In the era of Nicholas I, the policy for further unification of the religious life and stricter surveillance over parishioners led to a rise of investigative cases filed against schismatics. The article discusses how the clergy increased their efforts in revealing the facts of “apostasy” of Old Belief among the Orthodox. In the course of these activities, the Russian authorities discovered the imperfection of their own system of surveillance.

In this article the problem of the collision of different paradigms of religious and national identity in a multinational and multi-confessional Russian Empire is shown on the example of a debate about the model of the Orthodox parish in Finland. The debate revealed a conflict between the two legal systems — imperial and that of the Grand Duchy of Finland. The Finnish legislation was perceived in the Grand Duchy as a guarantee of national identity.