The Old-believers are the believers of the Greek Orthodox Church who did not accept the changes to this Church adopted by the highest Church authorities at the end of the 17^th century but decided to stay with the old religion. Some serious clashes occurred between the officials and the Old-believers and as a result the Old-believers were damned by the mainstream Orthodox Church and persecuted by the state. For this reason many of them went to remote places of the Empire and settled there, but other groups left the Russia Empire and settled in the territory of neighbouring Poland and in this way Latgale, which was a Polish province at that time, gained a population of Old-believers. Latgale later (1785) was included in the Russia Empire.

The Old-believers in the Russia Empire were restricted in their rights. I do not know all of the restrictions which changed in time, so only some can be mentioned - for instance, an Old-believer was not allowed to marry any Orthodox, he could not testify in a court against an Orthodox (later against a converted Old-believer) etc. It was only after May 3, 1905, when Tzar Nicholaj II issued the Edict of Toleration that the religion of the Old-Believers was allowed to function freely in Russia. There existed also serious pressure to the Old-believers to convert to the Orthodox Church. The real conversion was not intensive at all, because the Old-believers lived in rather closed communities, did not accept conversion, and even contact with other groups of people was restricted.

For example, I know that one of my father's female relatives married an Old-believer in the 1930s. She was not accepted by her husband's family for a long time until their children grew to adulthood. As she recounted to my mother, the Old-believers had a special cup in case an occasional visitor came to the farm. The cup was needed because it was prohibited to share their own utensils with people of a different religion, but it would be considered very non-Christian not to offer, say, a glass of water to a traveller. For me it seemed interesting from the linguistic point of view that the special cup was called poganaja kružka that can be translated as a cup for pagans and at the same time as a foul cup.

It is rather important that the main part of the Old-believers in Latvia belonged to the branch of this religion which accepted the idea that no clergy, i.e. persons with special religious power, are needed in their religion, and therefore the state could find nobody to put in charge of keeping any church books. For this reason, the official civil registers for the Old-believers in the Russia Empire were kept by pagasts authorities, but the unofficial ones were kept by the church communities of the Old-believers.

The community of the Old-belivers in Latvia as in the whole of the Empire was not homogenous. In some cases religious discussions caused the splitting of communities and some groups migrated out to other provinces and even abroad. There were groups that migrated to South America, but, as far as I know, no serious migration of the Old-believers from the Latgale part of the region of Latvia took place.