History of the Russian Old Believers on Polish Lands

The present book by the famous Polish historian and philologist Eugeniusz Iwaniec—an expert on the history and culture of the Old Believers in Poland and Lithuania—was first published in Polish in Warsaw in 1977.  This important scholarly event immediately became a social legend for more than a decade: after a long silence in People's Poland, the resident Old Believers, with their rich cultural and folklore traditions, were being spoken about publicly and vividly as a religious society.

In the 1960s and 1970s in Soviet Lithuania, long-time Russian inhabitants—for the most part Old Believers—were spoken of only as a unique cultural, but not religious, phenomenon.  Then in the 1990s in Lithuania, where almost 9,000 Pomortsy were forcibly relocated from Poland in 1941, the Old Believers themselves translated the Polish original of this book into Russian, and the circulated typescript of the book became a source of knowledge for them stimulated a living memory of their religious identity and roots in Poland.  In 2019, this book was first published in Russian in Russia.  Thus, to this day, Iwaniec 1977 remains a classic in historiography on this topic.

This English translation, prepared by Prof. Jeffrey Holdeman and Dr. Bethany Romashov (with a new foreword, comments, and subject index), is highly important.  It will open a significant chapter of history to a wide English-language audience, including the Old Believers in the eastern United States, many of whom are descended from ancestors from Polish lands.

—Dr Grigorii Potashenko, Assoc. Prof., Vilnius University, Lithuania