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Review Essay ⸪

Religion and Nationalism in Modern Russia; Or the Uses and Abuses of Edinoverie

James M. White1 Senior Research Fellow, Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources, Ural Federal University, Prospekt Lenina 51, Ekaterinburg, 620083, Russian Federation, +447812991378 [email protected]

Alexander S. Palkin Senior Research Fellow, Laboratory for Studies in Archaeography and Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources, Ural Federal Univerity, Prospekt Lenina 51, Ekaterinburg, 620083, Russian Federation, +447812991378 [email protected]

Simon (Shleev), Edinoverie v svoem vnutrennem razvitii (Moscow: Medium, 2004), 480 pp.

Nina Pavlovna Zimina, Put’ na Golgofu (Moscow: Pravoslavnyi Sviato-Tikhonovskii gumanitarnyi universitet, 2005), 2 vols.

1 James White is a senior research fellow at the Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources at the Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg. Alexander Palkin is a senior research fellow at the Laboratory for Studies in Archaeography and the Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources at the Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg. The completion of this article was sup- ported by the grant of the Russian Federation for attracting leading scholars to Russian edu- cational establishments of higher professional education, scientific institutions of the state academies of science, and the state academic centres of the Russian Federation (Labora- tory for the Study of Primary Sources, Ural Federal University). Agreement no. 14. A12.31.0004 from 26.06.2013.

344 White and Palkin

Radislav Viacheslavovich Kaurkin and Olga Anatol’evna Pavlova, Edinoverie v Rossii: ot zarozhdeniia idei do nachala XX veka (St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2011), 198 pp.

Kirill Mikhailovich Tovbin, Postreligiia i ee stanovlenie v russkom staroobriadchestve. (Moscow: Ethnosotsium, 2014), 484 pp.

Abstract

The Orthodox Church in post-Soviet Russia is currently tackling numerous issues. Some of these are modern, like the institution’s relationship with nationalism, while others are centuries-old, like the Old Believer schism. Some have argued that there is one potential solution to both problems: the restoration of edinoverie, a uniate movement founded in 1800 to bring the Old Believers into the Church. In this article, we consider all of the most recent works on this subject to demonstrate how a particular historical narrative has been sanctified by ecclesiastic writers to justify edinoverie’s revival. At the same time, its legacy is being utilised by a few nationalist or neotraditionalist figures to restore a distinctively Russian character to Orthodoxy that can inoculate the country against irreligiosity and globalisation. Finally, we consider the failure to offer a convincing scholarly alternative to these narratives, a problem which is only now being rectified by young Russian academics.

Keywords

Russian Orthodox Church – Old Belief – edinoverie – Russian nationalism

The meteoric restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church following the collapse of the Soviet Union has propelled it into a position of considerable social, political, and cultural influence. The Church’s attitude to vexed issues both modern and historical has been put under an intense spotlight: for instance, how should it consider and react to human rights, secularity, and the state?2 No less important are its contemporary relations to Russian nationalism, a prob- lematic issue for an institution that is simultaneously a national church and

2 For two of the best accounts of this situation in English, see Z. Knox, Russian Society and the Orthodox Church: Religion in Russia after Communism (London and New York: Routledge, 2005); K. Stoeckl, The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 2014).

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Religion and Nationalism 345 part of ecumenical Orthodoxy,3 and to Old Belief, a movement, or set of movements, that broke away from the Church in the mid-seventeenth century.4 These problems have provoked responses from the very highest levels of both the clergy and laity. Patriarch Kirill himself has spent much of the last 16 years seeking some kind of rapprochement between the Church and Old Belief. Meanwhile, Aleksandr Dugin, a prominent right-wing neo-Eurasian political theorist,5 has suggested that the two problems mentioned above are interconnected: by bringing the Old Believers back into the Church, Russian Orthodoxy may be able to assimilate Old Belief’s unbroken link to a truly national past, one that has not yet been tainted by either secular modernity or westernisation. Or, in his words, ‘the Old Believers do not talk about the West, about the sons of lawlessness, about apostasy from Russian holiness and Rus- sian rituals, which are the most correct, if only because all remaining nations have fallen under the yoke of other Christian faiths and foreigners while we have not, because everyone else has compromised with the West while we have not.’6 It is interesting that both Kirill and Dugin have hit upon the same solution to their distinct problems: the revival of edinoverie. To put it briefly, edinoverie (‘united faith’) was an arrangement forged in 1800 that allowed converts from Old Belief to use the ritual compact whose prohibi- tion in the mid-seventeenth century had caused the schism in the first place. This settlement was codified into law via the so-called ‘Rules of Metropolitan Platon’, a collection of conditions created by Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) of Moscow on the basis of a petition by Muscovite Old Believers. Between 1800

