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Updated: June 8, 2025
The slave was proud of having a different faith from his master; and slavery is always a propitious soil for the growth of sects. This nation of serfs dimly felt the Raskol to be an assertion of religious liberty and self-respect against master, Church and government; and these were symbolized by the beard and the peculiar sign of the cross.
Of most of these the name alone remains: such are the Martinovtsy, the Strigolniki, the Judaizers, and so on. All these sects were dying away when the Raskol broke out; and it absorbed all the vague, embryonic beliefs floating in the popular mind.
The Raskol has its counterpart in the past and the contemporary sectarianism of England and of the United States. A strong likeness holds between the Puritans and the Old Believers; and both as to originality and religious eccentricities the Anglo-Saxon and the inhabitant of Greater Russia may be compared.
A national prestige was thus communicated to the Raskol, which in its turn lent to the popular resistance the energy of religion. By giving the social revolt the semblance of a struggle for the rights of conscience the schism imparted to it a vigor and persistency which the lapse of two centuries has not succeeded in crushing.
"In such a year," says a Novgorod chronicler of the fifteenth century, "certain philosophers began to chant, 'O Lord, have mercy upon us! while others said, 'Lord, have mercy upon us!" In this remark the whole Raskol stands revealed. Controversies like these begat the schism which has rent the Russian Church asunder.
The autocracy, established by force, has encountered at all periods a steady, if passive, opposition, as exemplified in the Raskol, or separation of the "Old Believers" from the Orthodox Church, and in the resistance offered to the innovations of Peter the Great: "in the one as in the other case the popular revolt was against authority and all that it represented."
With all his hatred of foreign importations, the Old Believer is no enemy to reform in the sense of national tradition or of furthering the interests of the lower classes, the artisan and the peasant. Like all popular movements, the Raskol is essentially democratic, and in some of its sects socialistic and communistic.
To meet Peter's edicts enjoining a new costume or alphabet or calendar, the Raskol put forth a second decalogue: "Thou shalt not shave; Thou shalt not smoke; Thou shalt use no sugar," etc. In the North, where they are stricter and more numerous, many Raskolniks still have conscientious scruples about using tobacco and putting sugar in their tea.
Policy of Peter the Great and Catherine II. Present Ingenious Method of Securing Religious Toleration Internal Development of the Raskol Schism among the Schismatics The Old Ritualists The Priestless People Cooling of the Fanatical Enthusiasm and Formation of New Sects Recent Policy of the Government towards the Sectarians Numerical Force and Political Significance of Sectarianism.
Such a system of exegesis easily leads to a kind of mystic rationalism: the forms of religion tend to gain more consistency than the essence, and public worship to be placed above doctrine. Some of the extreme sects of the Raskol have actually reached this point.
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