R.O. Crummey. The Novosibirsk School of Old Believer Studies

THE AIM OF THIS CHAPTER IS TO EXPLORE the innovative research agendas and publications of the Novosibirsk school- Nikolai Nikolaevich Pokrovskii and his colleagues and students-on the history of popular religious movements, in particular the Old Belief. This undertaking forces us to examine many interrelated issues. To begin with, Pokrovskii s work provides a fascinating example of the creative possibilities and limitations faced by gifted and open-minded scholars in the last decades of the Soviet period. Moreover, tracking the writings of the Novosibirsk group into the post-Soviet years shows us to what extent its members' scholarly approaches, methods, and vocabulary did-or did not-change after the fall of the Communist regime.

The Novosibirsk experience takes us in several other directions as well. The school was self-consciously regional; its members published work on many aspects of Siberian history. The region was enormous-from the Urals to the Far East and even, for a time, Alaska. Even more important is the fact that the Novosibirsk school required its members to study regional issues in close connection with problems in the rest of Russia and, on that basis, offer an independent analysis of the latter. The schools heavy concentration on the Old Believers, however, makes excellent sense given the dissenters⁷ large numbers and strong influence on local society, politics, and culture. In addition, there is

probably much truth in the widely held assumption of the time that, in the last decades of Soviet power, scholars who did their research and published their findings on the periphery of the Soviet Union had greater creative freedom than their colleagues in Moscow and Leningrad. The achievements of the Tartu school of cultural semiotics are an obvious case in point.

The work of the Novosibirsk school raises once again the fundamental interpretative issues in the history of popular religion in Russia-and all premodern societies, for that matter. First, to what extent did religious convictions and modes of thought drive movements of religious dissent? And to what degree were movements of religious protest ultimately expressions of opposition to political oppression or social inequality? Second, are movements of religious opposition such as Old Belief the creation of dissident religious elites? Or do they mainly reflect the convictions of ordinary laypeople or even the marginal and dispossessed members of society? There are no neat solutions to either of these dichotomies. But each historian must continually keep them in mind.

The study of Old Belief has a long history, particularly in Russia itself. Before 1917, the voluminous literature on the Old Believers could be divided roughly into two categories. Scholars and popular writers who examined the history and political potential of the peasantry tended to see Old Belief as a nominally religious form of resistance to the tsars and to view its adherents as potential converts to the revolutionary cause (I will call this the populist approach). From the point of view of the official Orthodox Church, the Old Believers represented the resistance of uneducated believers and their self-appointed leaders to the authority of the hierarchy and clergy, the reformed liturgy, and contemporary currents of Christian learning and practice in Russia and elsewhere. The work of both schools of thought has retained much of its value. The populist approach studied the Old Believers in their economic, social, and institutional context and emphasized their relationship to movements of opposition to the ruling order, including the mass revolts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For their part, the Orthodox scholars-in some instances, specialists on missionary work among dissenters-took Old Believer liturgical practices, doctrinal statements, and forms of organization seriously, if only to refute them.¹

For much of the Soviet period, Russian scholars had little or no opportunity to study Old Belief or any other religious traditions on their own terms. For several decades, the only important works on the subject-Pierre Pascals classic study of Awakum and his world, and Serge Zenkovsky s monumental history of Old Belief, for example-were published in other countries.² In

the 1950s and 1960s, study of the movement experienced a renaissance in Russia thanks largely to Vladimir Ivanovich Malyshev (1910-1976), founder of the collection of Old Russian manuscripts (the Drevlekhranilishche) in the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) in St. Petersburg. Beginning in 1949 Malyshev organized for the institute annual field expeditions to the Far North of European Russia. Building on his earlier experience working alone, he concentrated above all on areas with a strong Old Believer tradition where the probability of finding old printed books and manuscripts was high.³ One of Malyshev s objectives was to convince the often suspicious owners to donate their treasures to academic institutions such as Pushkin House, where they would be carefully preserved and made available to the scholarly community. Among his discoveries were many previously unknown documents and new variants of well-known texts. On this basis, scholars began to publish new editions of Old Believer writings (particularly the works of Avvakum, a figure dear to Malyshev's heart) as masterpieces of Old Russian literature and thus indispensable parts of Russia's cultural patrimony.

From Malyshev's time, archeographic expeditions have been the driving force behind the resurgence of the study of Old Believer history and culture. Year after year, scholars from a number of academic institutions in Russia have sent teams of researchers into the remote countryside and, by so doing, have in effect divided up the territory of European Russia into their own preserves. Scholars from St. Petersburg and Petrozavodsk concentrate on Karelia and the European North; the Moscow University group on the upper Kama region, the lower Volga valley, and Moldova; and scholars from Perm⁷ on the Far Northeast of European Russia. While all of these groups follow the same general principles of field research, the leaders of each strive for their own unique "voice." For example, Irina Yasil'evna Pozdeeva, the longtime leader of the Moscow University researchers, heavily emphasizes the value of "complex" (kompleksnye) expeditions in which scholars of various disciplines-historians, literary and manuscript scholars, ethnographers, linguists, and musicologists-study the cultural heritage and contemporary customs of the same communities simultaneously, in order to establish the complete cultural context of the books, works of art, or oral traditions that are the focal point of their individual research.⁴

In my view, the most productive and imaginative of all the teams of Old Believer scholars is that of Pokrovskii and his associates in Novosibirsk and Ekaterinburg. Like their counterparts in the other centers of field research, the Siberian scholars concentrate on the collection and study of historical and polemical manuscripts in their own vast "territory" which includes the

Ural region as well as all of Siberia, Central Asia, and the Far East. Their publications combine their discoveries in the field with unpublished materials from all of the most important repositories of European Russia as well as local Siberian archives.

Pokrovskii has led the Novosibirsk research group almost from the beginning. A brief survey of his life and career will help us understand his scholarly approach and achievements.⁵ Pokrovskii was born in 1930 in Rostov-on-Don, the son of a professor of history at the local university. His father's most important work was a history of the Russian conquest of the north Caucasus and the local response-the guerrilla war led by Imam Shamil'. The book was completed on the eve of World War II; its subject was too sensitive to allow publication and was long known mainly to innumerable censors. The authentic version of the work was finally published in 2000 with an introduction in which the younger Pokrovskii pointed out the timeliness of a history of Russo-Chechen interactions in both his father's time and his own.⁶

World War II interrupted Pokrovskii's childhood. As Nazi armies dashed toward Rostov and the north Caucasus, his family fled on foot over the mountains to Abkhazia and subsequently took refuge in Erevan. After the war the family returned to Rostov, where he completed secondary school. From there, he entered the history faculty of Moscow State University, graduating with a diploma in 1952 and a candidate's degree in 1956. In the Soviet academic system, this was a major achievement for a young man of twenty-six. As a graduate student and young researcher, Pokrovskii had already distinguished himself as a talented and technically sound analyst of unpublished medieval Russian documents-a skill central to his work throughout his life as a scholar. Evidently his intelligence, skill, and hard work made a favorable impression on senior faculty members, above all Mikhail Nikolaevich Tikhomirov.

