OLD BELIEVER COMMITTEE

In 1820, Emperor Alexander I convened a secret committee to guide him in policies regarding the Old Believers (also known as Old Ritualists or raskolniki —schismatics). The secret committee included some of the most important churchmen and ministers in Russia, including the minister of religion and education (Prince Vasily Golitsyn) and Archbishop Filaret Drozdov, later to become metropolitan of Moscow and the preeminent prelate of mid–nineteenth–century Russia. Originally given the task of finding an appropriate form of toleration within the Russian legal system, the committee quickly broke into liberal and conservative factions. Internal politics of the committee, added to the emperor's own vacillating desire for a "spiritual revolution" in Russia, weakened its ability to make significant changes. Ascendance of conservative members pushed the committee's views from tolerance of the Old Belief to more stringent enforcement of punitive laws against them. After the death of Emperor Alexander, the secret committee became mostly a forum for discussion of anti-Old Believer policies in the Russian government. It continued to exist into the reign of Alexander III, whose landmark law of 1883 finally revised the legal status of Old Believers in the Russian empire.

See also: alexander i; filaret drozdov, metropoli tan; old believers; orthodoxy

bibliography

Nichols, Robert L. (2004). "The Old Belief under Surveillance during the Reign of Alexander I." In Russia's Dissenting Old Believers, ed. Georg Michels and Robert L. Nichols. Minneapolis: Minnesota Mediterranenean and East European Monographs.

Roy R. Robson