The Old Believers in Imperial Russia: oppression, opportunism and religious identity in Tsarist Moscow

'Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth'. So spoke Russian monk Hegumen Filofei of Pskov in 1510, proclaiming Muscovite Russia as heirs to the legacy of the Roman Empire following the collapse of the Byzantine Empire.

The so-called 'Third Rome Doctrine' spurred the creation of the Russian Orthodox Church, although just a century later a further schism occurred, with the Old Believers (or 'Old Ritualists') challenging Patriarch Nikon's liturgical and ritualistic reforms and laying their own claim to the mantle of Roman legacy.

While scholars have commonly painted the subsequent history of the Old Believers as one of survival in the face of persistent persecution at the hands of both tsarist and church authorities, Peter De Simone here offers a more nuanced picture.