The settlements that developed in the Vyg region were virtually
divorced from the new Petrine empire. Recognizing the value of their commercial activities to the Russian economy, Peter granted them freedoms which continued into the nineteenth century. The "fathers" and "brothers" of Vyg amassed considerable wealth and set up in their central commune one of the largest educational centers in eighteenth-century Russia-teaching the literature, music, and iconography of Old Muscovy. There were no professors in this informal center of instruction, just as there were no priests in their temples and monasteries. Yet there was higher literacy and deeper devotion to church forms in these "priestless" communes of Old Believers than in most parishes of the synodal church. Their entrepreneurial economic activity constitutes, moreover, a remarkable chapter of pioneering heroism. Because of their strong sense of solidarity they set up trading networks which were often able to produce and ship goods to Moscow and St. Petersburg more cheaply than they could be made on the spot. Their ascetic sense of discipline enabled them to establish settlements in some of the bleakest arctic regions of Russia and to send fishing expeditions as far afield as Novaia Zemlia to the east and Spitzbergen to the west. Their own fanciful chroniclers even speak of Old Believer expeditions reaching North America.72
Much less peaceful (and thus somewhat more typical) is the early history of the Old Believers in the Volga region. The Old Beliefs were zealously defended in these newly converted and newly colonized regions, "not for ourselves . . . but for our fathers and grandfathers." Long-suffering faithfulness was the supreme virtue of the region where "to change faith would be a hell beneath hell."73 Cossacks had recently brought their own traditions of violence to this already embattled region. These Cossack settlers and merchants who controlled the flourishing Volga trade were equally opposed to centralized authority and to Western ways. When representatives of Peter the Great arrived in the Volga town of Dmitrievsk in 1700 to shave, uniform, and mobilize Cossack troops for the forthcoming battles with the Swedes, the Cossacks rebelled. Aided and abetted by the local populace, Cossacks swarmed into the city at night and massacred officials from the capital. Heads without beards were cut off and mutilated, local collaborators were drowned in the Volga, and the voevoda was able to survive only by hiding out long enough to grow a beard and returning as a convert to the Old Belief.74
Whether from conviction or necessity, officials in eastern Russia often had to follow the voevoda of Dmitrievsk and make their peace with the Old Belief. Outside of the main towns in forward areas of colonization, communes of Old Believers were often more numerous than parishes of the official church. There were relatively few orthodox Orthodox in the lower
Volga region and in many other key trading and colonizing areas of eastern Russia. As with the Calvinists, the "this-worldly asceticism" of the Old Believer communities soon made them wealthy and, by the late eighteenth century, politically as well as theologically conservative. The prophetic priestless sects began to be challenged by the more sedentary communities of "priested" Old Believers (popovtsy), such as the one which developed in the wilds at Irgiz, beyond the Volga, or at Belaia Krinitsa, in the Carpathian mountains near the border between Russia and the Hapsburg empire. The voice of prophecy was kept fresh, however, by the repeated splitting off of messianic groups and wandering prophets from the Old Believer communities-and also by increasingly frequent contact and interaction with the sectarians.
The historical importance of the Old Believers in the development of Russian culture is out of all proportion to the relative smallness of their numbers. By effectively seceding from the political and intellectual life of the empire, this important nucleus of the Great Russian merchant community helped turn the main centers of Russian life over to foreigners and to the Westernized service nobility. The Old Believers' unique qualities of industry and abstemiousness were never integrated into the building of a genuinely national and synthetic culture. Instead, they withdrew petulantly into their own world, defying the march of history in the belief that history itself was coming to an end. Their communities represented a continuing rebuke to the luxurious life of the Westernized cities and the aristocratic estates. Their intense religious convictions and communal pattern of life represented a voice from the Muscovite past that was to become a siren song for the Russian populists in the nineteenth century.
