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