3 For a historical perspective, see J. Strickland, The Making of Holy Russia: The Orthodox Church and Russian Nationalism Before the Revolution (New York: Holy Trinity Publications, 2013). 4 R.O. Crummey, Old Believers in a Changing World (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011). 5 In terms of Dugin’s influence, Andreas Umland has noted ‘a rather close link between Dugin and the Presidential Administration official Ivan Demidov’: numerous high-ranking officials also belong to Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement. See A. Umland: ‘Alexander Dugin and Moscow’s New Right Radical Intellectual Circles at the Start of Putin’s Third Presidential Term 2012–2013: The Anti-Orange Committee, the Izborsk Club and the Florian Geyer Club in Their Political Context,’ in Europolity, 10 (2) (2016): 26–27. For more on Dugin and his place on the Russian right, see A. Shekhovtsov and A. Umland, ‘Is Aleksandr Dugin a Traditionalist? “Neo-Eurasianism” and Perennial Philosophy,’ Russian Review 68 (2009): 662–78; M. Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia (New York: Pal- grave Macmillan, 2010). 6 A. Dugin, ‘Sovershennaia pravota: staroobriadchestvo i russkaia natsional’naia ideia’, Arcto. ru, 13 March 1998, http://www.arcto.ru/article/1468. Last accessed: 08.04.2016.

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346 White and Palkin and the early twentieth century, edinoverie’s position between official Or- thodoxy and Old Belief was contested from every possible direction, includ- ing from within the settlement itself. Uncertainty, indecision, and suspicion were predominant in the minds of Orthodox churchmen, while Old Believer polemicists evinced hostility and contempt. The edinovertsy themselves were continually dissatisfied with the provisions given by Metropolitan Platon and routinely petitioned for either their amendment or abolition. Unsurprisingly, edinoverie remained, in the words of one recent historian, ‘a marginal and controversial phenomenon’: by the time of the Russian Revolution, it consisted of no more than 300 parishes.7 In the Soviet period, it was almost completely wiped out.8 Thus, far from solving the perennial problem of the schism, edinoverie barely scratched the surface. Since 2000, Patriarch Kirill has overseen the revival of edinoverie, sponsor- ing the establishment of new parishes (there are now 24) and backing research into the movement: he personally opened an impressive study centre in Mos- cow in 2009.9 This, combined with the interest that edinoverie has garnered from figures like Dugin, means that it is beginning to assume a degree of ideological importance. Kirill sees edinoverie as ‘a real and active bridge between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Old Believer concords’,10 while Dugin conceives it as the means of ‘an internal, conservative church revolution’ through which Russians can defend ‘the Church, Orthodoxy, the state, and the nation from the real Antichrist, who is manifested fully in non-Orthodox her- esies and especially in the satanic West.’11

7 I. Paert, Old Believers, Religious Dissent and Gender in Russia, 1760–1850 (Manchester: Man- chester University Press, 2003), 60–61. 8 Nonetheless, the 1971 Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church repealed the seventeenth-century anathemas against the old rites: this has largely defused one of the most enduring controversies surrounding edinoverie and has paved the way for its modern reincarnation. See ‘Deianie osviashchennogo pomestnogo sobora Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi. Ob otmene kliatv na starye obriady i na priderzhivaiushchikhsia ikh,’ Zhurnal Moskovskoi patriarkhii, no. 6 (1971): 6. 9 ‘Patriarshii tsentr drevnerusskoi bogosluzhebnoi traditsii’, Oldrpc.ru, n.d., http://www .oldrpc.ru/about/. 10 Kirill (Gundiaev), ‘Doklad mitropolita Smolenskogo i Kaliningradskogo Kirilla, predse- datelia otdela vneshnikh tserkovnykh sviazei Moskovskogo patriarkhata po voprosam vsaimootnoshenii s Russkoi zarubezhnoi tserkov’iu i staroobraidchestvom’, Mospat.ru, 4 October 2004, https://mospat.ru/archive/7769.html. Last accessed: 08.04.2016. 11 A. Dugin, ‘Staroobriadchestvo i edinoverie’, Evrazia.org, 16 June 2003, http://www.evrazia .org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1326. Last accessed: 19.01.2017.

