While the Russian authorities were dreaming of a wholesale conversion of Jews to Christianity, their attention was diverted by the ominous spectacle of huge numbers of Christians embracing a doctrine closely akin to Judaism. The Russian officials disclosed the existence of a sect of "Sabbatarians" and "Judaizers" in the Governments of Voronyezh, Saratov, and Tula, all of them without Jewish residents, who might otherwise have been suspected of a missionary propaganda among the Greek Orthodox. The new "Judaizing" heresy first engaged the attention of the central Government in 1817, when a group of peasants in the region of Voronyezh addressed a petition to the Tzar in which they naively complained of "the oppressions which they had had to undergo at the hands of the local authorities, both ecclesiastic and civil, on account of their confessing the law of Moses." Acting under Imperial instructions, Golitzin gave orders "to examine most rigorously" the origin of the "sect," for the purpose of preventing its further spread and bringing back the renegades into the fold of Orthodoxy. The Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Voronyezh reported, in substance, as follows: The sect came into existence about 1796[274] "through natural Jews." It afterwards spread to several settlements in the districts of Bobrov and Pavlovsk. The essence of the sect, without being directly an Old Testament form of Jewish worship, consists of a few [Jewish] ceremonies, such as Sabbath observance and circumcision, the arbitrary manner of contracting and dissolving marriages, the way of burying the dead, and prayer assemblies. The number of avowed sectarians amounts to one thousand five hundred souls of both sexes, but the secret ones are in all likelihood more numerous. To exterminate the sect, the Archbishop of Voronyezh proposes various measures, to be carried out partly by the ecclesiastic authorities and partly by the police, among them the deportation of the soldier Anton Rogov, the propagandist of the heresy. Similar reports from the ecclesiastic authorities of Tula, Orlov, Saratov, and other Great Russian Church districts were soon received by the Synod. The "Judaizing heresy" spread rapidly to the villages and cities, appealing alike to peasants and merchants. Whenever taken to task, the sectarians declared that they longed to return to the Old Testament and "maintain the faith of their fathers, the Judeans." The central authorities were alarmed, and resorted to extraordinary measures to check the spread of the schism. The Committee of Ministers approved the following draconian project submitted by Count Kochubay in 1823: