Konovalov's conversations with representatives of the "Austrians" took place there. They also succeeded in business activities: Grigory Gordeevich Shcherbakov owned several steam mills near the town of Kamyshlov, traded in meat, had a soap, candle and glue factories in Yekaterinburg. One of his four houses was located on Uktusskaya street, which in those days was called "millionaires' street". The son of Grigory Gordeevich, Fedor, was elected chairman of the Nikolskaya community of chapels in Yekaterinburg, registered in 1907, and, like his father, actively participated in the life of the Old Believer society: in 1915, he began distributing by subscription the journal Uralsky Old Believer".

A few words should also be said about the activities of the sons of Vasily Kolmakov. At the end of XIX - beginning of XX centuries. they were the largest merchants of the Tobolsk province. At their own enterprises in the Yalutorovsky district, the Kolmakovs were engaged in the production of butter, lard, flour and soap. The manufactured goods were sent to the Urals, to Moscow, St. Petersburg and even Turkey. At the Nizhny Novgorod fair, they traded in furs and leathers. In addition, they had their own shipping company in the Ob-Irtysh basin. One of the brothers - Anton Vasilievich - traded with Mongolia, buying wool, furs and raw hides. However, not only commerce was for the Kolmakovs the sphere of application of efforts, they participated in the solution of "spiritual" issues at the cathedrals. At the invitation of the brothers, in 1882/1883, the monk Nifont moved to one of the forest settlements, and then both sketes from the river. Sylva. Probably, while living “under the patronage” of the Kolmakovs, Fr. Nifont wrote the "Genealogy" of the chapel agreement, the "Historical legend" about the Orthodox faith and the "anti-Austrian" letter to Theophylact (Appendix 3).

Given the fundamental incompleteness of the discussion among the former fugitives about the suppression of the priesthood, the heads of the "Austrian" (Belokrinitskaya) hierarchy appealed to the chapels with calls to accept their "newly acquired true priesthood ... and rally their believing souls into the one Church of God" .

Beginning in the 1850s, after the appearance of the first priests of the Belokrinitskaya hierarchy in the Urals, some chapels took on a new priesthood. Here are a few examples: from the late 1850s. a community of “Austrians” was formed in the Yugo-Knaufsky plant (in 1887, the former chapel brothers Vasily and Stefan Rukavitsyn were ordained priests there); in 1857, residents of the village of Vaskinoy, Cherdynsky district, Perm province, received the priesthood; in 1861, Safony Pankratov, also a former chapel officer, was ordained a priest at the Sylva plant; the Old Believers of the village of Nizkaya, Kungursky district of the Perm province, who went over to priestlessness in 1850, accepted the Belokrinitsky priesthood in 1873; one of the main merits of the Yekaterinburg priest Pimen Petrovich Ognev was the formation of an “Austrian” parish from the Bespopovtsy of the village of Shipelovka, Yekaterinburg district; about. Tarasy Afanasyevich Khamkin from the village of Kurmanka, Beloyarsky volost, Yekaterinburg district, attached to the Belokrinitskaya hierarchy part of the chapels living in the zaimkas along the river. Pyshma and in the village of Obukhova, Kamyshlov district, Perm province. A number of representatives of the former chapels eventually became prominent figures among the "Austrians", for example, Afanasy Paromov, a Kolyvan tradesman, a native of the Nevyansk plant (in 1899-1918 - Bishop Anthony of Perm), a peasant of the village of Bolshaya Laya Andrei Berdyshev (in 1920-1934 - Andrian, Bishop of the Urals and Semipalatinsk), a peasant of the village of Shipelovka Andrey Tokmantsev (from 1900 to 1909 a teacher of the Ekaterinburg Holy Trinity Brotherhood) and others. Yuksu, Chernorizet Filimon, with his disciples Hesychius and Mikhail, joined the “Austrians” in 1881 and was ordained as hieromonk Theophylact, in 1882 he became rector of the new male skete, as well as head of the Belokrinitsky parish in Tomsk. Simultaneously with this, Theophylact made attempts to convince the other priestless Skityans to accept the newfound hierarchy. In 1882–1892 between him and one of the most authoritative elders of the chapel consent, Chernorizets Fr. Nifont, who at that time lived at the Kolmakov brothers' estate in the Tyumen district of the Tobolsk province, began a correspondence. Nifont responded to the proposal to accept the priesthood with a detailed message (appendix 3), where he outlined the reasons why he considers accession impossible due to the pouring baptism of the first Belokrinitsky hierarch, as well as due to violations during his appointment to the rank of metropolitan. Chernorizets emphasizes that before there were attempts to find the true priesthood in the Greek Orthodox Church, but it was the practice of pouring baptism, adopted by the Greeks from the Western church, that prevented this: “Our ancestors were very afraid of such consecration, so as not to scoop up old kvass, mixed with Western oversalting… » . At the present time, in his opinion, there is not a single blessed priest left and one should not separate from the former faith for the sake of those who create "iniquity and strife in the city."

At about the same time, among the Ural-Siberian chapels, another message was created “... to the brothers in the desert who are monks and all Orthodox Christians, on the face of the whole earth, from small to large, and living in the Siberian countries, or you can create or deign for them holy spirit to live in one Orthodoxy. Its author mentions the retreat of “our former brethren and hermits ... to the falsely eminent Austrian hierarchy” and also cites arguments from the Holy Scriptures that denounce the Belokrinitsa church, “so that it does not lift up its furious horn, and the Orthodox are not seduced by it ... like Philemon and other such they wanted to be gods, that is, to speak as priests and bishops, but there are no priests, not bishops, but simple peasants ... ", and their priesthood, "composed at the wrong time, because the pious bishops ended."

The question of whether the complete and final disappearance of the priesthood is possible and whether it should be sought has been repeatedly discussed by the Ural chapels. Disputes "for" and "against" the recognition of any hierarchy of "graceful" were between moderate representatives of the chapels, who lived in cities and factory towns, and more radical peasant Old Believer societies. When at the Yekaterinburg Cathedral in 1884 a proposal arose to search for the "true" priesthood, this issue was discussed very vigorously. The rector of the Old Believers of the Visimo-Utkinsky plant Trefily Vasilyevich Filatov, the trustees of the Yekaterinburg chapels Flegont Artemyevich Malinovtsev and Yegor Petrovich Suslov advocated the need to "find" the church hierarchy. The peasant delegates were opposed to the very possibility of the return of the priesthood, they denounced the vices of their former fugitive priests, saying that they “saw their unmercifulness, that they were somewhat unlike the legitimate shepherds and representatives of God. And they were more like robbers and predators ... ". Present at the cathedral, Fr. Nifont cited the words of Maxim the Greek about the general apostasy from the Orthodox faith, from which it followed that the true priesthood had long since ceased to exist. Opponents of the priesthood also noted that representatives of the Nizhny Tagil society were not invited to the cathedral (but they did come), whose trustee, merchant Vasily Matfeyevich Borodin, had already made trips to Belaya Krinitsa (to study the Belokrinitskaya hierarchy) and was now determined "very against the priesthood." Some of the delegates declared that they were not authorized by their society to discuss this topic, while others were inclined to give a positive answer, "but not without some spiritual indignation." As a result, at the insistence of the Yekaterinburg merchants, the cathedral, taking into account the thesis that “the true priesthood is to be until the end of the world”, decided to “search with care ... Will they find a true and blameless ordination, then this business would be good and soul-saving which we should not avoid. But it is even unthinkable that in only the last time such a thing will be found.

At the next Yekaterinburg Cathedral, in 1887, “there was also a reprimand about why our ancestors accepted the priesthood from the Russian church, and then later they did not accept the same priesthood from the same church.” This time, despite the fact that again “some zealots wanted to resume the reception of the priesthood of our ancestors, and if, according to the rules of the holy father, there are suitable priests in the Russian church, then look for the priesthood in other powers”, it was already decided to act like “Christians without the priesthood." Despite this, the supporters of the priesthood did not leave hope to sway the general opinion to their side, and they succeeded a year later, when the “congress of the Old Believer class” held in Perm in 1888 again agreed to seek the priesthood. When it became clear that no other church hierarchy, with the exception of the already known one - Belokrinitskaya, could be found, a wave of discussions about its "truth" began.

The trustee of the small Assumption Chapel in Yekaterinburg, merchant Flegont Artemyevich Malinovtsev in 1900 and 1907. two trips were made to the homeland of the first Belokrinitsky hierarch and to Belaya Krinitsa (to clarify the circumstances of the baptism, ordination and transition to the Old Believers of the Greek Metropolitan Ambrose). However, the collected evidence of Ambrose's compliance with the canons of "ancient" Orthodoxy did not convince the opponents of the priesthood. Many suspected that, firstly, the “Austrian” G. N. Grachev, who accompanied F. A. Malinovtsev, skillfully rigged the evidence they saw of the “correctness of Metropolitan Ambrose”, and secondly, Flegont Artemyevich himself was known as a supporter of the adoption of Belokrinitskaya hierarchy. The Yekaterinburg Cathedral of the Chapels, held on September 21, 1908, in which delegates from the societies of the Perm, Orenburg, Ufa and Tobolsk provinces took part, adopted a categorical resolution: “do not recognize the Austrian hierarchy as legal.” This wording, obviously, left no doubt that this issue would not be resolved in any other way. After the council, F. A. Malinovtsev and V. V. Kukin (from the city of Orenburg) - supporters of the priesthood - went over to the “Austrian” agreement.

The program of the All-Russian Congress of the Chapels in Yekaterinburg on September 25–30, 1911 did not include the question of the priesthood. However, at informal meetings of the leaders of the chapels with Daniil Kononovich Glukhov and Ivan Semyonovich Moshchevitin, authorized representatives of the Nizhny Novgorod All-Russian Brotherhood of the Beglopopists, who arrived specifically for this purpose, this problem was discussed, but, apparently, the meeting was not of particular importance for further rapprochement between the positions of the chapels and the Beglopopovites. A report was heard from Nizhny Novgorod on the course of the search for the bishop, which could not be considered successful. Understanding how unlikely it is in such a situation to get a positive decision on the priesthood from the congress, supporters of the adoption of priests could only “with genuine sadness” show the special assignment officer G. N. Taranovsky, sent from St. Petersburg to the congress for supervision, the unconsecrated throne and the royal gates, “which remain enclosed, for there is no person who would be entitled to touch the great shrine.”

Later, in 1913, several other members of the chapel, “finding it no longer possible for themselves to be priestless,” joined the Belokrinitsky agreement. Among them are Ananiy Kozmich Myagkikh, headman of the Yekaterinburg Nikolskaya chapel, and Nikolai Agafonovich Kholkin, a Yekaterinburg clerk, a participant in the Yekaterinburg Cathedral in 1908, the I All-Russian Congress of Chapels in 1911 and the co-religious congress in St. Petersburg in 1912. In 1916, "pro-Austrian" sentiments began to intensify in Nevyansk. The brothers Nazar and Ipat Serebrennikov, although they continued to visit the chapel, soon intended to accept the Belokrinitsky priesthood and persuaded the rest of the chapels to do the same. On June 19–21, 1916, disputes were held in Nevyansk between A.T. Kuznetsov and D.S. The interlocutors touched upon questions about the eternity of the priesthood, about the truth of the “Austrian” hierarchy, and about the rights of lay mentors. As a result, thanks to the brilliant polemical talent and authority of A. T. Kuznetsov, the mass transition of the chapels to Belokrinitsky consent was prevented, but a little later, the Serebrennikovs and the talented sign-singer Nikolai Mikhailovich Vengin nevertheless joined the "Austrians".

In general, even at the beginning of the 20th century, that is, half a century after their appearance in the Urals, Belokrinitsky were much inferior to the chapels in quantitative terms, but thanks to a more centralized organization and vigorous activity, every year they gained more and more influence and strengthened their positions .

* * *

In 1917, the "silver age" of the history of the Old Believers ended. Fleeing from the "godless power", the first wave of the Ural Old Believers went to Siberia with the retreating troops of A.V. Kolchak. It is known, for example, that Porfiry Simonovich Mokrushin, the head of the Dormition community of Yekaterinburg chapels, settled in the Altai Territory: the Bolshe-Basalashchak Cathedral of 1923 sorted out a questionnaire filled out by him as a mentor for registering a religious society in the Biysk Executive Committee.

The state anti-religious policy, although to a lesser extent than the Orthodox Church, nevertheless seriously affected the Old Believers, including the chapels. The Old Believers suffered in 1922–1923. due to the massive adoption, under pressure from party activists, of decisions to close prayer houses. The population was so dissatisfied with such harsh actions that the authorities, in order to prevent "the use of [these sentiments] by anti-Soviet elements," suspended such events. Secret directives to provincial executive committees said that in cases "when the closing of churches irritates part of the working population, the churches must be opened." The prayer houses of the Bespopovites that survived after this campaign fell under the second wave of mass closing of churches, which began in 1928. For example, by decision of the Sverdlovsk Regional Executive Committee in February 1930, the Yekaterinburg Assumption Chapel was closed, the building of which was first transferred to the medical club, and then demolished. The believers managed to defend the Nikolskaya chapel, it remained the only Old Believer church in the city. Later, the Old Believers of the Belokrinitsa consent and co-religionists received shelter in it. In addition, in the 1920s many Old Believer mentors found themselves in the category of "disenfranchised" - deprived of voting rights "for connection with a religious cult."

During the 1920s the flow of Old Believers-settlers to the east did not weaken. In 1928, the "instigator of the Mikhailovsky persuasion" M. Deryabinnikov left for Biysk. Even before the start of the anti-religious campaign to the east, first near Tyumen, then to the Kolyvan taiga, and later to even more remote places, the schema women of Sungul, Nizhny Tagil and other Ural sketes moved to the east, and this temporarily saved them from persecution by the "godless" authorities.

The son of P. S. Mokrushin Ivan, the first editor of the Ural Old Believer, who left with the troops of Kolchak, settled with his family in the Soloneshensky district of the Altai Territory. Twice, in 1931 and 1935, he was sent to forced labor by a court verdict, the first time for 3 months, the second for 7. In 1938, when he worked as a chief accountant in one of the state farms in the Soneshelsky district, he was arrested the third time. Ivan Porfiryevich was accused of leading the Old Believer monarchist organization "Brotherhood of Russian Truth", which, allegedly on the instructions of the Harbin White Emigrant Center, created "rebel cadres" in Siberia and the Urals, organized the collapse of state farms, and printed counter-revolutionary leaflets. The Chekists "revealed" 40 members of the "Brotherhood", which included many figures of the chapel consent: Sergei Pimenovich Kozlov, who at that time was a mentor of the community with. Shartash, Krotova Afanasia Samsonovna and Belyaeva Evdokia Ivanovna - abbesses of the Ural women's monasteries, Fr. Ephraim (Sherstobitov) - a monk who lived in forest cells, Kuzma Andreevich Krechetov, who was a trustee of the Verkhneyvinskaya chapel before the revolution, and many others.

A difficult fate awaited the wanderers who remained in the Urals. In 1936, a few inhabitants of the female hermitage in the forests of the Shali district, headed by the metro station Aleftina (Leskova A.D.), Evstoliya (Domracheva E.F.) and Afanasia (Voronina A.I.), only 9 people. , were convicted of evading socially useful labor and exiled for 3 years to a settlement in the northern regions of the Sverdlovsk region.

A.F. Kuznetsov, who remained in the Urals, was arrested several times in the early years of Soviet power for collaborating with the Kolchak authorities during the civil war and, in the end, in 1921 was exiled to Tashkent. Returning after exile to his homeland, he was able to get a job in one of the drilling artels, but, like many in this country, Afanasy Trofimovich did not survive the Stalinist repressions. On charges of belonging to a counter-revolutionary organization of the Socialist-Revolutionaries, leading an underground struggle against the Soviet regime, on February 14, 1938, he was arrested and shot on June 7, 1938, among 118 others convicted in this case by a troika of the UNKVD of the Sverdlovsk region.