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Religion and Nationalism 347

The fact that these two men have both heralded edinoverie as a solution to modern problems should not disguise the fact that they are ideological- ly distinct and have different purposes in mind. For Kirill, edinoverie offers the potential for a future rapprochement with Old Belief that will help serve the Church’s modern social goals: as he stated in 2004, whilst still a metropolitan, cooperation with the Old Believers is important for raising ‘the moral standing of society, spiritual, cultural, moral, and patriotic education, and the protection, study, and restoration of historical and cultural heritage.’12 For Du- gin, however, edinoverie is part of his nationalistic ‘cultural differentialism’, which, while not necessarily the same as ‘biological racism’, ‘leads to compa- rable programs of ethnic screening, forced deportation, global de-integration, and international isolation. It asserts that different cultural entities and their representatives are deeply incompatible, and it elevates civilizational values or traditions – rather than genetic or phenotypic traits – to characteristics that set human beings fundamentally apart from each other’.13 In other words, edinoverie and Old Belief are seen by Dugin as Russian ‘cultural entities’ that ‘set human beings fundamentally apart’. Nonetheless, the fact that the Church is encouraging the revival of what some see as a vehicle for such exclusionary nationalistic tenets may in the future force ecclesiastics to confront the vexed issue of their institution’s relationship with the varieties of Russian nationalism. As such, a review of the most recent works on edinoverie is useful for determining the extent to which its past is being utilised to serve contemporary goals and also to establish some potential directions for future scholarly research. Equally, it is our hope that this review will engender the interest of English-speaking historians not only in edinoverie’s past, but also in the modern relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church, the Old Believers, and nationalism. As it currently stands, Western and Russian historians have often accepted edinoverie’s marginality as the last word on the subject and have therefore ig- nored its potential both as an object of study in its own right and as a window onto the complicated and rich history of the relationship between church, state, and schism in imperial Russia. Thus there is an utter dearth of English- language research, a surprising caesura given the intense attention that the

12 ‘Opredelenie osviashchennogo arkhiereiskogo sobora Russkoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi o vzaimootnosheniiakh so staroobriadchestvom i o staroobriadnykh prikhodakh Russ- koi pravoslavnoi tserkvi’, Mospat. ru, 5 October 2004, https://mospat.ru/archive/2004/ 10/7803-1. Last accessed: 19.01.2017. 13 Shekhovtsov and Umland, ‘Is Aleksandr Dugin a Traditionalist?’: 667

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348 White and Palkin question of religious plurality in the Russian Empire has recently received14 and the substantial archival and published material available to researchers. In the post-Soviet Russian historiography, the situation is more complex, co- loured as it is by unresolved questions from the imperial historiography, the peculiar course of the Soviet study of Old Belief, and the recent edinoverie revival. While the last few decades of the autocracy saw a number of attempts to nar- rate edinoverie’s evolution,15 none was as thorough or as influential as Father Simeon Shleev’s Edinoverie in its Internal Development (1910): its importance for the modern situation has been underscored by the 2004 reprint.16 This work has numerous virtues: it is analytical, well-researched (although archival sources were not consulted), and presents a detailed, if not entirely persuasive, explanation for edinoverie’s inability to attract Old Believers to the bosom of the Church. However, it must be noted that Shleev was not simply a edinoverie priest, but was also the self-appointed national leader of edinoverie following the chaos of 1905.17 Engulfed in the debates surrounding edinoverie’s present and propelled forward by his own distinctive plan for its future, Shleev’s work must be understood not only as a history, but also as a polemic and a statement of his own programme for reform and renewal. Shleev desired a greater degree of autonomy for edinoverie under the aegis of the Church while also seeking its centralisation, standardisation, and institutionalisation: thus, his portrayal of edinoverie is that of a united movement with clear centres in Moscow and St Petersburg that were relatively undisturbed by developments or disagree- ments in the provinces.18 In his view, what had stopped this movement from