Tikhomirov played a crucial role in Pokrovskii's career and in the development of historical research in Novosibirsk. Educated before 1917, he managed not only to navigate the swirling currents of Soviet academic life but also to publish a large and remarkably varied body of historical scholarship, studies ranging from the earliest Rus' law codes to urban life from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and popular revolts in the seventeenth, and to serve as mentor to an entire generation of scholars of medieval and early modern Russian history. He also did extraordinarily important work as an academic organizer, above all in reviving the Archeographic Commission of the Academy of Sciences and revitalizing its journals and source publications. As head of the commission, Tikhomirov organized the first archeographic field expedition of this kind in Siberia in 1959.⁷

The early years of Pokrovskii's academic career coincided with the Thaw in Soviet society after Stalin's death. In this exhilarating time, Pokrovskii and some friends in and around Moscow University met in informal discussions to analyze the shortcomings of the Soviet system and to propose more fundamental reforms than the Khrushchev regime had undertaken. They wrote and circulated several position papers, which argued, among other things, that the Soviet system was an oppressive perversion of authentic Marxism and, for good measure, included scathing criticism of Lenin and Stalin. Perhaps more important than the group's opinions-its members did not fully agree with one another-was the fact that these young men had created their own informal group and circulated their views without the sanction of governmental or university authorities. Pokrovskii and the others were arrested in the fall of 1957, tried for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda and forming an illegal organization under articles 58-10 and 58-11 of the Soviet Criminal Code, and, early in 1958, sentenced to long terms in the labor camps of Mordovia. Pokrovskii spent six years in prison. In addition to the usual tribulations, he and some fellow prisoners went on a twenty-four-day hunger strike, hoping against hope to force a review of their convictions.⁸ Even after he had finished his sentence, his trials were not over. Forbidden to live in Moscow under the terms of his release, he took a job at the Vladimir-Suzdal' Museum-Preserve away from the main centers of Soviet academic life. Although such speculation is risky, it is easy to imagine that Pokrovskii's empathy for the oppressed and persecuted-not least religious believers-so evident in his writings had its roots, in part, in this experience.⁹

Suddenly Pokrovskii's life and career took a dramatic turn. In 1965, Tikhomirov bequeathed his important private collection of manuscripts and rare books to the humanities sector of the recently founded Siberian Branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk. He insisted that Pokrovskii, who had already done extensive work with the collection, be hired as its curator. The Siberian Academy met this condition, and within a very short time, Pokrovskii received appointments as research associate at the Institute of History, Philology, and Philosophy and as lecturer at Novosibirsk University.¹⁰ Since both institutions were new and located far from the traditional centers of political and academic authority, they provided an ideal setting for a young scholar to establish his own research agendas.

Pokrovskii responded energetically to his new opportunity. Almost immediately he took over the field expeditions, which had begun before his arrival. Siberia and the Urals proved to be ideal regions to look for undiscovered manuscripts and old printed books, for their remote corners

were traditional refuges of the Old Believers. His book Puteshestvie za redkimi knigami, first published in 1984, provides an evocative account of these expeditions, the research methods the participants used, and the people and places they encountered.¹¹ Work in isolated Old Believer settlements demanded enormous patience, respect for local traditions of dress (modest clothing, head scarves for women, and when possible, beards for men), and an ability to demonstrate detailed knowledge and respect for Russian Orthodox and specifically Old Believer texts and practices. Thus prepared, the Siberian researchers soon achieved remarkable successes. In 1968, Pokrovskii and his team discovered a priceless manuscript-the oldest and by far the longest account of the 1525 and 1531 trials of Maksim Grek, the Italian-educated Greek scholar and translator-in an Old Believer settlement in the Altai. Its publication three years later established the reputation of Novosibirsk as a major center of Russian historical studies and Pokrovskii as a leading scholar of his generation.¹²

From that time, Pokrovskii s scholarly career has been remarkable for the range of periods and subjects he has investigated and the variety of academic roles he has played-as author, editor, teacher, and mentor. He has slowly but surely reached the pinnacle of Russian academia. The culmination was his appointment as Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1987 and as full Member (Academician) in 1992. Even more significantly, he has earned the deep respect of his fellow scholars and achieved the status both in Russia and abroad of founding father of his own school.

From the beginning, Pokrovskifs most persistent focus has been on the history of the Old Believers in the Urals and Siberia and their relations with the imperial government. His first major book, published in 1974, AntifeodaYnyi protest uralo-sibirskikh krest'ian staroobriadtsev v XVIII u, covers official policy toward the Old Believers over the course of the eighteenth century and analyzes the main episodes in which they led "the anti-feudal protests" of ordinary Siberians against the state.¹³ Pokrovskii s analysis of the relations between officialdom and Old Believers is subtle and complex. Officialdom consisted of the state bureaucracy and the church hierarchy, which at times worked together and at others pursued contradictory objectives. In the mid- and late eighteenth century a self-consciously "enlightened" central administration fought regular skirmishes with Metropolitans SylVester and Pavel of Siberia, Ukrainian clerics who insisted on using repressive policies to force the "ignorant" Old Believers back into the official church.

For their part, the Old Believers split into moderate and radical tendencies within each of the main accords. Moderates and radicals alternatively supported or denounced each other depending on conditions in the wider world, especially the changing policies and actions of the government or official church. The moderates aimed, first and foremost, to preserve and strengthen their communities. When the central government offered limited toleration, they attempted to reach a practical accommodation with it. The more radically inclined sought, above all, to preserve the purity of their beliefs and practices in a world ruled by the Antichrist. When the Siberian hierarchy or local secular officials threatened them, the most radical resorted to the ultimate time-honored form of protest-self-immolation. The ambiguous response of officialdom to the threat or reality of mass suicide illustrates the dilemmas posed by such militants. Again and again, local officials received instructions to respond to potential instances of self-immolation by doing everything in their power to prevent such tragedies from occurring, but at the same time, to do nothing that might impel the militants to carry out their plans. In short, such self-contradictory orders put both local police officials and the militant Old Believers in a position from which there could be no good outcome.