In 1937, the mentor of the chapels with. Bashkarskoye, Sverdlovsk Region, Sidor Dmitrievich Zverev was sentenced to capital punishment for "calling" for the return of a prayer house taken from the Old Believers. In the same year, Elisey Petrovich Gubkin, a mentor from the village of Syskovo, Chelyabinsk Region, was shot for distributing religious literature (which the NKVD officers assessed as counter-revolutionary). 7 people of the Old Believers-chapels of the Shalinsky and Lysvensky districts in 1936 were charged under Article 58 "for activities aimed at overthrowing the Soviet regime." Two - B. I. Konkov and V. Z. Zverev - were sentenced to three years in the camps, and the rest, including Uvar (Uvenaliy Ivanovich Oznobikhin), a Chernoryst, were exiled to 5 years in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. However, in 1937-1938. The troika of the UNKVD of the Krasnoyarsk Territory again condemned Fr. Uvar and two other exiled Ural chapels - S. E. Shiryaev and R. V. Kozhevnikov - to capital punishment. When the case was reviewed in 1963, the Sverdlovsk Regional Court found all 7 Old Believers arrested in 1936 innocent and rehabilitated them.

Surviving documents of repeated investigations in the 1950s–1960s. testify that all the cases of the "counter-revolutionary Old Believer organizations" in the Urals - the "Brotherhood of Russian Truth", the "Group of Militant Christians" - were inspired by the NKVD investigators. In the materials of the initial investigation, as a rule, the Chekists' ideas about what could express disagreement with the existing government are clearly visible: the distribution of leaflets, sabotage, the creation of a network of underground organizations, etc. However, even those of the Old Believers who were opposed to a compromise with “godless power”, followed other traditions, the main manifestations of which were the escape, the spread of eschatological views and beliefs about the antichrist nature of the post-revolutionary power.

Most of the Old Believers of the Urals, despite the repressions, adapted to the conditions of Soviet life, turning to their centuries-old experience of coexistence with the authorities persecuting them. Secretly gathering for prayers in private homes, trying to perform, as far as possible, the sacraments of baptism and confession, following the Christian commandments in everyday life, the chapels were able to preserve their spiritual life and traditions.

In the period 1906–1917. on the territory of the Perm province. about two dozen chapel societies wished to acquire the status of a legal entity, and most of the communities were registered before 1912.

At the congress of chapels in the village of Kutorok, Biysk district, Tomsk province. On January 1, 1909, about 600 people were present, including 20 mentors and 250 lay representatives from the Biysk, Barnaul and Kuznetsk districts. One of the decisions of the congress was the excommunication of the mentors of s. Kamenki and with. Altai due to the fact that their communities were registered in the provincial government (Church. 1909. No. 6. P. 216; No. 11. P. 387). On May 28, 1911, a council in the village of Kachegarka, Barnaul district, excommunicated supporters of the community from the city of Barnaul. In a message to the Yekaterinburg congress of the chapels of Barnaul, they wrote: “... people who are opposed to the registration of communities have strong faith, strong and fear, in the past the authorities saw a different attitude towards the Old Believers. Therefore, it is quite natural that a new, albeit beneficent, law is adopted with distrust, and our brethren dubbed the law on communities a ‘trap’…” (Proceedings of the First All-Russian Congress of Old Believers who do not have a priesthood… P. 78).

Thanks to the traditions of home schooling existing among the Old Believers, their level of literacy was much higher than the average. Even taking into account that the ability to sign for oneself in an official document is not a sufficient sign of literacy, as well as the fact that there were fewer literates in rural areas, 75% of parishioners in the Old Believer urban community could do this (figures obtained based on data from the parish registers of the Assumption and St. Nicholas chapels: GASO, F. 6, Inventory 13, D. 206, 207, 208, 209). The issues of literacy of the unprivileged segments of the population of the Urals are considered in detail in the studies: Mosin A. G. Literacy of the peasants of the Vyatka province in the late 18th - mid-19th centuries. // Peasantry of the Urals in the era of feudalism: Sat. scientific tr. Sverdlovsk, 1988, pp. 138–150; Gavrilov D. V. Literacy and educational level of the mining population of the Urals in 1861–1885. // Public education in the Urals in the XVIII - early XX centuries. Sverdlovsk, 1990, pp. 48–69; He is. Literacy and educational level of the population of the Urals at the end of the 19th century. (1885–1900) // Ural. ist. vestn. Issue. 2. S. 81–98; Starikov M. Yu. On the issue of literacy of the population of the Urals in the first half of the 19th century. // Russian state of the XVII - early XX centuries: economics, politics, culture. Tez. report conf., dedicated 380th anniversary of the restoration of Russian statehood (1613 - 1993). Yekaterinburg, 1993, pp. 155–158. Mikityuk V.P. The dynasty of the Yekaterinburg merchants Belinkov // Third Tatishchev readings: Proceedings. report and message Yekaterinburg, April 19–20 2000 Yekaterinburg, 2000, p. 204.

GASO. F. 6. Op. 13. D. 206, 207 - Metric books of St. Nicholas Church; D. 208, 209 - Metric books of the Assumption Church. Prior to the issuance of the Decree on Old Believer communities on October 15, 1906, which is associated with the appearance of parish registers among the Old Believers, the record of their civil status acts, according to the Decree of April 19, 1874, was recorded by provincial (district) police departments or rural volost boards. Now, according to paragraphs 24, 36, 38-58 of the Decree of October 17, 1906, each officially registered community was obliged to keep registers of births independently. The filling of the book was assigned to the person who performed the rites. Entries were made during the year according to three standard sections "About the births", "About the dead", "About the married", indicating the class of the person being recorded. The books were to be checked monthly by the Community Council or (in the absence of the Council) by a specially elected person. At the end of the year, a copy of the book was provided to the provincial government for verification. On peasant townspeople, see: Ryndzyunsky P. G. Peasants and the city in capitalist Russia in the second half of the 19th century (the relationship between the city and the countryside in the socio-economic system of Russia). M., 1983; Mironov B. N. Social history of Russia in the period of the empire (XVIII - early XX centuries). T. 1. St. Petersburg, 1999. S. 325–326.

This figure reflects only the number of merchants - parishioners of only two chapels in 1 year; in all chapel harmony at this time there are more than a dozen representatives of the merchant class. Other Yekaterinburg merchants can be mentioned, for example, P. I. Tarasov and Z. I. Shcherbakov, A. M. and L. D. Sokolovs - trustees of the Nikolskaya and Assumption chapels, V. M. plant, as well as E. F. Tretyakova and G. V. Blokhin. Description of the acts and resolutions of the Yekaterinburg Cathedral. Cit. Quoted from: Pokrovsky N. N. The story of the Yekaterinburg Cathedral in 1884 // Studies in the history of literature and public consciousness of feudal Russia. Novosibirsk, 1992. S. 158.

Description of the acts and resolutions of the Yekaterinburg Cathedral. pp. 157–158. The initiators of the search for the priesthood were asked: “What kind of priesthood do you want to acquire, Austrian or something? No, they answered, if we were willing to accept it, then you would not be invited for a general council, because it is near us. Then we asked them again: And what about the newly-appeared Moscow priesthood, how do you approve of it or not? They decide: No, we do not approve of it and do not want to accept it. And again and again we asked them: What other priesthood would you like to find, and where? They decide: The Lord speaks in the Gospel: ‘Seek, and you will find’, and the Universe is wide” (Description of the acts and resolutions of the Yekaterinburg Cathedral on May 1, 1884 // Spiritual literature of the Old Believers of Eastern Russia in the 18th – 20th centuries, p. 343).

Descriptions of his travels to the East with G. Grachev, published in the journal "Old Believers" (1908. No. 7. S. 573–580; No. 8–9. S. 654–658; No. 10. S. 853–860; No. 11 pp. 984–989; 1909. No. 1–2. pp. 42–48; No. 3–4. pp. 154–173) and in a separate edition, contain the author’s observations “over the Greek rites” (rated by him as correctly performed) , testimonies of many Old Believer communities in Romania about immersion baptism in the Greek Church in general and the same baptism of the first Austrian metropolitan in particular.

Anticipating new debates about the Belokrinitsky priesthood at the next congress of chapels, F. A. Malinovtsev undertook a trip to the East in 1907 in order to “test his own research in 7 years” now without G. N. Grachev, who had died by that time, and was again convinced that the priesthood from Metropolitan Ambrose is completely Old Believer and you cannot find a purer and better one (Church. 1908. No. 27. P. 931-933; No. 28. S. 975-977; No. 30. S. 1031–1033).

The decision on the need for a bishop was made by the Beglopopovites at their congress in Nizhny Novgorod on May 15-19, 1908, which was attended by representatives of the chapels. So the visit of D.K. Glukhov was to some extent a reciprocal one.

There is reason to believe that it was the events that took place at the Edinoverie congress on January 22-30, 1912 that finally convinced N. A. Kholkin to accept the Belokrinitskaya hierarchy. At the congress, the question was discussed, "is it possible to give a bishop to fellow believers." Delegates from the chapels - A. T. Kuznetsov, N. A. Kholkin, S. Z. Zaplatin and P. K. Tolstykh - were admitted to the congress with the right to vote. They brought a letter declaring that the chapels were ready to accept the common faith if the oaths of the councils of 1666–1667 were lifted. and the fellow believers will have their own bishop. More than 10 thousand Old Believers put their signatures under the letter. However, the congress did not decide either the first or the second question. Thus, having come to the understanding that the chapels had finally rejected the Belokrinitsky priesthood and could not be sufficiently sure that the fugitives or co-religionists would ever find their own hierarchy headed by a bishop, N. A. Kholkin joined the “Austrians”.

In general, the prospect of co-religionists to receive their own hierarch was considered by many chapels as a necessary condition in the event of their joining the co-religion. In 1906, the missionary K. Kryuchkov informed F. A. Malinovtsev and his associates that the Synod had initiated consideration at the future council of the Russian Orthodox Church of the issue of removing the oaths from the Old Believers and granting a bishop to fellow believers. In this letter, K. Kryuchkov expressed the hope that by joining the common faith, the chapels would "acquire" the church hierarchy. But the implementation of these intentions dragged on for a long time, until the autumn of 1917 they were never realized (EEV. Unofficial department 1912. No. 10. S. 224–235; Church. 1912. No. 5. S. 116; No. 10. C 237; Old Believer, 1907, No. 3, pp. 354–360).

According to the memoirs of the Nevyansk chapels, who remember the Vengin family very well, Nikolai soon nevertheless returned to the faith of his fathers (Archive of the LAI UrFU. Diaries. D. 118/10. L. 13. Recorded by Klyukina Yu.V. and Korovushkina I.P. dated November 7, 1998).

Decrees of the Bolshe-Batsalaksuysky Cathedral on May 20–22, 1923 // Spiritual literature of the Old Believers of the East of Russia in the 18th – 20th centuries. Novosibirsk, 1999. S. 374.

Seizure of church valuables in 1921–1922 was carried out primarily in churches of the Orthodox confession (in 1923, in one of the reports of the anti-religious commission of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, it was noted that the main attention was focused "on the processes taking place in the largest organization, the Orthodox", rather than the Old Believers, sectarians, Muslims etc.): Archives of the Kremlin. In 2 books. Book. 1. The Politburo and the Church. 1922 - 1925 M.; Novosibirsk, 1997, pp. 424–425).

In the restless year of the vicious dog, one involuntarily recalls the “number of the beast” and 1666, when the church cathedral opened, a year later anathematizing the schismatics.

Despite the fact that the 21st, and not the 17th century has long been in the yard, the honorable public is still frightened by the name of the Old Believers. In the latest domestic blockbuster "Piranha Hunt", it is the Old Believers who act as the forces of evil. This is understandable given how little we know about them, and the unknown is always scary. Interestingly, the ideological scheme proposed by the authors of the film has not changed much over three hundred years. The still smart and fair servants of the sovereign save Russia (if not by the word of God, but by force of arms), and the evil and narrow-minded Old Believers prevent them from doing this.

The Old Believers did not accept and shunned the poisoned, corrupted world of the Antichrist, by which they understood Patriarch Nikon and many Russian tsars, starting with Alexei Mikhailovich. They believed that the Antichrist, having come into the world, poisoned the water, earth and air, so for many adherents of the old faith it became impossible to inhale this air and drink this water, and the best way out was to go to another world. In addition, according to the decrees of Alexei Mikhailovich, those convicted of the Old Believers were subject to ruthless physical destruction, including by burning. This is how Archpriest Avvakum was executed in Pustozersk. The boyar Theodosius Prokofievna Morozova was imprisoned for her convictions in a five-yard earthen pit, where she soon died of starvation. Therefore, the choice was small. Hence the numerous cases of mass suicides.

The Russian state did not like them either for their freethinking and stubbornness. It is no coincidence that the level of literacy has always been high among the Old Believers. Meanwhile, the most irreconcilable were either destroyed by the state, or died in numerous "burnt places", and the rest, to one degree or another, reconciled with reality. And already within the framework of the "sinful" state, they have become an important part of its history and culture. At the word “Old Believers”, the average Russian will most likely come to mind the taiga recluse Agafya Lykova, the noblewoman Morozova from Surikov’s painting, and the famous self-immolation. Meanwhile, the Ural Old Believers have done much of what surrounds us now, although we may not notice it. By the way, Surikov wrote the face of the noblewoman Morozova from a Ural Old Believer who happened to meet him in Moscow.

Character of the Old Believers

Over the centuries of persecution among the Old Believers, a peculiar attitude to life, an original philosophy was formed, which made it possible, over the long years of persecution, to achieve that in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, about 60% of industrial capital was concentrated in the hands of the Old Believers.

As a rule they do not drink, although, in extreme cases, it is allowed to drink no more than three glasses of wine, but only on Sundays. To get drunk “until the image of God is lost” is considered unworthy and shameful. Also among them there is a ban on smoking tobacco, since it is believed that this is a weed that has grown from the blood of the unclean. It is interesting that in the 18th century among the Old Believers there were bans even on tea and samovars. Although gradually the attitude towards this drink changed, since tea is still better than alcohol.

Cursing is denied as blasphemy. It is believed that a swearing woman makes the future of her children unhappy. The children of the Old Believers are called according to the Saints, and therefore the names are rare (Parigorius, Evstafiy, Lukerya), although there are also quite familiar names. Men are required to wear a beard, a girl braid. In addition, each person must be belted, it is necessary to constantly wear a strap without removing it. Observance of rituals, holidays and daily prayers are also an integral part of life. The Old Believers have a calm attitude towards death. It is customary to prepare in advance a “shell” (clothes in which they will put in a coffin): a shirt, a sundress, lime bast shoes, a shroud. The mother must prepare a shell for her son and give it to him when he goes to the army. It was also necessary to prepare a coffin, preferably hollowed out from a single piece of wood.

Abortion is considered a sin even more serious than murder, because the baby in the womb is unbaptized.

“Demand from yourself the most, consider yourself the worst of all” - another principle of the Old Believers, encouraging hard work and activity. Having a "tight economy" has always been important for these people, because it allowed them to have support in difficult times. Leaving their habitable places for the Urals and Siberia, they had to work hard and hard, which created a habit of hard work. Asceticism, due to religious tradition, did not allow overspending and living in idleness. In general, not working for an Old Believer is a sin, however, working poorly is also.

An important feature of their worldview is love for their small homeland as the home of their body and soul, which must be kept in beauty and purity.

