At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia

This detailed study examines the social, religious, and institutional conflicts accompanying the Russian Schism of the seventeenth century. By analyzing who opposed the reforms of Patriarch Nikon (1652-58) and under what circumstances, the author presents a complex and multi-faceted world of popular religious resistance that has been hidden from view for centuries. The documentary records of Russian church and state archives most studied here for the first time reveal that the schism evolved in two phases. The first phase began in 1652 and encompassed the activities of Old Believer literati as well as unrelated protests by social outcasts and independent-minded individuals. The second phase began in 1666 with a systematic church campaign to enforce the Nikonian forms of worship. The author argues that the vast majority of ordinary Russians rejected Nikonian symbols such as the three-finger sign of the cross and the new service book because they perceived them as tokens of obedience to church authority, and not because they responded to the teachings of Old Believers. In fact, the book demonstrates that seventeeth-century Old Believers literary and moralist concerns aroused little interest among contemporaries.