The attitude of members of the Old Believers Church to participation in the Great Patriotic War was by no means passive, but also ambiguous. Documentary evidence provides numerous examples of various spiritual and civic attitudes in this regard.
How the Old Believer Church lived before the war and in its first months
Leading researcher and chief archivist of the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg, Doctor of Historical Sciences Mikhail Shkarovsky writes that in the 30s most of the Old Believer church hierarchs, including the future Archbishop of Moscow and All Russia of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Orthodox Church, Vladyka Irinarkh, were in prisons and camps, many were shot. However, in 1941, the Soviet government agreed to the restoration of the Old Believer Archdiocese.
Erected to the rank of Archbishop of Moscow and All Russia, Irinarchus, as well as other hierarchs of the Old Believers, began to urge their flock to stand up with the whole world to defend the Fatherland from the "viper and Basilisk of the Teutonic" - to go to the front or join partisan detachments. There is a document in the Russian archives - the Christmas message of Irinarkh (1942), in which he encourages Old Believers who are already serving in the Red Army and calls on other believers to follow their example.
For the needs of the front, the Old Believers collected money in the rear (they transferred more than a million rubles to the Defense Fund). Irinarch's patriotism was even appreciated by the main atheist of the Soviet Union, Emelyan Yaroslavsky, who in 1941 wrote an article in Izvestia with completely uncharacteristic positive assessments of the contribution of believers to strengthening the country's defense capability (there is a hypothesis that he was urged to publish this document Stalin himself).
Were the Old Believers Nazi collaborators?
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In the book of Igor Ermolov, Candidate of Historical Sciences, which mentions the documented facts of collaborationism, there is information about the Old Believers who were accomplices of the Nazis. In particular, the author reports that the cooperation of the Old Believers with the Germans in the northwestern regions of Russia was especially active. The Nazis used these believers to identify the deployment of partisan detachments.
Dr. Mark Elliott, an American expert on the modern history of Europe and Russia, writes that in one of the Old Believer villages of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War, for some time there was the so-called Republic of Zuev, led by Mikhail Zuev. Zuev united around himself the same as himself, old believers-like-minded people repressed by the Soviet regime. The common believers paid the Germans a food tax and in return the Germans allowed them to live their lives, to open churches. The "republicans" did not allow partisans to come to them. The writer Boris Sokolov, whom many Russian historians consider a hoaxer, claims that after Zuev and his supporters fled with the retreating Germans when the Red Army approached,part of the remaining Old Believers went into the forests with the weapons left to them by the Nazis and continued to fight the Bolsheviks until 1947.
Religious scholar Marina Malafeeva notes the active participation in the partisan struggle of the Moldavian Old Believers (Moldova was occupied by the Romanian troops in the Great Patriotic War) - many Old Believer villages almost completely went into the forests, and the sketes of believers turned into places of basing for partisan detachments.
Nikolay Syromyatnikov