such as taverns and“pagan”holiday revelries. In all these efforts, the communi-
ties physically and symbolically distinguished themselves from the dominant
society.
Old Believers survived in the empire by preferring small communities and far-
flung locations; they were generally left unscathed by political persecution. Peter
I persecuted those he considered politically subversive, but pragmatically tolerated
most Old Believer communities in return for double poll tax and other fees. His
successors to 1762 persecuted communities off and on but did not eradicate them.
In Enlightenment style, Peter III and Catherine II ushered in a period of tolerance
of Old Believers; Peter III held that Old Believers were merely victims of supersti-
tion and should not be forcibly converted. Under Paul I the Orthodox Church
attempted a reconciliation with the Old Belief, offering dissenters their own rituals
in their own parishes if they agreed to return to the fold. Many joined initially, but
the movement faded quickly.
Living in community posed particular challenges for the Old Belief, as Irina
Paert has chronicled. Here, theology collided with daily life. Initially believing that
they lived in the End Time, Old Believer communities, priestly as well as priestless,
like the seventeenth-century followers of Kapiton, reverted to ancient Orthodox
traditions—monastic organization, asceticism, celibacy, and a contemplative life
of prayer. Sexuality was a major issue. For the priestly, sexual self-discipline within
marriage was recommended as purifying, but for priestless, celibacy was the
only option, since the sacrament of marriage was unavailable. Thus, early priestless
communities were organized monastically, with men and women living in
separate communities, under the oversight of elected lay leaders. Nevertheless,
priestless communities grew with converts, by taking in foundlings and orphans
and by procreation in spite of themselves.
Born out of millenarian expectations, Old Believers adapted as apocalypse failed
to come to pass. Priestless Pomorians began to construe the apocalypse more
metaphorically and adjusted rituals accordingly. They agreed, for example, to
include modified prayers for the rulers in services and by the end of the century
most of them accepted marriage as a necessary disciplining of sexual energy for
those who could not tolerate lay celibacy. They construed it not as a sacrament but
as a“commitment of the heart,”affirmed by the“consent”of the couple, their
parents, and the community; they designed wedding rites that mixed folk traditions
(matchmaking, betrothal, dowry, feasts) with oversight by lay elders. The priestless
Theodosians, on the other hand, debated this issue vigorously with the Pomorians
in the last decades of the century and ended up confirming lay celibacy. Their strict
stance then forced them to accept de facto toleration of procreation by members—
converts who were already married, the children of married couples, new
members—generally by punishing successive births and urging abstinence.
Old Believer communities, then, even when they tolerated conjugal life, offered
an alternative social community for Russians. They continued to organize them-
selves with communal, sex-separated living quarters for those who desired it; the Vyg
community maintained gender-separated quarters even as it was surrounded by
members who lived conjugally in nearby villages. From the 1760s all the major Old
Maintaining Orthodoxy 419