Icon and Axe

2. The Westward Turn

THE REJECTION of both fundamentalists and theocrats meant the end of any serious efforts to maintain a civilization completely distinct from that of the West. The religious ideology of Muscovy was rejected as unworkable for a modern state, and the rigid barriers against Western influence which both Nikon and Awakum had sought to shore up were largely removed after 1667.

It was not yet clear how much and what kind of Western influence was to prevail in the ungainly new empire. Only gradually and fitfully was Russia able to fashion a creative culture and an administrative system which harmonized with those in the rest of Europe. The celebrated reforms of Peter the Great pointed the way to the future. But the fresh religious gropings that preceded these reforms and the exotic resistance movements that developed in reaction to them indicate that the triumph of secular modernization was far from complete.

New Religious Answers

THE LAST QUARTER of the seventeenth century—from the death of Alexis to the assumption of real power by Peter the Great—was a kind of interregnum. The continued progression toward Western ways was dramatized by the emancipation of women from the terem (the special upstairs chamber to which they had previously been largely confined) under the regent Sophia, daughter of Alexis, who became the first woman to rule Russia. Her principal minister, V. V. Golitsyn, provided an important link between the Westernizing work of Alexis and that of Peter. Golitsyn helped reorganize the military establishment, abolish the antiquated system of social precedence (mestnichestvo), and modify many of the more cruel forms of legal investigation and punishment.

However, Golitsyn was more successful in changing old ways than in establishing anything in their place. He was eventually rejected and exiled—as were most other innovators of the period. Russia was not yet willing to commit itself to new ways of doing things. The continuing search for new answers was concentrated in the overgrown wooden metropolis of Moscow, where every shade of opinion was represented from the xenophobic fundamentalism of the streltsy quarter to the transplanted Germanic efficiency of the foreign suburb. The young Peter the Great derived many of his new ideas and tastes from a carefree boyhood spent largely in this Western enclave of Moscow. But the preoccupation of the uneasy ruling elite with combating religious-tinged rebellions against innovation—by Razin, Solovetsk, and the streltsy—naturally conditioned them to look for religious answers of their own: for a viable religious alternative to that of Old Muscovy. Thus, although the ruling elite had nowhere to look for guidance after 1667 but to the West, it still looked for religious answers: solutions of the old sort from the new font of wisdom.

The late years of the seventeenth century saw the consideration in Moscow of four religious answers—all of them brought in from the outside. Only after rejecting these last efforts to find religious answers for Russia’s problems did Russia turn to the West for the secular and political solutions of Peter the Great.

Each of the four religious answers proposed in Moscow represented an effort to come to grips with the reality of the schism and the irreversible changes in Russian life. None of these solutions was proposed by Great Russians steeped in the Muscovite ideology, like Nikon and Avvakum. Two of the solutions—those of the Latinizers and Grecophiles—were group movements sponsored by new elements within the Russian Orthodox Church anxious to give it solid new foundations. Two other, more radical proposals—direct conversion to Roman Catholicism and Protestant sectarianism—were offered from without by lonely prophets coming to Moscow from the West. This proliferation of conflicting solutions bears testimony to the state of confusion and uncertainty into which the schism had plunged Russian Christendom.

The Latinizing and Grecophile solutions arose because of the belated acceptance within the Russian Church of the need to develop a systematic educational system. Such a need had not been keenly felt by prophetic partisans of the Muscovite ideology. Neither Nikon nor Awakum had attached any importance to systematic education of the clergy, though both advocated careful study of the holy texts of which they approved. The question that divided the two parties in the post-1667 church was simply whether Latin or Greek language and culture should dominate the religious education of the new polyglot hierarchy.

The continued influx of Ukrainian and White Russian priests and the banishment of the Grecophile Nikon gave a considerable initial advantage to the Latinizing party. Polotsky set up in Moscow during the 1660’s an informal school for instructing state servants in Latin culture; and one of Polotsky’s first students, Silvester Medvedev, became the champion of the Latinizing party in the 1670’s. Medvedev was a widely traveled diplomat who had helped negotiate the treaty with Poland in 1667 and had taken monastic vows only in 1674. In 1677 he was given important new responsibilities in Moscow as chief corrector of books and head of the Zaikonospassky Monastery, which became the center of an expanding program of Latin instruction in the capital. In 1685 he petitioned the regent Sophia (who had also studied under Polotsky) for permission to convert his school into a semi-official academy.

Medvedev’s efforts to extend his already great authority rendered him vulnerable to the savage intrigues that were characteristic of Moscow during this period of upheaval and suspicion. He met much of the same resistance that Nikon had encountered; but Medvedev lacked the personality, the patriarchal power, and the authority of Byzantine precedent to carry out his reforms. He was soon attacked by a rival faction supported by the Patriarch Joachim and by a rival Greek school attached to the Moscow Printing Office.

The Grecophile faction acquired new strength with the arrival from Constantinople in 1685 of two well-traveled and educated Greeks, the Likhudy brothers. They undermined Medvedev’s position with doctrinal attacks and wrested away, for the use of their Greek school, stone buildings originally designed for Medvedev’s Latin academy. Rapidly stripped of his various positions, Medvedev was soon arrested for alleged treason and, after two years of torture and mistreatment, burned for heresy in 1691. As in the Nikon-Avvakum controversy, however, the Medvedev-Likhudy affair resulted in mutual defeat rather than clear victory for either side. The Lik-hudies themselves soon became suspect as foreign intriguers, and their influence declined precipitously in the early 1690’s.¹

There were two important issues with long-term implications for Russian culture lying beneath the sordid external details of the controversy. Each side was vindicated on one issue: the Latinizers on that of the basic language and style of theological education and discourse, the Grecophiles on fundamental matters of dogma.

The Latin bias in theological education represented the final victory of the new clergy over the traditional Greek-oriented monastic establishment of Muscovy. Henceforth, Russian theological education—almost the only form of education in eighteenth-century Russia—was far more Western in content than before. Latin replaced Greek forever as the main language of philosophic and scientific discourse; and Russia adopted through its church schools a more sympathetic attitude toward secular learning and scholastic theology than the more patristically inclined Grecophiles would have tolerated. It is not accidental that the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century saw a flood of learned treatises on the Russian Church by Western theologians, and that most of the important theological writing and teaching in the Russian Church during this period was the work of Russian priests originally trained in the Latin-speaking theological academies of Western Europe.²

The vindication of the Greeks in matters of dogma was in many ways more surprising than the victory of Latins in matters of form. The scholastic theology of Roman Catholicism has always attracted those in search of rational order and synthesis. Moreover, for the Orthodox, Catholicism was doctrinally far closer than Protestantism. A number of Catholic positions had been endorsed by the Orthodox Church generally at the synod of Bethlehem in 1672;³ and others were quietly accepted by the post-1667 Russian Church without any sense of contradiction or betrayal. The Catholic definition of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary was widely accepted. Leaders of the new Church even proposed that the long-proscribed Catholic phraseology on the procession of the Holy Spirit be reinserted in the Russian creed and that the Russian Church appoint a pope and elevate its four metropolitans to patriarchal rank.⁴ But the critical doctrinal issue over which the Latinizers came to grief was the nature of the eucharist, or holy communion.

Behind the seemingly technical debate over this sacrament, this commemorative re-enactment of the Last Supper, lay the deeper question of man’s relationship to God in a changing world. The nature of God’s presence in the bread and wine had deeply bothered the reformers of the West, most of whom had retained this rite while changing its form or redefining its nature. The Hussites had sought to make the “common service” (the literal meaning of “liturgy”) truly common by making the elements readily available to all. Luther spoke of con- rather than trans-substantiation, in an effort to reconcile the concurrent fact of Christ’s real presence and of essentially unchanged bread and wine. The Roman Catholic doctrine of the eucharist was systematically drawn up only when the need came to deal with the varying challenges of the reformers. It contended (1) that Christ was really, and not merely symbolically, present in the sacrament; (2) that a total change in the substance of the elements (transubstantiation) took place at the time the priest repeated Christ’s original words of institution: “This is my body… This is my blood”; and (3) that only the purely “accidental” aspects of the bread and wine remain unchanged.⁵

In the course of the seventeenth century the Orthodox Church also felt the challenge of the reformers and adopted the Catholic term “transubstantiation” as “the only possible word to deny Protestant heresy and at the same time affirm the Orthodox belief.”⁶ The Russian church hierarchy, which was especially fearful of divisive heresies, played a leading role in the general hardening of doctrinal positions and the increased use of dialectic method and scholastic casuistry in dogmatic writing. Catholic, and more specifically Jesuit, theological technique and terminology is evident in the two small efforts of the Orthodox Church of the Eastern Slavs to provide a systematic catechism for its communicants: Mogila’s catechism of 1640 and the catechism of 1670 of Simeon Polotsky, Crown of the Catholic (Kafolicheskaia) Faith. Medvedev was, thus, only continuing the tradition begun by his teacher Polotsky in speaking of transubstantiation and echoing other aspects of Roman Catholic teachings about the eucharist in his long dogmatic dialogue Bread of Life and in a second more polemic work, Manna of the Bread of Life.

Medvedev’s exposition of the Catholic position offended Russian Orthodox sensibilities in two important ways. First of all, the distinction between accidents and substances introduced a kind of terminological hair splitting into something which the Orthodox considered a holy mystery (literally, “secret,” tainstvo). It was celebrated behind the closed doors of the sanctuary during the third, most hallowed part of the Orthodox mass, the liturgiia vernykh, or “service of the believers.” Second, it specified the exact time at which God comes down to man through the transformed elements.

On this latter point Medvedev was challenged and eventually anath-emized; for it related to an issue that had been at the heart of the original split between the churches: the Eastern refusal to accept the Western version of the Nicene Creed, in which the Holy Spirit was said to descend from the Father and Son. A certain awesome if mysterious primacy within the unity of the Trinity was reserved for the Father in the East, and this primacy seemed once more jeopardized by Medvedev’s position. Insofar as one can define the precise moment at which God becomes present in the elements, Medvedev’s critics insisted that it came after the priest’s call for the descent of the Holy Spirit, following the repetition of Christ’s words of institution. In other words, the miracle of God’s presence in the sacrament was not assured by a priest’s re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice, but rather by the “common work of the believers” in supplicating God for the descent of His Holy Spirit.⁷

Thus, behind all the venality of intrigue which eventually doomed Medvedev lay the reluctance of the Russian Church to accept fully the detailed doctrinal formulations of post-Reformation Roman Catholicism, however much they were to borrow from its language and methods of instruction. The Russian Church displayed a stubborn determination to reassert the uniqueness of its doctrinal position even at a time when it was losing its independence from the state and rejecting its original orientation toward Greek culture.

