The “real” religious practices for official Orthodoxy, as Old Belie
vers say, seem to be connected to the Orthodox holydays, saints and
visiting a church. Old Believers do not venerate saints that appeared in
Orthodoxy after 1666. In contrast to the official Orthodoxy, based on
a church cult, Ural Old Believers have a book cult. The Gospel Truth,
they say, is only contained in the holy books, written in the Old Church
Slavonic language, which guard faith from the secular world full of
temptation.
4 Golovnev, “Healthy life to you”, 52.
104 ELENA GOLOVNEVA


Between the end of the 18" — the first half of the 19" century books
for spiritual leaders of Old Believers consist of rules and regulations.
They did not only explain how to keep order in a monastic cell, baptize,
etc.; but also contained other kinds of information pertaining to which
medicines are “clean” and which are “unclean”, what to do at different
times during the day, where to put the dishes, where to hang clothes,
etc. Due to the importance of the Word in these religious communities
Old-Believers’ culture could be called, for the most part, bookish.
One of the peculiarities of the religious self-consciousness of the
Ural Old Believers is non-acceptance of the chaos in data and morality,
generated by IT and by the processes of globalization. In Old Believers’
houses there are no TV-sets, because “if one watches TV he/she does
not think about a prayer”. Especially devilish digital video is dange
rous. One of the main things, connected to the modern eschatology, is
a computer. The computer, in the judgment of the Old Believers, is the
visible embodiment of the Antichrist, whose name is inscribed as 666’.