14 For the best and most holistic treatment of this subject, see P. Werth, The Tsar’s Foreign Faiths. Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2014). 15 See, for example, M. Chel’tsov, Edinoverie za vremia stoletniago sushchestvovaniia ego v russkoi tserkvi. 27 oktiabria 1800 g – 27 oktiabria 1900 g. (St Petersburg, 1900); N. Subbotin, O edinoverii (po povodu ego stoletniago iubileia) (Moscow, 1901). 16 S. Shleev, Edinoverie v svoem vnutrennem razvitii (St Petersburg, 1910). 17 Simeon Ivanovich Shleev (1873–1921) was born in Kostroma province into an Old Be- liever family. His family converted to edinoverie in 1876, and his father served as a edinoverie priest in Nizhnii Novgorod diocese. Shleev first attended the seminary in Nizhnii Novgorod and then the Kazan’ Ecclesiastical Academy. After serving as a priest in Kazan’ from 1900 to 1905, he was promoted to the Nikol’skaia edinoverie parish in St Petersburg. Following the establishment of edinoverie suffragan bishops in 1918, Shleev (widowed since 1916) was elected by the Petrograd edinoverie communities to serve as their bishop. In 1920, he was sent by Patriarch Tikhon to serve temporarily as the bishop of Ufa. 18 For analysis of Shleev’s position, see J. White, ‘Orthodox Old Belief: Edinoverie as Move- ment for Religious Rejuvenation in the Russian Church, 1905–1918’, Russian History, 43 (2) 2016: 181–208.

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Religion and Nationalism 349 blossoming was not its own inherent contradictions, the questionable alle- giance of many of its members, or the shifting tides of state policy towards Old Belief: those at fault were Orthodox bishops, missionaries, and bureaucrats whose inability to overcome their prejudices against the pre-reform rite had led to continual attempts to stifle edinoverie. In other words, this is a narrative which presents Shleev’s vision for edinoverie as the logical and perhaps even inevitable outcome of the past century and where the enemy to be challenged in the present is clearly identified. Furthermore, Shleev justified these reforms not only in terms of the advan- tages that they would bring to edinoverie, but also with regards to the rejuve- nating effect that they would have on the Russian Church and even the Russian nation. Shleev, like others at the time, saw in Old Belief a bearer of the traditional religiosity that had been lost when Peter the Great transformed Russia and oriented it towards the West.19 This, it was held, could be the cure for the ills of secularisation and westernisation that were plaguing the Church and the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century. However, the Old Believers had, for most of their history, been banished both from the ecumenical Church and Russian society.20 This was the advantage of edinoverie in Shleev’s eyes: it had been a part of the Church since 1800 and legal in the eyes of the state. Thus, Shleev’s vision of edinoverie was one that emphasised this romanticised understanding and its messianic role. Perhaps even more important than the vices and virtues of Shleev’s work was his own subsequent fate. In 1918, he was ordained as the first ever edinoverie bishop: then, in 1921, he was gunned down in the streets of Ufa by bandits robbing his home. These events paved his way to sainthood after the collapse of the Soviet Union: in 2000, he was canonised as a martyr and confessor of the Orthodox Church.21 This transformation has bestowed upon his book a quasi-hegemonic status in edinoverie historiography, especially among church historians participating in edinoverie’s rebirth in the territories of the former Soviet Union. This is not without its ironies: as Zimina, the author of the second book under review here, notes, when the history was originally published in 1910, church academics in both the Moscow and St Petersburg ecclesiastical academies refused to award Shleev his master’s degree for the work, so

19 For Old Belief’s changing reputation in the late nineteenth century, since E. Krevsky, ‘Defining the Schism: Images and Interpretations of the Old Belief in Late Nineteenth- Century Russian Discourse’ (PhD dissertation, University of Alberta, 2002). 20 Strickland, The Making of Holy Russia, 23–24. 21 Aleksii (Ridiger), ‘Deianie iubileinogo arkhiereiskogo sobora o sobornom pravoslavlenii novomuchenikov i ispovednikov rossiiskikh xx veka’, patriarchia.ru, 6 September 2008, http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/423849.html. Last accessed: 08.04.2016.