The success of the Old Believers in business is often tempting to draw a parallel with the Protestant capitalist spirit of individualism and competition. In reality, if the Old Believers entered into a competitive struggle, it was a struggle with the world of dark forces that surrounded them. They believed that the names of the pious Old Believers were chosen by the Lord for eternal life, therefore, by all means, it was necessary to preserve their own world. Old Believers-entrepreneurs were collectivists. They believed that all members of the community should treat each other as brothers. Therefore, any workshop or factory carried family features. This is also the source of the tendency of the Old Believers to charity. Old Believer traditionalism in this sense is closer to the Japanese work ethic with their "quality circles" and the cult of their company.

Demidovs

The first factories of the Demidovs, in fact, were created by the Old Believers. It was rumored that Nikita and Akinfiy themselves were secret schismatics. They wrote out the best Old Believer craftsmen from the Olonets factories, accepted the fugitives, and hid them from the censuses. Akinfiy Demidov even built an Old Believer monastery on the outskirts of Nevyansk. The talents of the Old Believers later gave rich shoots. Beglopopovites Efim and Miron Cherepanovs built in 1833-34. the first railway in Russia and the first steam locomotive.

Probably, the Ural Old Believers were also involved in the invention of the Russian samovar. Tea from the 17th century began to arrive in the Urals from China. It was the combination of Chinese tea and Ural copper that led to the appearance of the samovar, which was born here, and not in Tula. The first mention of the samovar is contained in the list seized at the Yekaterinburg customs and dates back to 1740. And that samovar was from the Irginsky factory, which consisted almost entirely of runaway schismatics. It was the masters brought by N. Demidov from the Urals to Tula who opened the first samovar workshops in the middle of the 18th century.

In the Nevyansk possessions of the Demidovs, a peculiar school of icon painting developed. This original cultural phenomenon was called the "Nevyansk Icon". It preserved the traditions of ancient Russia, and at the same time included the trends of the New Age in the form of features of baroque and classicism. The popularity of the Nevyansk Old Believer icon painters was so great that in the 19th century they worked not only for the communities of chapel consent or co-religionists, but also for the official church. In Yekaterinburg since 1999 there is a unique free private museum "Nevyansk Icon". In March 2006, the Andrey Rublev Central Museum of Ancient Russian Culture and Art for the first time in Moscow successfully hosted an exhibition of the collections of the Yekaterinburg Museum "Nevyansk Icon: Ural Mining Icon Painting of the 18th - 19th Centuries".

General V.I. de Gennin also appreciated the industriousness of the Old Believers and did not subject them to serious persecution, although from time to time they were caught, their nostrils were torn and flogged. Another founder of our city, V.N. Tatishchev, fulfilling the will of the sovereign, did not give descent to the schismatics. In 1736, on his orders, 72 nuns and 12 monks were caught, who were imprisoned for 30 years in a specially built prison in Yekaterinburg.

It was the inhabitants of the ancient Old Believer settlement Shartash who became the first builders of the Yekaterinburg plant - the future capital of the mining Urals. In the 17th century, when there was no Yekaterinburg, Shartash was a wealthy village with more than ten sketes and about four hundred inhabitants.

In 1745, a resident of the same Shartash village, an Old Believer Yerofey Markov, discovered grains of native gold while walking through the forest, laid the foundation for mass gold mining in Russia. In 1748, the first gold mine in Russia appeared at the place of discovery.

Catherine II abolished the double capitation salary of the Old Believers and stopped their persecution. They got the opportunity to be assigned to the merchant class. After that, the number of Old Believers among the Ural merchants began to grow rapidly and approach one hundred percent.

The merchants Ryazanovs, owners of lard factories and gold mines, played an important role in the religious life of the Urals. Ya.M. Ryazanov, who was considered the head of all the Ural Old Believers, founded a large prayer house in Yekaterinburg in 1814. However, the authorities then did not allow construction to continue. Only after in 1838 Ryazanov and many of his supporters converted to the same faith, they were allowed to complete the construction of the temple. So, in 1852, the Holy Trinity Cathedral appeared, which is now a cathedral and belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church.

In the Soviet years, the temple lost its domes and bell tower and was handed over to Sverdlovskavtodor. A little later, the building housed the Avtomobilistov Palace of Culture, a place known among the urban intelligentsia for the fact that during the years of perestroika various intellectual films were shown here and even a discussion club operated. In the 1990s, the building was transferred to the Yekaterinburg diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church and was restored. The domes and the bell tower had to be rebuilt, but already in 2000 the temple was lit by Patriarch Alexy II who personally came here.

The godless Soviet government hit hard on the old faith. In order to reduce the influence of the Old Believers, strong pressure was put on the leaders of the communities. They were either liquidated, or expelled, or forced to abandon the external manifestations of religious life.

Although strong and economic men were valued under the new government. True, now I had to abandon icons and join the party, but traditions and way of life were largely preserved. In this regard, the life or fate of the famous Kurgan field crop Terenty Semenovich Maltsev is remembered. He, being a representative of one of the Old Believer concords, never drank, never went to school for a day, but at the same time he was literate, had a beautiful handwriting, knew how to read Old Church Slavonic and, due to his literacy and prudence, at one time served as an “old man” in a rural prayer house.

In 1916, Terenty Maltsev was taken into the army. The First World War was on. Quite quickly, he is captured and from 1917 to 1921 is in the German city of Quedlinburg.

After the end of the Civil War, Terenty Semenovich returned to Russia. Here he is enthusiastically engaged in agricultural technology and eventually becomes twice Hero of Socialist Labor, an honorary academician of VASKhNIL. The Old Believer concern for the environment, apparently, manifested itself in the fact that Terenty Maltsev developed a sparing non-moldboard method of cultivating the land, for which he received the USSR State Prize in 1946. His books “The Word about the Nurturing Land”, “Thoughts about the Harvest”, “Reflections about the Earth, About Bread” are imbued with reflections on the relationship between man and nature.

Having been born at the beginning of the reign of Emperor Nicholas II in 1895, having passed all the trials that befell his native country, Terenty Semenovich passed away already in the first years of the reign of President Yeltsin, in 1994. So, for 99 years, Old Believer humility and diligence helped Terenty Maltsev endure all the hardships and hardships that befell a simple Russian person.

Places of residence

The Ural became the largest residence of the Old Believers who fled here from all over Russia. The first settlements of the Old Believers in the Urals appeared on the Neiva River and its tributaries. Beglopopovtsy settled in the area of Nevyansk, Nizhny Tagil and Yekaterinburg. Representatives of the chapel consent (Starikovshchina) live compactly in the village of Zakharov (near Lysva, Perm Region), Nevyansk, pos. Bolshaya Laya (Sverdlovsk region), Tugulymsky district, Revda and Polevskoy. A large number of Old Believers in the Sverdlovsk region live in the village of Shamary, the village of Pristan and other villages of the Artinsky district, in the Krasnoufimsky district (village of Russkaya Tavra), Nevyansk and Baranchinsky districts. These are largely adherents of the Belokrinitsky consent.

Within the Perm region, parishes are officially registered in Perm, Ocher, Vereshchagin, Chaikovsky, Kudymkar, at the Mendeleevo station, in the villages of Borodulino, Sepych, Putino.

In the 1990s, the active construction of Old Believer churches began. In 1990, a temple was consecrated in the city of Omutninsk, Kirov Region. On the basis of this project, a temple was built in the city of Vereshchagino in 1993. In 1994, the Old Believer community of Yekaterinburg was given the old building of the temple, which had previously served as a museum. Since 1996, a temple has been operating in the village of Shamary. The temple in the city of Miass was built in four years and consecrated in 1999.

In Yekaterinburg, in the area of Tveritin, Belinsky and Rosa Luxemburg streets, in a few years another Old Believer church in the name of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker should appear. It is going to be built by representatives of the Pomeranian consent, who reject priests (non-priests). The Ekaterinburg VIZ Church belongs to the Belokrinitsky Accord, which ordains its own priests. In general, there are a lot of various agreements in the Old Believers. Fedoseyevtsy and Filippovtsy, for example, reject marriage. Beglopopovtsy accept priests - "fugitives" - from other accords and directions. One of the most democratic agreements is the netovtsy. They have nothing: no priests, no temples. They believe that only individual contact with God through prayer can be salvific. The most mysterious group are considered to be runners or true Orthodox wandering Christians (IHPS). They preach a departure from the world of the Antichrist, therefore they break all ties with society. They do not have real estate, passports, do not pay taxes, do not participate in censuses, do not accept the modern chronology, do not have a name and therefore are called servants of God. They have contact only with a small group of people who support them financially. During the years of Soviet power, they went underground and became close to the Catacomb Church, and therefore, due to their anti-state position, they were under the scrutiny of the Chekists.

Andrey LYAMZIN,
Candidate of Historical Sciences.
Ural geographical journal "Podorozhnik", summer 2006.

reform church ural old believer

Introduction

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

The phenomenon of the Church Schism in general, and the Old Believers in particular, began to interest researchers almost from the 17th century. This interest was caused by the fact that the schism, as such, was not a purely religious phenomenon, but was a nationwide phenomenon and covered almost all social strata of the Muscovite state. The country was divided into two irreconcilable camps - adherents of the old faith and followers of the modernization reforms of Patriarch Nikon. The Old Believers, for quite objective reasons, could not influence the course of reforms and were forced to flee to remote and sparsely populated corners of the country. One of these regions was the Urals. Since it was just beginning to be settled, it is quite obvious why the Old Believers chose it as their refuge. Sufficient weakness of state power and low development of the territory were the main factors in the formation of the Urals as one of the main centers of the Old Believers.

The degree of knowledge. The theme of the Old Believers has been studied quite closely both in historical and ethnographic aspects. The history of the Old Believers in the Urals is well reflected in the documents, although this is only some of the material associated mainly with the official activities of the Old Believers (merchant, factory and religious). In this regard, the present work is not so much of a scientific as of fact-finding, historical and local history character.

Relevance of the topic. Despite the sufficient study of the chosen topic, it does not lose its relevance to this day. At the moment, the history of the Old Believers and its influence on the formation of the region, its contribution to the history of the Urals is beginning to become more and more popular. This is partly due to interest in one's own land, and on the other hand, to the all-Russian tendencies to search for one's identity and spiritual self-awareness of the population. Therefore, today one can often find appeals to ideas and values by representatives of the "old faith", both among ordinary people, and among representatives of various sects, nationalist organizations, etc. Accordingly, the theme of the Old Believers is relevant to this day. In addition, tourist interest in the culture and life of the Ural Old Believers is becoming increasingly popular.

The purpose of the work is a historical and local history review of the Old Believers in the Urals.

The objectives of the work are to consider the general political situation in the country on the eve of the reforms of Patriarch Nikon; consideration of the history of the Old Believer Urals through the prism of the main currents.

Geographic limits. The geography of the work covers the entire Urals, but mainly the territories of the Perm and Sverdlovsk regions. Such a geographical framework is explained by the localization of the main Old Believer communities, which have been sufficiently studied to date. Although individual sketes were scattered throughout the Urals, information about them is very vague.

Chronological framework. The main chronology of the work covers the framework from the 18th century to the present day. The lower date is explained by the fact that it is from the 18th century that stable and reliable documentary sources on the activities of the Ural Old Believers reach us.

Chapter I. Nikon's Reforms and the Church Schism

The church schism in Russia had long roots. As early as the 16th century, the first disagreements emerged between apologists for ancient, consecrated traditions, rituals and those who were not so zealous about the letter of church laws and dogmas. At first, these disagreements did not yet escalate into an open struggle.

In the 16th century, on the ruins of the former specific principalities and large boyar estates, the Muscovite state was formed. It is already based on small landownership and the merchant elite. The church is also being transformed both from the side of organization and from the side of ideology, and from the side of the attitude towards the state. The feudal church worlds give way to the Moscow centralized metropolis, and then to the patriarchy. During the second half and throughout the 16th century, a fierce social struggle simmered on this soil, in which church groups and leaders took a lively part. The crisis of the feudal church was accompanied by the emergence of various heretical movements. But this was a crisis of religious ideology, not of the church as an organizational structure. The latter, on the contrary, strengthened in the 16th centuries: in 1448 the Russian Orthodox Church acquired autocephaly (self-proclamation), and in 1589 its head received the title of Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia and took the honorable fifth place in the pan-Orthodox "table of ranks" - directly behind the Constantinople , Alexandrian, Antioch and Jerusalem patriarchs (Platonov S.F., M. 1993. S. 117-119).

The first heretical movement against feudal church organization and feudal piety began in Pskov. Then it migrated to Tver and Novgorod. It migrated from Novgorod to Moscow, and, despite all the measures against it, for a century and a half it continued to nest in Moscow and other cities, changing its forms and contents, but invariably maintaining the same tendency: to criticize the feudal church and fight against it. .

At present, we do not have any documentary information about the beginning of the heresy of the Strigolniki, as official representatives of the Russian Church dubbed the first Russian heresy. It is only known that this name was given in accordance with the craft of one of the founders of the Karp sect, "the art of a shearer", i.e. according to the most probable interpretation, "cloth shearer", cloth artisan. The starting point of the heresy lay in the local Pskov church relations, which hardly coexisted next to the feudal organization of the Novgorod archiepiscopal see, to which Pskov was subordinated in church terms. From this clash between the urban church organization established in Pskov and the archbishop of Novgorod, the Strigolnik sect was born. Almost a hundred years later, in the middle of the century, circles of zealots of piety formed among the urban clergy, who wanted to cleanse the church of filth. The most influential of all was the Moscow circle, organized by the tsar's confessor Archpriest Stefan Vonifatiev. He was joined by the future Patriarch Nikon, who was then archimandrite of the Novospassky Monastery, some cathedral archpriests and several lay people. The members of the circle were well aware of the "ailments" of the Russian church. The vices of the church are depicted from the point of view of the zealots in the famous anonymous letter found in Moscow in December 1660, which denounced the higher clergy and alarmed the Moscow bishops. Its compilation was attributed to the priest Herodium. The conclusion of the letter for the zealots was clear: if the lower clergy are corrupted, it is not through their own fault. The blame is on those who "set up priests and then turn them into wolves with their bribery and connivance." How can the lower clergy be non-acquisitive when all the bishops are acquiring, and, above all, they are acquiring from him? How can a priest avoid "pianism" when the "holy legislators of power" have "belly fat like cows"? How can a priest preach against the remnants of paganism when the bishops themselves arrange "buffoon games"? City zealots wanted to fight all these vices with the help of reform from above. Through the mediation of Vonifatiev, they gained influence over the young Tsar Alexei, and on their advice, the Tsar issued several decrees to correct church shortcomings. They also tried to act through purely ecclesiastical reforms, but it met with strong opposition from the then Patriarch Joseph and partly from the parishioners, who were dissatisfied with the significant lengthening of the services. For the zealots, it became obvious that the healing of the church must begin from above, by fighting the episcopate, and for this it is necessary, first of all, to take into the hands of the circle the most important episcopal offices. Through Vonifatiev, the Moscow circle found access to the tsar and was able to arrange for their people to fill the vacant episcopal chairs. And when Patriarch Joseph died, the same circle hurried to elevate to the patriarchal throne their "friend" Nikon, who by that time had become Archbishop of Novgorod, and hoped to ensure the implementation of the church reform with the assistance of the latter. However, Nikon completely deceived the calculations of the zealots. Nikon really began reforms, but not the same and not in the spirit that the zealots desired. Only then did the zealots realize their mistake, spoke in a completely different language and switched to a different tactic. At the same time, the rural clergy accepted the reforms as an open declaration of war - the situation immediately became decisive.

