Russian Revolutionaries and Russian Old Believers: From Sympathy to Repression. Part 2. Old Believers, Narodniks and Marxists

The purpose of this work is to clarify the reality or mythology of the position about the active participation of Old Believers in the anti-government movement in the second half of the 19th — early 20th centuries. An analysis of sources showed that the Old Believers never took an anti-state position, showing only their loyalty to state power. During the period under review they rejected the revolutionaries' claims to cooperation. Only during the Civil War did the Old Believers side with one of the warring parties, which, in the absence of a single supreme power, cannot be assessed as anti-state activity. Soon after the Bolshevik victory, the Old Believers took an unambiguously favorable position towards the Soviet regime, despite the previous brutal repressions. At the same time, the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia during the second half of the 19th century retained illusions regarding the Old Believers and unsuccessfully tried to attract them to the fight against the samoderzhaviye. The democratic revolutionaries of the 60s turned to the clergy of the Old Believers, and the populist revolutionaries of the 70s also tried to work with the broad Old Believer masses, primarily peasants, to no avail.