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Old Believers are a branch of Eastern Orthodox Christians in Russia who maintain the liturgical and ritual practices of the Russian Orthodox Church while rejecting the so-called reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow starting in 1652. The most prominant early leaders of the Old Believers were Avvakum Petrov and Ivan Neronov, members of the Zealots of Piety who along with the Old Believers held that the new ecumenical reforms of the Russian Orthodox were heretical and in keeping with the arrival of the Antichrist of Revelation. Old Believers were thereafter considered anathematized (accursed by God) and were greatly persecuted by the new Russian Orthodox Church as a result and many fled to establish colonies and monasteries in the wilderness.
The break with the new ‘Reformed’ Russian Orthodox church, was referred to as a “cleaving” and it all began with resisting the accommodation of Russian piety to the contemporary forms of Greek Orthodox worship. The state church led by Nikon and the Tsar of Russia condemned the Old Rite and their new form of Russian Orthodox sought to revitalize the Russian Church through the ecumenical Eastern Orthodoxy of the Greek Church, introducing various Greek reforms to the liturgy which the Old Believers despised.
Old Believers held to the belief that the pre-reform rites were the authentic practices of the early church. Their theology is characterized by this strict adherence to pre-reform traditions which differed from ‘reform’ Russian Orthodox in such things as: the spelling of the name Jesus, the method of carrying out the sign of the cross, number of Prosphora (temple bread) and the direction of the ceremonial procession (counter-clockwise vs clockwise). The rest of the essentials and major non-essentials still remain the same as the new Russian Orthodox.
There was widespread persecution of Old Believers for nearly 250 years but it finally came to an end with Tsar Nicholas II’s Edict of Tolerance in 1905. The total number of Old Believers at the beginning of the 20th century is estimated to be between 10 and 20 million. Persecution was renewed in the atheist Soviet era where anywhere from 8 to 17 million Old Believer Russian Orthodox were slaughter at the hands of atheists (along with many other forms of Jews and Christians). This horrific and largely unreported genocide went unreported by the atheist media in the West. This renewed persecution finally ended during Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms of the Soviet Union.
Strangely enough, atheists today still try to claim that the cause of all wars is religion but fail to mention the genocides of the far-left communist atheists of the 20th century.
Today, 110 years after the atheists came to power in Russia, the number of Old Believers stands at only 2 to 3 million, most of which are in Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, and the United States.
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