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350 White and Palkin controversial were some of its arguments.22 However, the value of Shleev as a symbol for edinoverie’s rebirth clearly outweighs such factors: born as an Old Believer and dying as an Orthodox bishop, he stands as a shining example of what edinoverie can achieve. It is precisely in the context of church history that Zimina’s book needs to be placed.23 The two volumes that constitute her work include a biography of Shleev and reprints of three of his more substantial essays on edinoverie. The intention here is not to offer a secular biography replete with the criticisms and multiple readings of the evidence that a professional historical account would entail: her obvious desire is to offer a hagiography of this recently canonised saint and to cement the status of his history within modern discussions about edinoverie and its place within the Church. Thus, we find that Zimina’s autho- rial voice is scarcely distinct from that of Shleev himself: sections of the text are directly copied from his writings, but are neither cited nor even referred to as quotations.24 Few of the arguments posited against Shleev’s plans and per- sonality by his contemporaries are discussed in any substantial way or given any credence: much as Shleev himself would have done, these figures are por- trayed as bigoted Orthodox ecclesiastics whose concerns lack legitimate basis and whose actions are prejudicial to edinoverie, the Church, and the schism in one and the same instance. Lacking also is any trace of a conceptualisation of edinoverie’s position between church and schism beyond that which Shleev himself propounded with boundless energy at the beginning of the twentieth century. The hagiographical element is, unsurprisingly, clearest in her discussion of the circumstances surrounding Shleev’s demise in Ufa. While Zimina’s archival and oral research on this subject is to be commended, her reading leaves much to be desired, motivated as it is by the need to frame the bishop’s death as the result of Soviet persecution and conspiracy. Given the sources she presents, it seems at least equally as plausible to explain the murder as a random act of vi- olence committed in the context of a country torn apart by revolution and civil war. Indeed, some of the Soviet sources presented suggest that the communist

22 N.P. Zimina, Put’ na Golgofu (Moscow: Pravoslavnyi Sviato-Tikhonovskii gumanitarnyi universitet, 2005), 1: 150. 23 Nina Pavlovna Zimina (1958–) is presently a senior research fellow in the department for the contemporary history of the Russian Orthodox Church at the St Tikhon Orthodox University for the Humanities: she is a noted expert on the history of Ufa diocese. 24 For instance, see ibid., 65. This section is an ad-verbatim copy of ‘Letopis’ edinovercheskoi zhizni,’ Pravda pravoslaviia, nos. 10, 11 (1906): 11–13, 14–16.

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Religion and Nationalism 351 authorities in Ufa were somewhat positively inclined towards Shleev.25 Were this to be conceded, of course, it would be more difficult to present him as a martyr for the faith crushed by the atheist persecutors of the Church. Thus, Zimina’s work largely exists to import Shleev and his vision wholesale into the modern context, where they can be raised as an icon to explain and justify the Church’s current course of action in seeking edinoverie’s revival.26 Equally, one should note that this is an effort to stress the continuity between the edinoverie of the Russian Empire and the new version, granting the latter a degree of historical legitimacy that it may otherwise lack. However, this represents a dead end in historiographical terms: it is an attempt to place Shleev’s legacy into a reliquary where it will be impervious to the touch of modern conditions and where tensions and contradictions within the life and works of the long-dead saint (and indeed edinoverie itself) will not be allowed to trouble worshippers. Certainly such a state of affairs is also beneficial to ideologists like Dugin: Shleev’s depiction of edinoverie as a treasure trove of old Russian piety lends itself well to projects that seek Russia’s salvation in a romanticised traditional religiosity. When considering the modern secular histories of edinoverie, a notable problem arises: in the Soviet period, no works completely devoted to edinoverie were published. It was mentioned in passing in the context of Old Be- lief. Soviet historians of Old Belief frequently sympathised with their object of study, understanding it as a movement that stood in opposition to the tsar- ist autocracy. In contrast, edinoverie was considered an instrument of the re- pressive religious policies of the imperial authorities, especially in the reign of Nicholas I: thus, it was rendered an uninteresting subject of research. As such, it is hardly surprising that the first monograph to present edinoverie’s history from a secular perspective was published by Radislav Kaurkin and Olga Pav- lova only in 2011.27 This work covers the entire pre-revolutionary period of edinoverie’s existence. The authors have proposed a rather debatable periodisation: while the entire period between 1800 and 1917 is considered to constitute only one stage

