Old Believer Church in Ulan Ude, Buryatia, Russia

The Old Believer schism did not occur simply as a result of a few individuals with power and influence. The schism had complex causes, revealing historical processes and circumstances in 17th-century Russian society. Those who broke loose from the hierarchy of the official State Church had quite divergent views on church, faith, society, state power and social issues. Thus the collective term “Old Believers” groups together various movements within Russian society which actually had existed long before 1666/1667. They shared a distrust of state power and of the episcopate, insisting upon the right of the people to arrange their own spiritual life, and expressing the ambition to aim for such control.
Both the popovtsy and bespopovtsy, although theologically and psychologically two different teachings, manifested spiritual, eschatological and mystical tendencies throughout Russian religious thought and church life. One can also emphasize the schism's position in the political and cultural backgrounds of its time: increasing Western influence, secularization, and attempts to subordinate the Church to the state. Nevertheless, the Old Believers sought above all to defend and preserve the purity of the Orthodox faith, embodied in the old rituals, which inspired many to strive against Patriarch Nikon’s church reforms even unto death.
Outsiders have often depicted the Old Believers' movement as an obscure, fanatic faith in rituals that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of ignorant people. All people of that time, however, felt that ritual expressed the very essence of their faith. Old Believers hold that the preservation of a certain "microclimate" that enables the salvation of one's soul requires not only living by the commandments of Christ, but also carefully preserving Church tradition, which contains the spiritual power and knowledge of past centuries, embodied in external forms.
The circumstance that the church reforms of Nikon considered mainly liturgical texts and rituals, sometimes leads to a view of the Old believers faith as being extremely conservative, not able to develop, and preferring form to content. From an Old Believers' point of view, the idea of contents a priori prevailing over form appears simplistic. To illustrate their response, consider poetry. If one converts a poem into prose, the "contents" of the poem may remain intact, but the poem will lose its charm, emotional impact, and much of its ability to influence an audience's reaction; moreover, the poem will essentially no longer exist. In the case of religious rituals, form and contents do not just form two separable, autonomous entities, but connect with each other through complex relationships, including theological, psychological, phenomenal, aesthetic and historic dimensions.
These aspects, in their turn, play a role in the perception of these rituals by the faithful and in their spiritual lives. Considering the fact that Church rituals from their very beginning have had a connection with doctrinal truth, changing these rituals can have a tremendous effect on religious conscience and a severe impact on the faithful.
Nevertheless, centuries of persecution and the nature of their origin have made some Old Believers very culturally conservative and mistrustful of anything they see as insufficiently Russian. Some Old Believers go so far as to consider any pre-Nikonian Orthodox Russian practice or artifact as exclusively theirs, denying that the Russian Orthodox Church has any claims upon a history before Patriarch Nikon.
However, Russian economic history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries reveals the Old-Believer merchant families as more flexible and more open to innovations while creating factories and starting the first Russian industries. This observation stands in apparent contradiction of the official doctrines of the Old Believers' faith, but centuries of struggle developed in them a habit of working and living without great concern for the State or for mainstream cultural influences. Old Believers also lent money to each other with a much lower interest rate than any financial institutions and individuals, which helped them to arrange a cross-financing network and to accumulate capital.