By the turn of the century, the position of Russian Old Believers was quite ambiguous. On the one hand, they had become quite successful in terms of finding their place in the country’s economy. Even in the small villages and settlements, the Old Believers were often cleaner and more prosperous than their Orthodox neighbors. As for large-scale trade and industry, the leading shots were called by Old Believer millionaire merchants – Morozov, Ryabushinsky, Sirotkin, Kuznetsov, Konovalov, Soldatenkov…
Millions of rubles allowed Old Believers incredible decision-making in terms of urban self-rule. Old Believer merchants were regularly elected to City Dumas, but one of them – the famous Tretyakov, who bequeathed his collection of paintings to the city – even became the city’s chief patron.
Money opened the greatest doors to Old Believer merchants. For example, an excerpt from Gilyarovsky’s report on the Nizhny Novgorod Fair follows:
“A special honorary table was set on the terrace of the Hermitage. Ordinary visitors were not allowed. Sitting here were top administration officials and select guests ... There were only two merchants at this table. The first was Savva Morozov, and the second, in maroon boots and a frock coat with an old fashioned haircut, was Bugrov, an Old Believer, a miller who was lively and mighty, despite his 60 years. He is worth tens of millions.”
Despite their wealth and social influence, the legal status of Russia’s Old Believers still left much to be desired. Religious life was constrained by numerous rules and prohibitions, churches were closed, and the clergy were harassed. Feodor Melnikov, a well-known researcher, described in detail the history of harassment of Old Believers starting from the time of Nikon, writing bitterly:
“For hundreds of years in Russia, all the foreign religions enjoy all kinds of rights: Roman Catholics, Protestants, Armenians, Muslims and even Jews. The same with those of all nationalities: Germans, Frenchmen, Poles, Tatars, Turks, Magyars, Jews and all others. All of them have been permitted to form religious societies with full legal rights and are able to acquire property, to bequeath money to build schools or seminaries, hospices and shelters, as well as educational and charitable institutions. In both of Russia’s capitals, they have occupied entire neighborhoods in the center. Their clergy have been recognized with all their inherent rights. Even the Lutheran Protestants, as stated by Pobedonostsev, ‘have their own false priests recognized by state laws, along with church elders and bishops.’ The Muslims and the Jews have operated legally. Only are the Old Believers faced with anxiety and a strange horror, unable to enjoy any of the rights that are so widely and so freely enjoyed by other religions and other nations.”
(Melnikov’s comments on Jews are particularly insightful, as one needed to feel extraordinarily low in order to openly envy the Jews in Imperial Russia!)
After the October Manifesto of 1905, which guaranteed Old Believers’ freedom of religion, among other things, their status improved considerably. Old Believers were granted the right to freely practice their faith and worship publicly. They were granted the right to form self-governing communities. Some restrictions remained in force, however, and full equality for Old Believers was achieved only after the February Revolution.
In view of all this, the political choices of Russian Old Believers, and especially their financial-industrial elite, are quite comprehensible and understandable. Despite the deep conservatism in religious beliefs, on political issues Old Believer merchants often subscribed to liberal-democratic viewpoints. Some of them were even sympathizers and provided support to revolutionary groups.
Among those who supported the revolutionary parties was the famous industrialist Savva Morozov, who generously funded the Bolshevik party through Maxim Gorky. Gorky also received money for the party’s needs from two other major sources of Old Believer money – the bread producer Bugrov and the oil trader Sirotkin. Whereas Bugrov gave money mainly out of his interest in Gorky (the latter of whom described their strange relationship in the essay “N.A. Bugrov”), Sirotkin was quite deliberate in his support for leftist political activities.
For the Old Believers, however, flirting with the revolutionaries was an exception rather than the rule. Unlike the Russian Jews, whose political sympathies often lied to the left of their class interests, Russian Old Believers supported mainly bourgeois, liberal-democratic movements: the Octobrists, Progressists and the Kadets. In different years, the Old Believers’ sympathies drifted among these parties, although for the most part, they did not move further left. As stated by one of their leaders, Brilliantov, “despite all the harassment and persecution, the suffering for freedom to believe, our Old Believer ancestors have never attempted to use force against the Russian tsars.”