25 Ibid., 275. 26 Zimina is not the only representative of this trend: see also Pravoslavnoe edinoverie v Ros- sii (St Petersburg: Izd-vo rgpu im. A.I. Gertsena,͡ 2004); E. Sarancha, I. Miroliubov, and N.P. Zimina, Kratkii ocherk istorii edinoveriia (Moscow), accessed 8 April 2016, http://www .edinoverie.com/img/200911261211024AA.pdf. 27 Radislav Viacheslavovich Kaurkin is presently an assistant professor (dotsent) at the High- er School of Economics in Nizhnii Novgorod and has written on various aspects of me- dieval and early modern Russian history. Olga Anatol’evna Pavlova defended a kandidat dissertation on edinoverie at the same university in 2007.

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352 White and Palkin in edinoverie’s history, the few attempts made before this period to realise ‘unity in faith’ are thought important and varied enough to be separated into two distinct periods. This has the unfortunate consequence of cloaking the numerous ruptures and changes that edinoverie underwent in its century of institutional existence while unjustifiably emphasising the isolated instances of attempted rapprochement in the eighteenth century. The structure of the book reinforces this impression, since more than a quarter of the text is dedi- cated to the pre-1800 period. A further 48 pages are given to some rather su- perfluous appendices which do little to enlighten the reader on the themes of the volume. Not that the themes are particularly inspiring, given that the two authors limit themselves to a purely legal perspective: endlessly listing laws and provisions, they rarely discuss the social implementation of such legislation or its subsequent impact. The utility of such an approach is further damaged by numerous factual errors, such as incorrect dates, inaccurate statistical infor- mation, and a cavalier attitude to referencing sources: archival documents are seldom used. The interpretations of the authors often seem to contradict the evidence they use in support of their conclusions and the narrative is incoher- ent, shifting from one theme or period to the next seemingly at random. With the exception of Nizhnii Novgorod, the authors ignore regional perspectives on edinoverie’s development. Indeed, Kaurkin and Pavlova do not seem to under- stand what edinoverie actually was. For instance, they state that ‘upon acquir- ing a bishop [in 1918], edinoverie became an integrated and indivisible part of the Russian Orthodox Church’:28 however, the ecclesiastical authorities had always officially declared that edinoverie was inseparable from the Church. So, while Pavlova and Kaurkin avoid the mythologising of edinoverie that dominates the church historiography, it cannot be said that they have succeed- ed in providing an alternative for readers interested in a less ideologised perspective: indeed, it is difficult to recommend their book even as a basic guide to edinoverie or the issues that it raised. One of the principal virtues of the final work we will discuss in this review, Kirill Tovbin’s Postreligiia, is that it has taken definitive steps to providing an original and innovative approach to the history of edinoverie that moves beyond the late-imperial legacy.29 As his title suggests, Tovbin grounds his

28 R.V. Kaurkin and O.A. Pavlova, Edinoverie v Rossii: ot zarozhdeniia idei do nachala xx veka (St Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2011), 147. 29 Kirill Mikhailovich Tovbin (1971–) is presently an assistant professor in the philosophy of religion at the South Sakhlin Institute of the Russian Economics University in the name of G.V. Plekhanov.

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Religion and Nationalism 353