From the point of view of the zealots, the reform of the church should have touched only the church organization and morality. In the place of the princes of the church, who exploited the parish clergy, the zealots wanted to install hierarchs obedient to themselves, dreaming, perhaps, of subsequently electing the episcopate, as was established in the nineteenth century. in the old church. Correction of church morality again served the purposes of internal strengthening of the church: on the one hand, it also had to reduce the exploitative habits of the "wolves", on the other hand, to reconcile the laity with the church. But the reform in the view of the zealots should not have touched the essence of faith and cult at all (Melnikov F.E., 1999, p. 72-81). Nikon had completely different ideas about the reform. He had nothing against correcting church morality, but that was where the points of contact between him and his former friends ended. On the organizational side, he wanted to correct the church, but not by establishing a conciliar principle in it, but by holding in it the strict autocracy of the patriarch, independent of the tsar, and by elevating the priesthood over the kingdom. The Patriarch of All Russia should stand next to the Tsar of All Russia. He should not share with the king neither income, nor honor, nor power. Nikon came up with a whole thoughtful and developed theory. He formulated it in full in his answers to the church council of 1667, before which he had to appear as an accused. But this theory was put forward by him even before accepting the patriarchate, for his entire policy as a patriarch was the implementation of this theory in practice.

The world is dominated by two swords, the spiritual and the mundane. The first is owned by the bishop, the second by the king. Which of the two is higher? In contrast to those who claim that the king is higher, Nikon proves that this is wrong and that the bishop is higher. Christ gave the apostles the right to knit and decide, but the bishops are the successors of the apostles. The bishop crowns the king to the kingdom, he can "bind" the king through the royal confessor, subordinate to the bishop, he can "forbid" the king. The king cannot interfere in church affairs except at the invitation of the patriarch, but the patriarch has the right and must lead the king. Thus, Nikon wanted to reform the organizational association of the Russian church by freeing it from subordination to the state, which sought to gird itself with two swords at once. Spiritual and material, to be used, judging by the need, either one or the other. By creating a church organization parallel to the state and leading it. But Nikon's dreams were not destined to come true - he was condemned and exiled (N.I. Kostomarov, M. 1995, pp. 15-17). But even before the disgrace, according to the idea of the king and with his full approval, he undertook and carried out another reform, which also had a unifying character. This last reform was completely opposite to the plans of the zealots and, as we have said, marked the beginning of a fierce intra-church struggle, which led to a schism in the church and found a response in all the opposition strata of the then society. We must pay close attention to it.

The essence of the official reform was the establishment of uniformity in the liturgical ranks. The United Russian Church, a sister of the Eastern churches, did not have a uniform liturgical order and differed in this from its Eastern brethren. This was constantly pointed out to both Nikon and his predecessors by the eastern patriarchs. In a single church there was to be a single cult. The cathedrals of the 16th century, having elevated local patron saints to the rank of all-Russian saints, did not complete the work of uniting the cult. It was necessary to introduce uniformity also in the liturgical order, to replace the specific liturgical diversity with Moscow uniformity. The question of carrying out this fundamental reform arose even before Nikon in connection with the victory of technology in the book business. As long as there were handwritten books produced locally by local scribes and based on local originals, there could be no question of reform. But when in the second half of the XVI century. a Printing Yard appeared in Moscow and it was decided to supply all churches with printed liturgical books; editors of printed publications, discovered an extraordinary variety in handwritten books, both in terms of individual words and expressions, and in terms of the rites of liturgical rites. Mistakes and omissions were easy to correct. But the matter was more complicated - it was necessary to choose one, the most correct, rank and fix it in printed books, thereby destroying all other ritual options. The main difficulty was in choosing a sample for correction. For the tsar and Nikon, these were the then Greek ranks. For the vast majority of the clergy - the ancient Russian ranks, enshrined in "charate" (manuscript) books (N.I. Kostomarov, M. 1995. S. 25-30).

So, the reform had to concern the ceremonies. They wonder how such a reform, correcting the details of the liturgical rite, could arouse such fierce disputes. They refuse to understand why Nikon and his opponents attached such importance to the "single letter" az ". But behind this "az" were hidden two real opposites of the old independent parish clergy with its diverse cults and ranks and the new noble church, which destroyed every shadow of independence everywhere and sought to uniformity.

The very course of the "correction" further contributed to the gap between the new uniformity and the old faith. We will not describe it in detail, but it is necessary to outline the main points. Officially, the need for correction was motivated at the council of 1654 by the fact that there were many errors and insertions in the early printed books, and by the fact that the Russian liturgical order very significantly differed from the Greek. They wanted to put the ancient charatees as the basis for the correction, i.e. handwritten, Slavic and Greek books. That, at least, was Nikon's original intention. But when the practical implementation of this task was started, enormous difficulties were discovered. There were few ancient manuscripts, and those that did exist diverged from one another. The referees did not know how to understand them, and this path was abandoned and replaced by another. The Tsar and Nikon decided to recognize as the norm the then printed Greek books printed in Venice, as well as Slavic breviaries for the Lithuanian-Russian Uniates, printed in the same place. According to them and edit Russian books. Following this directive, the translators first made translations from the Greek Venetian editions. Not particularly relying on their knowledge of the Greek language, they constantly checked it against the Slavic Uniate text. This translation was the main edition of the new Russian liturgical books. The final edition was established by making separate amendments on the basis of some ancient manuscripts, Slavic and Greek. This final version was approved by Nikon and went to the Printing Yard for reproduction.

The result of this correction was completely unexpected. The fact is that over the seven centuries that have passed since the religious reform of Vladimir, the entire Greek liturgical rite has changed in a very significant way. Double-fingeredness (which became a custom instead of the former single-fingered), which the first Greek priests taught Russian and Balkan Slavs and which until the middle of the 17th century. it was also kept in the Kiev and Serbian churches, in Byzantium it was replaced by the tripartite under the influence of the struggle against the Nestorians (end of the 12th century). Also changed the composition with the blessing. All liturgical ranks became much shorter, some important hymns were replaced by others (Melnikov F.E., 1999, p. 93-94).

As a result, when Nikon replaced the old books and rituals with new ones, it turned out, as it were, the introduction of a "new faith." The dogmas of the Stoglavy Cathedral, two-fingered and salting walking (according to the sun), were destroyed. While Stoglav proclaimed: "Whoever is not marked with two fingers, like Christ, be damned." Patriarch Macarius, at the request of Nikon, on the week of Orthodoxy in the Assumption Cathedral publicly showed how to be baptized with three fingers, and proclaimed: "And whoever, according to Theodorite's dancing and false tradition, creates (two-finger), he is damned." Following Macarius, the same curse on the double-fingered was proclaimed by two other Eastern patriarchs. The entire liturgical rite was redone and shortened to such an extent that the question of polyphony was no longer necessary. Former formulas and actions had to be replaced by completely new ones. The new church brought with it a new faith (History of the Old Believer Church: A Brief Essay. - M. 1991. S. 9-12).

Priests Lazarus and Nikita (Pustosvyat), from among the city's zealots, had the patience to do a great job of comparing the new books with the old ones in detail, and presented the results of their research in petitions to the tsar. It turned out that the rites of baptism and chrismation were changed and shortened, in which the “mysterious invitations” that followed the words “seal of the gift of the holy spirit” and explained what gift was given were excluded, that is, the most magical formulas were destroyed. Further, the rite of repentance, unction and marriage was changed. Of the public services, the rites of the ninth hour and Vespers have also been changed, now joined together and significantly reduced against the former ones, also the rite of Matins. Most of the changes were in the liturgy. First of all, the rank of progskomedia has been completely redone: instead of seven prosvir - five, for the repose, take out not one part for everyone, but a particle for each commemorated. Then, instead of the image on the prosvirs of the commonly used eight-pointed cross, the image of the four-pointed cross was introduced, which was commonly used among the then Greeks and Catholics. Then Nikita and Lazar point out a whole series of changes and abbreviations in the liturgy from the very beginning to the end: one is reduced, another is changed, the third is inserted, so that "the whole rite is violated." Changed the second and eighth members of the creed: in the first destroyed "az" (born, but created). In the latter, the word "true" is missing. Finally, in those prayers and psalms that have remained untouched, new turns of speech and new terms have been introduced instead of the old ones, and without any need! The enumeration of examples of these discrepancies in Nikita's petition occupies six pages of the text of Subbotin's "Materials". In conclusion, Nikita makes another discovery that finally undermined the good quality of the correction: in different books "official actions and litanies are printed inconsistently, in one book it is printed in this way, and in another differently, and the previous verses are placed last, and the last ones ahead or in the middle." Obviously, the editors of new books did not agree with each other or did not follow the printing, and thus greatly damaged the introduction of Nikon's uniformity (Melnikov F.E., 1999. P. 99-102).

One can imagine what a storm arose among the parish clergy when new books were sent to the churches. The rural clergy, illiterate, learning services by ear, had to either refuse new books or give way to new priests. For it was unthinkable to retrain him. The majority of the city clergy and even monasteries were in the same position. The monks of the Solovetsky Monastery expressed this in their judgment bluntly, without any reservations: “We have learned to serve the Divine Liturgies according to the old service books, according to which we first learned and got used to, and now we, the old priests, will not be able to keep our weekly queues according to those service books, and we won’t be able to study according to the new service books for our old age ... and which we priests and deacons are of little power and are unaccustomed to reading and writing, and are inert, according to which we studied the old service books for many years, but served with great need ... but according to new books the service books we are a stagnant and intransigent black man, no matter how much a teacher, and not get used to it, it will be better for brothers in the monastic works of life.

In 1668, the famous Solovetsky rebellion began, and only in 1676, thanks to the betrayal of one of the defectors from the monks, Feoktist, did the siege end. Theokistus led the royal archers at night through a hole in the wall, filled with stones, and the monastery was taken after an eight-year siege. Thus perished the last stronghold of monastic feudalism. The Old Believer legend about the Solovetsky siege, embellished with all sorts of miracles, and the Old Believer folk songs dedicated to the Solovetsky sitting, still retain a special charm and special interest. After all, this was the first fight in the open struggle of all forces hostile to the Muscovite state and united by the banner of the old faith. There was no such way out for the village and city priests. The new faith required, obviously, new ministers! The old had to fight to the last opportunity, and then either submit, which was virtually impossible, or finally break with the noble church and give way to the obedient henchmen of the Nikonians. And the guerrilla struggle, which had hitherto been carried on from time to time, immediately flared up along the entire line, engulfing the entire professional parish clergy. In the foreground of the struggle of the parish clergy he placed the apology of the old faith. The authors of the petitions to the tsar defend the "former Christian faith", proclaiming Nikon's innovations as "a new unfamiliar faith." For them, this former faith consisted precisely in the knowledge and observance of the right ways to please the deity. In general, the entire apology is based on the ideology of the XIV-XVI centuries. (Milovidov V.F., "Thought". 1969. S. 49-62).

But one should not think that the "correction" came from other, more developed religious ideas. In response to the apology, the tsar, Nikon and the Eastern patriarchs first of all pointed to the authority, antiquity and purity of the Greek faith, taken as the norm for correction, but did not at all go into explaining and exposing the "misconceptions" of the apologists, their perverted concepts of faith. By this they put the later apologists of Synodal Orthodoxy in the greatest difficulty: we have to admit that Nikon was just as ignorant of the faith as his opponents. But against the reference to the authority of the Greek Church, the apologists had an irresistible argument ready: the famous "Book of Faith", the official publication of the Moscow Patriarchal See, shortly before Nikon had already declared the Greek faith "perverted". "The violence of the Turian Mahmet, the crafty Cathedral of Florence, and embarrassment from the Roman sciences" destroyed the frequency of Greek Orthodoxy, and "from the summer of 6947 (1439) the Greeks adopted three papal laws: dousing, three-fingered, do not wear crosses," but instead of "honest tripartite cross" - Latin "double cross". Greek and Slavic books, from which Nikon ruled, were printed in Rome, "Vinetsy" and "Paryzh" with a fierce heretical potion brought in by the Latins and Lutherans. The heresy is not in the fact that the prayers were translated anew, but in the conversion to the Latin model of the sign of the cross, walking salting, tripling hallelujah, the cross, etc., in changing the entire church rite. "All heretics from the age of epics have been collected in new books," says Habakkuk. Nikon undertook such a thing, which no heretic had dared before him. “There have never been heretics before who turned holy books and introduced nasty dogmas into them,” says deacon Fyodor. Under the pretext of church corrections, Nikon wants nothing less than to eradicate pure Orthodoxy in Russia, using the indulgence of the tsar and with the help of such obvious heretics as the Greek Arseniy or Kiev scientists. The "new unknown faith" turned out to be the most evil heresy (N.S. Bogdanov, Science and Religion, 1994, pp. 115-118).

The petitions have already given all the prerequisites for the subsequent assessment of the Nikonian church, when the schism became an already accomplished fact: "her teaching is soul-damaging, her services are not services, the sacraments are not sacraments, the shepherds are wolves." The petitions, however, turned out to be too weak a weapon in the fight against the combined forces of the tsar, Nikon and the episcopate. The most prominent leaders of the opposition were exiled and damned. In response to the apology of the old faith, the Tablet was published, declaring the old rites to be heresy. Some time later, due to the cooling, and then the break between the tsar and Nikon, the situation remained uncertain. But in 1666 it was finally and officially recognized that Nikon's reform was not his personal affair, but the affair of the tsar and the church. The council of ten bishops, assembled this year, first of all decided to recognize the Greek patriarchs as Orthodox, although they live under the Turkish yoke, and to recognize as Orthodox the books used by the Greek Church. After that, the council condemned to eternal damnation "with Judas the traitor and with the crucified Jews of Christ, and with Arius, and with other accursed heretics" all those who do not listen to our commands and do not submit to the holy eastern church and this consecrated cathedral. "The king with his parties undertook to draw a material sword: by virtue of the decrees of 1666-1667, heretics were to be subjected to "royal executions, in other words, according to city laws." which, however, the clergy alone, by themselves, were not capable of. The professional opposition of the parish clergy is gradually fading away. The opposition of the urban clergy, which is very small in number, quickly disappears as soon as the circle of zealots has been finally crushed. The opposition of the rural clergy is drowning in the great peasant religious movement, which began in the 60s, and is losing its professional new individuality: the village priest, who did not want to accept new books or did not know how to use them, had only to leave after the peasantry who had fled from serf bondage, giving way to the protege of the Nikonian landowner. The new village priests, who served according to the Nikon rite, were already faithful servants of the local nobility. The intra-church movement ended with the victory of the official reform (History of the Old Believer Church: A Brief Essay. - M. 1991. S. 84-105).

The condemned ministers of the old faith, however, did not submit and went "into schism", that is, they broke away from the official church and continued to fight it in various ways. They found support in the struggle among the most diverse elements. On the one hand, these were elements condemned by the course of history to extinction - the last remnants of the boyars and the old archery service class. On the other hand, these were the elements that stood in opposition to the noble state due to the fact that they were the object of its cruelest exploitation - the townspeople and especially the peasantry. Groups from these social strata who did not accept Nikon's reform also went into a split. Thus, this original socio-religious movement began, multifaceted in its social composition and diverse in its ideology (Kostomarov N.I., M. 1995. P. 212-223).

So, there were three main directions of the split: boyars, townsmen and peasants. The clergy, who did not accept the "new faith," divided, and its various elements joined the main three directions, without forming any separate, original trend of the old faith. Of these three main trends, boyarism soon disappeared completely from the scene along with the end of the boyars. On the contrary, in the urban and peasant environment, the old faith received a further and extremely interesting development. At the same time, in the form of the "Old Russian" faith, the Old Believers remained in the midst of the townsman class and brought their most mature and genuine fruits there.

Posad opposition was the opposition of the future participants in political domination. As far back as the 18th century, in the social sphere, the posad merchants brought under their dependence almost all the "vile" elements of the posad world. Therefore, religious development among the Posad opposition was directed not so much towards the development of a new religious ideology, but towards the development of a church organization. The organization of domination, which operated on the old, "Old Russian", "truly Orthodox" ideology. The development of the township schism was based during the 18th century on the growth of commercial capital, which was looking for all sorts of ways to accumulate, and it was most straightforward in the so-called priesthood, which developed a complete Old Believer church by the middle of the 19th century.

