To see Russia’s past – or perhaps its alternative future that has never been realized – you have to go to Lipovania, a country that does not exist on the maps, but whose borders are well aware of its inhabitants. It is located in the Danube delta, in the province of Dobrogea in the territory of Romania, but it looks like a distant and idyllic Russia like a traditional fairy tale: the streets of the villages walk women in long colored skirts and scarves covering their hair gathered in braids, and men wearing long beards and blouses tied at the waist with cords, a Russian peasant look of yesteryear that seemed old-fashioned even when Leo Tolstoy had adopted it amidst the scandal and the emotion of the tsar’s aristocracy. They are the Lipovenians, who fish with trawl nets from small boats that have remained unchanged over the centuries, live in blue-painted wooden houses with sloping roofs and verandas on stilts, and pray in Russian and Old Slavic in churches with onion domes to a god all theirs, that god who forced them to flee Russia in the seventeenth century in order to keep their faith now engraved by the tsars of Moscow.
The year of the schism
The Lipovenians are old believers, the Orthodox of the ancient rite who never recognized the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon, introduced around 1650 to homologate the Russian church to the Greek tradition, in the first impulse towards the geopolitical expansion that in the following centuries would be became a constant streak in Moscow’s aspirations. The schism that followed led to a civil war that saw two traditions and two different visions collide: the “vertical of power” of a patriarchate closely linked to the power of the Tsar and the self-government of the communities, the imperial perspective against the local dimension, but also an aspiration to globalization and modernization rather than a much more indigenous roots. According to the writer Alexei Ivanov – who studied Old Believers and transformed their history and culture into the backdrop against which the protagonists of his novel-thriller move The cynocephalus (Voland editions 2020) – schismatics embodied one of Russia’s unfinished alternative pasts, along with the Cossacks, the merchant city-republics of Novgorod and the industrial civilization of the Ural Mountains.
In the forests and taiga
A theory of political fiction and fictional history, which however acquires a sense when one observes the tenacious resistance of the Lipovens, in preserving their traditions and in looking for a model of survival that makes them independent from political power. The schismatics fled from the persecutions of the tsars and official orthodoxy, some hiding in the forests of the Volga and in the Siberian taiga, some choosing to escape from the Romanov empire, headed for Europe, to the Holy Land or even to the New World. The first Old Believers arrived in the Danube delta just a few years after the schism, intertwining their fate with the tormented one of Eastern Europe: over the centuries, their lands have passed from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the principality of Moldavia to the Turks, up to to the regime of Ceaucescu who had tried to assimilate them by changing their surnames, from Russian to Romanians. Today the Lipoveni – a name that, according to some scholars, comes from that of their leader Filippo, and according to others derives from “lipa”, the lime trees among which they had ambushed – are about 35 thousand, but unofficial estimates speak of at least 100 thousand old believers who have chosen to blend in with the population of Romania.
The Protestant echo
Hiding and Surviving: Four centuries of persecution have produced a pattern that Old Believers still follow today. Horizontal communities, which elected their own spiritual and secular leaders, did not have ecclesiastical hierarchies, and above all they preached self-sufficiency and work ethic, having to survive in open hostility with the central state: the Lipovens still tend to produce everything they consume , including strictly handcrafted candles, and to practice community welfare that allows, for example, widows to move to special homes in the village, instead of relying on state hospices. An approach that recalls in many ways aspects of Protestantism, and perhaps it is not at all a paradox that the great tycoons of early Russian capitalism, the “oligarchs” of the early 1900s were mostly old believers, from the first Ryabushinsky car manufacturer to textile producers Schukin and Morozov, who have gone down in history for their art collections which then attracted thousands of tourists to the Hermitage in Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Ivan Morozov’s collection of impressionists and post-impressionists is on display until February 22 at the Louis Vuitton foundation in Paris, and his biography written by the Russian historian Natalia Semenova (Morozov and his brothers. History of a Russian dynasty and a rediscovered collection, Johan & Levi 2020) tells of the tenacious and independent spirit that prompted a grandson of peasants from the Russian province to bet on an art that at the time even scandalized many Parisians.
The communitarian utopia
The homes for the widows of the Lipovans are rooted in the same communitarian vision of the Morozovs who built the first workers’ citadels with hospitals, schools and even theaters in their factories. The boarding school for Morozov’s workers in Tver ‘, a jewel of industrial archeology from the early 1900s, is now dilapidated and in danger of disappearing, just as the communities of the Danube risk being swallowed up, after centuries of resistance. The young Lipovans are now Romanian, although modern and ecclesiastical Russian is still studied in schools. Moscow has taken the Romanian Lipovan community (there are villages of Old Believers also in Romania and in Russia itself, where some exiles returned after the Second World War) under its protective wing, but is more interested in the ethnic and linguistic link with the mother country, while the tradition of the old believers favors the religious one. For the village elders, identity is dictated by faith, “we are Russians of the old rite”, they say, and there is no contradiction between the spiritual homeland of a now vanished Russia like Atlantis and a secular homeland in Romania , as long as it guarantees that freedom of worship that the schismatics have pursued at the cost of an escape that lasted centuries. For many younger Lipovans, identity shifts from more folkloric aspects such as clothes and dances, into a joyfully popular religiosity that ignores liturgical divisions and the tragedy of a schism on which the patriarchate of Moscow has only half revoked the curse. century ago. Too late to heal the rift, and recover that past which now risks turning into a tourist attraction, or disappearing into memories.
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