As the title of AntifeodaYnyi protest indicates, it is a study of many forms of popular social, political, and religious resistance to the secular and church authorities. By definition, therefore, the author situated the ideas and actions of the participants in the concrete institutional and social conditions in the Urals and Siberia in the eighteenth century. His work on Siberian society in the seventeenth century, published some years later, provides helpful background to the conflicts of the eighteenth. In Tomsk 1648-1649 gg.: Voevodskaia vlast' i zemskie miry and Vlast' i obshchestvo: Sibir v XVII v., written with Vadim Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov, Pokrovskii outlined the traditional conceptions of communal rights and institutions that Russian settlers brought into this enormous frontier region. For its part, the central administration of the empire attempted to impose order on its unruly subjects by administrative fiat from Moscow through its appointed governors. Pokrovskii interpreted the interrelation of the central government and its agents with local society as a process of continuous give-and-take. In some cases Moscow succeeded in imposing its will on the Siberians; in others its agents had to back down in the face of local resistance; in still others, such as the Tomsk revolt of 1648-1649, the irreconcilable differences between the two sides produced armed rebellion against the state.¹⁴ The administrative structure worked best when the central government respected local communal institutions and collaborated with or co-opted the leaders of local society.¹⁵ Pokrovskii's approach and conclusions are remarkably similar to those of the most recent work by Western European and North American scholars on the relations of the state and local society in early modern Europe, Russia included.¹⁶

The later conflicts analyzed in Antifeodal'nyi protest took place against this background. Nevertheless, specific actions of the imperial government and the Orthodox hierarchy set off the most dramatic confrontations, such as the Tara revolt of 1722. In Siberia, Peter Is decree that all Old Believers register with the government and pay twice the normal capitation tax epitomized his burdensome demands on ordinary Russians. Moreover, Siberia's many Old Believers deeply resented the attempts of the local church authorities to force them back into the official Orthodox Church. Finally, the decree that all citizens of the empire swear loyalty to Peter s still unnamed heir provided the spark that set off the conflagration.

A central feature of Pokrovskii's studies of the Tara revolt of 1722, beginning with the chapter in AntifeodaYnyi protest) is his insistence that the rebels' beliefs and convictions had their own inner logic. He demonstrated clearly, for example, that Old Believer apocalyptic teachings motivated and justified the protests against the oath of allegiance to an unnamed heir.¹⁷ This emphasis set the tone for all of Pokrovskii's work. Throughout his career, in spite of difficulties with the censors ("in those years, 'religious' subject matter was severely frowned upon" [ochen ne liubili "religioznuiu" tematiku]), he has made the ideological convictions and internal development of the Old Believers a central and independent theme in his writings.¹⁸

Antifeodal'nyi protest embodies the best qualities of Soviet academic publication of the 1970s in a number of ways. In spite of a few mandatory Marxist-Leninist quotations, Pokrovskii situated his work within the traditional polarity of prerevolutionary populist and ecclesiastical interpretations of Old Belief. If he has a direct scholarly ancestor, it is Afanasii Prokof'evich Shchapov (1830-1876), the mid-nineteenth-century founder of the populist school. Born in Siberia and educated in clergy schools, Shchapov wrote several groundbreaking essays on the raskol while a teacher at the Kazan' Theological Academy and the local university. His passionate homily at the funeral of the victims of the government's repression of the peasant demonstrations at Bezdna in 1861 cost him his teaching positions. After his three years of freelance writing and political activity in St. Petersburg, the imperial government exiled him to Siberia where he spent the rest of his life.

Today Shchapov is remembered for introducing the then-novel concept that Old Belief movement was not really a movement of religious protest but, rather, a vehicle for popular resistance to social and economic oppression. In his view, Nikon's liturgical reforms, to which he had no objections, could not possibly have set off a massive movement of social-religious protest. Instead, the cause of the raskol was social oppression and the destruction of popular traditions of local initiative in all spheres, including parish affairs. Shchapov did, however, stress that the "democratic" teachings of the more radical Old Believers provided justification for popular opposition to state and church and made the Old Faith a central element in the mass revolts of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹⁹

In some general respects, Pokrovskii and the Novosibirsk school follow Shchapov s lead. Yet the conditions in which they worked were radically different. During the intervening century and more, the volume of accessible sources on the history of Old Belief, and scholarly and popular literature based on them, has grown enormously. Moreover, in spite of their surprisingly impressive learning, Shchapov's writings were general essays addressed to the educated society of his time. Most important, Pokrovskii and his school take seriously both the theological and the social dimensions of Old Belief. Religious ideas could well inspire political and social protest, but they also had an inner logic of their own that shaped the lives of those who espoused them. In this sense, the Novosibirsk scholars are heirs of the best ecclesiastical historians such as P. S. Smirnov as well as of Shchapov.

Technically as well, AntifeodaVnyi protest exemplified the best historical scholarship of the late Soviet period. The author made thorough, and critical use of any and all sources of information on his subject-files in the central historical archives of the Soviet Union and Siberian regional archives, and Old Believer polemical and historical texts. Although very different in their style and content and the circumstances of their creation, official reports in the state archives and Old Believer polemical and historical texts were treated as equally important. Each document, of course, had to be studied in its own context and on its own terms, weighing its reliability and significance. Pokrovskii carefully avoided forcing the evidence of these varied sources into any neat pattern or preconceived ideological framework. If their testimony was inconsistent, it was the historians duty to say so honestly. Finally, he carefully wove his evidence into a clear and compelling narrative. In all these respects, Pokrovskii's first book illustrates the methods, approaches, and qualities of his subsequent scholarly work throughout his career, and that of his students.

Pokrovskii's next book on Old Belief, Puteshestvie za redkimi knigami, presents his methods and findings to a broader readership. It is a wonderful combination of adventure story, travelogue, and description of the discovery and study of historical texts. Published under Soviet conditions, the book's first two editions appeared in printings of 55,000 and 50,000 copies respectively, remarkable for a work that deals, in substantial part, with a religious tradition.²⁰ At the same time, part of its appeal may have been precisely the rural Siberian setting and the evocation of Russian cultural and religious traditions, fashionable themes from the 1960s into the 1980s. Whatever the reason, Pokrovskii's book achieved the goal to which any historian aims in writing a work of this kind-sharing his methods and findings with a wider public and, one might add, advertising the accomplishments of his research team.