Equally important for the fate of Russian culture was the fact that much of the native entrepreneurial class became wedded not to a practical world outlook or rationalistic form of religious belief but rather to a most irrational and superstitious form of fanaticism. However ingenious and experimental in their business habits, the Old Believers rebelled at any change or modernization of their beliefs. Thus, whereas the development of an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie in the late medieval West tended to encourage the growth of rationalism in twelfth-century Paris and of sceptical humanism in fifteenth-century Florence and Rotterdam, the emergent merchant class of early modern Russia played no such role. In reality, no Russian bourgeoisie analogous to that of the West survived the transformations wrought by Alexis and Peter. Shorn of their ancient privileges and immunities after the urban riots of the mid-seventeenth century, the entrepreneurial leaders of Old Muscovy had only two choices. They could melt into the medium and upper level of officialdom of the new state along with
various foreign and mercenary elements. Or they could cling to their former ways and ideals by moving on to newly opening areas of the empire and blending their xenophobic complaints with those of other dispossessed elements. One could choose bureaucracy or raskol,75 the "homeless cosmopolitanism" of the new urban centers or the narrow chauvinism of the Russian interior.
Those who chose the latter course, the native Russian bourgeoisie, were spiritual relatives not of the secularized entrepreneurs of early modern Europe but of its messianic urban preachers: Waldo, Savonarola, and Winstanley. But unlike these Western preachers, the Old Believers were able to survive and flourish into modern times. They were sheltered by vast spaces and fortified by the belief that they were defending the true tradition which would yet prevail rather than synthetically re-creating early Christian piety. By appealing to instinct rather than intellect, to communal honor rather than individual reason, the Old Believers achieved a popular following that proved more enduring than that of most revivalist prophets in the West.
Old Believers rejected the name raskol'nik, or schismatic, which they applied rather to the new, synodal church. Nonetheless, the word raskol, with its physiological suggestions of cracking open as well as its theological meaning of schism, indicates the historical effect of this movement on Russian life. The wounds which it opened in the body politic would never be entirely healed. It weakened Russia politically and lent a Utopian and apocalyptical flavor to its internal debates which frustrated the harmonious development of a stable national culture.
Here are but a few of the divisions opened up by the raskol'niki. There was, first of all, their own separation from the civil as well as the religious life of Russia. The Old Believers went so far as to use secret codes, nets of informers, and at least two private languages for their internal communications.76 They were, moreover, split off from history- believing that earthly history was nearing an end and that all talk of historical greatness in the empire represented only the predictable delusions of the Antichrist. Among themselves the raskol'niki were soon split into endless divisive groups: the Theodosians, Philipists, wanderers, runners, and so on-each pretending to be the True Church of the original Old Believer martyrs. There was, finally, a schizophrenia in the attitude of all these Old Believers toward the world about them. Extremely stern, puritanical, and practical in everyday life, they were nonetheless ornate, bombastic, and ritualistic in art and religion. Indeed, one may say that the simultaneous allegiance of Old Muscovy to both icon and axe, to both formalized idealism and earthy harshness, was kept alive by the Old
Believers. With the passing of time their influence grew
and deepened. Some of the oppressive restrictions of the early eighteenth century were removed in the 1760's. Important settlements of both "priested" and "priestless" Old Believers were established shortly thereafter, significantly in Moscow rather than St. Petersburg.77 They became pioneers in providing care for the sick in destitute sections of Moscow. Gradually, the Old Believers began to attract sympathizers and sentimental admirers and to become, in spite of themselves, an influential force in the formation of a new national culture.
The second tradition of conservative protest against the new world of St. Petersburg, that of Cossack-led peasant insurrection, bears many points of similarity to that of the fundamentalist Old Believers. Both traditions have their origin in the religious revival of the Time of Troubles and produced their greatest martyrs during the great change under Alexis. Stenka Razin was for southern Russia the same semi-legendary hero that Awakum and the monks of Solovetsk were for the north. Yet, just as the Old Believers' tradition did not become fully formed except in reaction to Peter, so the tradition of peasant insurrection was in many ways established only with the Bulavin uprising against Peter's rule in 1707-8.78 If the merchants who led the Old Believer movement were protesting against the destruction of the old urban liberties by the central government, the Cossacks who led the insurrectionists were also protesting the extension of burdensome state obligations to their once free way of life. Just as the Old Believers were able to survive because of the remoteness of their settlements and the value of their commercial activities, so were the Cossacks able to sustain their traditions because of the distance of their southern settlements from the centers of imperial power and the importance of their fighting forces to the military power of the empire.
At times the tradition of insurrection merged with that of the Old Believers-particularly in the lower Volga region. However, their methods of opposing absolutism and their social ideals were quite different. The Old Believers were essentially passive in their resistance to the new regime, believing in the imminence of God's intervention and the redemptive value of unmerited suffering. The peasant insurrectionaries were violent, almost compulsive activists, anxious to wreak suffering on the nearest available symbols of bureaucratic authority. The Old Believers' ideal order was an organic religious civilization of Great Russian Christians united by traditional forms of ritual worship and communal activity. The insurrectionaries were animated by a purely negative impulse to destroy the existent order, an impulse which they sought to share with Moslem and pagan as well as Christian groups, along the multi-racial southeastern frontier of Russia.
The peasant insurrectionaries were, of course, protesting a far more degrading and debilitating form of bondage than that which faced the traditional merchants of the north. With the final sealing of all escape routes from lifetime peasant servitude in the mid-seventeenth century and the extension of military service obligation to twenty-five years in the early eighteenth, the lot of the ordinary peasant was, in effect, slavery. The violence of the peasant rebellions must also be placed against the background of continuing Tatar raids and military mobilizations along the exposed southern steppe. The final wresting of the southern Ukraine and Crimea from Tatar and Ottoman hands did not occur until the late years of the reign of Catherine the Great, well after the last great rebellions had been suppressed.
For all their disorganized violence, however, the peasant rebellions were animated by one recurring political ideal: belief in a "true tsar." From one point of view this was a revolutionary idea, a call for a coup d'etat based on a claim that a samozvanets, or "self-proclaimed" insurrectionary leader, was the rightful heir to the throne. But fundamentally this ideal was profoundly conservative-even more so than that of the Old Believers. For the concept of a true tsar implied tiiat the ultimate ruler of the system was its only possible redeemer. The political and administrative system of die new empire was simply to be destroyed so that Russia could return to die congenial paternalism of Muscovite days. The "true tsar" of peasant and Cossack folklore was thus a combination of benign grandfather and messianic deliverer: batiushka and spasitel'. He was a "real, rustic man" (muzhitsky), the true benefactor of his children, who would come to their aid if only die intervening wall of administrators and bureaucrats could be torn down. At the same time, die "true tsar" was given divine sanction in the eyes of the peasant masses by providing him with a genealogy extending in unbroken line back to Vladimir, Constantine the Great, and even to Riurik and Prus.
