old believers

The article presents an overview of the activities of the co–religionist clergy in the context of the struggle of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Old Believer schism in the Samara province of the second half of the XIX – early XX century. The co-faith is considered as a missionary platform, on the basis of which it became possible for Old Believers to reunite with Orthodoxy on the conditions of preserving the pre-Canonical liturgical practice.

Article is devoted a statistics problem Old believers. The author investigates government measures in this direction and answers thorny questions: what advantages and lacks why the statistics has not given desirable results at spent censuses of conservatives were. Also in article light is shed changes of number of supporters of old belief in the Kazan province in XIX and the beginning XX centuries, the old believe centres in province and on many other things.

The article examines the mechanism of political repression against believers by the example of the case of the Moscow neocircular Old Believer clergy. The central figure of the article is the deacon of the Old Believers prayer Ivan Afanasievich Vlasov as a characteristic type of clergyman of the 1930s, a peasant by origin, who was arrested during collectivization, but did not change his faith.

The article is dedicated to the issue of the unity of old-believers’ tradition analyzed in the case study of the communities of various branches existing in the Saratov region in the 18th and early 19th centuries.