The development among the peasant opposition took a different path. As the original peasant schismatic organizations formed at the end of the 17th century disintegrated under the influence of social differentiation, they disintegrated into sectarian peasant communities. In addition, tormented from all sides by the feudal state, the peasantry during the 18th and 19th centuries created more and more sects, rumors and accords (Kulpin E.S. 1997. S. 77-78).

Until the 18th century, the dominant church did not divide schismatics into categories, rumors, and accords. All Russian people who disagreed with the ruling church were called by the common name "schismatics". From the very beginning, the split was divided into two parts: priesthood and priestlessness. When, over time, the priests of the old ordination died out among the schismatics (i.e., those who were ordained to the dignity before the correction of church books by Nikon), then one part of the opponents of Nikon's reform, recognizing the need for priests to perform the sacraments, began to receive priests of the new ordination, i.e. .e. ordained after Nikon. The other part completely rejected the priesthood, declaring that the sacred order was everywhere abolished. Therefore, there are no more sacraments. In addition to baptism and confession, which, on the basis of canonical rules, in case of extreme need, are also allowed to be performed by the laity. The first, who lived mainly in inner Russia and southern Ukraine, constituted a clergy sect. The second, living mainly in the deserts of northern Pomorie and in Siberia, formed a bezpopovshchina. This lack of priesthood rejected the entire hierarchy, but not on principle, but only in fact, i.e., recognizing the need for priesthood and sacraments, it claims that there are no right priests. Restoring them forever is impossible, and therefore the performance of the five sacraments (except baptism and repentance) is forever impossible. Neither in the priesthood nor in the non-priestry, in their very formation, was there such a person who, using the authority of all his like-minded people scattered over the vast expanses of Russia, would give one invariable charters to the sect and would correctly organize it. As a result, in schismatic communities, from time to time, different views arose on one or another subject of church organization. From here came the divisions (Milovidov VF, M .: "Thought", 1969, pp. 51-54).

At the end of the 17th century, when the persecuted schismatics retired to the forests and deserts, many sketes were formed every year. And almost every founder of the skete, adhering to the schism in its main features, had views personally belonging to him on this or that particular schismatic charter. The difference between different interpretations of the same category, i.e. priesthood and bezpopovshchina, it was not important. Some differed from others either in the number of bows at the penance for the same sin, or in the methods of burning with a censer, or in the use of a leather or canvas ladder (rosary), or in the use of one or another inscription on the cross, etc. Each branch of the schism, each interpretation, each skete, or sect, was named after the creator of the monastery, teacher, rector. He died, another took his place. And the skete, ruled by him, took on a new name, after the name of its abbot. This new name was for some authors, as it were, a new branch of the schism.

We examined the main provisions concerning the general political situation in the country that led to the reforms of Patriarch Nikon, and with the consequences thereof, the result of which was the Schism. Now let's turn directly to the topic of interest to us, namely the Old Believers in the Urals.

Chapter II. Old Believers in the Urals

1 "Austrians" in the Urals and Western Siberia

From persecution and executions, the Old Believers fled to the outskirts of Russia and abroad. From the Volga along the Kama, the township schismatic colonization went to the Urals. One of their habitats was the Middle Urals, where they settled in Nizhny Tagil and Nevyansk, on the shores of lakes Tavatui and Shartash, in the village of Stanovaya and many other places. Part of the settlers arrived in the Urals from the vicinity of Nizhny Novgorod, from the Kerzhenets River. This area was considered a hotbed of schism, and therefore the local Old Believers were persecuted especially zealously (Preobrazhensky A.A., M. 1956. P. 8). Already in 1736, Privy Councilor Tatishchev reported to St. Petersburg about the Old Believers at the Ural factories, “that there were a lot of schismatics in those places, and most of all, that at the particular factories of the Demidovs and Osokins, almost all clerks were almost all, and the industrialists themselves were some schismatics, and if to send them out, then, of course, there is no one for them to maintain factories, and in the factories of Her Imperial Majesty it will not be without harm, for there, with many manufactories, like tin, wire, steel, iron, read all grubs and needs, Olonchans, Tulyans and Kerzhens trade all schismatics. All these Volga and Ural organizations supported the Kerzhenetsky sketes, from where they were sent teachers and priests who received “correct” in the sketes (N.G. Pavlovsky, Yekaterinburg, 1994, pp. 15-18).

Fugitive zealots of "drevlyago" piety were allowed to live at the factories until the decree, because the need for labor was enormous. One after another, new state-owned and private factories were opened in the Urals, and old ones were expanded. And when the Yekaterinburg fortress factory appeared near the village of Shartash, the Chief Commander, Major General Vilim Ivanovich Gennin (Georg Willem de-Hennin), began to provide special protection to the Kerzhaks. A Dutchman by birth, he basically did not recognize religious intolerance, but he evaluated people only by their business qualities. In this regard, V.I. Gennin could not fail to single out the Old Believers from the general mass of settlers, among whom there were many "walking people" - vagrants and real robbers. The "dvuperstniki" were distinguished by hard work, neatness, honesty, a thorough approach to any business. The Old Believers were also responsible for the supply of all kinds of supplies for state-owned factories, to which they were attributed by entire villages. In a similar way, the interests of the Old Believers and the largest Ural breeders, the Demidovs, coincided, who went even further and at one time even clearly pandered to prominent schism teachers, providing material support to their communities. Many of the Demidov factories were run by Old Believer clerks, who helped the migrants persecuted for their faith with settling in a new place. So the Urals became a haven for dissidents. Between V.I. Gennin and the Old Believers came up with something like an unspoken agreement: I give you the opportunity to live here in peace, and you, please, don’t stir up the people, live in friendship with those who profess official Orthodoxy and don’t attract “by your stupid reasoning others into your superstitious habit” "For those who acted differently, the most severe punishments were provided. But most of the Old Believers behaved peacefully, worked diligently, did not conflict with the secular authorities, and even prayed for the tsar (Industry and the working class of the mining Urals in the 18th-early 20th centuries. Sverdlovsk. 1982. P. 121-129).

The relationship of the Old Believers with the diocesan priests has always been, to put it mildly, difficult, and even the intercession of the mountain authorities did not always guarantee them a quiet life. 1736-1737, when the Ural mining industry was managed by V.N. Tatishchev, were remembered by many residents of the region by massive raids in the surrounding forests in search of sketes, elders and old women. At the same time, a special prison for stubborn schismatics (the so-called Zarechny Tyn) was built on the bank of the pond in Yekaterinburg, from which they were not supposed to leave alive. There was also a cemetery for them. But over time, the attitude of the Yekaterinburg mountain authorities towards the schismatics again became neutral (Essays on the history of the Urals. Ekaterinburg. 1996. P. 40-42).

In 1735, a census was taken of the Old Believers who lived in Yekaterinburg and its environs. In total, 2797 people were included in the lists, including 1905 at the Demidov factories (1127 men and 778 women), in Yekaterinburg - 196 (123 and 73), in the village of Shartash - 180 (101 and 79), in the village of Stanovoy 16 ( 11 and 5), "at Lake Tavatui" - 134 (85 and 49). A much larger number of Old Believers did not catch the eye of the scribes, since there were plenty of opportunities to hide. But there is no doubt that at that time it was possible to cover with the census the majority of those who had a farm or a trade and wanted to legalize their activities. Decrees from above ordered the Ural mining authorities to identify during the census those who introduced new settlers into a split. It was impossible to avoid this, but the mountain authorities also did not want to scare off good workers with inquiries. Then someone came up with a simple answer to this very tricky question, which suited everyone and neatly entered the officials into the journal: "He fell into a split with his brothers and sisters, and with his wives and according to the teachings of his parents, and their parents in this split from small years are available." According to the majority of the Old Believers included in the census, their appearance in Yekaterinburg and the city's environs dates back to the 20s - early 30s. XVIII century (Milovidov V.F., M.: "Thought". - 1969. S. 84-87).

In the last quarter of the XVIII century. Catherine II equalized the rights of the Old Believers with other Russians: she abolished the double salary that they paid under the decrees of Peter I. She granted the right to testify and allowed them to enter public office. It is no coincidence that Yekaterinburg zealots of ancient rituals always remembered Catherine II with gratitude, calling her "worthy of eternal glory" (Baidin V.I., Sverdlovsk. 1983, p. 34). It was then that the most energetic "two-faced" people showed their commercial talents. And many Shartash peasants moved to the urban estate - the Yekaterinburg merchants. In 1788, by decree of Catherine II, a special mission was sent to Yekaterinburg "to convert the stubborn schismatics of the Urals." But very few of the city merchants, led by Tolstikov, then accepted the exhortations of the mission. Together with the Tolstikovs, the merchants Cherepanovs and Verkhodanovs joined the common faith. In 1803, the first parish of the same faith was opened in Yekaterinburg, and since 1806 the church of the same faith in the name of the All-Merciful Savior began to operate. The Tolstikovs invested a lot of money in it. In terms of wealth, the Church of the Savior was considered the first among the churches of the same faith in the entire Perm province. The name "Tolstikovskaya" was assigned to it. Why did the bulk of Yekaterinburg "schismatics" persist and not convert to common faith? Indeed, after reunification through common faith with the official Orthodox Church, many problems were immediately removed - baptisms, weddings, funerals for the dead could be performed not with the help of fugitive, so-called "corrected" priests, but quite legally and according to ancient rites. With the corresponding entries in the metric books. Previously concluded marriages immediately became legal, and the children of the Old Believers became legitimate. The fact is that at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Yekaterinburg Old Believer community felt very confident and did not feel the need to formalize the family relations of its members through church records. Everyone knew that the Ural merchants and managers of private factories formalize their marriage unions with the help of Old Believer priests. This was quite enough, it never occurred to anyone to challenge the legality of weddings and baptisms of children. In addition, the Old Believers saw that common faith does not always guarantee the exact correspondence of church services to the ancient rites. In the same Church of the Savior, diocesan clergy very often violated them. The bulk of the Old Believers did not want to hear about any kind of agreements with the official Orthodox Church, associating cruel persecution in the past and numerous present humiliations with it. And, finally, the Yekaterinburg Old Believer community from the very beginning was supported in all matters by the very influential Rogozhsky cemetery in Moscow, helping to resolve conflicts with local and central authorities (V.P. Mikityuk, Yekaterinburg, 2000, pp. 15-18).

Starting from 1827, the Old Believers gradually lose one by one the rights they received under Catherine II, Paul I and Alexander I. A real hunt began for fugitive priests who were supported by the communities. Priests were defrocked and expelled from the clergy. And the leaders of the communities were punished for "sustaining". In 1829, the governor of Perm notified the mountain authorities that the emperor "had the highest command to inspire the Yekaterinburg schismatic foremen so that they would not at all intensify to spread their influence ... under fear of responsibility for disturbing public peace." Since that time, the decline of Yekaterinburg as the spiritual center of the Old Believers began (Essays on the history of the Urals. Yekaterinburg. 1996, p. 51).

The Old Believers in the Urals were not a single entity. And, although in the XVII-XVIII centuries. it never occurred to anyone to divide the Old Believers on any grounds; in modern historiography such a division is present. Therefore, in this paper, we will adhere to the modern understanding of this problem. Let's consider the two most influential and numerous groups of the Ural Old Believers - the "Austrians" and the "chapels".

From the very beginning of the schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, the Old Believers did not abandon the idea of "getting" a bishop to them. Their attempts in the 18th century were unsuccessful. This problem became especially acute in the first half of the 19th century, when the government issued a number of legislative acts prohibiting the admission of "fugitive" priests. The question of the need to restore the three-tier hierarchy in the Old Believer Church was discussed in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Starodubye, on Kerzhents, Vetka, Irgiz and other centers of the Old Believers. It was decided to send trustees to the East in search of the bishop - the monks Pavel (Velikodvorsky) and Alimpiy (Miloradov (aka Zverev)). The expedition of the Old Believers delegates was crowned with success: in Constantinople they met the former Bosno-Sarajevo Metropolitan Ambrose (Popovich). He agreed to join ancient Orthodoxy and moved to the territory of Austria to a monastery located near the town of Belaya Krinitsa. On October 28, 1846, the "widowhood" of the Old Believer Church ended: the metropolitan was joined to the Old Believers. The new consent was called the Belokrinitsky hierarchy ("Austrians"). As soon as the Russian government learned about the events in Belaya Krinitsa, a diplomatic scandal erupted. The Austrian authorities were forced to send Ambrose to the city of Ziel (where he died in 1863). But by this time, in addition to the metropolitan, there were already two bishops in the Old Believers - Cyril of Maynos (Timofeev) and Slavic Arkady (Dorofeev). Since 1849, Kirill became Ambrose's successor at the metropolitan see (Mir of the Old Believers., M.: ROSSPEN. 1998. P. 69-72). In Russia, the bishops of the Belokrinitsky hierarchy, for various reasons, were able to appear no earlier than 1849. The first, in the rank of Bishop of Simbirsk, was Sophrony (Moscow tradesman Stepan Trofimovich Zhirov; appointed bishop on January 3, 1849 by Metropolitan Kirill). Shortly after his arrival from Austria, Sophronius made a trip around the country (naturally illegally). This fact was also recorded by the Ural Orthodox priests. Dean of Nevyansk Fr. On February 15, 1850, P. Shishev reported to Bishop Jonah (Kapustin) of Yekaterinburg that “very recently, a rumor has circulated among the Nevyansk Old Believers in the most secret way that an Old Believer bishop appeared in Kazan, whom they lovingly call the groom of their Church, that this bishop comes from Austrian Slavs, that he is already doing his job - supplying priests for the Old Believers, and that in order to hide his rank, he pretends to be a merchant. Such seductive news for the Old Believers was sent by the Yekaterinburg merchant Polievkt Korobkov, who allegedly saw this bishop in Kazan, talked with him and received his blessing. So, in Samara, he was elevated to the rank of Bishop of the Urals Vitaly (Buzuluk merchant Vasily Mikheevich Myatlev), with whom Sophrony reached the Southern Urals. It was then that the "Austrian faith" began to spread in the Orenburg region. According to official statistics , in 1853, within the Orenburg province, there were over 46.6 thousand Old Believers, and more than 32 thousand of them lived in the Ural region.It is no coincidence that Sophrony was the first to visit the "main points of the split" - Sergievsky and Budarinsky sketes, known far beyond the region Skitniki, however, met the Old Believer bishop rather coolly, and he was appointed hieromonk consecrated to them foot hegumen Fr. Israel (the fugitive Cossack Yakov Vasilievich Brednev) was not accepted at all at first, dismissed from his post and expelled from the skete. Sophrony several times visited the Urals and the Southern Urals. In a very short time, communities and secret sketes of the "Austrians" were organized here (in particular, the Zlatoust monastery near Lake Turgoyak). According to the report of the Perm governor, in 1850 about 72 thousand "schismatics of various sects and persuasions" lived in the Perm province. According to the reports of the missionaries, in the 1850s. At least 100 thousand Old Believers were converted to Orthodoxy, and yet in 1860, according to the official report, the number of Ural Old Believers exceeded 64.3 thousand people. In fact, there is reason to believe that in reality there were 10 times more of them (Pavlovsky N.G., Yekaterinburg, 1994, pp. 20-28).

