Josephans and Non-Possessors (Trans-Volga Elders) during the Reign of Ivan IV

Abstract

In Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish I contradicted myself in discussing the possible existence of church parties in Muscovy. After accepting Ostrowski’s argument that Iosif Volotskii and Nil Sorskii did not belong to antagonistic “parties,” I followed Goldfrank’s earlier publications that there were Josephan and Non-Possessor “parties” after the deaths of their “founders.” I proposed that the Josephans were an old-boy network in Iosif’s time and then promptly dropped that concept in discussing the rest of the sixteenth century. This article attempts to rectify those errors by consistently applying the concept of old-boy network to the Josephans throughout the sixteenth century. Because the persecution of heretics is central to the paradigm of the Josephans as a “party,” this reconsideration entailed engaging the very notion of “heresy” in the Russian Orthodox Church at the time. It also proposes that the paradigm of antagonistic church parties, the Josephans and the Non-Possessors / Trans-Volga Elders, originated in Prince Andrei Kurbsky’s History of the Grand Prince of Moscow.