The Church Schism of the 17th Century and Its Political and Legal Consequences for the Russian Empire

The article highlights the main directions of the influence of the schism in the Russian Orthodox Church in the mid‑17th century on the political and legal development of the Russian state and the contribution of the church schism to the collapse of the Russian Empire. Relying on the comparative diachronic method of historical and legal research, which allows for the analysis of the political‑legal aspects of the phenomenon of the schism in its historical dynamics, the author demonstrates the process of the confessional schism transforming into a more extensive phenomenon, which in modern historiography is often interpreted as the Russian sociocultural schism. The thesis is substantiated that the church schism of the 17th century for the first time exposed one of the fundamental problems of Russian history associated with the difficulties of solving the problem of socio‑cultural modernization of the country while preserving the people’s root spiritual identity. Overcoming this contradiction between two opposing imperatives of Russian history required the creation of political and legal conditions for the inclusion of the broad masses in modernization processes. However, due to a number of reasons (including subjective ones, reflecting the specifics of the legal policy towards the Old Believers of various representatives of the Romanov dynasty), the country’s development went in a different direction, and the church schism played a negative role in these processes, excluding for a long time from the cultural, economic and political life of the country a significant part of the population that had a high spiritual passionarity. This problem is considered in light of the urgent task of ensuring the general civil socio‑cultural unity of the Russian nation. Based on the results of the study, it was concluded that the objective difficulties of the historical development of the country, aggravated by the unsuccessful configuration of a number of subjective factors, led to the fact that the schism in the confessional sphere that occurred in the middle of the 17th century eventually grew into a large‑scale socio‑cultural phenomenon that made a significant contribution to the collapse of the Russian Empire.