Icons from the early 16th century were a rallying
point for the Old Believers.
Subject to severe persecution all over Russia, Old Believers were not allowed to live in St Petersburg during the first decades of its existence. Thus, according to the synodal order of 1732, the Old Believers found in St Petersburg were to be sent to distant monastery prisons "to be kept there in chains and in hard work." (Khristianskoye Chtenie, 1887)
Beginning in the 1760s, city authorities became more liberal and the number of the Old Believers living in the new Russian capital gradually increased.
Many Old Believers lived in the district of Okhta where something still remains of an Old Believers cemetery, near Novocherkassky Prospect.
In that area, you can see the former almshouse constructed in the very beginning of the 20th century to replace another almshouse building dating back to the 1820s. The original building was constructed by Old Believers and, in fact, it was not an almshouse, but an undercover convent.
Since Old Believers were not allowed to have their own convents or monasteries, they used almshouses for fronts. In 1854, the convent and its chapel were liquidated by the authorities and the building was given to a legitimate almshouse belonging to the State Russian Orthodox Church.
Another clandestine Old Believers convent and monastery ran in a similar "almshouse" near the Volkovo Cemetery, where more than 200 nuns and monks worked under cover at the charity house.
But in the 1850s, severe religious persecution resulted in the liquidation of the convent, monastery and large chapel in the building, which was handed over to one of the charity societies of the State Russian Orthodox Church. It then operated under the name of the Volkovo Almshouse.
In the late 1880s, however, Old Believers got the authorities' permission to build a new almshouse in the neighborhood.
But the huge new building made the comparatively small Volkovo Alms-House with its chapel of the Assumption invisible from the street. "Insulted by this outrage" (as it was written in a contemporary newspaper), the icon of Our Savior fell from one of the walls of the chapel of the Assumption.
Of course, the new almshouse was also nothing but a convent and a monastery under the same roof. There were also two chapels. Both the convent and the monastery were liquidated in the 1920s, and the building was later turned into a pediatric hospital.
Another clandestine Old Believers convent was at 19 Volkovskaya Ulitsa (now Ulitsa Koli Tomchaka), in a large house belonging to a rich merchant. Also under cover of an almshouse, the convent operated until the 1920s. More than 100 nuns from different parts of Russia lived there.
Icons from the early 16th century were a rallying
point for the Old Believers.
The chapel was so beautiful and contained so many old icons that even some Soviet art critics began to implore the city authorities to leave the chapel intact when it was closed several years after the liquidation of the convent.
But everything was in vain: the icons were confiscated and sold to foreign collectors, the building of the convent and the chapel were demolished.
These were the biggest and most famous establishments. There were more than a dozen smaller convents and monasteries in St Petersburg with scores of nuns and monks.
Some of them were quickly liquidated by the authorities, while others survived the persecution and became almost official after 1905 when the persecution of Old Believers ceased (although it was still not officially allowed to found Old Believer monasteries and convents in St Petersburg).
Under the Soviets, Old Believers were persecuted together with other religious people.
The 1920s saw the destruction of all these centers of Old Believers' monastic life in the city. Many monks and nuns were shot, arrested or exiled.
Others were forced to leave the city for fear of imprisonment and to find refuge in the forests of the Urals and Siberia. But even there, the NKVD found them.
Some Old Believers, knowing they were about to be arrested, followed the traditions of their 17th-century forebearers by locking themselves in houses and setting them on fire.
From 1932-33 in just one region of the Urals, more than 1,000 Old Believer monks and nuns committed suicide by self-immolation or by drowning themselves.
Those who remained were shot or died in labor camps. Very few survived after two or three decades of imprisonment.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, hardly a dozen Old Believer nuns and monks were hiding in the city. The families in whose houses or apartments they illegally lived could be arrested if they were discovered by the militia.
But at the risk of their freedom and even their lives, some people still hid nuns and monks in their houses and apartments.
Sometimes, in somebody's private little wooden house, in the outskirts of the city, two or three nuns or monks lived at one time.
Strictly speaking, these were also clandestine convents and monasteries, but of course, they were very few.