Because of Pokrovskii s voice as narrator, Puteshestvie reveals a good deal about his attitudes. He made no bones about his devotion to the populist tradition and allied himself with such earlier members of the social and cultural elite as Leo Tolstoy and Shchapov, who reached out to the masses. Within his own generation he has aligned himself with "liberal nationalists" in Soviet academia such as Dmitrii Sergeevich Likhachev and Sigurd Ortovich Shmidt. Paradoxically perhaps, he has also privately expressed his admiration for Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, whose Gulag Archipelago he cited on a number of occasions.²¹ Puteshestvie also underlines Pokrovskii's intense admiration for the radical Old Believers of his own day-both those who live freely in isolated places and work hard to maintain their cultural and religious traditions and the victims of persecution such as the residents of the monastic settlements who were arrested and sentenced to the Gulag in 1951.

Pokrovskiis latest book on Old Belief, Starovery-chasovennye na vostoke Rossii v XVIII-XX vv., coauthored with Natalia Dmitrievna Zol'nikova, was published in 2002. The chapters on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are Pokrovskii's work. Zol'nikova wrote the latter half of the book, which deals mainly with people and events of the twentieth. The chasovennye, the dominant Old Believer accord in the Urals and Siberia, were a loosely organized, complex coalition of groups. At first its adherents saw themselves as the direct successors of the priestly Kerzhenets communities, but over time and in many areas, they gradually became priestless.

The authors began once again with the neopopulist assumption that Old Belief was ultimately a movement of resistance to official institutions and society. Since the book appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union, they were free to concentrate on the beliefs, attitudes, and practices of an oppositional religious movement without having to tie every word or action to the previously mandatory language of "popular protest."

In one sense, then, Starovery-chasovennye is the history of a "textual community." The authors focused on the polemical and historical writings from the early eighteenth century to the late twentieth. The introductory chapter lets the reader know that the authors intended to write an intellectual and cultural history, for it surveys the Old Russian literary tradition with particular emphasis on popular, "folk," or oppositional texts, not least the works of the first generations of Old Believer writers. Then in analyzing the writings of the chasovennye (most unearthed by Novosibirsk and Ekaterinburg field researchers), Pokrovskii and Zol'nikova presented them as compositions with their own inner logic and purpose. They gave each of the polemical and narrative texts a meticulously close reading and showed how the writers drew on the heritage of the Eastern Church fathers, the medieval Russian Orthodox tradition, and earlier Old Believer literature.

On another level, Pokrovskii and Zol'nikova assembled a detailed narrative history of the chasovennye, the dominant Old Believer accord in the Urals and Siberia. The authors constructed this narrative from the records of the periodic councils of the accord and many other writings from the local Old Believer communities unearthed by researchers in the field.²² Their treatment concentrates on the organizational, canonical, and doctrinal issues that continually defined the various factions among the chasovennye. In Starovery-chasovennye, the authors confront head-on thedassicdichotomies faced by scholars of popular religion. The line between elite and popular religious cultures virtually disappears. Many of the Siberian Old Believers were peasants, yet they drew selectively from the classics of Orthodox high culture, the works of highly educated bishops and priests. Moreover, the connection between the social rank of the chasovennye writers and their arguments and prophecies was, in Pokrovskii's phrase, "indirect" (oposredovanno)P At times, social position reinforced polemical stance. As one of the Ekaterinburg scholars, Viktor Ivanovich Baidin, has argued, the Ural merchant-industrialists supported the moderate position among the chasovennye-acceptance of fugitive priests, seeking accommodation with imperial government when possible, and willingness to j oin the edinoverie, created in 1800 in order to bring priestly Old Believers into communion with the official Orthodox Church. The peasant chasovennye leaned in the more radical direction of priestless practice, radical rejection of state and official church, and an emphasis on apocalyptic prophecy.²⁴ Nevertheless, the relationship between ideology and social status was never simple, and the inner logic of their arguments often led chasovennye polemicists to surprising conclusions.

Moreover, the authors allow the reader to hear the Old Believers' own voices.²⁵ Indeed, their role in encouraging and "commissioning" the creative work of contemporary Old Believer writers raises serious questions about the relationship between contemporary academics and the bearers of the Old Believer tradition. To be sure, the Novosibirsk scholars and their Old Believer contacts such as Afanasii Gerasimovich Murachev live in completely different cultural worlds. Murachev, a very independent, self-assured man, writes in a deliberately archaic style and interprets the events of the late twentieth century within the framework of the Old Believer apocalyptic tradition. Nevertheless, one may legitimately ask to what extent his contacts with them may have influenced his most recent writings.²⁶

Within Soviet and post-Soviet academia, one of the Novosibirsk schools avowed purposes is to study the local history and culture of Siberia. As its leader, Pokrovskiis responsibilities include overseeing the research and publications of his fellow historians. The other members of the school, unlike Pokrovskii, tend to concentrate on a single broad theme in Siberian history. Three obvious examples come to mind. Before her recent work on Old Belief, ZoFnikova published books on the parish and clergy in the eighteenth century and on the complex relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the state in Siberia.²⁷ Aleksandr Khristianovich Elert s study of Gerhard Friedrich Miiller's notes on his Siberian explorations in 1733-1734 and 1739-1743 has demonstrated that there were far more settlements in the region than were listed in the imperial government's records. In addition, his painstaking deciphering of Miiller ' handwritten German notes has provided him with a great deal of new information on the ethnic composition of Siberia's population, including its indigenous ethnic groups.²⁸ Natalia Petrovna Matkhanova has analyzed the administration and administrators of eastern Siberia in the nineteenth century. In addition to official administrative records, she has made extensive use of the diaries of the governors of the region to illustrate their characters and philosophies of government, their interactions with the central administration in St. Petersburg, and their relations with the local population.²⁹

Finally, any description of the Novosibirsk group of scholars would be incomplete without mention of Pokrovskii s colleagues in the field of early Russian literature and intellectual history-his longtime colleague Elena Konstantinovna Romodanovskaia (an Academician in her own right), LiuboV VasiFevna Titova, Tamara Vasil'evna Panich, and Ol'ga Dmitrievna ZhuraveF. All are distinguished scholars. The subjects of their publications, however, fall outside the scope of this article, except for Titovas admirable edition of Deacon Fedor s epistle to his son Maksim, Zhuravel's articles on Old Believer historical and devotional writings, and Romodanovskaias book on the origins of Siberian regional literature.³⁰

