Russia under the Old regime

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the souls of living people. Aided by Leo Tolstoy, they migrated early in the twentieth century to Canada where they have distinguished themselves by spectacular acts of civil disobedience.

The Molokane (Milk-drinkers) were a moderate sect, identified by the practice of drinking milk and its products on fast days.

The Stundists emerged in the nineteenth century and spread after the Emancipation. They formed circles to study the bible. Baptism, which is probably the most dynamic sectarian movement in contemporary Russia, is its outgrowth. In the second half of the nineteenth century Stundism and Baptism made some converts among the educated in Moscow and St Petersburg.

All of these and many of the minor related sects have in common opposition to the state and the established church. The political views of their members can best be defined as Christian Anarchist. As such, and because they would not obey the official church, they suffered harsh persecution in the first century following the Schism. Under the tolerant reign of Catherine 11 the state left them alone, but under Nicholas 1 the harassment resumed, military expeditions being sent out to destroy sectarian strongholds, especially those of the more radical sects. Nevertheless, dissent kept on gaining adherents. Statistics of Russian dissenters are notoriously unreliable because the imperial government falsified census figures bearing on them by a factor of anywhere from five to thirty, so as to minimize defections from the official church. The 1897 census listed only 2 million Old Believers and Sectarians, but there are reasons to believe that their actual number then was closer to 20 million. Scholarly estimates place the number of dissenters at 9-10 million in the 1860s, between 12 to 15 million in the 1880s, and around 25 million in 1917, of whom 19 million were Old Believers and 6 million Sectarians.* l These figures indicate that the dissenting churches more than held their own in terms of over-all population growth.

The Schism was a disaster for the Russian Orthodox church, robbing it of its most dedicated adherents and placing it more than ever at the state's mercy. 'After Nikon, Russia no longer had a church: it had a religion of state. From there to state religion it required but one step. The state religion was instituted by that power which in 1917 succeeded the imperial.'12 Although in large measure integrated into the state apparatus and subservient to the crown, until Peter the Great the Russian Church still preserved its institutional identity and some semblance of autonomy. The Byzantine principle of 'harmony', restated by the great synod of 1666, retained its theoretical validity. The church was an entity different from the state, with its patriarch, its administrative, judiciary and fiscal