Russian spiritual ravines: Old Believers-Wanderers and the grassroots religious landscape of the late Russian Empire

Cahiers d'histoire russe, est-européenne, caucasienne et centrasiatique (ex. Cahiers du Monde Russe). 2025. Vol. 66. No. 3. P. 381–403.

Kuziner I.

The article is devoted to analyzing the religious landscape of the late Russian Empire. It deals with how this landscape was seen from a grassroots perspective, namely from the perspective of the followers of one of the most radical movements of the Old Faith - the Old Believers Wanderers. In the 19th century, Wanderers adopted a special mode of religious adherence, which allowed the believer, at various periods of her life, to be affiliated relatively uncontroversially with the dominant Orthodox Church, while remaining a Wanderer. The focus on this ambivalence allows both to make visible the precariousness of the boundaries of the clearly structured religious hierarchies of the empire and to demonstrate the complex and heterogeneous social reality of the Russian Empire that made this situation of ambivalence possible.

Keywords: social history, history of Russian Empire, Orthodoxy, History of the Russian Empire, Old Believers, folk orthodoxy, Old Believers, Social history