The followers of the Belokrinitsky hierarchy appeared in the Middle Urals in the middle of the 19th century, which was greatly facilitated by the energetic activity of the "Austrian" monks Aaron (caught in 1854 and escorted to his place of residence in Yekaterinburg), Seraphim (arrested in 1854, sent to Belebey) and Gennady and new priests. On December 23, 1855, Archbishop Neofit (Sosnin) of Perm received an anonymous note “through the mail” stating that “the root of evil, vegetating, has finally reached our Urals. Last November, an Austrian priest was here and corrected the requirements among the Old Believers. They say that this newcomer married two or three half-marriages and christened several children. There is reason to assume that he is now almost in the local district ... ". Meanwhile, Archbishop Anthony (Andrey Illarionovich Shutov) arrived in Moscow; he was appointed Bishop of Vladimir in Belaya Krinitsa on February 3, 1853. According to the plan of the leaders of the Belokrinitsky consent, it was Antony who was to become the head of the "Austrians" of Russia. However, Sophrony was also not averse to leading the Old Believer Church. In an open conflict, the advantage was on the side of Antony and his associates. Sophrony again withdrew to the Urals and decided to establish an independent and independent "patriarchy" here. To this end, on January 16, 1854, Hieromonk Israel was consecrated a bishop, and the next day - a "patriarch of all Russia" under the name of Joseph. On January 18 and 19, Sophrony and Vitaly mutually elevated each other to the rank of metropolitans (of Kazan and Novgorod). These events seriously alarmed the leadership of the "Austrians". Sophrony was summoned to Moscow, but ignored this "invitation". More drastic measures had to be taken: in 1856, Metropolitan Kirill overthrew the "rebel" from the episcopal chair, which forced Sophrony to humble himself and repent, although, as it soon became clear, only for a while. The Moscow Council of the Belokrinitskaya Church in 1859 appointed Sofroniy as a provincial bishop. Vitaly, who also brought repentance, was assigned the Ural diocese (Preobrazhensky A.A., M. 1956, pp. 128-139).

While the struggle with Sofrony was going on, the "Austrians" seriously strengthened their positions in Russia. New Old Believer dioceses and new bishops appeared: Athanasius (peasant of the Vyatka province. Abram Abramovich Telitsyn, aka Kulibin; in 1855 he was consecrated Bishop of Saratov), Konon (Don Cossack Kozma Trofimovich Smirnov; since 1855 Bishop of Chernigov (Novozybkovsky), in 1859 he was arrested and exiled to Suzdal), Pafnuty (Potap Maksimovich Shikin; from 1856 Bishop of Kazan; "one of the best minds of the Old Believers"), Gennady (Grigory Vasilievich Belyaev from 1857 Bishop of Perm), whose name associated with a significant increase in the activity of representatives of the Belokrinitskaya Church in the Urals and Siberia.

The true leaders of the "Austrian" movement in the Urals, as well as everywhere else in Russia, were rich merchants (Punilova M.V., Krasnoyarsk. 1986. P. 215-226).

One of the most important tasks facing the representatives of the Belokrinitsky hierarchy in the Urals was to attract new followers to their side, not only from among the big merchants, but also from the peasants. Earlier it was said that already in the 1850s. the leaders of the "Belokrinitsky" conducted active propaganda among the Old Believers. They did not leave this activity even at a later time. A feature of the period that began in the 1880s. and lasting until 1905, there was an increase in "ideological" pressure on the "Austrians" from the Orthodox Church. If earlier the main method of combating Belokrinitsky consent was mainly repressive measures, then from the end of the 19th century. the method of persuasion was used more and more frequently. It is characteristic that if in the 1860-1870s. "Austrian sect" was not mentioned among the most dangerous, then in the late XIX - early XX centuries. Orthodox missionaries unanimously declared that "the most harmful part of the schism must be considered, undoubtedly, the Austrian consent. It is with him, par excellence, that we have to reckon with in our region" (Cherkasova A.S., M. 1995, p. 169 -172).

It is noteworthy that many missionaries who opposed the "Austrians" in the Urals at various disputes about faith were themselves Old Believers in the recent past.

Of the most famous names, one can name, for example, fellow-faith priest Mikhail Sushkov (former Nizhny Tagil mentor of the chapels); famous polemist, "synodal missionary" Fr. Ksenofont Kryuchkov, who adopted the common faith in 1878, and before that he also led the Bespopovtsy in the village. Poim Penza province; missionary-priest Lev Ershov, who before his conversion to Orthodoxy in 1894 was one of the most literate and active members of the Fedoseev community in Krasnoufimsk; the former head of the "Austrians" of the South-Knauf plant, Vasily Efimovich Konoplev, who took monastic tonsure with the name of Varlaam and in 1894 became rector of the Orthodox missionary Belogorsky monastery; shortly after his conversion to the Edinoverie (1903), Daniil Semenovich Kolegov (formerly a priest of the Belokrinitsk hierarchy in Nizhny Tagil) took up missionary work among the former parishioners.

A lot of troubles had to go through the "Austrian" dogmatists during public conversations with the Old Believers-bespriests. In the Middle Urals, for example, the blind man A.A., famous throughout Russia, was a frequent visitor. Konovalov (Savior's consent). At the beginning of the XX century. "Belokrinitsky" was actively opposed by the defender of the chapels A.T. Kuznetsov.

As in most other regions, in the Urals and Western Siberia, the main source of replenishment of the ranks of the "Austrians" were the Old Believers of the chapel consent (former Beglopopovtsy). Therefore, the main attention of the leadership of the Belokrinitskaya hierarchy was traditionally directed to preaching among the chapels. Another important element of their missionary activity was a lively polemic with representatives of the non-priests' concords (in the Urals, these are primarily Pomortsy and Spasovites), who sought to prove the "untruth and gracelessness" of the "Austrian" priesthood. And, finally, the Ural Old Believers attached great importance to the work against the missionaries of the official Church. A feature of the missionary activity of the "Austrians" in the Urals at the end of the 19th century. there was a lack of highly qualified teachers who were able to speak "on an equal footing" both with Orthodox priests - "academicians" and with non-priest literate people (Pokrovsky N.N., M., 1998. P. 78-82).

The revolutionary events of 1917 found the most lively response in the leadership of the Belokrinitskaya hierarchy. At the All-Russian Congress in May 1917, a resolution was adopted to support the Provisional Government. In a telegram addressed to the Prime Minister, Prince Lvov said: "... the congress of Old Believers, welcoming the Provisional Government in your person, expresses its full confidence and confidence that under its wise leadership God will save Russia from the coming anarchy and the external enemy."

The leadership of the white movement was well aware of the strength of the Old Believers. In 1919, the Union of Youth of the Old Believers of the Belokrinitsky Accord was organized in Tomsk, the cells of which soon appeared in the Urals (in Yekaterinburg, Miass and other cities).

In the army of Kolchak, along with representatives of the official Church, the institution of Old Believer priests was introduced, the activities of which were controlled by Bishop Filaret of Kazan, who temporarily headed the Tomsk diocese. However, this cooperation between the civil authorities and the Belokrinitskaya Church was short-lived and ended with the defeat of the Kolchak troops.

Soviet administration in the 1920s still allowed the "Austrians" some "liberties". Until 1927, Consecrated Councils were convened and diocesan congresses were held (though irregularly).

According to the authoritative opinion of V.P. Ryabushinsky, in 1926 there were at least 20 bishops of the Belokrinitskaya Church in Russia. However, at the same time, the authorities began a gradual offensive against the Old Believers in general and the Belokrinitsky hierarchy in particular. In the second half of the 1930s. repressions against the Old Believers of the Belokrinitsky consent reached their peak. By 1939, there were only no more than 5 bishops in the country. Everywhere, including in the Urals, there were arrests and trials of Old Believer priests. A large number of temples, monasteries and sketes were destroyed. The consequence of this was a significant reduction in the number of followers of the "Austrians". The situation was very reminiscent of the position of the Belokrinitskaya Church in the 1850s, only in a much more tragic version. Of several dozen communities in the Perm-Tobolsk diocese, only a few survived, for example, in Miass or in the village. Pier (Artinsky district, Sverdlovsk region).

Currently, on the territory that used to be part of the Perm-Tobolsk Old Believer diocese, there are about 10 "Austrian" communities. One can distinguish a number of the most significant centers of consent in the Urals, for example, in the city of Vereshchagino (120 km from Perm). At the beginning of the XX century. there was an "Austrian" deanery, uniting 17 parishes. The temple, destroyed after the revolution, was rebuilt in 1947. The community is led by Archpriest Valery Shabashov.

Temple in the name of the Nativity of John the Baptist in the village. Shamary (in the east of the Sverdlovsk region) was built again in 1996, and the surviving drawings of the old church were taken as the basis for the project. According to our information, the Shamar community is the largest in our region. Hundreds of pilgrims come to Shamary every year who want to bow to the graves of the Old Believer monks Konstantin and Arkady, who were buried near the village 100.

The rector of the temple is Fr. Mikhail Tataurov. The "Austrian" community in Yekaterinburg resumed its activities not so long ago, but now there is already a prayer house and the issue of appointing a permanent priest is being decided. Local communities are directly subordinate to Metropolitan Alimpiy, who has repeatedly visited the Urals. However, the issue of creating the Perm-Ekaterinburg diocese and appointing a bishop to the Urals has already been raised (Milovidov VF, M .: "Thought". - 1969. P. 119-136).

2 Old Believers-chapels of the Urals in the late XIX-early XX centuries.

We have already mentioned the Old Believers-chapels in the context of their contacts with the "Austrians". Let us dwell on the adherents of this persuasion in more detail.

For more than two centuries, starting from the end of the 17th century, the Ural region was one of the largest centers of the Old Believers, having not lost this importance by the beginning of the 20th century. Despite all the efforts of the missionaries of the official Orthodox Church, the Perm province, as before, occupied one of the first places in the Russian Empire in terms of the number of Old Believers. According to the 1897 census, 95,174 Old Believers lived on the territory of the Perm province, while in the Tobolsk province - 31,986, and in the Orenburg and Ufa provinces adjacent to the Perm province from the west - 22,219 and 158,501, respectively. according to this census, about 3% of the total population of the provinces, but since the distribution of the Old Believers across the region was uneven, in some areas the proportion of the Old Believer population was higher, while in others it was much lower. Historically, the main Old Believer centers were mining settlements, as well as settlements lying on the way from the European part of the country to Siberia and the Far East.

The 1897 census showed how far from reality the data collected by the official church were, which, however, was recognized not only by researchers of the Old Believers, but also by missionaries. This circumstance was noted by Vrutsevich, who until 1881 served as secretary of the Perm Spiritual Consistory. He cited the minimum, in his words, figures obtained on the basis of viewing the parish registers of the late 1870-1880s. (in the Verkhotursk district - 85,000 Old Believers, Shadrinsk and Kamyshlovsky, taken together - 166,880), accompanying them with a comment: in three counties there are 4.5 times more schismatics than their number indicated in official reports throughout the Perm province. As the main reason for the significant increase in the number of Old Believers in the first decade of the 20th century. Representatives of the Orthodox Church most often referred to the policy of tolerance proclaimed by the Manifesto on April 17, 1905, declaring that with "such freedom" their missionary work would not continue to be successful. Pointing to the growth in the number of "called Old Believers", the local church authorities no longer concealed and did not underestimate these data, as before, but on the contrary, for a more impressive illustration of how, under favorable conditions, "the schism is swallowing up the Orthodox population more and more", probably could somewhat "round off" the data on the number of the Old Believer population, as was done in the report of the Perm diocesan missionary for 1913. times compared with the data of the statistical committees that conducted the census in 1897.

The increase in the number of the Old Believer population after 1905 occurs to a greater extent due to the legalization of that part of the Old Believers who, before the declaration of freedom of religion, was considered formally belonging to the official Orthodox Church. According to the requirements established in 1905, everyone who wished to apply for the transition to the Old Believers had to submit separately. However, in exceptional cases, collective petitions were also granted. Very unusual was, for example, a petition filed in 1908 by 137 peasants from the village. Katarach of the Shadrinsk district of the Perm province. These peasants, who are considered Orthodox, petitioned to be allowed to return to the "faith of the fathers", that is, to the Old Believers. In the process of admonishing them, it turned out that the parents of many of them in 1887 "evaded schism", accompanying their decision with a petition to the Ekaterinburg Spiritual Consistory with a request to consider them officially Old Believers. The case was transferred from the consistory to the Synod, and there its consideration was delayed. The peasants, without waiting for official permission, began to baptize their children "according to the priestless rite" and later turned not to the church, but to the mentor, but the local priest still considered them at his church, and not without some benefit: after all, all parishioners, and consequently, they, too, were obliged to fulfill the office of church watchmen. It was this circumstance - the desire to get rid of the guard service - that became the main reason for initiating in 1908 that same petition for exclusion from Orthodoxy. After conversations with the missionary, the peasants confirmed their desire to convert to the Old Believers, referring to the Decree on religious tolerance. As a result, in the reports of the local dean for 1913, out of all the inhabitants of the village. Only 92 were listed as attending the official Orthodox Church, all the rest were classified as Old Believers-bespopovtsy (Industry and the working class of the mining Urals in the 18th - early 20th centuries. Sverdlovsk. 1982. P. 72-78).

The circle of Old Believer agreements in the five central districts of the mining Urals, which make up the Yekaterinburg diocese, was quite wide. However, the chapels were considered the largest agreement among the Ural Old Believers at that time. The transformation of Beglopopov's consent (of the Sofontievites) into Bespopov's (or, as the chapel missionaries were also called, the "Starikovsky sense"), took place in the context of the struggle against the "split" that the government of Nicholas I launched from the beginning of the 30s. 19th century Under the threat of deprivation of social and economic rights, most of the Yekaterinburg merchants, leaders of the beglopopov society of the Old Believers of the Siberian Territory, in 1838 joined the Edinoverie. However, the hopes that ordinary Old Believers would follow the example of the leaders did not come true. Because of the persecution by the authorities of the fugitive priesthood and the collapse of the organization of the fugitive priests, they switched to non-priestly practice. Thus, the Nikolaev repressive policy in relation to the Ural Old Believers was not crowned with success, since it only led to a change in its organization: the decentralized world of non-priest communities of chapels replaced the fugitive society. Part of the Trans-Ural peasant communities, under the influence of M.I. Galanin and his like-minded people, switched to bespriest practice as early as the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

Let us single out a set of reasons why the Old Believers of the Urals and Trans-Urals switched to the priestless practice. First, runaway priests were always in short supply. Old Believer parishes were very large, often at the right time the priest was not around, and some liturgical functions were taken over by the laity. A stable practice was created to do without a priest. In addition, the priests who converted from Orthodoxy to the Old Believers did not, as a rule, have high moral qualities, and in conditions of an acute shortage of personnel, moral flaws usually worsened. Exacting to the moral character of their shepherds, the peasants were more and more inclined to reject such priests.

The final decision to refuse further reception of the "Nikonian" priests was made at the Tyumen Cathedral on November 13, 1840, because "... and to this day they are strictly persecuted, we leave them. fulfill the demands and needs of the laity, as if our ancestors had our abbots, but they obeyed the priests of the government. But now we completely deny them. Thus, the correction of the needs passed to the mentors-old men and tutors, elected by the community. The old people acted as laymen, they did not have the right to read the prayers that the priest was supposed to say during worship and during the performance of the sacraments. But, even after turning to priestless practice, the doctrine of the consent of the chapels continued to deny the dogma of the complete suppression of the true priesthood after the reforms of Patriarch Nikon. To resolve the most important issues, the chapels, as well as their predecessors, the fugitives, convened a council, to which representatives from the communities were delegated, both mentors and other laity. Usually, wealthy Old Believers took care of organizing such meetings; delegates held their meetings in their spacious city houses. The role of the chairman of the meeting was often performed by mentors or trustees of secular communities, but the most influential was the opinion of the skete elders (as in former times, in the 18th - first half of the 19th centuries), who were necessarily invited to the cathedral. This continued, presumably, until the 1880s, when the differences in views between the radical peasant communities (mainly Trans-Urals) and the moderate urban commercial and industrial circles of the chapels again made themselves felt. In 1884, at the council, the people of Yekaterinburg were able to achieve the resolution they needed on a new search for the priesthood, despite the fact that it contradicted the arguments of the supporter of priestlessness, the most authoritative of the Chernorizians - Fr. Nifont, with whose opinion the peasant delegates agreed. The fact that the role of the skitniks invited to the Ural cathedrals has decreased is also evidenced by the further practice of holding such meetings: the Chernoriztsy were present at the council of 1908 and at the congress of 1911, but they no longer participated in the discussions, giving up the leading role to representatives of secular communities. Nevertheless, despite the decrease in the ideological role, forest dwellings retain their social and cult significance. Ural "factory dachas" in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. are still a haven for many skete settlements. The proximity of some sketes to the settlements provided, if necessary, the help of local chapel-laymen, however, this neighborhood contained a danger: from time to time the sketes were robbed (Pokrovsky N.N., //http//cclib.nsn/ru/win/projekts /siberia/religion/pokrov_ros/html).