On one point the Latinizers and Grecophiles had been in agreement: their opposition to the Western churches. Medvedev had inveighed against the heretical ideas he had found among foreign book correctors in Moscow; the Likhudies had written a series of tracts against Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists.⁸

The xenophobia of the Russian Church, which they helped thus to fortify, was to claim two foreign victims in the waning years of the seventeenth century: Quirinus Kuhlmann and Yury Krizhanich. Each came from the western borderlands of European Slavdom to Moscow with high expectations of the role Russia could play in the religious regeneration of Europe. Each was a prophet without honor in his own country, who was to be rejected as well in Russia. From a purely Western point of view they represent only curious distant echoes of the Reformation and Counter Reformation respectively. Yet in Russia they stand as harbingers of important new ideas and developments. Each bears witness to the extent to which “uniquely Russian” movements and ideas can be traced to Western, or at least non-Russian, origins.

The Croatian Catholic priest, Yury Krizhanich, was the first to come to Russia, arriving with a Polish diplomatic mission in 1647 and returning in the guise of a Ukrainian war refugee in 1659.⁹ Throughout his long second stay in Russia, which lasted two decades, Krizhanich sought to advance both an old and a new idea. The old idea was the conversion of Russia to Catholicism; the new was the development of Russia as the center of a new united Slavdom. Only such unity could, in Krizhanich’s view, counter the growing strength of the Protestant Germans on the one side and the infidel Turks on the other. The ideal that Russia rather than Poland should serve as the anchor of Catholic hopes in Eastern Europe had been favored in Vatican circles during periods of demonstrated Muscovite strength under the two Ivans. The idea was particularly popular with certain Croatian Catholics who had participated in the Vatican-sponsored lllyrian movement and whose strategic imagination may have been captured by the idea of Slavic unity,¹⁰ which had already been set forth in 1601 by an Italian priest, Mauro Orbini, in his Il regno degli Slavi, hoggi corrottamente detti Schiavoni: the first over-all history of the Slavic peoples ever written.¹¹ The official recognition of the Romanov dynasty by the Holy Roman Empire in 1654 cleared the way for the resumption of close ties with Russia and the dispatching of embassies which regularly included Catholic clergy.

Special interest in Russia was also shown by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which was founded in 1622 largely to open lines of communication with Eastern Christians. The Congregation was a useful vehicle for Catholic activities inside Russia, because it was not identified with Polish expansion, as was the Society of Jesus. However, the Congregation also lacked the Jesuits’ semi-military structure and could not exercise binding authority over those who went to Russia in its name. Ligarides, for instance, was educated by, and loosely affiliated with, the Congregation, but soon discarded his allegiance as he began to carve out a career for himself in the Orthodox world.¹² Krizhanich, however, appears to have remained a dedicated Catholic throughout his much longer stay in Russia. Because of the incomplete records surviving, the extent of his proselytizing activities in Russia cannot be determined. But it is clear that he became a librarian and cataloguer within the Kremlin shortly after his second arrival and refused to collaborate in the formation of the new state church. Probably for this reason, he was sent early in 1661 to distant Tobol’sk, in Siberia, where he remained until after Alexis’ death. During this exile Krizhanich wrote some of the most perceptive and profound essays in pre-Petrine Russia, returning to Moscow only in 1677 in an unsuccessful bid to gain the support of the new tsar.

Of his many works on different subjects—all written in a strange mélange of Croatian, Latin, and Russian—much the most interesting is his “Political Thoughts,” or “Conversations on Power,” an argument for absolute monarchy based largely on classical and Renaissance authorities.¹³ Even though Krizhanich is the first writer in Russia to quote extensively from Machiavelli, his argument is essentially moralistic. The monarch derives his authority from God, who has decreed objective natural laws for all the world. The Russian people, who are still superstitious and lacking in moderation, are in particular need of a strong monarchy. All of Eastern Europe is, in turn, dependent on Russian leadership. The Ukraine should cease its political intrigues and subordinate itself to Russia. The Russian monarch must not permit his authority to be diluted either by a Polish type of aristocratic diet or by the German merchants who cover the land “like a swarm of locusts devouring all the fruit of the earth.”¹⁴ Russia has unique advantages for effective absolute rule because neither of the two classic sources of palace intrigue (women and traditional noblemen) are of any real importance in Muscovy.

To realize its destiny, however, Russia had to rid itself of many of its myths, and of its subservience to the Greeks in theology and the Germans in practical affairs. The idea that Kievan Russia was dependent on Varangian princes for political order was rejected by Krizhanich more than a century before native Russian historians began to question the predominant role of the Normans in early Russian history. Krizhanich also rejected the mythical descent of Russian imperial authority from Prus and the anti-Catholic idea of a Third Rome. Krizhanich’s political recommendations were embellished with detailed commentaries on the language, history, economy, and geography of Russia. The cumulative effect of his prolific writings was to suggest that a great destiny lay before the Russian nation. To realize it, however, Russia would have to unify the oppressed Slavs, accept Roman Catholicism, and be the bearer of its mission to heathen lands east and south.

Krizhanich anticipated a number of different movements in modern Russian thought. He was one of the first to appeal on moralistic grounds for enlightened despotism as the best means of civilizing Eastern Europe. Indeed, it is interesting to note that the status and intellectual influence of Catholic priests in Russia was at its highest precisely during those periods when reforming despots were on the throne: Peter I, Catherine II, and Alexander I. Even Krizhanich, despite his exile, was not nearly so badly treated under Alexis as most other religious dissenters. Technically, he was not even under compulsion, having been officially sent on “government business.” He was given a pension and freedom to write, and devoted much of his time to tasks that might conceivably have been assigned him by the central government: the gathering of historical and geographic material on Siberia and the refutation of the schismatics.

Krizhanich is most important, however, as the forerunner of two widely contrasting currents of thought that would reappear in nineteenth-century Russia with far greater strength: Catholic proselytism and militant Pan-Slavism. The fate which eventually met Krizhanich after his last sad departure from Russia was one worthy of veneration by either movement—and suitably heroic for the romantic temperament of the nineteenth century. Krizhanich remained in the Slavic East, drifting about Poland, taking monastic vows, and finally dying outside Vienna in 1683 with the army of Jan Sobieski as it turned back the last great Turkish assault on European Christendom.

If the visionaries of the Counter Reformation were to be rejected in late-seventeenth-century Russia, extreme prophets of the Reformation were to fare no better. Just as Krizhanich sought to have Russia revitalize for Europe the strategic hopes of a revived Catholicism, so Quirinus Kuhlmann sought to realize through “the unknown people of the north” the fading messianic expectations of the radical Reformation.

Kuhlmann was born in Silesia, the heartland of European mysticism which lies along the ill-defined border between the Slavic and German worlds. His mother was Polish, his father German; the city in which he was brought up bears the dual names of Wroclaw and Breslau; and his own strange life was equally divided between East and West.

He was less interested in his formal studies at Breslau and Jena than in a personal quest for religious understanding. He set forth his ideas in mystical poems with that “alchemy of speech” based on hypnotic repetition which was so characteristic of the German baroque. Coming from a part of Europe particularly devastated by the Thirty Years’ War, he sought to further a “cooling down” of passions, considering his own name an indication of divine selection for this Verkühlung. He wrote a “cooling psalter” (Kühlpsalter) and was briefly associated with a literary-patriotic fraternal order, “The Fruit-bearing Society,” in which each member took a new name from the vegetable kingdom and swore to defend the florid peculiarities of German vernacular culture.¹⁵

Kuhlmann soon drifted to Amsterdam, where he became fascinated by the theosophical treatises of an earlier Silesian mystic, Jacob Boehme. Standing at the end of the Reformation, Boehme had rehabilitated the ancient Gnostic belief that esoteric inner secrets of the universe could be discovered both within and beyond the traditional source of revelation for older Protestantism: the Holy Bible. Boehme’s gnosticism was particularly appealing to those who shared both the religious concerns of the age and the new taste for intellectual speculation freed from traditional authority. There was, after all, no higher goal for the mind to aspire to than “the wisdom of God”—the literal meaning of the word “theosophy,” which Boehme used to describe his system of truth.

Boehme’s speculations had been used by his followers as the basis for prophetic predictions about the coming of a new order. Just as man was to recapture the lost perfection of Adam before the fall, so was the whole world on the eve of a new millennium, according to many prophetic Protestants in the mid-seventeenth century. Jan Comenius, the brilliant educator and long-suffering leader of Czech Protestantism, had died in Amsterdam in 1671, predicting that the millennium would come in 1672. In his last great work, Lux e Tenebris, Comenius gathered together the writings of a number of recently martyred East European Protestants and spoke in a Manichean manner of the coming struggle of light and darkness. Kuhlmann was much influenced by this work, which was published and widely discussed in Amsterdam (and perhaps also by Jewish Sabbataianism, which claimed Amsterdam as one of its centers). In his treatise of 1674, Boehme Resurrected, Kuhlmann announces his own expectation that the thousand-year reign of righteousness is about to begin on earth:

Jesus Christ, the King of all Kings and Lord of all Lords is coming with his Lily and Rose to bring back Adam’s forgotten life of paradise on Earth.¹⁶

Kuhlmann sought to recruit various rulers of Europe as leaders of the righteous remnant, instruments of the New Jerusalem. His preaching took him progressively farther East: to Lübeck and Rostock on the Baltic in the mid-seventies, to Constantinople and the court of the Sultan in the late seventies. By the 1680’s he had become a political extremist, urging the rulers of Europe to abdicate from power in preparation for the coming “Jesuelite” kingdom, implying at times that they should hand over power during the interim to the custody of the inspired prophet himself. Kuhlmann provided his own devotional literature of mystical songs and hymns. In his Kühlpsalter the word “triumph” occurs several hundred times. His works circulated together with those of Boehme throughout the Baltic region and became known among German merchants as far afield as Archangel and Moscow. Sympathizers among the foreign colony in Moscow urged Kuhlmann to come to discover for himself the spiritual potential of this new land, and when Kuhlmann arrived in Moscow by way of Riga and Pskov in April, 1689, there was already a nucleus of sympathizers quick to respond to his preachings.

