The combination of church and state severely persecutes Russia’s Old Believers, making martyrs of many of them, including the archpriest Avvakum Petrov, a Russian protopope of Kazan Cathedral on Red Square who leads the opposition to Patriarch Nikon's reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Avvakum and others strongly reject these changes, seeing them as a corruption of the Russian Church, which they consider to be the "true" Church of God.

The other Churches are more closely related to Constantinople in their liturgies and Avvakum argues that Constantinople had fallen to the Turks because of these heretical beliefs and practices.

The principled Old Believers chafe at the notion that contemporary Greeks and westernized Ukrainians have preserved the correct usages while the Russians have not.

Avvakum is repeatedly imprisoned for his opposition to the reforms.