Last, but not least, Pokrovskii took the lead in all the Novosibirsk groups common enterprises. For years, he continued to lead the field expeditions that trained his students "on the job." He also mentored and encouraged a group of scholars at the University of the Urals in Ekaterinburg who adopted the same basic research agendas and methods. Finally, under his and Romodanovskaias leaderships the Novosibirsk group regularly publishes its findings in two series- Arkheografiia i istochnikovedenie Sibiri, volumes of articles and article-length documents that have appeared since 1975, and Istoriia Sibiri: Pervoistochniki, collections of documents, the first of which was published in 1993.³¹

As one would expect; the scholarly qualities of Pokrovskiis students' publications on Old Belief and popular religion reflect their teacher. Natal'ia Sergeevna Gur'ianova's; Krest'ianskii antimonarkhicheskii protest v staroobriadcheskoi eskhatologicheskoi literature perioda pozdnego feodalizma traces the evolution of Old Believer apocalyptic political ideas or_; in Michael Cherniavskys term; "political theology."³² These include the conviction that the End Time had come and that the Antichrist ruled the world. For generations Old Believers debated what this presupposition meant. Their teachings divided into the theories of the "perceptible" (chuvstvennyi) and "spiritual" (dukhovnyi) nature of the Antichrist. The former meant that the Antichrist was embodied in one particular ruler-most commonly Peter I- or_; in another variant; in the entire succession of Russian rulers after Aleksei Mikhailovich. Over time some of the less radical Old Believers argued that the spirit of the Antichrist dominated the world; or the official Orthodox Church in particular; but that no individual embodied it. Whichever view they held; Gur'ianova pointed out_; the Old Believers did not reject the government or state power as such. Indeed; they looked back with nostalgia to the idealized Christian rulers of the past.

The second part of Gur'ianovas study analyzes the debates within Old Belief over prayers for the rulers. For if the emperor embodied the Antichrist or ruled over a world dominated by his spirit; was it. permissible to continue the traditional prayers for the ruler and his family in the liturgy? At first; the various emerging accords agreed that; in the extreme circumstances of the End Time; it was impossible to offer such prayers. Over time some of the moderate Old Believers; such as the leaders of the Vyg community, reached a limited accommodation with the state and; on the governent's demand; reintroduced prayers for the emperor. The more radical adamantly rejected such compromises. The Filippovtsy broke with Vyg over this precise issue. Moreover; the moderates were distinctly uncomfortable about praying for the ruler and debated among themselves how they should do so. Was it permissible to pray for the emperor as "well-born" (blagochestivyi) but not as "true-believing" {b\agovernyi)1 Or should they pray for the rulers' conversion to the true faith? Clearly neither of these formulas gave legitimacy to the state or reformed church.

Gur'ianova built her work on an exhaustive search of well-known but poorly catalogued manuscript collections in St. Petersburg and Moscow as well as local discoveries in Siberia. As I can testify, she and her Moscow colleague Elena Mikhailovna Iukhimenko slogged through hundreds of large miscellaneous manuscript books most unhelpfully catalogued simply as sbornikj thereby unearthing many undiscovered compositions on apocalyptic themes. She wove her findings into coherent groups of arguments, which she connected to the various accords and the specific circumstances in which they lived. While worded in the obligatory rhetoric of late Soviet times, Gur'ianova s conceptual framework-"peasant antimonarchical protest"-is, for the most part, appropriate. Theories equating the emperor or the official order in church and state with the Antichrist certainly advocated opposition to the imperial government, and the people who expounded them were most often peasants. Ultimately, however, the greatest strength of Gur'ianova's book is the diligence with which she unearthed many new examples of Old Believer apocalyptic theory to add to the canon of long-published texts, analyzed their varied arguments, and studied the contexts from which they emerged.

Two other students of Pokrovskii have combined the neopopulist approach with close reading of texts in a similar way. Before 1990, Lev Kabdenovich Kuandykov published a series of articles on the structure and "rule" of the Vyg community. His arguments stressed the community's origins as an informal, radical peasant community that the Denisov brothers transformed into a hierarchical monastic community modeled, at least in theory, on Solovki. Again in this Case, the strongest part of the author's work lies in his meticulous analysis of the prescriptive documents (the "rule" and other ustavy) of Vyg. Kuandykov showed more clearly than any predecessor-including the present author-the subtle distinctions between earlier, and later rules and the evidence they provide of the evolution of Vyg in the direction of a more rigid structure and tighter discipline. In view of its promise, it is unfortunate that his project never reached its logical conclusion in a book.³³

Ol'ga Valer'evna Chumicheva's reexamination of the revolt of the Solovetskii monastery, Solovetskoe vosstanie 1667-1676 gg.., blends social analysis and text study in a less mechanical way.³⁴ Perhaps because she published her monograph in post-Soviet times, the author was able to concentrate almost entirely on the analysis of her sources. She careful unraveled the published and archival documents on the revolt, many of them familiar, and produced a detailed, intricate narrative of the course of the rebellion. Step by step she traced the ever-shifting factions and alliances within the monastery. She pointed out, for example, that in September 1669, a moderate faction among the rebels temporarily seized control of the monastery from the radicals. The moderates advocated continuing armed resistance in the name of pre-Nikonian Orthodoxy but rejected the radicals' attempts to make revolutionary changes in religious practice. Like the scholars who studied the revolt before her, she was fully aware of the political and social dimensions of the uprising. The most important feature of Chumicheva s approach, however, is her emphasis on the liturgical and political-theological debates among the rebels and their long-term influence on later Old Believers. Like other members of the Novosibirsk school, she focused primarily on the texts themselves, especially the polemical writings of leaders of the monastery during the revolt, above all Gerasim Firsov, the leading intellectual in Solovki.

Her analysis brought her to a number of important conclusions, the first being that Solovki did not rebel because of the ignorance of its residents. The intellectual leaders of the community such as Firsov understood that symbols such as the two-finger or three-finger sign of the cross were ultimately important not for themselves but as signs of underlying theological doctrines. To be sure, the core participants in the revolt were not learned churchmen but laypeople, including some veterans of earlier uprisings in other parts of Russia and a minority of the monks. Most of the monks opposed the revolt, and a significant number either escaped or were expelled from Solovki during the siege. As the rebellion dragged on, the most radical of the defenders began to function without priests and develop justifications for the practice. In that sense the rebels were not only role models for later rebels against state and church in the name of the Old Faith but also direct precursors of the priestless accords of Old Belief that emerged in subsequent decades.