The purpose of Kuhlmann’s visit was to prepare Russia for transformation into the apocalyptical fifth monarchy: the place on earth where Christ would come again and launch a thousand-year reign on earth together with his chosen saints. Before leaving England for Moscow, Kuhlmann had set forth such a program in a collection of writings addressed jointly to the young Peter the Great and his ill-fated co-ruler, Ivan V. It was similar to appeals that he had unsuccessfully addressed to the rulers of France, Sweden, and Brandenburg Prussia, and reflected an attempt to carry over to the continent the ideas he had picked up from yet another prophetic group: the rejected “Fifth Monarchy men” of the English Revolution.

Kuhlmann quickly established a following within the German suburb of Moscow. He appears also to have won supporters at the imperial court and to have written a memorandum for his Russian followers.¹⁷ He taught that the Jesuits had taken over the world and that Lutheranism had betrayed the true Reformation, which was provided by the teaching of Boehme and the witness of the persecuted East European Protestants whom Comenius had praised. Such views frightened the leading Lutheran pastor of the German community, who pleaded for help from the Tsar in silencing this disruptive prophet. Translators in the Russian foreign office advised that his teachings were, indeed, “similar to those of the schismatics.”¹⁸ Probably fearing that he might gain influence over the impressionable young Tsar Peter, who was an habitué of the German quarter, Sophia designated Kuhlmann and his followers as bearers of “schism, heresy, and false prophecy.” In October, 1689, just six months after his arrival, Kuhlmann was burned in a specially built thatched hut in Red Square together with his writings and his principal local collaborator. The English mercenary colonel in the Tsar’s service, whose family had sponsored Kuhlmann’s trip to Moscow, was placed in prison, where he committed suicide. Orders were distributed to provincial voevodas for the suppression of his ideas and destruction of his writings.¹⁹

Like the Catholic Krizhanich, this lonely Protestant prophet had little direct impact on the Russian scene. Russia in the late seventeenth century was in the process of rejecting all purely religious answers to its problems.²⁰ The West to which Russia had turned was not moving from one religion to another but from all religions to none at all. This was the time of the “crisis of the European consciousness,” when faith suddenly became nominal and scepticism fashionable.²¹ Russia was deeply affected. Grecophiles and Latinizers within the Orthodox Church were rejected as decisively as theocrats and fundamentalists had been earlier; and Russia refused to accept either a purely Catholic or radical Protestant solution to its problems. Thus, from one point of view Krizhanich and Kuhlmann represent two final, foredoomed efforts to provide a religious solution for Russia. From another point of view, however, they represent early examples of an important future phenomenon: the Western prophet who looks to Russia for the realization of ideas not given a proper hearing in the West. Though unreceptive to such prophets in the late seventeenth century, the rulers of Russia were to lend increasingly sympathetic ears to prophetic voices from the West: Peter the Great to Leibniz, Catherine the Great to Diderot, Alexander I to De Maistre. But these were a new breed of prophets; and they brought their messages not to the chaotic religiosity of a city on the upper Volga but to the geometric new secular capital on the Baltic. It was not to Moscow but to St. Petersburg that the new Western prophets were to bring their ideas.

The Sectarian Tradition

MORE THAN KRIZHANICH—or any other foreign religious voice in seventeenth-century Russia—Kuhlmann was a harbinger of things to come in Russia. For the rejected radical Protestantism of Central Europe was to find roots in eighteenth-century Russia second in importance only to those it found in America.

Kuhlmann was, of course, only one of many prophetic influences that helped launch the vigorous Russian sectarian tradition. There is no firm evidence for the contention that Kuhlmann’s teachings provided the original doctrine for either of the two sects that he is sometimes alleged to have founded: the khlysty, or “flagellants” (the sect that first appeared in the late seventeenth century) or the Dukhobortsy (the “spirit wrestlers” who date from the eighteenth century). But the teachings of these and other Russian sects bear greater over-all similarities to the teaching of Boehme, Kuhlmann, and other sectarian Protestant extremists than to that of the Russian schismatics with whom they are often loosely identified.²²

In practice, of course, sectarians (sektanty) and schismatics (raskol’-niki) were equally persecuted and equally fractious forms of religious dissent. They often merged or interacted with one another (and at times also with Jewish and even Oriental religious traditions). Moreover, Russian sectarians generally shared with schismatics a hatred of bureaucrats and “Jesuits” as well as a general expectation that providential changes in history were about to take place. Nonetheless, the two traditions are fundamentally different. For the sectarians represent totally new religious confessions rather than attempts to defend an older interpretation of Orthodoxy. This distinction separated the heirs of Kuhlmann from the heirs of Awakum in two important ways. First, the sectarians built their devotional life around an extra-ecclesiastical calisthenic of self-perfection and inner illumination. Russian sectarians disregarded church ritual—old or new—and paid little attention to the celebration of sacraments in any form—or even to the building of churches.

A second difference between schismatics and sectarians lay in the contrasting nature of their historical expectations. Although both traditions were prophetic, the schismatics were basically pessimists, and the sectarians optimists. The followers of Awakum dwelled on the coming reign of Antichrist and the need to prepare for judgment. They believed that earthly corruption had gone so far that God’s final, wrathful judgment was all that could be expected from history. The followers of Kuhlmann, on the other hand, generally believed that the promised thousand-year reign of righteousness on earth was about to begin. However sectarians differed as to the nature and location of this millennium, these self-proclaimed “men of God” generally believed that they could help bring it about.

The Old Believers believed that heaven had moved irretrievably beyond reach; the men of God, on the contrary, believed themselves capable of bringing heaven back within man’s reach.²³

The sectarians were in many ways modern religious thinkers, beginning with the assumption that man was essentially an isolated being, separated from God in an unfriendly universe. The aim was to recapture lost links with God by uniting oneself with divine wisdom. Following the pantheistic tendencies of Central European mysticism, they saw all of creation as an expression of divine wisdom, for which Boehme used the hallowed Greek word “sophia,” giving to it for Russian mystical and sectarian thought a different meaning from what it had traditionally possessed in Eastern Orthodoxy. “Sophia” was understood as a physical—sometimes even sexual—force as well as a merely intellectual form of “divine wisdom.” New paths to salvation were provided by a host of sectarian writers, some emphasizing the physical and ecstatic, some the rationalistic and moralistic, path to God. Occult and kabbalistic tracts were translated, revised, and plagiarized by a series of religious popularizers. Boehme’s claim to have unraveled the “great mystery” of creation and read the divine “signature of things” inspired other prophets—as it had Kuhlmann—to draw up their own “new revelation” or “key to the universe.”²⁴

Each sect tended to regard the teachings of its particular prophet as the revealed word of God, which was meant to supplement if not supplant all previous tradition and scripture. The emphasis on simplifying ritual and introducing new beliefs gave sectarianism many points of contact with the emerging secular culture of the new aristocracy. In contrast, the schismatics remained suspicious of, and isolated from, this new and Westernized world. Only when the aristocratic dominance of Russian culture came to an end in the mid-nineteenth century did the schismatics become an important force in the main stream of Russian culture.

The Russian sectarian tradition can be traced not only to the prophecies of Kuhlmann but also to transplanted White Russian Protestants who filtered into Muscovy in the late seventeenth century: the persecuted survivors of a once-rich Polish Protestant tradition. Typical of these was the gifted Jan Belobodsky, against whom Medvedev wrote his doctrinal treatises. Belobodsky was formally converted to Orthodoxy apparently to qualify as a diplomat and official translator in Moscow. His main interest, however, lay in converting the new academy in Moscow into a kind of revanchist theological bastion for the struggle with the Jesuits: the “Pelagians” of the modern world.²⁵ The Jesuits offended Belobodsky’s Calvinism by placing too much emphasis on what man can accomplish through his own works and on the saving power of the sacraments and too little on God’s awesome remoteness. Although Belobodsky was soon condemned for heresy, his anti-traditional approach became fashionable in Petrine Russia, where even native Russians were found substituting a placard of the first two commandments for the traditional icon in the reception hall.²⁶

Under Peter one finds the first mention of a new Russian sect: a curious group who called themselves “God’s people” (Bozhie liudi). Their more familiar name, “flagellants” (khlysty), points to the ecstatic, Eastern strain that was incorporated into Russian sectarianism.²⁷

The first documentary reference to this sect occurred in 1716, at the time of its founder Ivan Suslov’s death; but it allegedly originated in the weird proclamation of a runaway soldier, Daniel Filippov, on a hillside near Viazma in 1645. Daniel claimed that he was God Sabaoth himself, come to give men twelve commandments in place of the ten originally given on Mount Sinai. He spent the disturbed early years of Alexis’ reign prophetically exhorting Russians to leave the existing church in order to live as “God’s people,” throwing all books of secular learning into the Volga, and abstaining from alcohol, honey, and sexual relations. In 1649 Daniel apparently declared that Suslov (a peasant formerly bonded to the Westernized Naryshkin family, from which Peter the Great was descended) was his son, and thus a Son of God. Suslov’s followers referred to Jesus as “the old Christ” and Suslov as the new. As he moved from Nizhny Novgorod to Moscow and thence (apparently in 1658) to prison, fanciful pseudo-Christian legends were attached to his name. The building in Moscow where hisfollowers met was said to be “the House of God” or the “New Jerusalem.” Suslov was said to have been born of a barren 100-year-old woman, crucified in the Kremlin (with Patriarch Nikon as Caiaphas and the author of the law code of 1649 as Pontius Pilate), and then resurrected from a tomb which was watched over by a faithful group of virgins dressed in white.

Actually, Suslov appears to have lived on in Moscow until his death at the age of nearly 100, and the Suslov legend may well have been embellished by the new “Christs” that succeeded him.²⁸ The first of these was a former leader of the streltsy, who entered a monastery and began systematically recruiting harassed monks for the new sect in the early eighteenth century.²⁹ His wife also entered a convent and began winning over feminine followers. The growing strength of the sect led to a heresy trial of seventy-eight in 1733, the exhumation and complete destruction of all remains of the two “Christs” in 1739, and a further trial involving 416 of “God’s people” that lasted from 1745 to 1752. But the sect flourished under conditions of increased publicity and martyrdom. New “Christs” began appearing in various sections of Russia, often accompanied by twelve apostles and by feminine “angels” who were in turn headed by a prophetess known as the “Mother of God.”

The forms of devotion practiced by “God’s people” link them with the classic dualistic heresies of Christendom with their demands for self-mortification and their claim to constitute a secret elect. “God’s people” met not in a church but in a secret meeting place usually known as “Jerusalem” or “Mt. Zion.” They conducted not a service but a “rejoicing” (radenie) or “spiritual bath.” They comprised not a congregation but a “boat,” and were led not by a consecrated priest but by a “pilot” for the voyage from the material to the spiritual world—into the seventh heaven where men could in fact become gods. The means of ascent lay partly in the “alchemy of speech”—spiritual songs were sung and incantations uttered in semi-hypnotic repetition, such as “Oh Spirit, Oh God, Tsar God, Tsar Spirit.” Soon, however, rhythmic physical exercises began; and the one most certain to produce spiritual ecstasy, a sense of liberation from the material world, was the “circle procession.” As the pace of circular motion increased, these whirling dervishes of Russian Christendom began their process of mutual- and self-flagellation accompanied by the rhythmic incantation: “Khlyshchu, khlyshchu, Khrista ishchu” (I flagellate, flagellate, seeking Christ).³⁰

If the flagellants represent the frenzied aspect of Russian sectarianism, the second important sect to arise, that of the “spirit wrestlers,” illustrates a more moralistic, Western element. Characteristically, this sect arose as a reform movement among “God’s people” rather than as a completely separate movement. The sectarians, like the schismatics, split up into many subgroups, but all sectarians shared key characteristics derived from the first sect, just as all schismatics derived their main characteristics from the original, fundamentalist martyrs.

The spirit wrestlers first appeared in the 1730’s or 1740’s in the region of Tambov. They accepted the flagellant idea of the need to combat earthly things while seeking the world of spirit; and they produced as many “Christs” for leaders as had their forebear. But the new sect appears to have been largely founded by military personnel seeking refuge from tsarist service. Their main interest was in finding a faith more simple than that of the alien Orthodox Church and in securing relative freedom from the authority of the state-controlled hierarchy. Within their own communities they became increasingly concerned with moral questions—leading a highly puritanical, communal life that minimized prophetic revivalism in favor of homely readings from their “revealed” book: The Living Life.³¹

Only a little later than the “spirit wrestlers” a similar sect arose in the Tambov region: the “milk drinkers” (molokane). The spirit wrestlers received their name from a Church official who had meant to imply that they were fighting with the Holy Spirit; and they accepted it as an indication of their intention to combat matter with spirit. The milk drinkers had been so named because of their practice of continuing to drink milk during the Lenten fast, but they too accepted the name, insisting that it meant they were already drinking the milk of paradise, or dwelling by milky waters. They insisted more than any of the other sects on equality of wealth, and their efforts to produce a simplified, syncretic religion led them to incorporate certain Jewish practices into their essentially Christian forms of worship. One of the most interesting of the many splits that developed within the sectarian movement is the one that occurred between the “Saturday” and “Sunday” milk drinkers.³² The very fact that Jewish elements participated in the life of the sects provides testimony to the fact that the sectarian communities tended to be cosmopolitan in composition. Unlike the Great Russian schismatics, the sectarians tended to welcome all comers as “brothers” (the usual term for member) in a common effort to attain the true spiritual life. The growing number of foreign settlers—particularly Germans and Central Europeans with Mennonite and Anabaptist backgrounds who began streaming into southern Russia after it was opened to foreign colonization in 1762—reinforced the trend toward austere egalitarianism. But this was already implied in Kuhlmann’s teaching that in the coming millennium “there will be no Tsars, kings, princes, but all will be equal, all things will be communal, and no one will call anything his own.…”³³

In addition to this tendency toward communal and egalitarian living, Russian sectarians shared a common belief that man was capable of attaining direct links (if not actual identity) with God outside all established churches. Behind all the sects stands the symbol which Kuhlmann (following Boehme) had used as the frontispiece for his new book of spiritual psalms: the figure of a cross melded into a latticework leading men up through the symbolic lily and rose to a new heaven and a new earth.

For each new sect, the ascent to higher truth lay in fleeing the material world outside for the spiritual world within. In place of the old liturgy and ritual, the sectarians worshipped with “spiritual songs,” which became a rich and many-sided form of popular verse. The word “spirit” (dukh) itself was to be found in the name or credo of each of the early sects. The flagellants considered the most important of their new commandments to be “Believe in the Holy Spirit,” and intoned their prayers and incantations to “Tsar spirit.” The spirit wrestlers carried the dualistic denial of the material world even farther than the flagellants, viewing all of world history as a struggle between the flesh-bound sons of Cain and the “fighters for the spirit” who were descended from Abel. The name the milk drinkers gave themselves was “spiritual Christians.”

As with other dualists, there was a kind of totalitarian fanaticism about the sectarians. In rejecting the “tyranny” of the established churches for the “freedom” of spiritual Christianity, the sectarians tended to set up even more rigorous tyrannies of their own. Contending that earthly perfection was possible within their community led them to assume that such perfection was possible only within their community. New forms of “higher” baptism and new sources of infallible truth were introduced; and the quest for perfection often drove them on to acts of self-mortification. It is characteristic that the popular names assigned to all the major sects of the eighteenth century designated some action which was thought to expedite their flight from the material to the spiritual world: flagellation, wrestling, drinking, and finally—in the last and most eerie of all the eighteenth-century sects—self-castration.

As time went on and Russian sectarianism became influenced by pietistic sectarians from the West, the masochistic and dualistic qualities of the tradition tended to be less dominant. Nonetheless, sectarianism kept alive its pretensions at offering a Utopian, communal alternative to the official Church; and it played an increasingly important role in the depressed agrarian regions of southern and western Russia. Sectarianism exercised considerable influence as well on the intellectual community. Its greatest periods of subsequent growth at the grass roots level coincided with the periods of increased political ferment and ideological Westernization at the intellectual level: under Catherine, Alexander I, during the sixties and nineties of the nineteenth century—and perhaps even the fifties and sixties of the twentieth.

Thus, contact with the West brought sectarian Protestant ideas into Russia along with secular rationalism. The centers of this strange sectarian tradition were the relatively new, western cities of Russia: St. Petersburg and the cities that had arisen on the southern plain of Russia during the Tatar and Ottoman recession: Voronezh, Kharkov, Ekaterinoslav, and Tambov. This latter city played such an extraordinary role in producing prophetic sectarians that it was often popularly called Tambog (“God is there”).³⁴ It seems darkly fitting that Tambov should prove a center of Utopian anarchism during the Civil War, one of the last to capitulate to Bolshevik rule, and the one to which anxious Soviet academicians flocked in the late logo’s seeking to discover why sectarian sentiment continued to exist after forty years of atheistic rule.³⁵ Perhaps it is also appropriate that the leading defender of an ascetic and Utopian reading of Communist doctrine amidst the waning of ideological fervor in post-Stalinist Russia was Michael Suslov, who was brought up in a family of religious dissenters and bore the name of the founder of Russian sectarianism.

The New World of St. Petersburg

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY was greeted in Moscow with parades, festivities, and bonfires that lasted for an entire week. Like almost everything else in the official culture of the century to follow, these activities were ordered from above for reasons of state. Author of the decree—and of the change in New Year’s Day from September to January—was, of course, Peter the Great, who has remained in the eyes of historians as towering a figure as his six feet eight inches rendered him to contemporaries. Having finished his tour of Western Europe and crushed the unruly streltsy, Peter was to turn in the first quarter of the new century to the administrative reforms and military campaigns that were to consolidate the position of Russia as a great and indisputably European power. In 1700 he took the first decisive step: he decreed that beards should henceforth be shaved off and short, German style of coats worn for “the glory and beauty of the government.”³⁶

Yet the suddenness of such reforms and the ruthlessness of their enforcement generated a passionate reaction. From many directions men rose up to defend the greater “glory and beauty” of the old ways. In the same year, 1700, an educated Muscovite publicly proclaimed that Peter was in fact the Antichrist, and a violent Cossack uprising on the lower Volga had to be crushed by long and bloody fighting.³⁷ Such protest movements continued to plague the “new” Russia and to influence its cultural development. A history of that culture must, therefore, include not only the relatively familiar tale of Peter’s modernizing reforms but also the counterattack launched by Old Muscovy.

The soldiers of the new order, Peter’s glittering new guards regiments, were, after the total destruction of the streltsy, opposed only by a disorganized guerrilla band of Muscovite loyalists. The guards regiments had all the weapons of a modern, centralized state at their command, but the guerrilla warriors had the advantage of vast terrain, ideological passion, and grass roots support. Although the ultimate victory of the new order was perhaps inevitable, the defenders of the old were able to wage a more protracted and crippling warfare against modernization than in most other European countries. Within the amorphous army of those opposed to the Petrine solution were three groups of particular importance for the subsequent development of Russian culture: merchant Old Believers, peasant insurrectionaries, and monastic ascetics. Even in defeat these voices of Old Muscovy were able to force the new state to adopt many of their ideas as it sought to extend and deepen its authority.

Before looking at the counterattack of Moscow, however, one must consider the new legions which Peter called into being and their new cultural citadel, St. Petersburg. This city was the most impressive creation of his turbulent reign: the third and last of Russia’s great historic cities and an abiding symbol of its new Westernized culture.

In 1703 Peter began building this new city at the point where the Neva River disgorges the muddy water of Lake Ladoga out through swamps and islands into the eastern Baltic. The way had been cleared for Russian activity in the area by the capture in 1702 of the Swedish fortress city of Noteborg at the other end of the Neva. This was the first turning of the tide of military fortune from Sweden to Russia in northeast Europe, and the vanquished city was appropriately renamed Schlüsselburg: “key city.” The key made possible the opening of what an Italian visitor soon called Russia’s “window to Europe.”³⁸ In February, 1704, the first of a long line of foreign architects arrived to direct all construction on the new site—assuring thereby that the “window” would be European in style as well as in the direction it faced. Within a decade, St. Petersburg was a city of nearly 35,000 buildings and the capital of all Russia—though it was not fully recognized as such until the Empress Anna permanently transferred her residence from Moscow to St. Petersburg in 1732 and a fire gutted Moscow five years later.

