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R   E   V   I   E   W 

 
Russian Old Believers:  Three Videos 

Old Believers. Directed by Margaret Hixon. Berkeley, Calif.: University of 

California, Extension Media Center, 1981. 29 minutes, VHS;  The Old Believers. 

Directed by John Paskievich. National Film Board of Canada. 1989. 57 minutes, VHS; 

Savoniha, a Siberian Old Believer. A film by Costanzo Allione. Available from Mystic 

Fire Video, www.mysticfire.com. 1997. 30 minutes,VHS. 

 

For a folklorist, the term “Old Believer” is about as helpful as the term “Protestant.” Old 

Believers may inhabit isolated wilderness settlements, living every detail of daily life in 

accordance with hallowed tradition, or they may live in a Novosibirsk apartment, adopting their 

neighbors’ norms as their own, pretty much undistinguishable from the society around them. 

What makes them Old Believers, of course, is their faithfulness to Russian Orthodox 

Church life as it existed prior to liturgical reforms introduced in the seventeenth century. 

Historically, Old Believers’ adherence to the  “old,” pre-reform liturgy often included adherence 

to what they understood as “old” ways of life, most famously illustrated in their rejection of 

western habits (such as shaving off beards) introduced by Peter the Great. Thus, their liturgical 

conservatism was often part of a broader cultural conservatism. 

Under intermittent persecution from the Russian government and the official, reformed 

church, many Old Believers fled to isolated regions of Russia or left Russia altogether.  This 

dispersal, plus internal divisions within Old Belief, resulted in hundreds of small Old Believer 

communities scattered around the world; more or less in touch with each other, more or less in 

agreement with each another, and more or less culturally conservative. Among these, it is the 

culturally conservative communities that have attracted the most scholarly and popular attention, 

as they often preserve colorful aspects of Russian traditional culture which have disappeared 

elsewhere. 

The videos under review represent part of the popular examination of Old Believers. None 

of the film-makers involved have any scholarly training in Russian traditional culture. All made 

use of scholarly consultants, but the videos are essentially journalism – produced by generalists 

SEEFA Journal 2001, Vol. VI No. 2



 

 

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for a general audience. All meet high technical standards and all are easily accessible to the 

English-speaking viewer. 

Old Believers, directed by Margaret Hixon, modestly sets out to document a wedding in 

the Old Believer settlements of Marion County, Oregon, in the years 1979 and 1980. Set in the 

berry farms of the Willamette Valley, it records the preparations, celebration, and significance of 

one real-life wedding. Along the way, the film briefly touches on a wealth of traditional arts (such 

as embroidery, clothing construction, weaving, vernacular architecture, folk song, and foodways) 

and beautifully presents a whole series of rituals; the “devichnik” or engagement party, “selling” 

the bride and her braid, the wedding feast, the delivery of the dowry and subsequent bargaining, 

the ceremony of bestowing gifts and advice on the newlyweds, and tossing the groom’s father to 

the ceiling.  

The narration throughout is unobtrusive, supplying just enough detail to let general 

audiences feel in touch with the action on the screen. While the narrator supplies some basic 

historical background, we mainly hear the Old Believers themselves (in English, with subtitles or 

with voice-over translations), as they describe wedding preparations, hopes for the future, or 

memories of life before coming to the USA. Traditional Russian costume fills every frame, and 

Old Believer voices grace the soundtrack with sacred and secular song. The viewer feels like a 

guest in a foreign home at a busy and happy time, with the narrator as a friend who can explain 

briefly what is going on, but who has no time for lengthy lectures on cultural assimilation.  

This topic does appear, but only momentarily, just as the “pech’” (Russian stove) and the 

“zybka” (hanging cradle) and the “pel’meni” (Russian ravioli) appear in glimpses.  Viewers alert 

to assimilation issues will catch several fleeting glimpses – in the words of the bride and the 

weaver and the cantor’s son, and in the “Have a Pepsi Day!” t-shirt among the handmade 

“rubashki” (traditional-style Russian shirt). But, resolved to let the Old Believers speak for 

themselves, Hixon refrains from forecasts and pronouncements. The narration ends with the 

words: “Like their ancestors before them, the children face challenges of their own. And life goes 

on.” 

