Robert Crummey's study of the Old Believer community centered on the Vyg River in northern Russia documents how the movement split further into distinct branches over the generations following the initial schism, chiefly between priestless Old Believers, who concluded that no validly ordained clergy sharing their position remained available and restructured worship around lay leadership instead, and priestly Old Believers, who maintained that ordained clergy remained essential and worked to secure bishops willing to serve their communities, eventually establishing their own separate hierarchy in the nineteenth century.
Old Believer communities survived through internal exile, remote settlement in Siberia and the Russian far north, and periodic state persecution that continued in various forms into the Soviet period, and later emigration carried Old Believer communities well beyond Russia's borders, into diaspora settlements across the Baltic states, Romania, China, and eventually the Americas, including notably rural communities in Oregon and Alaska that maintain pre-Nikonian liturgical practice, dress and calendar into the present day.
Old Believers did not, on Crummey's reading and that of most subsequent historians, significantly diverge from mainstream Russian Orthodox theology; their difference lay in ritual practice rather than doctrine, a distinction that makes the Raskol one of history's clearer examples of a major and lasting religious schism driven by liturgical form rather than by any substantial disagreement over belief itself.