GLOBAL MODERNITY AND OLD BELIEVERS. AMBIVALENCE OF INTERACTION

Globalization is the main trend and reality of the modern world social processes, which is opposed by a national and cultural, but above all, religious tradition. Globalization and traditionalism have nonlinear vectors and ambivalent models of interaction, which is most vividly traced in the study of the history and a current state of the Old Believers in Russia and abroad. The tragic events of the split of the Russian Church put the Old Believers outside the law, caused them to flee to the borderlands of the state and beyond. The flight took the character of migration flows, shaped the transnational ethno-confessional Russian religious diaspora of Old Believers in different parts of the world. The modern Old Believers are in a difficult search for self-determination in modern times answering global challenges in very polar variations: migration/archaization, glocality/entrepreneurship, literacy/strength in faith, practicality and activity/orientation to spiritual needs. In general, the Old Believers have adapted the globalizing modernity in accordance with their ideas. If for most of their history the Old Believers were perceived as a countercultural phenomenon, marginal to the dominant culture, be it Orthodox or Soviet, now the Old Believers are taking shape of a rather noticeable religious traditionalist subculture with a high adaptive potential in the context of globalization.