The Castrates, the Specter of Pugachev, and Religious Policy under Nicholas I

Abstract

The tenure of L. A. Perovskii in the Ministry of the Interior (1841–52) witnessed a growing interest by the tsarist government in the collection of information about the Old Believers, the traditionalist Orthodox Christians who rejected the church reforms introduced under Patriarch Nikon in the 17th century. Perovskii’s policies have been well described by Thomas Marsden in his book on religious toleration in 19th-century Russia. Marsden sees Perovskii’s approach as marking a new stage in government policy toward the Schism. By stressing its political significance and depicting it as a potential threat to the security of the state, Perovskii laid the basis for the policies of his successor, D. G. Bibikov, who in 1853–55 embarked on a campaign of harsh repression of Old Belief.1 Marsden identifies three main areas in which Old Belief was found to be a political threat in the mid-19th century. First, in 1846 the priested Old Believers (popovtsy) established an episcopate in Austrian Belaia Krinitsa which could ordain priests for their community in Russia, thereby evading the restrictions on their acquisition of priests that had been imposed by the government of Nicholas I. Second, the community of priestless Old Believers (bezpopovtsy) based in the Preobrazhenskii Cemetery in Moscow was claimed to harbor antistatist elements who refused to pray for the tsar, while some of them even regarded the monarch as the Antichrist. And finally, in 1850 one of the fact-finding expeditions that Perovskii sent to the localities to collect information “discovered” in Iaroslavl ́ Province the sect of beguny (Runaways) or stranniki (Wanderers), whose identification of the tsar as Antichrist had led them to avoid all engagement with the state and its institutions, thereby committing acts that officialdom understandably