By the 1690s disagreements in the Old Belief emerged over the problem of
replicating Orthodox life and liturgy in the End Time when all ordained priests
were tainted by Nikonian reform. Some, becoming the“priestly”Old Believers,
maintained an ordained priesthood and a sacerdotal faith by recruiting renegade
priests and re-educating them in the old rites and books. Abjuring an episcopal
hierarchy (until some accepted the authority of a Bosnian episcopate in the mid-
nineteenth century), they made do with priests only. Priestly Old Believers used
pre-Nikonian service books and rites, revered the saints, and lived the full sacra-
mental life of the Church. Initially they concentrated in the south and southwest,
including among the Don and Iaik Cossacks and in the Irgiz valley, where
Pugachev rallied support in the early 1770s. In the era of religious toleration
from Catherine II’s time to about 1820, priestly Old Believers founded a thriving
community at Rogozhskoe in Moscow.
Other Old Believers took a more radical stance. Rejecting tainted bishops and
priests, they deprived themselves of most sacraments, including the Eucharist,
and lived as prayerful communities awaiting the Second Coming. Priestless Old
Believers in essence evolved what one might call a Protestant Christian alternative:
they observed only the non-sacramental Liturgy of the Word led by lay ministers.
Over time they became known for their sober lives, hard work, high degree of
literacy, and devotion to prayerful meetings. Like many early Protestants, they
thought they were not creating a new faith, but preserving an old one. Old Believers
continued to revere saints and the mysteries of the faith; they believed icons were
conduits of the mystical presence of God; they preserved two sacraments that they
believed laymen could administer—baptism and penance (construed not as sacra-
mental absolution but personal repentance). They abjured mystical, spontaneous
religiosity in favor of devotion to the texts of the old faith, but they also did not
reduce the faith to a one-on-one confrontation of believer and God through the
Scriptures. Priestless communities, living a faith of mystery and grace but lacking
most liturgical and sacramental practice and bound together by prayer, inhabited a
tension between Protestant and Orthodox approaches to spirituality.
Two important priestless communities evolved in the 1690s, generally in the
northern borderlands. One, that came to be called the Pomorians, started around
Vyg on the Karelian border northwest of Moscow and then dispersed around the
outskirts of the realm. The other, called the Theodosians after their leader Feodosii
Vasil’ev, lived on either side of the borders with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and
Livonia; they also established a compound at Preobrazhenie in the outskirts of
Moscow in Catherinian times. Other priestless groups scattered in isolated com-
munities in the Urals and Siberia.
The priestless“concord,”as they called themselves, amounted by the mid-
nineteenth century to about half of all those Orthodox living in dissent, including
sectarians. But they maintained with the priestly concord a recognizable cohesion
over time. They accomplished this with a variety of textual and ritual steps. First, as
Robert O. Crummey showed, dissenters created a“textual community,”that is, a
corpus of writings that defined the faith. They assiduously preserved pre-Nikonian
books—service books, hagiographies, psalters, and the like, often revering them as
Maintaining Orthodoxy 417