In Canada, however, the end is near. In John Paskievich’s film The Old Believers, we see 

three Old Believer women, in traditional dress, strolling through the glittering West Edmonton 

Mall. The eldest takes in the glamour, the frivolity, the lasciviousness of the whole scene, and 

remarks that “when the end of the world comes, it will probably start here.” 



 

 

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Director, writer and narrator of The Old Believers, Paskievich has a great deal to say about 

the place where Old Believers encounter the outside world. His film is at once a vehicle for these 

comments, a documentary about a year in the life of the Reutov family, and a presentation of Old 

Believer history, ritual, and theology. A large amount to pack into sixty minutes, and the results 

are uneven. 

The presentation of Old Believer history, theology and ritual is by and large accurate, 

although pronouncements such as that “all Old Believer houses are built beside a river” cause the 

informed viewer to wince. Still, some essentials such as “the past is always present” and the 

concept of the physical world as a window through which we can glimpse heaven are presented 

accurately enough.  

His documentary of a year in the life of the Old Believer Reutov family on their remote 

Alberta farm is also largely successful. We see the family matriarch consulting the calendar to 

determine what food is canonical for that day, girls eating raw eggs at the start of a singing party, 

harvest scenes, Easter celebrations, and non-Old Believer guests being served far from the family 

table.  We see children and adults gathered to sing dukhovnye stikhi (spiritual songs) from a book. 

We see the men going off to the woods for a week of forestry work. The shots of forestry camp 

life in the woods and slaughtering the pig in a muddy farmyard convey the gritty physicality of 

life on the land. These are marvelous scenes. 

However, Paskievich’s heart lies in examining the zone where Old Believers and outsiders 

interact. He examines the walls Old Believers erect when they meet the outside world – walls of 

ritual purity, isolationism, exclusivity and “stubborn certainty” in matters theological. He also 

examines the reaction of the outside word to Old Believers – historically, persecution under the 

tsars and the Communists; and in modern North America, a kind of benign neglect combined with 

the seductive alternative of a materialistic, individualistic way of life. 

This seduction occasionally proves powerful enough to break through the Old Believers’ 

walls, and Paskievich dwells on schoolchildren trying to reconcile physics with Biblical 

teachings, on a Reutov daughter who married out of the faith, on the rock music infiltrating into 

engagement festivities. Presently Paskievich mounts a pulpit, telling “us” that in comparison to 

the Old Believers, “we” are like children with no memories and no purpose. He equates “our” 

society’s physical pollution with the moral pollution that Old Believers strenuously try to avoid. 

It is all too much. 

SEEFA Journal 2001, Vol. VI No. 2



 

 

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This pompous attitude constitutes a real shortcoming, as do the disingenuous use of 

historical images and inappropriate soundtrack music. It is still a worthwhile film, however, one 

which will provoke much discussion. 

In Savoniha, A Siberian Old Believer, we meet a ninety-year old Semeiskii Old Believer 

woman whose experience of war, revolution, religious repression and general hard times led to a 

profound understanding of forgiveness. Savoniha’s earthy, practical, inward peace suffuses the 

film as thoroughly as the late autumn sunlight and the floating, polyphonic songs on the 

soundtrack. And while Italian filmmaker Allione is essaying a spiritual portrait of an individual, 

not an ethnographic portrait of a group, there is much here to interest the folklorist. 

While Savoniha’s translated words reveal her personal history and spiritual depth, the 

camera follows her and her neighbors about their daily business in the Siberian Old Believer 

village of Kuitun. We get a close look at the hills, the fields, the architecture, the herds of horses 

and the muddy streets. Villagers harvest cabbage, feed the pigs, milk the cows, herd the livestock 

from horseback. One woman blesses water drawn from her well, then sprinkles it on the buildings 

of the family compound.  

This is a culture where the spiritual and the physical interpenetrate to the point of blending. 

Savoniha makes clear that her clothing and amber jewelry are as much a part of her religion as the 

words of Old Believer preachers and the birch tree to which she makes her confession. “Earth is 

our heaven.”  she declares, and this bent old woman, at the end of a turbulent and difficult life, 

quietly gives us all a lesson in forgiveness. 

 

Margaret McKibben 

North Seattle Community College