An Argument Over Two Fingers Versus Three Split the Russian Church for 300 Years

Patriarch Nikon of Moscow took office in 1652 and immediately began a project of aligning Russian Orthodox practice with the Greek liturgical norms used at Constantinople. The changes were small in print and enormous in implication for the people whose lives they governed. The sign of the cross, Russians had been making with two fingers — index and middle, with the thumb folded across the ring and little finger — to symbolize the two natures of Christ. Nikon prescribed three fingers, in the Greek style, to represent the Trinity. Liturgical processions were redirected. The spelling of Iisus was added to the older Isus. The number of prosphora (offering loaves) used during the Eucharist was changed.

The response was a popular religious crisis. Many Russian peasants and clergy refused. The Great Moscow Synod of 1666–67 formally anathematized the dissenters, declaring them schismatics — raskolniki. Imperial enforcement followed. The Solovetsky Monastery, on an island in the White Sea, expelled its reformist abbot and held out under armed siege from Tsar Alexei's troops between 1668 and January 1676; when the walls were breached, almost all of its remaining several hundred monks were executed.

The most famous Old Believer leader, the archpriest Avvakum, refused to recant under multiple imprisonments and exiles. He was kept for fifteen years in a frozen dugout at Pustozersk on the Arctic coast, where he wrote a startling first-person spiritual autobiography that survives. On April 14, 1682, Avvakum and three companions were burned at the stake. The Old Believer communities, splintered into a dozen subgroups, persisted underground. Demographers estimated 10 to 20 million Old Believers in the early twentieth century. The Russian Orthodox Church formally lifted the anathema only in 1971.