Gur'ianova's publications in post-Soviet times display a similar shift in emphasis within the neopopulist framework. In her more recent books, she concentrated on Old Believer "high" culture. Istoriia i chelovek v sochineniiakh staroobriadtsev XVIII veka analyzes the historical writings of the Vyg school in the first half of the century, especially Ivan Filippov s history of the Vyg community, the last testaments of the community's leaders, and the funeral homilies in their honor. Her workin the most important manuscript collections in Moscow and St. Petersburg uncovered previously unknown polemical and historical texts and variants that allowed her, among other things, to undertake the first scholarly analysis of Filippov's well-known but puzzling history. Comparing the extremely varied manuscripts of this work, she concluded that Filippov deliberately chose not to complete a definitive text of his work, thus leaving to his successors the opportunity to make further editorial changes and to continue chronicling the ongoing history of the community.

The main conclusion of Istoriia i chelovek is that, in spite of their quaintly elaborate rhetoric-what Malyshev called "Vyg verbosity" (vygoretskoe mnogoslovie)-and the authors' obvious ideological convictions, Old Believer historians' writings display the same qualities as more "secular" writers of the early eighteenth century. They understood the need to weigh and balance the testimony of the written and oral sources from which they worked. Citing Iukhimenko's analysis of Semen Denisov's "Istoriia ob ottsekh i stradal'tsakh solovetskikh"³⁵ as well as her own findings on Filippov's history, Gur'ianova argued that until today scholars have let the religious convictions and deliberately archaic language of the Old Believer histories blind them to their authors' scrupulous concern for the factual accuracy of their work. Moreover, just like contemporaries such as Tatishchev, the Old Believer historians put heavy emphasis on the role of individual personality in shaping the course of events. In these respects, Gur'ianova concluded, the Vyg historians were as sophisticated as their counterparts in the world of official high culture. In my view, Gur'ianova somewhat overstated her case in her understandable desire to undermine the traditional image of the Old Believers' intellectual poverty and cultural isolation. No matter how carefully they worked, the Vyg historians wrote sacred history, in which the religious message ultimately took precedence over scholarly accuracy. Nevertheless, Istoriia i chelovek adds a great deal to our understanding of the Vyg historians' achievement and rightly emphasizes that the quality of their work should be judged against that of their own contemporaries rather than by the standards of later generations.³⁶

Most recently, in Staroobriadtsy i tvorcheskoe nasledie Kievskoi mitropolii, Gur'ianova continued the study of Old Believer elite culture. Once again she stressed the intellectual sophistication of the leading Old Believer writers of the early eighteenth century, especially the leaders of the Vyg community. In this instance, she focused her attention on their polemical skills and their use of "Kievan" learning in their own defense.

As Gur'ianova made clear, this book builds on Tat'iana Anatol'evna Oparina's Ivan Nasedka i polemkheskoe bogoslovie Kievskoi Metropolii, a study of the impact of Ukrainian scholarship in Moscow in the first half of the seventeenth century. Oparina, who received her training in Novosibirsk, traced the development of Muscovite theology in the first half of the seventeenth century. Until Nikon's elevation to the patriarchal throne in 1652, the church hierarchy and the scholars who, like Nasedka, worked in the patriarchs' printing house firmly believed that Muscovite Russian Orthodoxy was the only true faith. All other variants of Christianity, including Eastern Orthodoxy outside of Muscovite territory, were fatally flawed. At the same time, the Muscovite Church did not have the intellectual and polemical resources to defend the its claims effectively against the challenges of Protestants, Roman Catholics, and the Orthodox outside its jurisdiction. The scholars in the Printing House had no choice but to make extensive use of polemical literature from the Orthodox in Ukraine for anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant arguments and, indeed, basic information about the beliefs and practices of these branches of Christendom. Given the complexity of confessional debates in Ukraine, it was no easy task to select appropriate texts and arguments and weave them into the evolving body of Muscovite Church texts without unwittingly undermining the unique purity of Russian Orthodoxy. Nasedka and his colleagues understood the danger. In a series of editions published in the 1630s and 1640s, they made extensive but selective use of polemical and devotional works from Ukraine and Belarus, tailoring them for Russian use. By far the most influential of these were the apocalyptic miscellanies, the Kirillova kniga and the Kniga o verej which appeared in Moscow in 1644 and 1648 respectively. These compilations of prophetic writings quickly achieved great-but ambivalent and thus divisive- influence among the cultural elite in Moscow and later became integral to the Old Believer canon of sacred texts.³⁷

Gur'ianova took up the story where Oparina left off. When the church schism took form, the first generations of Old Believer polemicists had to defend their understanding of true Orthodoxy against the leaders of the official church. Like their predecessors, the first critics of the Nikonian reforms used any polemical ammunition they could find. From the beginning, they had no compunctions about citing pre-Nikonian books based on "Kievan" (Ukrainian and Belorussian) materials as long as they had been published in Moscow. In the first half of the eighteenth century the need for polemical flexibility had become even more urgent, not least because, in some well-known instances, the imperial government and Orthodox hierarchy forced Old Believers into public debates with defenders of the Nikonian reforms. In building their case, the leaders of the Vyg community, the leading Old Believer scholars of their day, not only made extensive use of pre-Nikonian Moscow editions such as the Kirillova kniga and Kniga o vere but also had copies of some of the Ukrainian originals on which such books drew. When compiling the D'iakonovy and Pomorskie otvety for debates with their opponents, they did not hesitate to cite such "Kievan" writings when polemically necessary. Moreover, Vyg scholars used innovative approaches to the study of manuscripts-such as paleography and the analysis of the paper and bindings of manuscript books-to prove that some of their opponents' most important proof texts were forgeries. In this respect, they surpassed their adversaries in official society. Later in the eighteenth century the distinction between pre-Nikonian Muscovite and "Kievan" polemical works disappeared altogether. In other respects, however, Gur'ianova suggested, Old Believer learning had ceased to be a viable alternative to the official elite culture.³⁸

