The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

This article primarily focuses on the “non-payers” religious movement, which appeared in the Urals in the 1860s. This paper highlights the early period of the “non-payers” history, when the movement, which appeared due to peasants’ conditions of living after their liberation from serfdom, gets religious traits. In this article the mechanism for interaction between material and spiritual factors, which led to emergence and development of religious societies, is described. The work was made on the basis of the archival records which are introduced into the academic circulation for the first time. Special attention is paid to “non-payers” behavioral practices. Their actions and activities are studied in the context of changes of religious beliefs about the world around them. The article concludes that there was a high possibility that socio-econoic issatisfaction in the Russian Empire of the 19th century was supplemented by religious discontent, because cultural standards of the traditional society contributed to predominance of a person’s irrational interpretation of the real world.