account of Old Belief and edinoverie firmly within postmodernist sociology: his principal concepts derive from Baudrillard and Derrida, not Shleev. Tovbin makes a clear distinction between ‘classical’ (i.e. pre-revolutionary) edinoverie and the modern form of the movement. The former was a ‘centaur’, Old Be- liever in its liturgical life and Orthodox in its administrative form. It began life as a missionary movement, a ‘bridge to the schism’, but later morphed into an attempt to restore pre-Petrine religiosity to the Church and combat secularity. However, this move to revive tradition was undermined by the distinctively modern (and ‘pro-Catholic’) mental gymnastics required to allow the anath- ematised old rituals back into the Church: by creating a hierarchy of faith- dogma-ritual (thus rating ritual as a matter of secondary importance that should not block unity in faith or dogma), the Church introduced a novelty which was not to be found in the canons and sacred texts. Contemporary edinoverie, on the other hand, is a manifestation of what Tovbin calls ‘the mental secularisation’ of Russian society: it is a mosaic of ele- ments playfully and speculatively pulled from history to create a simulacra of tradition and holiness. This, he confidently assures us, does more for ‘mental secularisation’ than militant atheism ever did. As such, edinoverie represents the spiritual vacuity at the heart of modern Russian Orthodoxy: it is a superfi- cial and artificial attempt to recreate a holy, national tradition in the heart of a church which has lost all connection with an authentic past. We are not qualified to offer a critique of Tovbin’s dense philosophy, a problem which the author himself only exacerbates with his failure to offer an explanation of the many conceptual terms he employs (what, for instance, is the ‘marginal secularism’ that was apparently embodied by the Bolsheviks?).30 However, we can comment on the historical account at the basis of his explanation and perhaps offer some further thoughts on his conceptualisation. His history certainly has some strengths. He is sure to quote his sources and has made considerable use of both the Russian and English historiography surrounding Old Belief. He is also one of the few to ask what the wider ramifications of edinoverie’s creation were for the Orthodox Church and Russian society: for instance, he considers the way in which edinoverie, somewhat accidentally and partially, helped to relegitimise the Old Believer liturgy and thus allowed them to be perceived as authentic bearers of a lost traditional spirituality in the last few decades of the imperial regime. Finally, the notion that edinoverie may have some kind of connection with secularisation is not entirely without basis. The downgrading of rituals to matters of secondary importance that

30 K.M. Tovbin, Postreligiia i ee stanovlenie v russkom staroobriadchestve (Moscow: Ethnosot- sium, 2014), 273.

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354 White and Palkin allowed for edinoverie’s creation came with a concomitant focus on inten- tions and internal beliefs: this may be a manifestation of the growing assigna- tion of religion to the private sphere that has often been heralded as a sign of secularity. However, there are also considerable problems. For one thing, the account is blighted by factual errors and tendentious interpretations (there is abso- lutely no evidence, for instance, that the Church and the Old Believers were anywhere near re-unification in 1917).31 It is also almost entirely divorced from social and political realities. Changes in the perception of edinoverie and the theology which justified its existence are found only in the minds of a few se- lect Orthodox hierarchs and edinoverie leaders: external causal factors are neither evaluated nor even mentioned. Furthermore, Tovbin excludes alternative viewpoints on the particular issues he discusses, thus assuming (and leading the reader to assume) that the perspectives he focuses on were necessarily vic- torious in the debates. The edinoverie that emerges from his account is not a real social and religious phenomenon subscribed to by hundreds of thousands of people, but instead is a vehicle for the roots of the sociological and philo- sophical principles that Tovbin has espied in post-Soviet Russia. And, as we have noted, Tovbin’s work is not helped by its lack of both conceptual and nar- ratival clarity: unwieldly and ill-defined postmodernist terminology clouds a logic of argumentation that is already disjointed and difficult to follow. Finally, and most importantly in terms of the general themes of this review, it is evident that Tovbin idealises Old Belief as a kernel of national identity in an areligious and cosmopolitan world: as he puts it, ‘in the conditions of global postmodernity, the study of the history of Old Believer movements can help Russia to create (or to protect) its own social-historical type, closed off from the destructive forces of global post-humanity’.32 The essential difference between Tovbin and Dugin is that the latter believes it is through edinoverie that the preservation of Russia’s own ‘social-historical type’ can be achieved, while the former argues that the restoration of edinoverie represents precisely those ‘destructive forces of global post-humanity’ that currently threaten Rus- sian religiosity and morality. Therefore, the need to sacralise Old Belief informs and drives Tovbin’s analysis in much the same way that the need to sacralise edinoverie’s past informs and drives the works of church historians. Given that his intention is to provide ideological legitimation for a neotraditionalist political project, Tovbin’s history and his conclusions must be subjected to doubt.

