RETROSPECTIVE HISTORICAL AND ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF OLD BELIEVER NATIONAL ECONOMIC MODEL
AND ITS CULTURAL HERITAGE 

Fenin Kirill Vyacheslavovich, postgraduate student, Saratov National Research State University named after N. G. Chernyshevsky,
E-mail: fenin.kir@yandex.ru 

338.2 

Background. This article is devoted to a research of social characteristics of Old Believer economic model as possible example of the economic system passing through limit states – cyclic transformations during change of the modes of the functioning. It is supposed that some cultural and spiritually-moral elements of Old Believer economic model, having resistance to changes in time, prolonged existence of this economic paradigm and were partially apprehended by post-revolutionary Russian society.
Materials and methods. The fragmentary statistical data, supported by expert assessments and extensive factual data on the scale of the production and trade activities of the Old Believers, made it possible to conduct a retrospective historical and economic analysis of the social factors of genesis and the uneven development of the model of the economic behavior of Old Believers.
Results. The retrospective economic analysis has shown that the Old Believer economic paradigm has undergone the considerable changes which are keeping within two century cycles: with 1670-h – on the 1770th and from the 1770–80th – on the 1850–60th, and one semicentennial cycle: from the 1860th – before World War I. Development of model of trade and production activity of Old Believers in practice consisted in its transformation from partially closed and socially isolated structure in economic space of the Russian Empire in the structure incorporated in interindustry and interregional hierarchy of the markets of national economy.
Conclusions. Unique labor ethics of Old Believers is the major sociocultural factor of their success in business. The orthodox labor economic ethics which are steady in a long time have made historical and cultural heritage of Old Believer economic model. This heritage has found the reflection in the ideas about a priority of public interests over personal, in the sublime relation to work, in tendency to altruism and household charity which have been partially adopted by the Soviet and Russian society. 

Old Believers, Vasily O. Klyuchevsky, economic model, communality, economic enclaves, markets hierarchy, work economic ethic, charitable cause