Almost no buildings have survived from the original city, whose bleak appearance bore little resemblance to the elegant city of later periods. The utilitarian structure of early Petersburg reflects the taste and preoccupations of its founder. Originally known by the Dutch name of Sankt Piter Bourkh (the abbreviation Piter remaining a familiar term for the city), St. Petersburg was conceived as a kind of Dutch-style naval base and trading center. In partial imitation of Amsterdam, the new city was systematically laid out along canals and islands. The pattern of construction was geometric and the pace rapid. The human cost of building in such a damp, cold climate was probably greater than that involved in building any other major city of Europe. Even more illustrative of Peter’s military preoccupations was a second city founded in 1703 and bearing his name: Petrozavodsk, or “Peter’s factory.” Built to provide an arms manufacturing center near the metal resources of the north, this distant city on Lake Onega was thrust into an even more cold and inhuman location than Petersburg.

Military expediency and raison d’état were the abiding considerations of Peter. The practical-minded, shipbuilding countries of the Protestant North were the source of most of his reformatorial ideas and techniques. Sweden (and to a lesser extent Prussia) provided him with quasi-military administrative ideas: a utilitarian “table of ranks” requiring state service on a systematic basis and a new synodal pattern of church administration subject to state control. Holland provided him with the models (and much of the nautical terminology) for the new Russian navy. Saxony and the Baltic German provinces provided most of the teachers for his military training schools and the staff for the new academy of sciences that was set up immediately after his death.³⁹ His efforts to advance Russian learning were almost completely concentrated on scientific, technical, or linguistic matters of direct military or diplomatic value. “To Peter’s mind, ‘education’ and ‘vocational training’ seem to have been synonymous concepts.”⁴⁰

This practical, technological emphasis is evidenced in the first periodical and the first secular book in Russian history—both of which appeared in 1703, the year of the founding of St. Petersburg. The printed journal, Vedomosti, was largely devoted to technical and order-of-battle information. The book, Leonty Magnitsky’s Arithmetic, was more a general handbook of useful knowledge than a systematic arithmetic.⁴¹ Though often labeled the first scientific publication in Russian history, the term “science” (nauka), as used in its subtitle, carries the established seventeenth-century Russian meaning of “skilled technique” rather than the more general European meaning of theoretical knowledge.⁴² Far more general and abstract than Peter’s “science” was the lexicon of political and philosophical terms that Peter took over from the Poles. This process of borrowing also continued a seventeenth-century Russian trend, whereby new labels were adopted piecemeal as the practical need for them arose.⁴³

Thus, although Peter met and corresponded with the doctors of the Sorbonne while in Paris, and made the first purchase while in Holland for what was to become a magnificent imperial Rembrandt collection,⁴⁴ his reign was not one of philosophic or artistic culture. Indeed, from this point of view, Peter’s reign was in many ways a regression from that of Alexis or even Sophia. There was no painting equal to that of Ushakov, no poetry equal to that of Polotsky, no historical writing equal to that of Gizel. The perfunctory dramatic efforts of Peter’s reign represent an aesthetic decline from those of Alexis’; and even the theological disputes between Yavorsky and Prokopovich came as an anticlimax after the intense controversies that had raged about Nikon, Medvedev, and Kuhlmann.

Peter’s celebrated new departures in statecraft also moved along lines laid out by his predecessors. The drive to the Baltic was anticipated by Ivan III’s establishment of Ivangorod, Ivan IV’s attempt to capture Livonia, and Alexis’s attempt to capture Riga and build a Baltic fleet. His reliance on Northern European ideas, technicians, and mercenaries continued a trend begun by Ivan IV and expanded by Michael. His ruthless expansion of state control over traditional ecclesiastical and feudal interests was in the spirit of Ivan and Alexis, and his secret chancellery in the spirit of their oprichnina and prikaz of secret affairs, respectively. His program of modernization and reform was anticipated in almost all its major respects by the long series of seventeenth-century proposals for Westernization, extending from Boris Godunov and the False Dmitry to Ordyn-Nashchokin and Golitsyn.

But if Peter’s reign represents the culmination of processes long at work, it was nonetheless new in spirit and far-reaching in consequences. For Peter sought not just to make use of Western personnel and ideas but to be made over by them. A century before Peter’s important victory over the Swedes, Skopin-Shuisky had begun the process of adopting Western military techniques to defeat a Western rival. Alexis’ decisive victory over the Poles had removed a far greater potential threat to Russian dominance of Eastern Europe than Sweden. But all of these earlier victories were won in the name of a religious civilization; Peter’s victories were won in the name of a sovereign secular state. Peter was the first Russian ruler to go abroad, to meet foreigners as an apprentice seeking to learn from them. He formally called himself not “tsar” but “emperor”; and insofar as he provided any ideological justification for his relentless statecraft of expediency, he spoke of the “universal national service,” the “fortress of justice,” or the “common good.” He used “interests of the state” almost synonymously with “utility of the sovereign.”⁴⁵ The official court apologia for Peter’s rule, The Justice of the Monarch’s Will, echoed the pessimistic, secular arguments of Hobbes about the practical need of a debased humanity for absolute monarchy. Its author, Feofan Prokopovich, was the first in a long line of Russian churchmen willing to serve as “an ideologist of state power using Christianity as its instrument.”⁴⁶

In plays and sermons Prokopovich exalted the glories of the people whom he designated by the new term Rossianin, “imperial Russian.” Russian self-confidence was strengthened by Peter’s defeat of the Swedes, whom Prokopovich called “our great and terrible foe… the strongest warriors among the German peoples and, until now, the terror of all the others.”⁴⁷ The new secular nationalism was, however, more limited in its ambitions than the religious nationalism of the Muscovite era. Peter, no less than other European monarchs of the early eighteenth century, spoke of “proportion” and the need to “maintain a balance in Europe.”⁴⁸

His courtiers adopted not only the manners and terminology of the Polish aristocracy but also the self-gratifying feeling of being culturally superior “Europeans.” Court poets began to speak patronizingly of other “uncivilized” peoples in much the same manner that Western Europeans had written about pre-Petrine Russia.

America is wilfully rapacious,

Her people savage in morals and rule…

Knowing no God, evil in thought

No one can accomplish anything

Where such stupidity, vileness and sin prevail.⁴⁹

If one uses the essentially organic term perelom (“rupture”) to describe the changes under Alexis, one may use the more mechanistic term perevorot (“turnabout of direction”) to describe those of Peter.⁵⁰ Political expediency based on impersonal calculation replaced a world where ideal ends and personal attachments had been all-important. The traditional orders of precedence under Alexis were far less binding and rigid than Peter’s new hierarchical Table of Ranks but lacked the special new authority of the modern state. Moscow under Alexis had welcomed more, and more cultured, Western residents than St. Petersburg in the first half of the eighteenth century, but was not itself a living monument to Western order and technology. This new city was, for the pictorial imagination of Old Russia, the icon of a new world in which, as the corrector of books in the early years of Peter’s reign put it,

geometry has appeared,

land surveying encompasses everything.

Nothing on earth lies beyond measurement.⁵¹

There was a kind of forbidding impersonality about a world in which the often-used word for “soul” (dusha) was now regularly invoked to describe the individual in his function as the basic unit for taxation and conscription by the new service state; in which the traditional familiar form of address (ty) was rapidly being supplanted by the more formal and officially endorsed vy.

Nothing better indicates Peter’s preoccupation with state problems and underlying secularism than his complex religious policy. He extended an unprecedented measure of toleration to Catholics (permitting at last the building of a Catholic Church inside Russia), but at the same time expressed approval of the stand taken by Galileo against the Church hierarchy and reorganized the Russian Church on primarily Protestant lines. Peter persecuted not only the fanatical Old Believers who sought to preserve the old forms of worship, but also those thoroughgoing freethinkers who sought more drastic and permissive ecclesiastical reforms. Peter curtailed and harassed the established Orthodox Church at home, but simultaneously supported its politically helpful activities in Poland.⁵² He vaguely discussed the unification of all churches with German Protestants and French Catholics.⁵³ Yet the church he created was more than ever before the subordinate instrument of a particular national state. He recreated the state bureau for supervising monasteries, severely restricted the authority of the “idle” monastic estate, melted down their bells for cannon, and substituted a synod under state control for the independent patriarchate.

Yet Peter also built the last of the four major monastic complexes of Russia: the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg. It was a practical necessity for his new capital to be linked—like Kiev and Moscow—with a great monastery; just as it was essential to stability to have an established church. Thus, Peter built his monastery, naming it for Alexander Nevsky, patron saint of St. Petersburg and the entire Neva region. The saint’s remains were duly transferred from Vladimir for public exhibition, not in Moscow, but in Novgorod, and then floated down river and lake for final reburial in St. Petersburg, the new gateway to the West. The Tsar decreed that henceforth the saint was to be portrayed not as a monk but as a warrior, and that the saint’s festival be held on July 30, the day of Peter’s treaty with Sweden.⁵⁴ The architectural style of the monastery and the theology later taught in its seminary were to be in many ways more Western than Russian.

The beginnings of rationalistic, secular thought can be seen in the works of three native Russians of the Petrine era—each of whom approached intellectual problems from an earthy background of practical activity of the type encouraged by Peter.