In the preface to his monograph Starovery-stranniki v XVIII-pervoi polovine XIX v., Gur'ianova's colleague Aleksandr Ivanovich Mal'tsev provided an admirable summary of the Novosibirsk schools approach in the last two decades. He praised Shchapov and other nineteenth-century progressives for taking seriously the dimension of social and political protest within Old Belief. At the same time, he argued, they presented a badly distorted view of the movement. Their writings tended to equate all of Old Belief with its most radical fringes such as the stranniki (fugitives), in part because they relied on the reports of government inspectors whose job was to investigate political subversion. Mal'tsev explicitly rejected the nineteenth-century populists' claim-echoed by scholars of the Soviet period such as K. V. Chistov and A. I. Klibanov-that the teaching of the stranniki amounted to "religious whitewashing" of social and political protest. A truly balanced understanding of their doctrines, he argued, requires a careful analysis of all of the evidence, written, oral, and visual.³⁹

With this in mind, Mal'tsev undertook a systematic study of the fundamental teachings of the first prophet of the stranniki, Evfimii, and his followers.⁴⁰ Like other members of the Novosibirsk group, he concentrated on the search for unpublished treatises that would allow him to make a more nuanced analysis of the evolution of Evfimii's convictions and ideas. Mal'tsev admirably fulfilled this mission. His archival searches led him to major new discoveries particularly in Iaroslavl', including two treatises in Evfimiis own hand. On this basis, he was able to explain Evfimii's radical "anarchist" teachings as a condemnation of those Old Believers who consorted with the Antichrist by registering with the government as dissenters and paying the double tax or who "hid behind" the local Orthodox priest who would include them in the list of his parishioners. Even his fellow Filippovtsy, until then one of the most radical priestless accords, alienated him by attempting to reach accommodation with more moderate groups within the movement. At first, Mal'tsev argued, Evfimii accepted that true Christians could live rigorously in "the world" following scripture and the example of the first leaders of the Vyg community whose teachings and example, in his view, later generations betrayed. Within a few years, however, he concluded that "flight," or the life of a hermit, was the only path to salvation. Having chosen radical separation from the world of the Antichrist, Evfimii and his later followers had no dealings with the government and its agents, the rest of society, and all religious structures including other Old Believer accords. Indeed, Mal'tsev argued, the stranniki could be considered anarchists, since they also made no attempt to create any organizational structures of their own. But like the Cathars, centuries earlier, the stranniki gradually came to the realization that a life of total "inner emigration" was possible only with the help of sympathizers who still lived in "the world."⁴¹

Mal'tsev s new book, Staroobriadcheskie bespopovskie soglasiia v XVIII-nachale XIX v., published after his untimely death, traced the complex relations between the priestless accords within Old Belief. Working meticulously, he chose to emphasize not the much-publicized quarrels and schisms among the priestless but, rather, their persistent attempts to reconcile their differences. Following in the tradition of P. S. Smirnov, Mal'tsev analyzed the negotiations between the leaders of the various priestless accords document by document. In the absence of any clearly defined centers of authority, the bespopovtsy accords had great difficulty achieving cooperation and mutual toleration. Disagreements on liturgical and canonical issues, the personal ambition of individual leaders, and the pride of each accord and community in its own heritage further complicated their attempts at collaboration. In 1727 the Pomortsy and Fedoseevtsy reached an agreement recognizing each other's legitimacy thanks largely to the efforts of individual peacemakers on both sides. The well-known willfulness and ambition of Il'ia Kovylin had much to do with a renewed rift between the two groups later in the century.

As always, one of the important underlying sources of dispute within Old Belief was the tradition of resistance to authority in church and state and the best ways to maintain it in a changing world. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries most of the main priestless accords evolved in a more moderate direction in response to more tolerant governmental policies and the growing influence of wealthy merchants who strove for stability within Old Belief and good relations with the state. That tendency, in turn, aroused the opposition of radicals and traditionalists-usually men of less privileged social rank-who defended the rigor of earlier generations of the faithful.⁴²

To summarize, the individual works of Pokrovskii and his colleagues that we have examined demonstrate the central characteristics of the Novosibirsk school as a whole. First, the Novosibirsk scholars insist on the primacy of sources. In their view, the central task of any historian is to hunt down and analyze meticulously all possible sources of information and insight on any subject that they investigate. Scholars sometimes divide the sources on Old Belief into two categories-investigative records in government and church archives and the Old Believers' own polemical, historical, and devotional writings, whether collected during field research or located in long-established manuscript collections. The Novosibirsk scholars make extensive use of both. Even though the discoveries of their field expeditions are their pride and joy, painstaking, their seemingly endless plodding through the main archives and collections in Russia's historic capitals and regional archives in Siberia and elsewhere is an equally critical part of their arsenal. In Puteshestvie za redkimi knigami, Pokrovskii related several anecdotes illustrating the frustrations and triumphs of archival research, such as the search for the manifesto (protivnoe pis'mo) of the Tara rebels. Archival catalogues (opisi) may be missing or hopelessly inadequate. Materials on a single incident may be scattered through several different archives. Centrally important documents, such as the manifesto, may turn up by accident in a completely unexpected context.⁴³ Some research projects require the interweaving of documents discovered by researchers in the field with governmental records in the archives. Pokrovskii needed sources of both kinds in reconstructing the case of the Old Believer Orenburg Cossacks, who in 1854 were condemned to walk the gauntlet for insubordination.⁴⁴

Pokrovskii's archival research has produced unexpected glimpses of the personal life and thoughts of individual Russians. In the best-known example, he found the confession of the Altai peasant Artemii Sakalov in the Tobolsk archives. The authorities arrested Sakalov on the assumption-false, in Pokrovskii's view-that he was an Old Believer because he refused to make his confession to a parish priest. Instead, the investigators discovered, he had written a confession for himself and God in which he revealed a remarkable "mixture of Orthodoxy and paganism, prayer, and blasphemy." He admitted that he used magic charms and incantations addressed indiscriminately to God, the Blessed Virgin, the saints, and devils. Some of the. sins on the list of this energetic, stubborn man-blasphemous words while in his cups, for example-are hardly surprising. But how many Russian peasants admitted to having long, amicable conversations with a devil? Pokrovskii s discovery has given us a glimpse of the inner life of a man who was both an extraordinary individual and a representative of his time, place, and cultural milieu.⁴⁵ To my knowledge, no other documents of such depth and intimacy have come to light. The publications of the Novosibirsk group, however, do contain more fleeting revelations of the thoughts and emotions of ordinary people such as, for example, the poignant letters of leaders of the Tara revolt to their families.⁴⁶