At the beginning of the XX century. the most literate people in the worldly communities, the scribes, had great authority among the chapels of the mining Urals. They knew relatively deeply the texts of Holy Scripture, the works of St. fathers and church rules, mastered the methods of conducting polemical conversations, defending the doctrine of their consent was a professional activity for them. In the course of disputes over strict observance of the rules of true Orthodox life in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries. inside the chapel agreement, insignificant rumors stood out: "Klimentovtsy", "Mikhailovtsy" and "Porfiryovs" - whose name came from the names of their founders. "Klimentovtsy" (followers of the monk Clement (Klimont) from the skete near the village of Bolshie Galashki, Verkhotursky district, Perm province) were not numerous - no more than two dozen people. The separation occurred due to the ban by Clement to keep samovars, lamps, and wear colorful clothes in the houses. According to the missionaries, the teachings of Clement differed from those of the chapels also in eschatological views: according to him, the Antichrist had already reigned in the world in the form of the idol of Samora, that is, a samovar. Therefore, in such end times, one should not be recorded in any civil books and pay taxes. In 1902, the "Mikhailovites" - supporters of Deryabinnikov Mikhail Illarionovich - separated from the "Klimentovites". Reproaching the “Klimentovites” for the fact that many old women in their sketes have personal belongings and money, Mikhail called such a life a “robber” assembly and declared that he was separating from it. Deryabinnikov was a supporter of the greatest possible distance from the world. At the already mentioned Galashkinsky Cathedral, it was he who initiated the decision not to accept for prayer the parents whose children study in zemstvo schools.

The "Porfirians", of whom there were even fewer than the "Clementists", separated from the chapels because of their special opinion about the rite of baptism: they believed that true baptism could only be performed in running river or spring water, and all those baptized in a different way should have been baptized. It is obvious that the "disciples of the Porphyry" had doubts about the need to rebaptize the chapels. To clarify the situation, in 1909 they invited an active figure in the consent of the “baptized people” from the village of Nizhny Tagil to Nizhny Tagil. Tolby of the Nizhny Novgorod province Alexander Mikheevich Zapyantsev. Having entered the course of the matter, Zapyantsev answered the question "on what basis should those coming from the chapels be baptized?" extended message. From his reasoning, it followed that baptism in this case was necessary because of the former practice of receiving fugitive priests, "because their priests were appointed from the servants of the Antichrist and were received illegally, and did not act according to the rules of the holy fathers." It is not known whether the "Porfirians" accepted his arguments, but such views were not supported and widely disseminated in the Urals. In some Siberian conciliar resolutions there are references to the "Zavyalovskaya heresy" of the late 19th-first quarter of the 20th centuries, whose supporters introduced elements of the rejected "priestly" practice during marriage (Pokrovsky N.N., M., 1998. P. 99-105) .

The problem of the unification of the rites of baptism, communion, marriage, repentance, without the solution of which it was impossible to prevent divisions in societies, the chapels discussed in 1911 at the First All-Russian Congress, held in Yekaterinburg. Many of the participants came only to consider these ordinances. It was possible to immediately reach a consensus on only one issue: it was recognized that a priest is not required for the sacrament of repentance, it can be performed by monks and simpletons, that is, "any worthy person chosen for it." Consideration of all other issues was not easy: the participants in the discussion, referring to the Holy Scriptures, often drew directly opposite conclusions. After many hours of debate, it was established how the rites of baptism and marriage should be performed. The question of communion turned out to be the most difficult, it was generally decided on the plane of "to be or not to be." The fact is that for more than half a century the chapels had no priests from whom it would be possible to receive spare Gifts for communion. In many societies, the holy Gifts left by the former priests have run out, but even those who have not yet run out of them, for example, the chapels of the Kyshtym factory, doubted their truth and the legitimacy of receiving such Gifts from the common people. D.K. Serebryannikov (from Nevyansk) and A.E. Arapov (from the Verkhneivinsky plant) insisted on the right to accept the preserved Gifts, as well as on the possibility of allowing communion with epiphany water instead. The exchange of opinions did not lead to anything, and the decision of this issue was postponed until the next council.

Disagreements among the chapels also appeared in relation to the "Regulations on the Old Believer Communities" published on October 17, 1906. Many doubted the benefits of the opportunity provided by the "Regulations" to register a community with the provincial administration (and thus obtain the rights of a legal entity), expecting that information about the presence of a community could subsequently do a disservice, for example, it would not allow to avoid harassment by the authorities, if the policy in against the Old Believers will become more rigid. There was a serious controversy between the supporters of the legal status of the community and the so-called "opponents of the community", but both sides invariably remained unconvinced. The already mentioned Afanasy Trofimovich Kuznetsov spoke in defense of the registration. In the magazine "Ural Old Believer" he published a number of articles exposing the delusions of the "anti-communalists". Emphasizing the great importance of the right to officially organize communities and "the acquisition of legal and ecclesiastical rights by the Old Believers in this way," which was guaranteed by the "Regulations," he nevertheless noted that "however, there were also such people who see in the community nothing more than sin and apostasy from the faith of the fathers. "Anticommunists" substantiated their position in several paragraphs of the decision of the cathedral, which took place in the village. Gorbunov, Verkhotursky district, January 13-15, 1912 A.T. Kuznetsov mentions that among the "inspirers" of the rejection of the registration of communities at the cathedral were the hermits Sergius, Varlaam, Euphrosyn and Clement. In the mining Urals, the decision of the Gorbunovsky Cathedral was completely in tune with the mood in the Nizhny Tagil community. In the Tomsk province, the "anti-communist" tendencies were even stronger.

The problem of literacy and education was perceived ambiguously among the Ural chapels. A group of the most active figures (self-name - "Old Believer intellectuals"), which included scribes and the most literate parishioners of large factory and urban communities, advocated the establishment of separate Old Believer educational institutions and special training for teachers. The idea of "raising literacy among children, setting up and equipping Old Believer schools for this purpose" was also discussed at the All-Russian Congress of Chapels and was generally supported. Among the supporters of schools, the main stumbling block was the different understanding of the content of the educational program. It seemed to many that the traditional course of teaching writing, reading, divine literacy, which in former times was entrusted to the "craftswoman", was enough. Of course, the Old Believers sometimes sent their children to zemstvo schools to receive some professional skills, but still such an education was considered unsatisfactory (“they don’t teach psalms, canons, or hook singing”) and was not welcomed everywhere. Dissatisfaction with the zemstvo schools remained even when some of the subjects (most often the Law of God) were taught by teachers from the Old Believers. Thus, Vasily Andreyevich Laskin, rector of the village of Yar, Kamyshlov uyezd, expressed his concerns at the congress: “Our zemstvo has built a ten-thousand building for the school. Our teacher is now from our Old Believers. Things are going well. and the sun is up. We don't like that." And one of the representatives of the community from the Shadrinsk district said: "We do not want a brotherhood, or a community, or a school. We doubt all this" (Pokrovsky N.N., M., 1998, pp. 105-108).

To the question of the relationship between the Old Believers-chapels and the "Austrians" (respectively, priests and bezpopovtsy), it should be added that, given the fundamental incompleteness of the discussion among the former fugitives about the suppression of the priesthood, the heads of the "Austrian" (Belokrinitskaya) hierarchy appealed to the chapels with calls to accept them "again acquired the true priesthood ... and unite their believing souls into the one Church of God." This issue has been raised with varying intensity up to the present.

Conclusion

In this work, we have given a historical and local history overview of the Old Believers in the Urals. We examined the general political situation in the Muscovite state, which led to the reforms of Patriarch Nikon. They gave a brief description of these reforms and the church schism that followed.

We have shown that the Urals became one of the main centers of the Old Believers due to quite objective reasons, namely, its remoteness from the center, the relative weakness of state power and low development. Old Believers of various persuasions and currents flocked here. The main centers of localization of the Old Believers in the region were the Perm and Sverdlovsk regions, although individual sketes are found throughout the Urals. In modern historiography, it is customary to divide the Old Believers into many currents. This division has been going on since the 17th century, when the first lists of "rebels" began to appear. Although, as can be seen from the example of the Ural Old Believers, they were mainly two currents - priests and bespopovtsy.

As shown above, the Old Believers made an invaluable contribution to the development of the region. This is factory activity, trade, cultural, religious. Even Gennin noted the exceptional diligence, honesty and conscientiousness of adherents of the "old faith". Almost the entire color of the Ural merchants was the Old Believers.

Today, "Old Orthodoxy" is not forgotten. In the absence of persecution and oppression, it is on fertile ground. Churches are opening, the topic of the Old Believers is widely exaggerated in the press and television. There is an increasing interest in the ethnographic aspects of the life and life of the Old Believers. Tourism also begins to enter the sphere of the Old Believers. In addition to all of the above, many ideas of the old faith are used by various sects and nationalist organizations. Thus, we see that the Old Believers not only made a huge contribution to the development of the Urals, both industrial and cultural, but also continues to actively participate in the modern life of the region. We can say that it has become an integral part of the Urals.

Bibliography

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The schism in the Russian Orthodox Church began in 1653 under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Steep in character, Patriarch Nikon introduces new rules. The tsar cherished the dream of uniting the entire Orthodox world around Moscow and liberating Byzantium. The first step should be to bring rituals and creeds to a single model so that all Orthodox pray and believe in the same way. So the Greek Church, which essentially gave Russia Orthodoxy, had a number of differences by the 17th century. Nikon invites Greek scientists to Moscow. They should compare Russian Orthodox books with ancient Greek ones. The conclusion was drawn such that the Russian Church for several centuries departed from the true old Byzantine canons.

I was always surprised by the fanaticism of the Old Believers, their willingness to go to death, but not to betray their faith. Furious, cruel eradication, suppression, destruction of the old faith by the authorities and the Nikon church. There must be some ideological principle here, extremely important, for which people went to the stake, to torture. And this, of course, was not the main thing, to be baptized with two or three fingers and how many bows to put.

The fact is that our great Russian saint Sergius of Razhonezh reformatted Western Christianity into Vedic Orthodoxy. Father Sergius was a highly consecrated sorcerer. His Orthodoxy is the triumph of the laws of the Rule. He subtly inscribed the Slavic Vedic laws into Christianity. But the teachings of Christ were originally Vedic, it was only then totally distorted. The Christian teaching of Sergius of Radonezh has become what it should be - sunny, life-affirming, not different from the ancient Hyperborean world outlook.

Then it becomes clear that the Old Believers are precisely the bearers of that very true Orthodox faith. And Nikon, together with the second Romanov (Rom-man - a man of Rome), began the reverse process - the destruction of the church of St. Sergius of Radonezh, the enslavement of the Russian people, the imposition of the Greek religion with its servility and obedience to power.

Sergius of Radonezh clothed the Slavic-Aryan worldview in a Christian form. He didn't have any dogmas. The Vedic head of the Gods Rod turned into the Heavenly Father, and the son of the Rod Svaroh - into Christ, the son of God. Lada - the Slavic goddess of love and harmony took on the image of the Virgin Mary. The most important thing in the teachings of Father Sergius is the steps of a person's moral, spiritual growth. Violence, violation of human dignity, and the use of alcohol were prohibited. Love for the Motherland, for the native Slavic culture, self-sacrifice, and the moral qualities of a person were maintained. It so happened that Russia began to unite around Sergius of Radonezh. The still surviving Vedic Slavs and Orthodox began to understand each other, they had nothing to share. Both of them looked to the West as a hotbed of evil and demonism. Under Sergius of Radonezh, the ancient Vedic holidays were inscribed in the Orthodox. And we still celebrate them. Maslenitsa, Christmas time, Kolyada.

The Church of Magus Sergius denied the conversion "servant of God". Under him, the Rus were children and grandchildren of God, as before in Vedic times. Under Ivan the Terrible, all this continued. All Western attacks failed. And only in the middle of the 17th century, the proteges of Rome, the Romanovs, were ordered to cleanse Russia from the Orthodoxy of Sergius of Radonezh.

There was a murmur among the people that these scientists were crooks pursuing self-interest. And the changes go according to the Latin books. The first to refuse to obey Nikon were the monks of the Solovetsky Monastery. They are ready to give an armed rebuff. The murmur turns into confusion.

With special trepidation, they are waiting for the year 1666. It is not entirely clear why. Indeed, before the calendar reform of Peter I in 1700, the chronology in Russia was conducted from the creation of the world. 1700 AD corresponds to 7208 AD, so 1666 AD is 7174 AD. By the way, the Old Believers still keep the chronology according to the old style, just as we had in Vedic Russia. (In September 2012, we had the year 7521 and the beginning of the era of the Wolf).

On June 22, 1666, a solar eclipse terrifies many, foreshadowing the end of the world. In the same year, the Council takes place. All innovations of Nikon to observe as true - the Council decides. Defenders of the old faith are cursed and called schismatics. The Solovetsky Monastery is taken by attack. The main rebels are hanged and burned to intimidate. The most ardent preacher of the Old Believers, Archpriest Avvakum, is executed by fire. In an earthen prison, the nun Theodora, who is more familiar to us as the noblewoman Morozova, dies of hunger. Ordinary people, frightened by the executions, ran across the expanses of Russia. First, in the Kostroma, Bryansk forests, and then further to the Urals, to Siberia.

The purge began under Tsar Alexei, and continued with particular fury under Peter I. Bonfires from ancient manuscripts blazed. Slavic culture was destroyed in order to break the connection of times. Mass drunkenness ensued. The people were turned into slaves. How many Russian people were destroyed? There is a version that the third. The second genocide after Vladimir the Bloody - the baptizer of Russia.

Ural.

The first report about the Old Believers who appeared in the Urals dates back to 1684. About 50 people appeared in Porechye in the Usolsky district. Especially many Old Believers took over the Ural forests after the famous Streltsy rebellion. The suppression of the rebellion by Tsar Peter was cruel. Those who fled are buried in the most remote corners - forests, mountains, caves. The chronicle writes: "During the resettlement, they started monastic sketes. And they lived like monasteries crowded with a hundred people." One of the settlements of the Old Believers was on the site of the current village of Kulizei. According to legend, it was from this churchyard that the Old Believers began to settle in the Urals. The forest surrounded the graveyard with such a dense wall that the Old Believers called the narrow clearing leading to the world a hole. The Old Believers were divided into two groups: priests and non-priests. The name itself speaks for itself. Both of them pray only for icons painted before Patriarch Nikon. Contact with the outside world was kept to a minimum. Caught distributors of the old faith are ordered to be tortured and burned in a log house. And those who keep the faith are supposed to be mercilessly flogged with a whip and exiled. It is ordered to beat with a whip and batogs even those who will give the Old Believers little help, give them food or just drink water.

Tsar Peter I allows the registered Old Believers to live openly in the villages, but imposes a double tax on them, and this is ruinous. And most of the Old Believers live unrecorded, that is, illegally, for which they are judged and exiled. They are forbidden to hold any state or public position, to be witnesses in court against the Orthodox, even if the latter are convicted of murder or theft. But in spite of everything, the Old Believers are indestructible.