The first popular rumors of a "true tsar" appear to have started during the reign of Ivan IV, who was largely responsible for both establishing and breaking this mythical line of succession.79 The False Dmitry, the first of the "self-proclaimed" in Russian history, and the only one ever to gain the throne, drew skillfully on the people's longing to believe that there had been a miraculous survivor of the Old Muscovite line. Although soon disenchanted because of Dmitry's Catholicism, many Russians came to believe during the Time of Troubles that only a tsar from the old line favored by God could deliver Russia from intrigue and anarchy. The idea that a true tsar existed somewhere spilled over into the peasant masses who participated in the chaotic uprisings that followed die murder of Dmitry. Some
attached themselves to a second Polish-sponsored pretender, but more followed the leadership of a former serf, Cossack, and Turkish prisoner, Bolotnikov, who was rumored to be the nephew of the true Dmitry and the son of Fedor. The chaotic and violent uprising led by Bolotnikov in 1606-7 came close to capturing Moscow and is properly considered the first of the great nationwide peasant rebellions.80 The peasant insurrectionaries appear thus as a throwback to the old Muscovite ideology: their true tsar was to be the leader of an organic religious civilization. At first the idea was also maintained that such a tsar must be descended from die old line dirough Ivan the Terrible; but it soon became enough merely to show that the pretender's claim was more ancient and honorable than that of the incumbent. Much emphasis was laid on the fact that the self-proclaimed leader of rebellion and claimant to the throne was to be a holy tsar (of which there could be but one) rather than just another king or emperor, such as abounded in die corrupted West. The peasant rebels often echoed themes sounded by tile Old Believers: that the title "emperor" came from the "satanic" pope, that passports were an invention of Antichrist, that the emblem of the two-headed eagle was that of the devil himself (because "only the devil has two heads"), and that the special identifying cross mark placed on the left hand of runaway soldiers was an abomination of the holy cross and the seal of Antichrist.81
There were fourteen serious pretenders in the seventeenth century, and the tradition developed so vigorously in the following century that there were thirteen in the final third of it alone. There were some even in the early nineteenth century--the legends about Constantine Pavlovich as the true tsar rather than Nicholas I providing a kind of uncoordinated popular echo of the aristocratic Decembrist program.82 One reason for the boost which the tradition received in the eighteenth century was the sudden development of the belief in a "substitute tsar." Properly sensing that Peter's reforming zeal was intensified by his trip abroad, partisans of the old ways began a series of apocryphal legends purporting to explain how someone else (usually the son of Lefort) had been substituted for the Tsar. As a result, the claims of Bulavin, die leader of peasant insurrection under Peter, to be rightful heir to the throne were more widely accepted than those of earlier rebel leaders. The Tsar's cruel treatment of his son Alexis a decade later enabled even the weak Alexis to appear to many as the rightful heir. Special opportunities were created for a belief in a true tsar after Peter's death by the fact that women ruled Russia almost continuously until 1796. The peasants tended to equate the worsening of their lot with the advent of feminine rule. "Grain does not grow, because the feminine sex is ruling"83 was the popular saying; but by the time of the Pugachev rebellion
ment Trinity" (Plate V) that the Church Council of 1551 prescribed it as the model for all future icon
s on the subject. Painted in about 1425 for the monastery founded by St. Sergius on the religious subject to which that monastery was dedicated, Rublev's celebrated masterpiece is a fitting product of the intensified spirituality and historical theology of Muscovy. It depicts the concrete Old Testament event that foreshadowed the divulgence of God's triune nature rather than the ineffable mystery itself. Three pilgrims come to Abraham (Genesis 18: 1-15) in accordance with the sung commentary of the Orthodox liturgy ("Blessed Abraham, thou who hast seen them, thou who hast received the divine one-in-three").
The spiritualized curvilinear harmony of Rub-lev's three angels gathered about the eucharistic elements contrasts sharply with the cluttered composition and gourmet spirit of a mid-fifteenth-century icon on the same theme (Plate VI). Based on a Byzantine-Balkan model, this painting of the Pskov school subtly betrays the more worldly preoccupations of that westerly commercial center.
The third representation of the theme of the Trinity (Plate VII), an icon by the court painter Simon Ushakov in 1670, illustrates the decline of Russian iconography under Western influences in the late years of the reign of Alexis Mikhailovich. The outline form of Rublev's three figures is maintained, but the spirit has drastically changed. The symbolic tree of life, which gave aesthetic balance to both the Rub-lev and the Pskovian icon has become a spreading oak, balanced now by a classical portico with Corinthian columns. The semi-naturalistic, faintly self-conscious figures and sumptuous furnishings suggest the imminent arrival of an altogether new and secular art.
PLATE VI
The Icon and the Axe Page 30