Schism of the Russian Church

It was triggered by the reforms of Patriarch Nikon in 1653, which aimed to establish uniformity between Greek and Russian church practices.

In the 1630s and 1640s, Nikon had been a part of a group known as the Zealots of Piety, a circle of church reformers whose acts included amending service books in accordance with the "correct" Russian tradition.

First, the usurper False Dmitry I was crowned tsar in 1605[2] and converted to Catholicism[3] before being assassinated during an uprising in 1606,[4] and later Moscow was occupied from 1610 to 1612 by the Catholic Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Polish–Russian War.

[5] These dangers to the Orthodox Church, and the entire period of violent instability, aroused a renewal of religious fervor among some Russians who perceived the events as divine retribution for a lack of devotion.

[7] In the 1630s and 1640s, during the reign of Patriarch of Moscow Joseph, the Zealots of Piety were concerned primarily with reforming a disordered liturgy and suppressing impious pre-Christian festivals, issues which had been prominent since the Stoglav Sobor of 1551.

The petition further cited the observance among villagers of pre-Christian festivals such as Koliada, to which Tsar Alexei responded by decreeing a ban on the pagan entertainment.

[11] Nikon was a Volga Finn born to a peasant family, and his harsh upbringing meant he took an uncompromising stance as Patriarch and reformer.

The former were a more learned and reactionary group than native Muscovite priests, having adapted Catholic Counter-Reformation rhetoric to the defense of the Orthodox Church,[13] while the latter had an obvious bias in favor of the Greek rite.

Among liturgical rituals, the most controversial changes included replacing the two-finger sign of the cross by one with three fingers and pronouncing "hallelujah" three times instead of two.

[21] The official reason for the gathering was to try Nikon for dereliction of duty during his absence from Moscow, but as part of its proceedings the council also declared the Stoglav Sobor of 1551 heretical, as it had dogmatized pre-reform Russian practices such as the two-finger sign of the cross, which was unacceptable under the Greek rite.

Ivan Neronov spoke against the strengthening of patriarch's authority and demanded democratization of ecclesiastic management, while Avvakum directly protested the reformed rituals.

[30] Secular aristocrats also participated in the Raskol movement, such as Boyarynya Feodosia Morozova and her sister Princess Evdokia Urusova, who openly supported the defenders of the old faith and were also martyred.

[32] While occupying the capital, part of the rebel unit's conditions were that the official church must agree to a public disputation with the Old Believer priest Nikita Pustosvyat; his well-known debate with Patriarch Joachim of Moscow led to his beheading and to the Moscow uprising's alternative title as the "Raskolnik rebellion".

[35] In 1684, Princess Sophia, with active support from the Russian Orthodox Church, began to persecute the so-called raskolniki (раскольники 'schismatics').

Up to this point, Old Believers had merely been anathematized, but following Sophia's ukaz, local governments were commanded to burn all schismatics at the stake unless they submitted to the Nikonian reforms.

Following the Time of Troubles, loss of ecclesiastic power and the legal enserfment of peasants in the Sobornoye Ulozheniye (not to mention a plague in Moscow), there was a general atmosphere of the end-times in Russia in the middle of the 1600s.

[39] The more famous early schismatics, such as Avvakum and his brothers-in-exile at the Pustozyorsk prison, often justified this time of strife as God's punishment of the ecclesiastic and tsarist authorities for their erroneous reforms.

[43] These ideas of the Antichrist's arrival on Earth and of the end-times found a broad response among the Russian people, who sympathized with the ideology of these more radical apologetes.

'forest elders'), appeared in Russia at the same time as the Zealots of Piety and were equally inspired by the sense of Armageddon following the Time of Troubles;[39] however, while the Zealots practiced optimistic conservation of ecclesiastic rites, the lesnye startsy believed in a kind of pessimistic triumph of the Antichrist over the world, where ecclesiastic rites were no longer meaningful.