The result was that Nikon's attempt to reform the church produced—even after Nikon himself was gone—a full-scale religious rebellion. Thousands of people who refused to accept the reforms became known as Old Believers or Schismatics. Because the state was supporting the church reforms, revolt against the church widened into revolt against the state, and the Old Believers refused to obey either authority. Neither persuasion by the church nor repression by the government could move them.
To escape the rule of the Antichrist and the persecution of the state, whole villages of Old Believers fled to the Volga, the Don, and shores of the White Sea and beyond the Urals. Here, deep in the forest or on remote riverbanks, they formed new settlements, enduring the hardships of pioneers to build their communities. Some did not flee far enough. When the soldiers followed, the Old Believers declared themselves ready to be engulfed in purifying flames rather than renounce the ritual and liturgy of their fathers. Children were heard saying, "We shall be burned at the stake. In the next world, we shall have little red boots and shirts embroidered with golden thread. They will serve us as much honey, nuts and apples as we want. We will not bow down to the Antichrist." Some communities, tired of waiting, crowded together—men, women and children—into their wooden churches, barricaded the doors and, singing the old liturgies, burned the buildings down over their own heads. In the far north, the monks of the powerful Solovetsky Monastery won over the garrison of soldiers to fight for the Old Beliefs (in part by stressing the Nikonian ban on drink). Together, monks and soldiers endured an eight-year siege, repelling all the might that the Moscow government could send against them.
The most commanding, incandescent figure among the Old Believers was the Archpriest Avvakum. At once heroic, passionate and fanatical, he possessed a physical courage to match and sustain his puritanical faith. He wrote in his autobiography, "A woman came to confess to me, burdened with many sins, guilty of fornication and of all the sins of the flesh, and, weeping, she began to acquaint me with them all, leaving nothing out, standing before the Gospels. And I, thrice accursed, fell sick myself. I inwardly burned with a lecherous fire, and that hour was bitter to me. I lit three candles and fixed them to the lectern and placed my right hand in the flame, and held it there till the evil passion was burned out, and when I had dismissed the young woman and laid away my vestments, I prayed and went to my house, grievously humbled in spirit."
Avvakum was the most vivid writer and preacher of his day— when he preached in Moscow, people flocked to hear his eloquence—and, among the leading clergymen, the one most outraged by Nikon's reforms. Bitterly, he condemned all change and any compromise and denounced Nikon as a heretic and a tool of Satan. Raging against such changes as the realistic portrayal of the Holy Family in newly made icons, he thundered, "They paint the image of Immanuel the Savior with plump face, red lips, dimpled fingers and large fat legs, and altogether make him look like a German, fat-bellied, corpulent, omitting only to paint the sword at his side. And all this was invented by the dirty cur Nikon."
In 1653, Nikon banished his erstwhile friend Avvakum to Tobolsk in Siberia. Nine years later, with the Patriarch himself in disgrace, Avvakum's powerful friends in Moscow persuaded the Tsar to recall the priest and establish him once again in a Kremlin church. For a while, Alexis was a frequent and respectful member of Avvakum's audience, even referring to the priest as an "Angel of God." But Avvakum's stubborn fundamentalism kept intruding. Defiantly, he announced that newborn babies knew more about God than all the scholars of the Greek church, and declared that, in order to be saved, all who had accepted the heretical Nikonian reforms must be rebaptized. These outbursts led to a second banishment, this time to far-off Pustozersk on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. From.this remote spot, Avvakum managed to remain the leader of the Old Believers. Unable to preach, he wrote eloquently to his followers, urging them to preserve the old faith, not to compromise, to defy their persecutors and to accept suffering and martyrdom gladly in imitation of Christ. "Burning your body," he said, "you commend your soul to God. Run and jump into the flames. Say, 'Here is my body, Devil. Take and eat it; my soul you cannot take."'
Avvakum's final act of defiance assured his fiery destiny. From exile, he wrote to young Tsar Fedor declaring that Christ had appeared to him in a vision and revealed that Fedor's dead father, Tsar Alexis, was in hell, suffering torments because of his approval of Nikonian reforms. Fedor's response was to condemn Avvakum to be burned alive. In April 1682, Avvakum achieved his long-desired martyrdom, bound to a stake in the marketplace of Pustozersk. Crossing himself a last time with two fingers, he shouted joyfully to the crowd, "There is terror in the stake until thou art bound: to it, but, once there, embrace it and all will be forgotten. Thou wilt behold Christ before the heat has laid hold upon thee, and thy soul, released from the dungeon of the body, will fly up to heaven like a happy little bird."
Across Russia, the example of Avvakum's death inspired thousands of his followers. During a six-year period, from 1684 to 1690, 20,000 Old Believers voluntarily followed their leader into the flames, preferring martyrdom to accepting the religion of the Antichrist. Sophia's government seemed to fit this image as well as that of Alexis or Fedor; indeed, she was even harsher on Schismatics than her father or her brother had been. Provincial governors were instructed to provide whatever troops were necessary to help the provincial metropolitan enforce the established religion. Anyone failing to attend church was questioned, and those suspected of heresy were tortured. Those who gave shelter to Schismatics suffered loss of all their property and exile. Yet, despite torture, exile and the stake, the Old Beliefs continued strong.
Not all the Old Believers submitted to persecution or cremated themselves. Those who had fled to refuges in the northern forests organized life there along new lines, not unlike the Protestant religious dissenters who in this same period were leaving Europe to found religious communities in New England. Keeping to themselves, the Old Believers established farming and fishing communities and laid the foundations of a future prosperity. A generation later, in Peter's time, the Old Believers were already recognized as sober, industrious workers. Peter, appreciating these qualities, told his officials, "Leave them alone."
In the long run, it was the established church and therefore Russia itself which suffered most from the Great Schism. The reforms which Nikon had hoped would purify the church and prepare it for leadership of the Orthodox world had shattered it instead. The two antagonists, Nikon and Avvakum, and the two factions, the reformers and the Old Believers, fought each other to exhaustion, draining the energy of the church, alienating its most zealous members and leaving it permanently subordinate to the temporal power. When Peter arrived, he would look upon the church in much the same light Nikon had: as a disorganized, lethargic body whose corruption, ignorance and superstition must be vigorously purged. Setting about this task (and not completing it until near the end of his reign), Peter had two overwhelming advantages over Nikon: He had greater power, and he was dependent oh no one to approve his reforms. Even so, he attempted less. Peter never tampered with ritual, liturgy or doctrine as Nikon had. Peter enforced the authority of the established church against the Schismatics, but he did not broaden the religious schism. Peter's schisms lay in other realms.
6
PETER'S GAMES
During the years Sophia ruled, there were certain ceremonial functions which only Peter and Ivan could perform. Their signatures were required on important public documents, and their presence was necessary at state banquets, religious festivals and ceremonial receptions of foreign ambassadors. In 1683, when Peter was eleven, the two co-Tsars received the ambassador of King Charles XI of Sweden. The ambassador's secretary, Engelbert Kampfer, recorded the scene: