Oksana and her daughter-in-law pose with their sons after the harvest.
The village of Dersu lies beyond the Ussuri River. In order to get to this lost village in the taiga you need a good all-terrain vehicle; a wooden barge if the water hasn’t frozen over; more than a day to make the trip from the nearest inhabited town; and lots of faith in God.
To protect themselves from the influence of the outside world, Russian Starovery (староверы), or Old Believers, choose to live in the most isolated, wild, and inaccessible places. “The fewer people there are, the closer we are to God,” they explain. Some call them the “Russian Amish.”
It all started 350 years ago, in 1666. In that year, reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church begun by Tsar Alexei and Patriarch Nikon, with the goal of bringing it closer to the Greek Church, came to a head at the Great Moscow Synod (which also saw Nikon defrocked – see Calendar, page 19). Previously accepted liturgical rites and texts, and those practicing them, were anathemized. What is more, those who insisted on continuing to adhere to the old ways were persecuted as “schismatics” (раскольники) or “Old Ritualists” (старообрядцы).
Young Ulyana picks pumpkins from the family’s garden. According to Old Believer traditions, Ulyana wears her hair braided. Once married, she will stop wearing white lace and cover her hair.
They, of course, continued to call themselves Orthodox Christians and considered the new ways to be heresy. Thousands immolated themselves in their churches, setting them on fire. Others decided to retreat from society so they could continue to perform the old rites they considered sacred and inviolable. Some fled to the Far East in search of the pristine environment that the wild and uninhabited regions of the Urals and Siberia offered. (One family of such Old Believers was discovered in the depths of Siberia only in the 1970s, completely isolated and out of touch with the modern world.) Still others exiled themselves from Russia to some of the most secluded areas of China, South America, Alaska, Canada, Australia, or Eastern Europe.
In 1905, after over 200 years of state-sponsored persecution, Tsar Nicholas II took steps to heal the schism, signing a decree that forbade religious persecution of minorities and outlawed use of the term raskolniki. Old Believers were again allowed to build churches, hold services, and organize. There was even a campaign to repatriate the exiled children of the old faith. But of course the Bolshevik Revolution initiated a whole new level of persecution – of all believers – provoking a new exodus.
Daily life
Old Believer church in Dersu.
A century later, the exodus may be reversing course. Some Old Believers are returning to what they call “the homeland, the land of our ancestors,” despite the fact that many generations have passed since those ancestors called Russia home.
In 2007 the Russian government created a special program that defrays the costs of traveling “home,” if the trip will last more than three days.*
It enables Old Believers in distant equatorial countries like Bolivia, Argentina or Uruguay to return to their homeland of tigers, bears and wolves and an extreme climate that fluctuates between -40° Celsius in winter +40° Celsius in summer.
Despite not having had direct contact with the land of their ancestors, such émigrés kept their roots alive from generation to generation by practicing the study of eighteenth-century Scripture written in Old Slavonic; attending church services three times a day; adhering to agricultural practices similar to those used by their ancestors in Nikon’s day; and encouraging large families with dozens of children and grandchildren.
Porfiry, Ulyana’s brother, is 12 years old; he came came to Russia with his family four years ago from Argentina. While technically he and his family live in a small house in Dersu, in reality Porfiry, Ulyana and one other brother and sister live on their own, because their parents are working in a fish processing factory near Vladivostok.
Ulyana and her siblings at the door of their family’s home in Dersu.
Dersu has become something of a long-cherished paradise for new immigrants from the diaspora – perhaps inspired by the mythical Belovodye, the promised land of Old Believers who fled in search of a heavenly place on Earth.
The isolation provides an appropriate setting for their ascetic lifestyle, with its strict rules and traditions. Television does not exist, nor do postal services, a sewage system, businesses, newspapers, or, of course, the internet.
The Old Believers here only consume what they produce, and one can tell which women are married by the kerchief covering their heads. All of the men sport long beards (because Jesus too had a beard), and newborns are baptized according to the canons of the old Orthodox faith (thrice-immersed, not simply sprinkled). They also use the old Julian calendar, abandoned by Moscow in 1918.
One source of income is hunting, which they practice three months of the year, engaging in the fur trade with locals and the Chinese. The only other contact with the outside world appears to be via a solitary public telephone situated in the center of the village. It is used only for emergencies or to contact relatives in Latin America that plan on traveling to the new homeland.
Indeed, the outside world is but a distant echo in the mountains that surround Dersu. When asked about the recent Russian-Ukrainian conflict, its inhabitants reply that they “prefer to maintain their way of life and not be bothered.”
But of course modernity is relentless, even in these less-than-conducive circumstances. Electric generators, tractors and chainsaws, unthinkable things a generation ago in their former exile, are no longer unknown in the village. For their part, the younger generation battles the lure of the smartphone and other modern technologies.
Julian is working with his son to build a new home.
Ulyana and her mother.
For Moscow, the Starovery are a valuable political asset, but also a physical one, possibly helping to replenish, grow, and revitalize increasingly deserted regions of the country, where small rural settlements are often besieged by alcoholism and desperation, with young people leaving for bigger towns and cities. For Old Believers, vodka is only permitted during certain religious festivals. And, during the last census in 2010, the population in Dersu was 17; it has since doubled.
It is estimated that Old Believers (or, in their own formulation, “Followers of the True Faith”), despite being divided into countless sects across the world, total almost two million persons. In Russia alone, their numbers are approaching 300,000, though far from all share the Spartan lifestyle of those in Dersu. In Samara, on the banks of the Volga, one community even has their own website (samstar.ucoz.ru).
The school in Dersu.
Ulyana and her mother prepare tea. Her mother has only just returned after working for several weeks in a fish processing factory in Vladivostok.
In fact, only a few thousand Old Believers have re-settled in Siberia. Nonetheless, in 2013 Vladimir Putin received a delegation of Old Believer dignitaries in the Kremlin, bestowing upon them the prestigious Order of Friendship for their “contribution to the strengthening of the moral and spiritual climate of our society.”
Hardly the words that the reformers of 350 years ago would have used. RL
* In the 1970s, both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia repealed the seventeenth-century anathema imposed on Old Believers.
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