The apothecary Dmitry Tveritinov was one of the many men with medical knowledge who were brought to Moscow prior to the foundation of the first Russian hospital in 1709. As a native Russian from nearby Tver, he was more trusted than foreign doctors and soon had many influential friends at court. His rationalistic and sceptical approach to miracles and relics appears to have been an outgrowth both of his scientific training and of his sympathy for Protestantism. Church leaders feared that he was connected with a like-minded group, known as “the new philosophers,” within the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy in Moscow, and he was imprisoned and forced to recant in 1717.⁵⁵

The manufacturer Ivan Pososhkov was one of a number of self-made men who arose from relatively humble origins to positions of influence during the reign of Peter. By accumulating land and developing state-supported economic enterprises (including a vodka-distilling plant), he acquired great wealth and considerable experience in trade and commerce. Amidst the general reformatorial atmosphere of the Petrine period, he felt encouraged to write in the early 1720’s On Poverty and Wealth, the first original theoretical treatise on economics ever written by a Russian. He argued that economic prosperity was the key to national welfare rather than the actual wealth in possession of the monarch at any given time. Trade and commerce should be stimulated even more than agriculture. A rationalized rule of law and an expanded educational program are necessary for economic growth, and both the superstitions of the Old Believers and the Western love of luxury are to be avoided. Pososhkov’s tract was evidently designed to appeal to Peter as a logical extension in the economic realm of his political reforms, just as Tveritinov’s ideas were designed to represent such an extension in philosophy. But Pososhkov like Tveritinov never gained imperial favor for his ideas. He finished his book only in 1724, was imprisoned shortly after Peter’s death the following year, and died in 1726.⁵⁶

Tatishchev, the third of these Petrine harbingers of new secular thought patterns, lived longest and attained his greatest influence after Peter’s death. He formed, together with Prokopovich and the learned poet-diplomat Antioch Kantemir, a group known as the “learned guard,” which was in many ways the first in the long line of self-conscious intellectual circles devoted to the propagation of secular knowledge. Tatishchev’s career illustrates particularly well how Peter’s interest in war and technology led Russian thought half-unconsciously to broader cultural vistas.

Tatishchev was first of all a military officer—trained in Peter’s new engineering and artillery schools and tested by almost continuous fighting during the last fifteen years of the Northern War. He spent the last, peaceful years of Peter’s reign supervising work in the newly opened metallurgical industries of the Urals (later to become his major vocation) and journeying to Sweden to continue his engineering training at a higher level. The combination of geographic explorations in the East and archival explorations in the West turned this officer-engineer toward the study of history. In 1739 he presented to the Academy of Sciences the first fruit of a long and panoramic History of Russia: the first example of critical scientific history by a native Russian.

Tatishchev’s history was not published until thirty years after it was written and twenty years after his death. Even then, it produced a remarkable effect, for it was still decades ahead of its time. Unlike the Sinopsis of Gizel, which remained the basic history of Russia throughout the early eighteenth century, Tatishchev’s History was a scientific work, seeking to combine his knowledge of geographical and military problems with a critical, comparative examination of the manuscript sources. Its aim was, moreover, the frankly secular one of proving useful background reading for those engaged in war and statecraft. Not only was its framework free of the traditional preoccupation with sacred history and genealogy, but it was even free of a narrowly Russian focus, making an effort to include the history of the non-Russian peoples of the empire. It introduced a descriptive scheme of periodization, defended unrestricted autocracy as the only form of government suited to a country of Russia’s size and complexity, and generally served as a model for many of the subsequent synthetic histories of Russia.⁵⁷

There is a kind of continuity between the reign of Peter and that of the Empress Anna, the most important of his immediate successors. During her rule throughout the 1730’s, the influence of Baltic Germans continued to predominate. Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the son of a metal forger and sculptor brought to Russia by Peter, built a new Winter Palace—the first permanent imperial residence in the new capital—but he devoted more of his talent to building a new palace for her favorite, Biron, miles to the west at Mitau (Jelgava) in Courland. St. Petersburg was still looked on as a kind of hardship post for mercenary officers. Court life in the new capital was marked by continued crudeness and vulgarity. Like Peter, Anna relied on dwarfs and freaks for entertainment and enjoyed mocking traditional ceremonies and court personalities. Probably the most remarkable new building of her reign was the great ice palace she built on the Neva during the severe winter of 1739-40-Eighty feet long and thirty-three feet high, the palace was equipped with furniture, clocks, and even chandeliers—all molded from ice. It was built largely as a mock gesture to an unfaithful courtier, who was forced to marry an old and ugly Kalmyk and spend his wedding night naked in the icy “bedroom” of the palace, with his “bride” the only conceivable source of warmth.⁵⁸

Like Peter, Anna was suspicious of intellectual activity that had no practical value and might conceivably lead men to question the imperial authority. She conducted a personal vendetta against the most cultured Russian of the age, the new scion of the Westernized Golitsyn family, Dmitry. Even more than his first cousin once removed, Vasily, who had been exiled by Peter, Dmitry Golitsyn was a man of ranging cultural interests. As an ambassador to Constantinople and voevoda of Kiev from 1707-18, he had amassed a six-thousand-volume library and launched an extensive personal project for translating such Western political theorists as Grotius, Pufendorf, and John Locke. Under their influence, Golitsyn became, in effect, Russia’s first secular political theorist. He was the first native Russian to popularize the familiar Western idea of objective natural law.⁵⁹ At the same time, Golitsyn became the spokesman for the new service nobility by drawing up the constitutional project of 1730 in an effort to limit autocratic authority by a council of the higher nobility. This project represented a genuine innovation rather than a traditionalist protest movement. The models were Swedish, and the objective was to extend the Petrine reforms further in the same Westward direction which the original reforms pointed.⁶⁰ The Senate, which Peter had created in 1711, was not basically a legislative or even a consultative body, but an executive organ of the emperor for transmitting his commands to the provinces and to the administrative colleges, which were created subordinate to it in 1717. Like Peter, Anna was inhospitable to any limitation on her power; and Golitsyn suffered an even cruder fate than had befallen Tveritinov and Pososhkov in the preceding decades. His library was taken, and he was imprisoned in the Schlüsselburg fortress. In 1737 he became the first in a long line of reformers to die within its walls.

Nonetheless, Anna was forced to concede a few new privileges to the service nobility. The founding in 1731 of a school for the Corps of Nobility accelerated the trend begun by Peter of providing a veneer of Western manners to his crude new ruling class. The name of the corps, shliakhetsky korpus, was derived from the Polish word for nobility, szlachta, and reveals the source of inspiration for this effort to civilize the ruling classes. But the teachers and the language of instruction were—as in the Academy of Sciences—primarily German. This school, like that founded for the Corps of Pages in 1759, provided the non-technical curriculum of an aristocratic finishing school.⁶¹ Graduates of these schools (and of the somewhat more rigorous gymnasium of the Academy of Sciences) provided the nucleus of a Western-educated minority. A new secular culture slowly began to emerge under Anna as the first orchestra was assembled and the first opera was performed on Russian soil. Certain emphases of this new culture were already apparent by the end of her reign.

First of all this new world rejoiced in the discovery of the human body. The cutting off of the beard destroyed man’s sense of community with the idealized likenesses of the icons. The introduction of secular portraiture, of heroic statuary, and of new, more suggestive styles of dress—all aided in the discovery of the human form. The beginnings of court ballet and of stylized imperial balls under Anna placed a premium on elegance of form and movement that had never been evident in Muscovy.

Gradually, the individual was being discovered as an earthly being with personal attributes, private interests, and responsibilities. The word persona was used to describe the new portraits which were painted of men in their actual, human state rather than in the spiritualized saintly manner of the icons. By the late seventeenth century, this word had begun to acquire the more general meaning of an important or strong individual. Even he who was not important enough to become a persona in his own right was now considered an individual “soul” by the all-powerful state, which began to exact taxes and services directly from the individual rather than from the region or household.

Prokopovich introduced the word “personal” (personal’ny) in its modern sense early in the eighteenth century; and the first precise terms for “private” and “particular” also entered the Russian language at this time. Words that are now used for “law” and “crime” had long existed in Slavic, but “they did not penetrate into the language of Russian jurisprudence with their modern meaning until the eighteenth century.”⁶²

There was also a new love of decorative effects, of embellishment for its own sake. The lavish ornamentation and illusionism of the European baroque quickly imposed itself on the new capital. Guided by the bold hand of Rastrelli, the first original style for Russian secular architecture emerged under Anna’s successor: the so-called Elizabethan rococo. At Peterhof and in the rebuilding of Tsarskoe Selo and the Winter Palace, this style superimposed decorative effects drawn from Muscovite church architecture on the giant facades, theatrical interiors, and monumental staircases of the European baroque. A similar ornateness soon became evident in furniture, hair styles, and porcelain.

Finally, a cult of classical antiquity began to emerge on Russian soil. Taken over first from Poland and then from Italian and French visitors was the idea that classical forms of art and life might serve as a supplement (if not an alternative) to Christian forms. The belief subtly grew that classical antiquity could—unaided by Christian revelation—answer many of the pressing problems of life. The first work of classical antiquity translated into Russian in the eighteenth century was Aesop’s Fables; and the first ensemble in the new medium of sculpture to be displayed in St. Petersburg was a series of statues by the older Rastrelli, illustrating the morals of these fables. The new poets and writers that emerged under Elizabeth’s reign in the 1740’s all used classical forms of exposition: odes, elegies, and tonic verse rather than the syllabic verse of the late seventeenth century. The new operas, plays, and ballets of the Elizabethan era were built around classical more often than scriptural subjects—in marked contrast to the theater of Alexis’ time. Peter the Great had himself sculpted in the guise of a Roman emperor; and Latin became the scholarly language of the new Academy of Sciences.

This summoning up of classical images in a land so remote from the classical world points to the underlying unreality of early post-Petrine culture. The turquoise blue with which buildings were painted lent an unreal coloration to the great edifices of the new capital. The endless proliferation of three-dimensional decorative effects—artificial pilasters, statuary, and garden pavilions—reflects the general desire of baroque art to achieve mastery over its material and, in the last analysis, over nature itself.⁶³ This effort seemed particularly presumptuous and unreal for such an untutored people in such an inhospitable natural environment.

Perhaps there was an unconscious realization of this unreality in Elizabeth’s almost compulsive fondness for masquerades. Things were not what they seemed to be in either the decor or the dances of the Elizabethan court. Cryptic maxims, fables, and acrostics had already established themselves at the Tsar’s court;⁶⁴ and ever since 1735 there had been a special chair of allegory in the Academy of Sciences. Elizabeth’s coronation in 1740 had been celebrated by two examples of allegorical ballet, her favorite form of theatrical entertainment. Increasingly during her reign, she sponsored not only masked balls of various sorts but a particular type known as a “metamorphosis,” wherein men came disguised as women and vice versa. A laboratory for making artificial fireworks and a wooden “theatre of illuminations” jutting out into the Neva across from the Academy of Sciences were other forms of artifice initiated by Elizabeth. The greatest Russian scientist of the day, Michael Lomonosov, seems to have relished his assignment as official chronicler of these illuminations. He describes one in which a giant colossus looks toward the sea, holding up a torch and the initials of Elizabeth.

