© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/18763316-04302004 brill.com/ruhi russian history 43 (2016) 181-208 Orthodox Old Belief: Edinoverie as a Movement for Religious Rejuvenation in the Russian Church, 1905–1918 James White Senior Research Fellow, Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg james.white@eui.eu Abstract This article will analyze edinoverie reform in the early twentieth century. Edinoverie was a uniate movement that joined former Old Believer schismatics to the Orthodox Church. Its unique position between the Church and the schism led to a feeling of in- security and alienation from the ecclesiastical administration among the edinovertsy: in 1905, this culminated in an attempt to reform the bases of edinoverie. A party of edinovertsy led by Father Simeon Shleev proposed an alternative vision of Orthodoxy wherein edinoverie’s Old Believer legacy would be used to rejuvenate the Church and even Russia itself. However, like some of the other ecclesiastical reform movements with which Shleev’s party was connected, edinoverie reform failed to come to fruition because of the hostile atmosphere of Church politics between 1905 and 1918 and the long-standing problems within edinoverie itself. Keywords Russian Orthodoxy – edinoverie - Old Belief – Church reform * The completion of this article was supported by the grant of the Russian Federation for at- tracting leading scholars to Russian educational establishments of higher professional edu- cation, scientific institutions of state academies of science and state academic centres of the Russian Federation (Laboratory for the Study of Primary Sources, Ural Federal University). Agreement no. 14.A12.31.0004 from 26.06.2013.