Second, for the Novosibirsk school, the discovery of new sources leads directly to their rigorous analysis and, in many instances, publication. The monographs of Gur'ianova, Mal'tsev, and Chumicheva all end with editions of unpublished documents that the authors discovered in the course of their work. Pokrovskii and Zol'nikova's study of the chasovennye is actually a two-volume work_; the monograph Starovery-chasovennye itself and Dukhovnaia literatura staroverov Vostoka Rossii XVIII-XX vv., a volume of sources on their history many of them the writings of the accord's leaders. The commitment to publish historical sources has recently taken a high-tech turn in Pokrovskii s current work with a team of collaborators; most prominently Gail LehnhofFof UCLA; to publish a new edition of the Stepennaia kniga tsarskogo rodosloviia, based in large part on two newly discovered copies; one of which he recently found in Tomsk.⁴⁷

Third; given his personal and family history it is hard to imagine Pokrovskii avoiding intense involvement with the larger society in his own time. His empathy for the victims of political repression and religious persecution is obvious whether he writes about the Tara rebels of the 1720s; the persecuted Old Believers of the 1950s; or the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and clergy in the 1920s. The last of these issues merits a brief comment. From his investigations in the 1990s in the previously forbidden Archive of the President of the Russian Federation; Pokrovskii drew a heart-rending picture of the inescapable dilemma faced by the leaders of the church under the new Communist government. He demonstrated that; from the beginning of the campaign to confiscate church property in 1922; the top leaders of the Party aimed at nothing less than the division and ultimate destruction of the church as an institution. In this situation; everything that the Russian Orthodox hierarchy and its flock did to make its peace with the new government or to minister to society's needs was turned against them.⁴⁸

Beyond this_; however; it is hard to see any contemporary political agendas hiding behind his publications or those of his colleagues. Moreover; Pokrovskiis civic consciousness has led him to communicate his research findings to a wider public. A Journey for Rare Books can serve as a model for any author who aspires to combine the highest standards of scholarship with an attractive popular presentation that evokes the natural world and the strength of individual personalities.

To conclude; Pokrovskii and his colleagues have combined the best qualities of the two main traditions of Old Believer scholarship-the populist and the ecclesiastical. A neopopulist approach is the foundation of their scholarship. By definition; this commitment has led them to concentrate on Old Belief as a movement of resistance of peasants; Cossacks; and the urban poor to the imperial government and the official church. At the same time; the flexibility and resourcefulness with which they used this framework in late Soviet times allowed them to stretch their treatment of the liturgical and theological dimensions of Old Belief to the limits of political orthodoxy and beyond. The populist impulse has also made the "Siberians" even more acutely aware than scholars elsewhere of the degree to which the Old Belief was an extremely complex network of accords and groups with distinct systems of belief and practice that varied from one place and time to another. Their studies made abundantly clear that the lines of demarcation between the Old Believers and the rest of the population were amorphous and, at times, invisible.

At the same time Pokrovskii and his colleagues are also heirs of the ecclesiastical scholars of prerevolutionary times. They take their subjects' own statements about their religious and political convictions with the utmost seriousness. At no time do they assume that their struggles to practice the true Eastern Orthodox faith as they understood it were merely a reflection of underlying political, economic, or institutional grievances. Instead, resistance to authority on theological or liturgical grounds reinforced political opposition and the reverse. The Tara revolt is a particularly telling illustration of the inextricable interweaving of resistance to the government's arbitrary policies and Old Believer apocalyptic prophecies.

Moreover, the Novosibirsk school has all but destroyed the distinction between "elite" and "popular" religion, at least in the case of Old Belief. Without question, the writers of many of the most important compositions in the Old Believer canon were educated and well-informed men by the standards of their day. Nevertheless, the manuscripts of their works and the ideas these contained spread across vast distances and shaped the lives and convictions of seemingly uneducated or illiterate men and women. Similar ideas about the Apocalypse or the historical roots of their tradition appear among Old Believers of widely differing levels of formal education and affiliations with one or another accord. And what is one to make of self-educated peasants such as Miron Ivanovich Galanin or Murachev, who did not hesitate to comment on the confessional and social issues of their day? In the works of the Novosibirsk school, then, Old Belief appears as a movement of nearly infinite variety that combines elements of "elite" learning and "popular" culture in virtually endless variations. This insight has implications for the study of religious movements far beyond the enormous expanse of Siberia.

Finally, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the balance of elements in the works of the Novosibirsk school and the rhetoric of their publications has changed significantly. Since 1990 Pokrovskii and his colleagues have given increased attention to the theological and liturgical issues, including the debates within Old Belief, which could not be addressed head-on under Soviet conditions. This new emphasis does not mean a rejection of the neopopulist insistence that Old Belief was, in essence, a movement of resistance to the official order in state, church, and high culture. The recent studies of Old Believer ideas such as Gur'ianova's work on political theology, Mal'tsev's analysis of the teachings of the stranniki and Pokrovskii and Zol'nikovas exposition of the convictions of the chasovennye revealed the profoundly subversive nature of these beliefs and teachings. Indeed, even the recondite writings of moderate Old Believer leaders were intended to subvert the doctrines and practices of official Russian Orthodoxy. Moreover, the heavy reliance in recent publications on the Old Believers' own writings by no means constitutes a neglect of the investigative records used extensively in all of Pokrovskii's work. Finally, we would do well to remember the source of many surviving Old Believer writings. For the last century and more, collectors of Old Believer manuscripts, not least contemporary field researchers, have received most of them, directly or indirectly, from peasants or less privileged townspeople.⁴⁹

The publications of the Novosibirsk school are of as high a scholarly quality and significance as those of scholars of popular religion in Roman Catholic and Protestant Europe. If anything, the Novosibirsk scholars paint on a far larger canvas than their colleagues to the West-and not simply because of the enormous territorial expanse of Siberia. It is unfortunate, then, that Russian and non-Russian scholars of popular Christianity have worked in relative isolation from one another. Judging by their personal comments and their publications especially in Soviet times, scholars in Novosibirsk knew the work of their foreign colleagues on Old Belief but apparently not the work of non-Russian scholars of popular religious movements elsewhere in the world. There are several possible reasons for their isolation from international scholarly currents-lack of access to foreign publications, issues of language, and the refusal of official Soviet academia to recognize the value of any work not published within the orthodox Marxist-Leninist framework. For their part, non-Russian scholars of popular religious movements have been equally isolated from their Russian colleagues. The remarkable accomplishments of the Novosibirsk school deserve to more widely known. Scholars of popular religion in other societies would do well to break through the barrier of language to draw on its achievements.

12-The Novosibirsk School of Old Believer Studies

Afterword