Far o’er the restless sea its beam would pour

And lead the periled vessels safe to shore…⁶⁵

St. Petersburg, at the eastern extremity of the Baltic, was such a colossus, but it did not rest on firm foundations. It had been built over a swampy region which the Finns and Swedes had used only for forts and fisheries. It was constantly menaced by floods. Pushkin, Gogol, and other writers of the late imperial period were fascinated with the defiance of nature inherent in the creation of the new capital. The history of European culture in this city is rather like that of the extraordinary palm tree in a story by Vsevelod Garshin. Artificially transplanted from more sunlit southern regions to the greenhouse of a northern city, the plant restlessly seeks to bring the expansive freedom of its former habitat to all the docile native plants confined in the greenhouse. Its brilliant growth upward toward the elusive sun attracts the fascinated attention of all, but leads ultimately to a shattering of the enclosure and a killing exposure to the real climate of the surrounding region.⁶⁶

By the end of Elizabeth’s reign St. Petersburg had a population about equal to that of Moscow and a culture similar to that of the leading capitals of Europe. It was already

… one of the strangest, loveliest, most terrible, and most dramatic of the world’s great urban centers. The high northern latitude, the extreme slant of the sun’s rays, the flatness of the terrain, the frequent breaking of the landscape by wide, shimmering expanses of water: all these combine to accent the horizontal at the expense of the vertical and to create everywhere the sense of immense space, distance, and power.… Cleaving the city down the center, the cold waters of the Neva move silently and swiftly, like a slab of smooth grey metal… bringing with them the tang of the lonely wastes of forests and swamp from which they have emerged. At every hand one feels the proximity of the great wilderness of the Russian north—silent, somber, infinitely patient.⁶⁷

The soaring and exotic motifs of Muscovite architecture had been rejected, and the only vertical uplift was provided by the Admiralty and the Peter and Paul Fortress, reminders of the military preoccupations of its founder. The setting was completed by the bleak seasons of the north: the dark winters, the long, damp springs, the “white nights” of June, with their poetic iridescence,

and, finally, the brief, pathetic summers, suggestive rather than explicit… passionately cherished by the inhabitants for their very rareness and brevity.

In such a city the attention of man is forced inward upon himself.… Human relationships attain a strange vividness and intensity, with a touch of premonition.…

The city is, and always has been, a tragic city, artificially created… geographically misplaced, yet endowed with a haunting beauty, as though an ironic deity had meant to provide some redemption for all the cruelties and all the mistakes.⁶⁸

Such was St. Petersburg, symbol of the new Russia and a city which was to dominate the quickening intellectual and administrative life of the empire. Yet the victory of St. Petersburg and of its new secular culture was not complete. The thought patterns of Old Muscovy continued to dominate the old capital and much of the Russian countryside. Indeed, its traditionalist, religious culture made a number of powerful—if uncoordinated and ultimately unsuccessful—counterattacks against the culture of St. Petersburg. These protest movements commanded widespread popular followings and helped turn the ideological split between old and new into a deep social cleavage between popular and elite culture.

The Defense of Muscovy

ALREADY in Peter’s lifetime two of the main forms of Muscovite protest reached a fever pitch of intensity: Old Believer communalism and Cossack-led peasant insurrectionism. Each of these movements first appeared under Alexis; but it was only under Peter that each became a distinct tradition with a broad social base and a deep ideology. The two movements often overlapped and reinforced one another—sharing as they did a common idealization of the Muscovite past and a hatred of the new secular bureaucracy. They did much to shape the character of all opposition movements under the Romanovs, not excepting those which brought about the end of the dynasty in 1917.

The Old Believers consolidated their hold over many Great Russians under Peter. The gathering strength of the amorphous Old Believer movement represented not so much increased support for their doctrinal position as resentment at the increased authority of foreigners in the new empire. The transition from Muscovite tsardom to multi-national empire was a particularly painful one for the Great Russian traditionalists. It involved the growth of a government bureaucracy dominated by more technically skilled Baltic Germans and the absorption from former Polish territories of better-educated Catholics and Jews. The confusions of war and social change gave a certain appeal to the simple Old Believer hypothesis that the reign of Antichrist was at hand, that Peter had been corrupted in foreign lands, and that the flood at the time of Peter’s death was but a foretaste of God’s wrathful judgment on this new world.

The Old Belief became particularly embedded in the psychology of the merchant classes, not only because of its fear of foreign competition, but also because of its special resentment of central bureaucracy. The Great Russian merchants, whose wealth had been amassed in the Russian north and protected by the traditional liberties of its cities, were hard hit by the new policies of increased central control. They tended to find solace in the Old Belief—identifying their own lost economic privileges with the idealized Christian civilization of Old Muscovy. They often preferred to move on to new areas rather than surrender old liberties or change old business practices. Gradually a pattern developed of internal colonization by disaffected Great Russians who practiced puritanical, communal living along with the old forms of worship. Belief in the coming end of the world was not abandoned in these new communities, but the expectation of judgment was increasingly invoked to provide a sense of urgency about the work of the new community rather than a sense of imminent apocalypse. Salvation was no longer to be found through the sacraments of the Church or the activities of the state after the reforms of Nikon and Peter respectively. One sought salvation now in the grim and isolated communities in which alone the organic religious civilization of the Muscovite past was preserved.

The parallel between the Calvinists of Western Europe and the Old Believers of the East is striking. Both movements were puritanical, replacing a sacramental church with a new, this-worldly asceticism; an established hierarchical authority with local communal rule. Both movements stimulated new economic enterprise with their bleak insistence on the need for hard work as the only means of demonstrating one’s election by a wrathful God. Both movements played leading roles in colonizing previously unsettled lands. The Old Believer communities pushing on into Siberia were, like the pilgrims sailing to North America, driven on both by the persecution of established churches and by their own restless hope of finding some unspoiled region in which God’s ever-imminent kingdom might come into earthly being.⁶⁹

Perhaps the most extraordinary of these new communities were those that spread out along the frozen lakes and rivers of northern Russia. Inspired by the heroic resistance to central authority of the Solovetsk monastery,⁷⁰ these new communities continued their old communal business practices and traditional forms of worship in surroundings where the imperial authority was less likely to pursue them. The model community for the entire region was that which developed in the 1690’s along the Vyg River between Lake Onega and the White Sea. By 1720 there were more than 1,500 Old Believers in this community, and a rich hagiographical and polemic literature was developing in the Old Muscovy style. An impoverished princely family of the Russian north, the Denisovs, became the administrative and ideological leaders of the new community: in effect, lay elders of a new monastic civilization. The older brother, Andrew Denisov, provided the first systematic defense of the Old Belief in his Answers from Beside the Sea, drawn up in response to theological interrogation by the Holy Synod in 1722. His younger brother Semen developed and codified the martyrology of the schismatics with his History of the Fathers and Sufferers of Solovetsk and his Vineyard of Russia.⁷¹

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 Avvakum 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’état 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 that the ultimate ruler of the system was its only possible redeemer. The political and administrative system of the new empire was simply to be destroyed so that Russia could return to the 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 the intervening wall of administrators and bureaucrats could be torn down. At the same time, the “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 the 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 the old line through 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 the corrupted West. The peasant rebels often echoed themes sounded by the 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, the 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 under Catherine it was unclear what the relationship of the true tsar was to be toward the woman on the throne. For many of his followers, Pugachev was simply the miraculously returned figure of Peter III, the slain husband and imperial predecessor of Catherine. A few thought he should replace Catherine, but many thought he should marry her, and he himself seems to have looked on Catherine as a mother being ravished by her courtiers.⁸⁴

Theme and Variations in Iconography

PLATES V-VII

So perfect was the blending of aesthetic and spiritual values in the monk Andrew Rublev’s “Old Testament Trinity” (Plate V) that the Church Council of 1551 prescribed it as the model for all future icons 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 Rublev’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 Rublev 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 V

PLATE VI

PLATE VII

PLATE VIII

The New Portraiture

PLATE VIII

Typical of the new secular portraiture that replaced icon-painting in the eighteenth century as the most vital form of the visual arts is the picture (Plate VIII) of the merchant-aristocrat F. Demidov. Completed in 1773 by the court painter of Catherine the Great, D. Levitsky, this painting is done full figure in the manner of the so-called “parade portraits,” amidst pseudo-classical surroundings. The old obraza, or “forms,” through which God was thought to have intervened in history were replaced by persony, or “persons,” of importance who were thought to be making history in their own right. Demidov is pointing, not like the central figure in the “Old Testament Trinity” to God’s mysterious gifts to man, but to his own eminently tangible benefactions to humanity as an “enlightened” patron of agriculture in the countryside and of botanical beautification in the new cities. The virtue of the painting lies in the faint note of caricature which Levitsky has injected into his portrayal of this rather vain and venal scion of a famous aristocratic family.

The fundamentally conservative nature of the belief in a true tsar may be seen from the fact that each of the major pretenders gained national support not through any positive program but through his ability to serve as the focus for a variety of forces resisting change. In each case the tsar most immediately threatened was attempting to extend central authority and cultural Westernization: Boris Godunov (the False Dmitry), Shuisky (Bolotnikov), Alexis (Stenka Razin), Peter the Great (Bulavin), and Catherine (Pugachev). The effect of the heroic rebellions was to strengthen rather than weaken the bureaucratic centralization they were opposing. Peasant animosities were in effect directed into periodic bloodbaths of local officials, who were relatively expendable for the central government, while peasant loyalty to the autocrat, the pivot and heart of the system, was intensified. Even in rebellion the peasants could not conceive of an alternative political system. They refused to believe that the reigning tsar was responsible for the evils of the time and the bureaucrats and foreign elements around him.

