Loyal to god: Old Believers, oaths and orders

ABSTRACT

Since the reign of Peter the Great, the Russian sovereign, be it Tsar, Soviet or Putin, has required demonstrations of ‘loyalty’ that evidence subjects’ interior as well as exterior states. This article explores, through historical and current ethnographic examples, how Old Believers, a dissenting movement of Russian Orthodox Christians, have sought to reconcile this worldly demand with their overarching allegiance to the Kingdom of God, and their refusal to acknowledge a separation between the spiritual and the temporal. This dichotomy is particularly problematized around the swearing of oaths of fealty and the giving and receiving of decorations and orders that vouchsafe loyalty to state or sovereign.

KEYWORDS:

• Old Believers
• sovereignty
• Third Rome
• oath
• Hobbes

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Mikhail Dolbilov, Elisey Eliseev, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov and Ivan Shevnin for insights that contributed to this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. ‘The central value of Nicholas’ [the first] reign was loyalty, which Official Nationality defined particularly as distinctively Russian. The loyalty of the people was displayed in ceremonies of devotion to the monarch. The people were recognized and then engulfed in demonstration of loyalty to the sovereign’ (Wortman 2006, 144).

2. The so-called Ecclesiastical Regulation (dukhovnyi reglament), issued by Peter the Great to reform the administration of the Orthodox Church, solemnly stated what was bound to become one of the most famous definitions of the Russian autocracy’s nature:

The All-Russian Emperor is an autocratic and absolute Monarch. God Himself commanded to obey His supreme power not only out of fear, but in good conscience (povinovatsya ne tol’ko za strakh, a za sovest’). Reverberations of this maxim can easily be found in later foundational pronouncements of the Russian autocracy, crucial for its relationship to the noble elite. For example, Peter III, ‘emancipation’ Manifesto of February 18, 1762 honed the Petrine notion ‘za sovest’’ in such a florid way: ‘We hope that all the well-born Russian Nobility … will remain in their most submissive loyalty and devotion to Us, and not seek to escape from service, but rather enter it willingly and zealously … ’ (Dolbilov, n.d., 5)

3. We will see that the other main Russian word for loyalty, vernost’, does not appear in common usage until Peter I.

4. The concern over the bindingness of oaths had filtered into even the highest ranks of the Soviet army at the dawn of the post-Soviet era. Boris Yeltsin’s personal bodyguard recounts an episode during the vacuum of power that followed the August coup of 1991 when a Soviet general insisted on the obligation of his oath:

I cannot not follow the order, because I gave an oath (prisagu)’ answered the General, ‘but I gave the oath to Gorbachev. Now there’s no Gorbachev. It’s not even clear where he is. But there’s a way out. If you Boris Nikolaevich [Yeltsin] give an order that appoints yourself as Commander and Chief (verkhovnym glavnokomanduyushim), then I will subordinate myself to you. (Korzhakov 2004, 129)

5. Literally ‘rule of the uncles’: the term for the violent hierarchy by which fresh draftees are hazed by older recruits.

6. ‘Literatura novogo vremeni v strannicheskikh sbornikakh postoyannogo sostava ‘svet’ i ‘univers’: novatsii i traditsii v XX v.’ http://starajavera.narod.ru/Zolnikova1.html accessed June 2017.

7. Even while travelling to their barracks on the Trans-Siberian railway, I noticed, conscripts are not exempt from this rule, as the long line outside the cramped wagon toilet testified.

8. This account and the quotations in the two paragraphs below come from a transcript of an interview that Vladimir Oyvin conducted with Alexei Ryabtsev in 2013 published http://www.portal-credo.ru/site/?act=news&id=99230 accessed June 2017.

9. A derogatory slang term for a Soviet-style way of thinking.

10. Quotes taken from an interview with a Belokrinits priest, July 2016.

11. Interview with the above Belokrinits priest, July 2016.

12. ‘[T]he recognition of the alter qua alter. I submit that such recognitions can only be hierarchical … Here to recognize is the same as to value or integrate’ (Dumont 1994, 20).