Living in the End Times

In the Danube delta between Romania and Ukraine, a shrinking community of Russian Old Believers - Orthodox Christians whose rejection of seventeenth-century religious reforms eventually drove many of them out of tsarist Russia - has struggled for survival, withdrawn from the world while simultaneously trying to engage with it. Waves of social change, from internal migration and fragmentation to external secularization and modernization, have reinforced this community's dedication to old Orthodox rites and customs, as well as their long-standing conviction that the end times - and their salvation - are imminent.
Living in the End Times offers an in-depth ethnographic and historical exploration of the persistence of this community in modernity. Author Vlad Naumescu examines their ways of making history, pursuing continuity, and inscribing their historical experience into a narrative of radical hope. The interwoven life stories of the Old Believers challenge wider dichotomies of secular and religious, Soviet and post-Soviet, and continuity and fragmentation, revealing a community whose conviction that the present moment is "the time that is left" creates a historical identity built on the future as much as it is on the past. Against the threats of spiritual doubt, changing practice, and an aging priesthood that have defined centuries of religious crisis within and beyond all of Christianity, Romania's Old Belief has already provided its adherents with a horizon of possibilities.
Moving beyond their initial appearance as an isolated community "stuck in time," Living in the End Times reveals the Old Believers as active historical agents, inviting us to reconsider the natures of orthodoxy, modernity, and historicity.

Vlad Naumescu is Professor of Anthropology at Central European University. He is author of Modes of Religiosity in Eastern Christianity: Religious Processes and Social Change in Ukraine.