As in the case of the Old Believers, the conservative peasant insurrectionaries bear certain resemblances to other European protest movements against modernization. In social composition and messianic utopianism the Russian peasant rebellions resemble those of sixteenth-century Germany. In their conservative longing for a more godly ruling line, they resemble the Jacobites of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Just as the Jacobite myth lived on in agrarian Scotland and northern England long after it had failed as an insurrectionary force, so the myth of peasant rebellion lived on in the mentality of southern Russia long after the last great insurrection under Pugachev.

Thus, although the state bureaucracy and army grew steadily and the service aristocracy gained in wealth and local authority throughout the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, many Russians continued to believe in the superiority of the small schismatic communities or to dream of a new Stenka Razin who would lead them to a tsar-deliverer.

Less dramatic than either the schismatics or the peasant insurrectionaries was a third form of religious protest against the new world of St. Petersburg: the monastic revival within the official Church. This movement was the slowest to develop and the most restricted in terms of popular participation. But it was perhaps the deepest of all and the one most faithful to the culture of Old Muscovy. The central institution of that culture had always been the monasteries; and their ability to recover even in part from the crippling blows of the early eighteenth century is perhaps the surest indication of the continued importance of this “old” culture in the “new” period of Russian history.

The possibility of any such revival must have seemed extremely remote in the early eighteenth century. The efforts of Peter and Anna to bring the Russian Church closer organizationally to the Lutheran state churches of the Baltic regions had resulted in a great weakening of the monastic estate. Whereas there had been about twenty-five thousand in monastic orders at the beginning of the eighteenth century, there were less than fifteen thousand by the end of Anna’s reign; and the number was to decline still further after Catherine the Great formally confiscated monastic property in 1763. The listing of 1764 showed that only 318 monasteries remained out of more than two thousand in the late seventeenth century.⁸⁵

The initial reactions of many monasteries had been to lash out in defense of their former privileges, allying themselves at times with those who advanced the claims of another “true” line of tsars. Typical was a monk of Tambov who fled his cloister convinced that the Antichrist had taken the place of the real Peter and was responsible for the murder of Peter’s son. Although his prediction proved ill-founded that the end of the world would come early in 1723, he continued to gain monastic followers in the excitable Tambov region and went to Moscow at the time of Peter’s death with high hopes of turning Russia back to the true path. Instead, he was arrested and executed, his followers rounded up and mutilated, and his head exhibited in the streets of Tambov by troops from one of the new guards regiments.⁸⁶

Only after the impossibility of a full return to the old ways had been clearly realized, perhaps, was the way clear for fresh approaches in Russian monasticism. Once all hope was lost of recovering their lost wealth and independence, the Russian monasteries began to return to the long-submerged tradition of the original fourteenth-century monastic pioneers and evangelists. This spiritual revival began quietly in the late eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth, producing a gradual increase in the size of the monastic establishment⁸⁷ and a deepening of its spiritual life.

The heart of the revival was, once again, the “holy mountain” of Athos and the rediscovery of its still-vigorous traditions of patristic theology and inner spirituality. The man who brought the spirit of Mt. Athos a second time to Russia was Paissius Velichkovsky, the son of a Poltavan priest and a converted Jewess. Although descended from one of the greatest Ukrainian baroque poets, Paissius was repelled by the “pagan mythology” that he found in this Westernized heritage. Like Maxim the Greek in the sixteenth and Ivan Vyshensky in the seventeenth century, Paissius came to Russia from Athos in the eighteenth century with a simple message: turn back from secularism to the simple ways of the early desert fathers. Like these earlier elders, Paissius was deeply opposed to worldly learning, yet was himself a learned and articulate figure. He began a series of Russian translations of the works of the early fathers—the best and longest collection of patristic writings yet to appear in Russia—and translated the popular Greek collection of ascetic spirituality, the Philokalia.⁸⁸

Unlike Maxim or Vyshensky, however, Paissius was the initiator of a movement within the church rather than a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness. He founded a number of new cloisters in Moldavia and southern Russia, and provided them with a series of “Letters of Spiritual Direction” as guides for the purification of the monastic estate. The key to monastic life for Paissius was common obedience to the spiritual elder within a community of ascetic hermits dedicated to the practice of unceasing prayer. The spiritual life was thus seen in hesychastic terms as one of internal prayer and self-discipline; and the “rule” adopted was modeled on that of the early desert fathers. The term pustyn’, or desert, increasingly replaced other designations for a monastery as the austere rule of Paissius became more widely accepted.

Even more influential and original was Tikhon Zadonsky, an anguished seeker for a new religious calling in a new kind of world. Born and brought up near St. Petersburg and educated in Novgorod, Tikhon was fully exposed to the new secularizing influences of the capital and also to the new wave of German pietistic thought. Influenced perhaps by the pietistic idea of inward renewal and rededication. Tikhon moved from his high post as suffragan bishop of Novgorod, by way of the bishopric of Voronezh, to a new monastery in a frontier region of the Don. The title of Arndt’s influential pietistic tract On True Christianity became the title of Tikhon’s own magnum opus on the holy life. In it and in his other writings and sermons Tikhon emphasizes the joys of Christ-like living. At Zadonsk, Tikhon took the role of the spiritual elder out of the narrow confines of the monastery into the world of affairs, becoming the friend and counselor of lay people as well as monastic apprentices.⁸⁹

The man who carried this revival into the nineteenth century, Seraphim of Sarov, combined Paissius’ ascetic and patristic emphases with Tikhon’s insistence on self-renunciation and ministering to the people. Seraphim gave up all his worldly goods and even his monastic habit to don a white peasant costume and spend fifteen years as a hermit in the woods near his new monastery at Sarov. A devoted Hesychast, he believed that “silence is the sacrament of the world to come, words are the weapons of this world.”⁹⁰ After returning from his forest retreat, Seraphim traveled widely in and out of cloisters, urging men to rededicate themselves to Christ. “Boredom,” he taught, “is cured by prayer, by abstaining from vain speech, by working with the hands…”⁹¹ Virginity he regarded as particularly desirable, and he was a frequent visitor to women’s convents, the rapid growth of which was an important sign of the revived interest in religious callings.

The spiritual intensity generated by the new monastic communities which Seraphim set up began to attract a new kind of pilgrim—secularized intellectuals—back for visits if not pilgrimages. The famous Optyna Pustyn, to the south of Moscow, became a center of counseling and of spiritual retreats for many of Russia’s most famous nineteenth-century thinkers: beginning with the Slavophile Ivan Kireevsky, who spent much of his later life there, and extending on through Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Vladimir Solov’ev. The figure of Father Zossima in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov presents a fairly accurate composite picture of Father Ambrose, the monastic elder at Optyna Pustyn, whom Dostoevsky frequently visited, and of Tikhon Zadonsky, whose writings Dostoevsky reverently studied.⁹²

The problems of the new monasticism were those of any religious calling in a primarily secular society. The new monks were bothered by self-doubt, harassed by demands that they prove themselves useful to the state like everyone else. Shorn of their role as court ideologists and great landlords, they were not yet sure what the role of the monastery could be in the new society. The monastic revival tended to be strongest outside the traditional monasteries.

On the one hand, there was a tendency to withdraw to ever more remote hermitages, where the saintly ideal was removed from ordinary social life and related to individual ascetic exercises. In this strange, semi-Oriental world the attainment of physical incorruptibility after death was thought to be the ultimate fruit of ascetic self-mastery; and proof of some degree of this incorruptibility became a pre-requisite for canonization in the eighteenth-century Russian Church.⁹³ The ascetic emphases of the new monasticism took it outside of the history and politics in which Muscovite monasticism had been continually involved. In its emphasis on repentance and reversion to the silent asceticism of the early Church, the new Russian monasticism was similar to the Trappist movement in post-Reformation Catholicism. Tikhon was typical not only in fleeing from ecclesiastical authority and civilization in general but also in his attempt to compile a “spiritual thesaurus gathered from the world.” Only scattered fragments of insight and experience were worth finding and preserving in the contemporary world.

As a merchant gathers varied wares from different countries, brings them into his house and hides them, so the Christian can gather from this world thoughts that are useful for the soul, lock them in the prison of his heart, and build up his soul with them.⁹⁴

At the same time, there was a new desire within the monasteries to communicate more directly with people in all walks of life. The emphasis on ascetic piety tended to break down the older ritual and formality of the communal monasteries, just as the confiscation of monastic lands had taken away the former preoccupation with economic affairs. The influence of Protestant pietism tended to turn monastic elders like Tikhon into part-time popular evangelists. Elements of self-doubt may lie behind the almost masochistic desire of the new monks to humble themselves. Tikhon requested that he be buried under the entrance stone of a simple church so that he could be literally trampled underfoot by the humblest believer. When hit by a freethinker in the course of an argument, Tikhon replied by throwing himself at the feet of his astonished assailant to ask forgiveness for driving him to such a loss of self-control.⁹⁵ It is perhaps fitting that Tikhon was canonized and his works studied anew in the 1860’s, when Russian thinkers were turning again to the problem of moral purification and humbling themselves before the simple people. The principal ideological movement of that age, the famous “movement (literally ‘procession’ or ‘pilgrimage’: khozhdenie) to the people,” was in many ways only an extension and secularization of the effort to take the monastic ideal out to a bonded but still believing peasantry. Indeed, the complex populist movement—the most genuinely original social movement of modern Russian history—appears in many ways as a continuation of all three post-Petrine forms of conservative protest to the Westernization and secularization of the Russian empire. Like all of them, populism was a loose tradition rather than an organized movement. Like most Old Believers, the populists believed in preserving the old communal forms of economic life and in the imminent possibility of sudden historical change. Like the peasant insurrectionaries, the populists believed in violent action against police and bureaucrats and in the ultimate benevolence of the “true tsar.” Even after killing Alexander II in 1881, the populists could conceive of no other program than to address utopian appeals to his successor.⁹⁶ Like the monastic revivalists, the populists believed in ascetic self-denial and in humbling oneself before the innocently suffering Russian people.

But before considering this and other movements of the late imperial period one must turn to the new and distinctive culture that took shape under Elizabeth and Catherine and lasted for a century. During this period the schisms and tensions that had been opened in Russian society by the reforms of Alexis and Peter were plastered over with the decorative effects of aristocratic culture. It is to the brilliant and self-confident culture of the aristocratic century—and to its lingering inner concerns—that attention must now be turned.