No less accepted was cooperation with the far right, exemplified by the Black Hundreds. It is true that Bugrov funded the Black Hundred newspaper Minin in Nizhny Novgorod. In 1906, retired lieutenant colonel Kolontaev cooperated with Black Hundred publicist Gringmut and even managed to organize a conservative-monarchist Old Believer union. Such sentiments among Old Believers were marginal at best, however. The overwhelming majority of Old Believers who were politically active strongly supported the transformation of Russia into a bourgeois-democratic country.
The most famous bourgeois-liberal politician with Old Believer roots was undoubtedly Alexander Guchkov, who became chairman of the third State Duma in 1909. According to the Stolypin, the Octobrist party led by Guchkov was to be the foundation of the Duma majority required to implement the government's reform program. At first, the Stolypin-Guchkov tandem really worked. After a scandal surrounding the law on the western zemstvos, however, the Octobrists and Stolypin parted ways. In the fourth Duma, the party joined the opposition progressive bloc, and in 1917, Guchkov and Shulgin approached Nicholas for an act of abdication, after which Guchkov became the military and maritime minister in Prince Lvov’s Interim Government.
Another Old Believer who became a Russian minister was the well-known industrialist Alexander Konovalov. In 1912, Konovalov was elected to the fourth Duma as a Progressist, and from the end of July 1915, he was a friend of the chair of the Central Military Industrial Committee (uniting business in Moscow and the surrounding provinces). In 1917, he entered the Interim Government, where he became the Minister of Trade and Industry.
In speaking about the Progressist party, we cannot fail to mention the name of one of its founding fathers. In 1905, Pavel Ryabushinsky, co-owner of the Ryabushinsky Brother’s Bank and chairman of the board at Moscow Bank, joined the Union of October 17. The Octobrists’ program proved to be too moderate for him, however, and in 1912, he became an organizer of the new bourgeois-democratic party.
Of course, the names of certain politicians from Old Believer roots in themselves do not mean anything, although there is significant evidence supporting the argument that their views fully reflected the broad sympathies of Old Believer communities that were sympathetic to the bourgeois-democratic opposition.
For example, when Moskovskiye vedomosti published an appeal from the society Old Believers and Black Hundreds mentioned above, the reaction of Moscow’s merchants followed immediately. “Old Believers, of course, know that this appeal, calling upon them to join the ranks of the liberation movement’s enemies, does not come from their environment. This is an appeal by Gringmut and his followers ... if the Old Believers remain silent, people might being to think that they really do sympathize with Gringmut and his program and are willing to take part in the Black Hundred organizations. The Old Believers should bow before these noble fighters, but they should not go with the Moskovskiye vedomosti appeal and incite people to murder them. The traitors are those who brought Russia to its present situation, namely, the tsar’s officials. If the Old Believers, driven by centuries of bureaucratic government, now have freedom of religion, the opportunity to meet openly and discuss their needs, this freedom was given to them not by the deteriorating government; rather, it came from the very liberation movement that Gringmut and his followers are battling against.”
Sympathy for the liberation movement led to a situation in which the Old Believers, along with the Jews and Freemasons, were declared Russia’s main enemy. Arguing against this kind of literature is not interesting. Old Believers’ huge contribution to the country’s economic development, their millions of rubles of donations to education, charity and culture speaker louder than any words as to how these people related to their country.
As for opposition sentiment, Old Believers by and large held the same views that Russian society as a whole did. In this sense, Ryabushinsky’s Old Believers were no different from the followers of Tereshenko, ministers Guchkov and Konovalov, or from their colleagues Milyukov or Godnev – none of whom had any relation to Old Belief. The inability of the tsarist government to achieve mutually beneficial cooperation with the Old Believers became one of the manifestations of the general political crisis that pushed a significant portion of the higher classes in the country to the ranks of the opposition, thus becoming one of the major causes of death for the Russian monarchy.
