In interpreting the entrepreneurial rise of the Old Believers, one must turn to the history of the group since its condemnation by the Council in 1666–7. It is a dark and sorrowful story, the first part of which—some four decades—was marked by monstrous cruelties. Violence began almost at once. A fortress-like island monastery in the far north (Solovki) was stormed by government troops after a siege that lasted for seven years. As the government embarked upon the repressions in and around Moscow, the Old Believers began to flee away from the center in all directions of the compass: westward to the densely-wooded areas of Belorussia and northern Ukraine, beyond the boundaries of the State, southward to the frontier areas on the Don and Kuban rivers, northward toward the Arctic shores, and eastward into the steppes and forests beyond the River Volga. In the eighties, they took some part in a military mutiny in the capital and caused considerable fermentation among the Don cossacks. By that time, the leaders of the Old Believers with the Priest Avvakum at their head had been burned at the stake after having been imprisoned for fifteen years.

From then on the ferocity of the persecutions continued unabated. The decree of 1685, issued by the Regent Sophia, sanctioned burning at the stake for those who preached Old Belief and refused to repent after thrice repeated torture. Those who repented were to be sent to monasteries, the unmarried among them ‘forever’, and the relapse into Old Belief was to be punished by death.