The Preobrazhenskoe Cemetery

Chapter 2 turns to the other main group of Old Believers, the bespopovtsy, and to their religious and economic centre in Moscow: the Preobrazhenskoe Cemetery. It examines the growing incentive, not unique to Russia, to regulate and supervise the lives of religious dissenters to ensure that their communities were not legally anomalous. The bespopovtsy, and in particular the Preobrazhenskoe Cemetery, became the focus of these attempts due to a number of social disorders that were associated with their rejection of priests and marriage. The resulting tensions between legality, civil rights, and religious toleration came to a head in the 1840s under the modernizing Minister of Internal Affairs Lev Perovskii. His attempts to bring the bespopovtsy under control were frustrated by disagreements within government about where the limits of toleration lay, and also led the government on a collision course with the powerful Old Believer merchant elite.