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Updated: June 8, 2025
Those who belong to the Raskol are called Raskolniki. From that time down to the present the Government has followed a wavering policy, oscillating between complete tolerance and active persecution. It must, however, be said that the persecution has never been of a very searching kind.
The Raskol, with its thousand sects, is perhaps the most original feature of Russia, and what most sharply distinguishes it from Western Europe. Like rivers colored by the soil through which they flow, religions often change their characteristics according to the nations who practice them. The Raskol is Byzantine Christianity issuing from the Russian lower classes.
Few religious revolutions have involved results so, complex as the Raskol, yet few have been simpler in their inception. The countless sects which for two centuries have had their being among the Russian people took their rise, in general, from the revision of the liturgy. The Middle Ages in Russia, as elsewhere, were marked by the rise of heresies.
Here, as often happens, there is little ground for the Starovery's boast, for if they preserve the ancient Russian books, their opponents have gone back to the old Byzantine liturgy; and the party which most loudly vaunts its claim to antiquity does so with least reason. The principle of the Raskol, which sometimes runs out into the wildest dreams of mysticism, is essentially realistic.
In the thick and muddy waters of Muscovite sectarianism we can distinguish foreign admixtures, sometimes Protestant, sometimes Jewish, or even Mohammedan, more frequently Gnostic or pagan. The Raskol, nevertheless, remains wholly different, in principle and in tendency, from all the religions and religious movements of the world: it is original and national from the foundation up.
The emancipation of the serfs has given a blow to these millennial dreams, and consequently to the more advanced sects of the Raskol: its ruin will be completed by education and material improvement. The sects whose general evolution we have sketched may appear to us ridiculous and childish.
From the historian's point of view, the Raskol is that same popular resistance to the introduction of Western novelties which under Peter the Great passed from its original aspect of an ecclesiastical and religious revolt into the further stage of a social and civil insurrection. In spite of himself, Peter the Great both inherited and aggravated the schism.
And even now, after the lapse of more than two centuries, a large body adhere immovably to the ancient books and the ancient ritual, which are made sacred to them by the approbation of national councils and the blessing of generations of patriarchs. Such was the inception of the schism, the Raskol, which still divides the Russian Church.
Ten years after the promulgation of the revised liturgy its rash author fell a victim to the jealousy of the boyards and to his own arrogance, and was solemnly deposed by a council. To the Raskol his deposition appeared in the light of a justification of their own course. The condemnation of the reformer seemed necessarily to involve the condemnation of the reform.
The Oriental patriarchs have shared the heresy of the Russian prelates by agreeing to their anathemas against the ancient rites, and orthodoxy has carried with it in its fall the episcopate, apostolical succession and the lawful priesthood. Thus, in the first generation the Raskol fell into two sections the Popovtsy, who adhere to the priests, and the Bezpopovtsy, who do not.
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