The Old Believers, long deprived of civil rights in the Russian Empire, emerged after the Revolution of 1905 into a radically new religious and political environment. The regime of toleration opened the way for diverse Old Believer communities to practice their faith openly, but it also exposed the asymmetries of power that continued to privilege the Synodal Church. Bureaucrats intensified their campaign against “schismatics,” ensuring that marginalization persisted even within the new framework of legality.

For the Belokrinitskaia Hierarchy, the most institutionally developed branch of Old Belief, this moment was transformative. If earlier generations had organized around preserving pre-Nikonian books, in the late Russian Empire, modern print culture became a key site of community-building. Before 1905, clandestine hand-copied newsletters circulated within closed circles of believers; after 1905, newspapers and journals flourished, offering a more visible public platform for Old Believer intellectuals in periodicals such as Tserkv’ and Slovo Tserkvi. Through these publications, their writings portrayed the Old Believers not as a marginal sectarian remnant but as enduring guardians of true Russianness and rightful heirs to an authentic and unbroken Church tradition.

These periodicals operated as devices of discourse, determining who could speak and how authority could be imagined. They envisioned a civil church rooted in voluntary institutions, education, and lay participation, which directly challenged the theology and authority of the Synodal Church. In particular, Old Believers opposed violent Russification by advancing obrusenie – a model of cultural unity of empire achieved through free embrace of Russian culture rather than coercion.

The First World War altered the balance of their discourse, heightening nationalist rhetoric at the expense of more pluralistic aspirations. Wartime crisis pushed the Old Believers toward the ambition of becoming a new national church capable of uniting the empire through popular legitimacy. In this trajectory, the creative energy of a grassroots civil church gave way to a more radicalized form of religious nationalism.

This project examines how the Belokrinitskaia Hierarchy’s print culture between 1905 and 1917 redefined the terms of religious authority, contested imperial hierarchies, and offered an alternative imagination of nation and Church in late imperial Russia.