The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694-1855

Robert O. Crummey was a historian of Russia, and this academic book, published by University of Wisconsin Press, is a detailed history of the Vyg community, a major Old Believer settlement that formed after the seventeenth century schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, examining how the community organized itself and negotiated survival under an often hostile Russian state. Its strength is close archival reconstruction of one specific, well documented Old Believer community, showing concretely how apocalyptic religious conviction translated into actual communal and economic organization. Its limit is that it focuses on this one community and period, so the broader and more varied history of Old Believer groups elsewhere in Russia needs separate sources to cover fully.