The Old Believers in the Urals become especially widespread with the development of industry here. The Demidovs and other breeders, contrary to the supreme royal authority, encourage the Old Believers in every possible way and hide them from the authorities. Even give them high positions. After all, breeders only need profit, they don’t give a damn about church dogmas, and all Old Believers are conscientious workers. What is difficult to give to others, they observe without difficulty. Faith does not allow them to destroy themselves with vodka, they do not smoke. The Old Believers, in modern terms, quickly make a career, becoming masters and managers. The Ural factories are becoming a stronghold of the Old Believers.

Not far from Nevyansk, the capital of the Demidovs, there is an old Old Believer village of Byngi (emphasis on "i"). Here is a very beautiful, even unique in its architecture Nikolskaya Church (1789). The end of each century was marked by a thaw in relation to the Old Believers. Around - heavy huts. Yes, what! Just 19th century. Many huts could decorate any museum of wooden architecture. By the way, the film "Gloomy River" was filmed here.

The persecution first weakens, then intensifies, but never stops. In the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna, a new wave of repression and persecution falls upon the Old Believers. Schismatics are forbidden to build sketes, to be called hermits and hermits. Another trap is the introduction of common faith. Dilapidated Old Believer churches are being closed, new ones are being baptized. In churches of the same faith, services are conducted in the old way. However, they are subordinate to the official Orthodox Church. If one cannot get rid of schismatics by destroying churches, then one can try to overcome the faith by a new schism. In the village of Byngi, near Nikolskaya, there is exactly the same faith Kazan Church (1853) with rather primitive architecture.

In Nizhny Tagil, they decide to remake the Trinity Chapel into a church of the same faith. The Old Believers surround the chapel, blocking access to it. "We'll die, but we won't give up," they say. An angry governor comes to see the conflict. And gives the command to storm the chapel. The chapel has been taken. The sketes are ruined: Kasli, Kyshtym, Cherdyn. A permanent mission begins to operate in the Urals. Its members, Orthodox priests, travel around the villages, talk with the Old Believers, assuring them that their faith is nothing but heresy. In words, the peasants agree with the missionaries, but after their departure they are often asked by the cathedral to impose a penance on them in order to make amends for the sin that has happened. In general, the struggle against the Old Believers is carried out almost all the time the Romanovs were on the throne. We can count only 60-70 years when the struggle subsided. This time is considered to be the happiest time in their history.

But a new cruel and bloody 20th century, rich in upheavals, was already approaching. The official church, which fought so fiercely against the Old Believers, will have to drink the cup of bitter trials itself. Who knows, they may have prepared this cup for themselves when they chased the old faith with hunting passion. For the new power of the Bolsheviks, the issues of faith and property turned out to be extremely important. The Old Believers were directly related to both issues. To begin with, the whole religion was subjected to an atheistic revision. Faith in Marx-Engels was supposed to supplant any religion. The Bolsheviks found out that among the Old Believers, the old people play a huge role, they do not allow young people to break away from the faith. The struggle with faith takes on the most cruel forms. Churches are closing. Priests are shot or exiled. By the beginning of the 20th century, there were almost 100 Old Believer parishes in the Perm Territory. After 60 years, two remained. Most of the Old Believers have strong family farms. They depend only on the weather and do not depend at all on party directives. This position of the new government must be broken. Many Old Believers are declared kulaks and exiled. The whole way of life collapsed. The entire period of Soviet power was a struggle with religion. The impoverished villages pushed people into the cities.

In 1971, the official church removed the curse from the Old Believers, which it imposed on them during the split. So after three centuries the old faith was rehabilitated. But even today there is a chill of alienation in the relationship between the two churches. The last 15 years of the 20th century turned out to be the most liberal in Russia. But on the other hand, it became clear what losses the Old Believers suffered during the years of Soviet power. Now the Old Believers hope that young people will come to faith.

We have one country, one history. They are just as Russian as we are. And their perseverance in spite of all the trials is admirable. Today there is no more persecution. But temptations are coming, which are becoming more and more difficult to resist. The technological age invades their lives more and more.

Old Believers settled in the Southern Urals for a long time. These were mainly two streams: from the Volga, more precisely its tributary Kerzhents, where the Nizhny Novgorod sketes were defeated (probably another name for the Old Believers, Kerzhaks, came from here) and from the Russian north, from Pomorye. It is believed that even the first breeder of Miass I. Luginin was an Old Believer. In 1809 there was a chapel here, and in 1895, when the repressions weakened, there was also a stone church, which was destroyed in the 1960s. At the end of 1999, the Old Believer Church of the Most Holy Theotokos was built in Miass.

August 20, 2018, 6:00 AM

“Officers see us as sectarians, we have to complain to Putin”: how the Old Believers live in the Urals

A month after the visit to Yekaterinburg of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill, the primate of the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church (ROOC), Metropolitan Kornily (Titov), arrived in the capital of the Middle Urals. He is also the head of the Ural diocese, which, in addition to the Sverdlovsk region, includes the Perm Territory, the Chelyabinsk and Orenburg regions.

Metropolitan Cornelius- 71-year-old primate of the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church (since October 2005). From the beginning of his leadership, the ROCC took a course towards the withdrawal of the Old Believers from isolation, as well as establishing contacts with the ROC MP. Due to repeated meetings with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Kornily was criticized by some Old Believer communities. Since 2012, the head of the ROCC began to actively establish ties with the leaders of the regions, and subsequently the country. In particular, in May 2017, a meeting was held between Metropolitan and Russian President Vladimir Putin

For the Urals, half of which was built by the Old Believers in the 18th-19th centuries, this visit is significant. Metropolitan Kornily, by his status, is actually the patriarch and spiritual leader of the Old Believers. Compared to his "colleague" from the Russian Orthodox Church, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church visits the Ural flock much more often - about once every two years. At the same time, the community of Old Believers in Yekaterinburg is not numerous and numbers about a hundred people. The correspondent of the EAN spoke with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church about the current situation of the Old Believers in Russia and the capital of the Urals.

"The Russian Orthodox Church is not our enemy"

Vladyka, for more than 300 years the Old Believers were persecuted by the secular authorities. First, during the reign of the Romanov dynasty, then during the Soviet era. What is your current relationship with government agencies?

I see dynamic improvement. Serious progress occurred after a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, when he visited the Old Believer Rogozhsky spiritual center in May 2017. In 350 years, he became the first head of state to meet with us. This is a historical turn in the relationship between the Old Believers and the secular authorities. At the same time, I managed to get acquainted with the president's entourage. They learned more about the Old Believers and developed a positive attitude.

We started getting more attention. Let this not always help, but they interfere with us less, and this is already good.

- And what kind of relations do you have with the regional authorities? For example, with the leadership of the Sverdlovsk region?

Old Believers or Old Believers- an Orthodox movement that was formed in the 1650s - 1660s after the church reform carried out by Patriarch Nikon. The Old Believers consider themselves the guardians of the Orthodox faith, which has been approved in Russia since 988. The Old Believers believe that the church reforms were drawn up under the influence of the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodoxy was thus distorted. This was one of the reasons for the conflict. Since the 17th century, the Old Believers have been using the term "Nikonians" to supporters of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Here we have always had fruitful cooperation. And so it was with the previous governor, and with the current head of the region, Yevgeny Kuyvashev. You can always rely on them. A sign of a good attitude is that with each of my visits, new churches appear in the region, and parishes grow with young people.

In the Urals, there has always been an understanding that the Old Believers are the founders of industry, because Old Believers flocked here from persecution both in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Old Believers have always enjoyed a reputation in the region as strong and reliable people, and now they are given their due.

- Is it easy to get a land plot for a church?

Still difficult. On the ground, the provision of land is not very welcome.

- What difficulties arise in negotiations with local officials?

They do not know anything about the Old Believers at all: at the level of films and the painting “Boyar Morozova”. They think that we are some kind of sectarians. This is a stereotype that has developed since Soviet times. They have to explain to them from Moscow through the presidential administration: "These are also ours, the Orthodox."

- How many people are there in the Russian Orthodox Old Believer Church?

No one has counted and does not keep such statistics. I can only say by the number of parishes: there are 200 in Russia, about 50 more in Ukraine, a little less in Moldova.

In addition, there is an influx of Old Believers-migrants. The Internet has greatly accelerated this work, as people began to learn about each other, and we are now establishing contacts with them. Recently, we have begun work on establishing ties with the Old Believers who moved to the Far East from Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil. This process of joining Old Believers from Latin American countries began two years ago, and we need to actively work on it.

- What are the current relations between the Old Believer Church and the Russian Orthodox Church?

I would say that now these are good-neighbourly, peaceful relations. There is cooperation on social projects: the fight against drunkenness, drug addiction, unbridled customs, for example, sodomy. A commission has now been set up to analyze what happened in the schism and how to return to the starting point.

- What obstacles exist for legal reunification?

The unwillingness of the ROC to return to its original position. For example, double and triple.

Why is it important how you fold your fingers? After all, with the same gesture they confess the Trinity and two essences in Jesus Christ.

We do not just fold and wave our hands - we impose a cross. And dogmatically, in two-fingeredness, it is confessed that Jesus was crucified on the cross (in the pronunciation of the Old Believers - approx. EAN) Christ. Here are the two fingers. And in triplets it turns out that the Trinity. Under Ivan the Terrible, there was a council in 1551, which decreed: "If anyone is not baptized with two fingers, he will be damned."

- Is double-fingering the main barrier to reunification?

Not the main one, of course. For 350 years, a lot of contradictions have accumulated. Even Archpriest Avvakum said: “Start to change something, and there will be no end.”

For example, how is baptism performed? The apostles wrote that there should be baptism in three immersions. In the West, in the Roman Catholic Church, water or sprinkle. Then it passed to the Russian Orthodox Church, but they are gradually realizing that this is wrong.

Now, both in terms of the charter and in spirit, we see relaxation in the ROC. The same Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other writers said that they were grateful to the Old Believers for the preservation of Orthodoxy. And Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev) expressed gratitude to the Old Believers for the preservation of Byzantine singing, which was created specifically for prayer.

- Do you use liturgical music written, for example, by Tchaikovsky?

In no case. This is a purely Western influence, when the chant turns into an opera, just like the iconography in the Russian Orthodox Church was influenced by Raphael and other artists of the Renaissance.

- Was the issue considered that the ROCC would receive a separate status within the ROC?

Such an experience was in common faith, but we do not want any separate attitude towards ourselves.

We suggest: "Let's go back to the starting point." But in any case, we are not enemies now, as it was under Peter the Great and subsequent Romanovs.

Only under Nicholas II was there an indulgence at the end of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty.

unanimity- a trend in the Old Believers that arose in the 18th century. It was characterized by the transition of the Old Believers under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate (later the Holy Synod). At the same time, the Old Believers received the right to preserve their former way of life. In Soviet times, unity of faith practically disappeared.

- Vladyka, how long can the reunion of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church take?

We never leave the dialogue, but how long this can last, only the Lord knows.

Why don't the Old Believers disappear? Interview with Father Pavel Zyryanov, Rector of the Yekaterinburg Old Believer Church of the Nativity of Christ

- Father Pavel, how many Old Believers live in Yekaterinburg?

In the payroll, which I maintain, there are approximately 1 thousand people. If we talk about the parishioners of the temple, then about 100 people attend an ordinary Sunday service.

- Does the number of parishioners change?

Yes, it is growing gradually. For example, since the beginning of this year, we have had 14 funerals, and about 30 baptisms. The increase is obvious.

I ask these questions to the fact that, according to historical logic, the Old Believers should have disappeared. They did not have government support. After all, for 300 years, including the Soviet era, they were constantly persecuted.

God is not in power, but in truth. God's spirit kept us afloat and helped us grow. Hence our fortress and reliability - the reputation that the Old Believers in the Urals have developed.

We simply understand that any attacks against us will rebound if we are without sin.

Family upbringing also plays its role, when a father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, by personal example, living according to church rules, control themselves and set an example for children by their behavior.

It is widely believed that the reference book for the Old Believers in education is "Domostroy"?

In no case. "Domostroy" is available in some families to draw on the tradition when it is forgotten. But our main book is the Bible. First of all, the gospel.

In the Russian Orthodox Church, for many who call themselves Orthodox, religious ideas are closely intertwined with superstitions or some kind of family traditions. For example, it is widely believed that sins are washed away at Epiphany in the hole. And how prone are the Old Believers to superstitions?

We don’t have this, because at confession the priest asks a person: did he swear, did he swear, does he believe in birdsong (a gloomy prediction, - approx. EAN), whispering. This is equated with sin. Annually confessing, a person hears these questions and understands that this is impossible. Superstitions are not that suppressed, they do not even arise among the Old Believers. At the first signs, already at the family level, explanatory work is underway that this is all from the evil one in order to bring down a person.

"Persecution bled the Old Believers"

As you know, several trends have developed in the Old Believers over these 350 years. Including bezpopovtsy. Do they still exist?

Bezpopovstvo- currents in the Old Believers, which were left without priests in the 17th century due to the extinction of priests appointed before the church reform. The Bespopovites deny the legitimacy of the clergy who were ordained after the schism. It was not uncommon for Old Believers to become priestless in the 18th-19th centuries due to the lack of a priest in remote places of residence. Established communities also differ from each other in worldviews. In particular, some of them denied the church calendar or icons painted after the reform.

Indeed, there are such communities in the Urals. For several centuries of persecution, we were bled dry, deprived of clergy - by the 19th century, there was a ban on accepting clergy from the dominant church. Many communities in such conditions were left without priests, and in this state they became ossified. They say: "This is how our ancestors lived, and this is how we will continue."

- That is, family traditions have replaced religious foundations?

Here it is rather not traditions, but precisely a misunderstanding of the fullness of the church sacraments, which the bespriests do not have. After all, if there is no priest, there are no sacraments. They themselves baptize, they themselves accept confession, but they do not read any priestly prayers. In addition, the clergyman is the bearer of the doctrine, and since the priests have been lost, the doctrine is also lost. Grandparents could not pass on the tradition of church life to their descendants.

In Yekaterinburg, these communities were decentralized, that is, they pray only at home. The last community in the city collapsed ten years ago after the sale of the house on Shartash, where they met. It is here that we see the decay and extinction that you spoke about. Where there is no centralization and hierarchy, such processes take place.

- What happens to the members of the disintegrated communities?

Those who are left without spiritual guidance, but feel the need for it, come to us. They receive chrismation and enter the Church.

Still, the sacraments alone are not enough for a person to plunge into church life. After all, a new member of the parish needs to be explained what is happening at the services. How is this done?

A person who has come to this on his own has already realized why he needs the Church. To the newcomers, we gradually explain what moments take place at the services. This must be done in doses, as a person understands all things. I personally answer people's questions. We also have Sunday schools for adults and children.

This is precisely the process called churching.

- The persecution bled the Old Believers. Are you still experiencing a shortage of clergymen?

Unfortunately, there are still not enough priests. But on the other hand, 30 years ago there was not a single clergyman in the Sverdlovsk region. In 1988, one appeared - in the village of Pristan. So far, there are four of them in the region. The growth is 400%. For us, this is already a result.

In the Russian Orthodox Church, where there is also a shortage of personnel, there is a practice when a new member of the church becomes a priest in two or three years. How are you with this?

No, the Apostle Paul wrote in his epistles: “Do not lay hands on soon” (meaning the sacrament of ordination to the priesthood, - approx. EAN). The rules say that for five years after baptism, "do not hand over any positions" so that a person does not have temptations.

This barrier protects a person from himself. Especially if we talk about a candidate who should become a priest, then he is actually nurtured in the parish for a certain time. It is clear that the process is not fast.