31 Ibid., 272. 32 Ibid., 273.

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Religion and Nationalism 355

To conclude, it is evident that much of the historiography currently surrounding edinoverie exists to explicitly serve modern ecclesiastical and political needs. On the one hand, the Church and its writers have once again come to the conclusion that edinoverie is a possible solution to the age-old contest with the Old Believers and have found in Father Simeon Shleev the perfect symbol under which to campaign: thus, Shleev’s own writings have near-canonical importance in the project to revive edinoverie, which obscures the failings and limitations of these works and their author. Such is hardly beneficial for the Church itself, given that a broader and less dogmatic examination of edinoverie’s history might reveal important lessons for its current policy. On the other hand, neotraditionalist political philosophers have continued to reify Old Be- lief, regarding it as an uncontaminated time capsule full of Russian values that can handily be deployed to save the country from a variety of contemporary evils. From one perspective, this makes the restoration of edinoverie desirable, since it can act as a handy bridge for bringing the Old Believer liturgical tradition back into the Church and thus into the mainstream of Russian cultural and spiritual life. From another perspective, Tovbin’s, such is undesirable because edinoverie is a postmodern pastiche incapable of truly bearing any spiritual, cultural, or national values. Both of these views remain heavily indebted to Shleev, since he was tireless in championing the idea that Old Belief was, as one of his supporters put it, the best expression of the ‘psychological particu- larities of the religious soul of the Russian people’.33 Regrettably, Kaurkin and Pavlova’s secular work, which is also the most widely available, hardly offers any competition to these narratives: its limited purview, inexplicable periodisation, and confused conclusions serve only to muddy the historiographical waters still further. It is fortunate, however, that this is not the last word on the subject. In the last five years, a number of dissertations and scholarly articles on edinoverie have been written at various Russian universities by a new generation of young historians.34 Through exhaustive archival research and multifaceted analysis,

33 Pervyi Vserossiiskii s”ezd pravoslavnykh staroobriadtsev (edinovertsev) (St Petersburg, 1912), 377. 34 L.N. Suslova, ‘Edinoverie v Tobol’skoi gubernii vo vtoroi polovine xix – nachale xx v.’, Problemy istorii Rossii, no. 7 (2008): 212–44; D.S. Ermakova, ‘Edinovercheskaia tserkov’ v Zaural’e: xix – pervaia tret’ xx veka’ (Dissertatsiia kandidata istoricheskikh nauk, Tiu- menskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2011); V.N. Ilyin, ‘Edinoverie v xix v. na territorii Tomskoi gubernii’, Izvestiia Altaiskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 4–2, no. 76 (2012): 85–91; T.S. Romaniuk, ‘Edinoverie i pravoslavie na territorii Ural’skogo voiska v per- voi polovine – seredine xix veka’, in Tserkov’. Bogoslovie. Istoriia: Materialy Vserossiis- koi nauchno-bogoslovskoi konferentsii (Ekaterinburg, 12 fevralia 2013 g.) (Ekaterinburg:

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356 White and Palkin they are in the process of placing provincial edinoverie firmly in the spotlight. In doing so, they are revealing that edinoverie was not a centralised or uniform movement, but a diverse and differentiated phenomena formed as much by local realities as by the centre’s theological prescriptions. This in turn is prof- fering new views on the devotional and communal lives of edinovertsy, in particular their relationships with Orthodox and Old Believer neighbours. Novel questions about religious identity are being formulated: what did it mean to be a edinoverets or a edinoverka? Was there a concrete edinoverie identity and, if so, when did it emerge? What did edinoverie mean for Orthodox and Old Believer identity? It is noticeable that such questions are currently exercising western scholars of Russian Orthodoxy, who are currently applying the concept of ‘lived religion’ to investigate how spirituality, theology, identity, and community were experi- enced by believers.35 There may very well be grounds for fruitful cooperation, with one side sharing possible theoretical and methodological insights and the other forwarding the immensity of data gathered in archives, museums, librar- ies, and private collections that are difficult to access. There is thus reason to hope that the works we have reviewed here will soon be circumvented by new publications that combine the methods and apparatus of professional historiography with interesting conceptualisations, periodisations, and perspectives. It will be possible to reimagine edinoverie’s position between Old Belief and Orthodoxy and liberate this complex and multidimensional historical problem from those who would seek to broadcast a simple message for modern ideological purposes.

Ekaterinburgskaia͡ dukhovnaia͡ seminariia,͡ 2013), 160–67; A.S. Palkin, ‘Edinoverie v kontse 1820-kh – 1850-e gody: mekhanizmy gosudarstvennogo prinuzhdeniia’, Quaestio Rossica, no. 3 (2014): 88–106. 35 See C.D. Worobec, ‘Lived Orthodoxy in Imperial Russia’, Kritika 7, no. 2 (2006): 329–350.

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