Some time later, he looked back.
She was still there, a tiny patch of redness in a huge expanse of green; a lonely figure on an endless plain. She watched him until he was out of sight.
Andrei rode south. Soon he would see the steppe again, and thatched cottages, and swaying fields of wheat.
What a strange and contradictory land this Muscovy was. Now that he was leaving it, his spirits seemed to lighten, as though a door to a dark room were being opened.
His mind drifted back to earlier days – to Anna. And then, suddenly, he thought of his old friend Stepan the Ox. He did not suppose he would see him again.
Freedom, that was the thing. Life was good. He was a dark and handsome fellow, there was no doubt about it. He felt his moustache – a true Cossack one.
His wide Cossack trousers flapped as the sun rose in the east and a little breeze got up.
Peter
Many times before in Russian history it had been thought that the end of days was approaching. But it was only in the second half of the seventeenth century that the new and ominous development began which convinced many that, this time, surely, the Apocalypse and the coming of the Antichrist must truly be at hand.
In order to understand Russia, it is important to remember that, while events in the centre may sometimes move quickly, and new ideas be introduced there, in the vast land itself, things change only very slowly. There is thus, almost always, a huge gap between what is said and what is done. And often confusing for the historian is that even the reaction of the endless hinterland to events at the centre may be so delayed that it becomes like an echo, returning long after the original sound has been forgotten and the person who made it has departed.
While historians may argue about the origins of the cataclysm that was to mark the end of old Muscovy, there is no doubt that for many Muscovites, it began in the year 1653.
It began with the Church reforms of the mighty Patriarch Nikon. And, most visibly, it concerned the way that the Russians made the sign of the cross.
If this seems strange, it must be explained that the Russian Orthodox was unlike other Orthodox Churches. Over the centuries, isolated from the rest of Christendom, it had developed its own spirit and its own practices which, as Patriarch Nikon had correctly seen, were out of line with the Orthodox mainstream. At certain points in their service, Russians sang two Hallelujahs instead of three; they used a different number of Communion loaves and made too many genuflections. They misspelt the name of Jesus in their texts, along with sundry other errors. And of all these differences, none was more obvious than their manner of making the sign of the cross.
The Orthodox did not make the sign of the cross in the manner of the Catholics. Instead of touching their forehead, chest and then crossing their hand from left to right on the chest, as did the Romans, the Orthodox with great care and solemnity touched first their forehead, then the middle of their chest, and then swung their hands first to the right and then to the left breast – in the opposite way, that is, to the western churches.
Further yet, however, the Russian Orthodox in crossing himself, or making the sign of benediction, held his fingers in a special way. For instead of closing the thumb against the fourth finger and raising the other three, the Russian would place his thumb against the fourth and little finger, raising only two fingers, the index and third.
This was the famous two-fingered sign – ‘the single hand’ as they often called it – which the Russians believed to be the pure and ancient practice. And it was this, together with his textual and liturgical corrections, that the Patriarch Nikon had set out, back in 1653, to change.
Like many Russian reformers, the tall austere Patriarch, who had so impressed Andrei, was in a hurry. He began to build a great monastery outside the capital which he called New Jerusalem. The river beside it he renamed the Jordan. Its architecture was massive, plain and severe. He planned five thrones there on which, one day, he hoped to see sitting all five Patriarchs of the Orthodox Church, with the Russian Patriarch at the centre.
His lust for ecclesiastical power, however, was his downfall. For Tsar Alexis, often away on campaign, had left Nikon in charge in his absence and even given him the highest title of Great Sovereign; and it was not long before Nikon had started to suggest, like a medieval Pope, that the Patriarch and the Church should have authority over the Tsar and the state – an idea which neither Alexis nor the boyars would tolerate. Mighty Nikon was exiled: his rule was over.
But his Church reforms remained.
At first, even in 1653, there had been opposition. A small group of conservative clergy – the best known of whom was the Archpriest Avvakum – had opposed the changes. At once the Patriarch had crushed them, and exiled Avvakum to the far north; but the opposition had continued.
In 1666 the great Church council called to settle the dispute agreed that, while the over-ambitious Nikon should be deposed, his reforms should stand and, amongst other things, three fingers should be raised in making the sign of the cross, instead of the traditional two. Those who refused to follow the new practices were to be excommunicated as heretics.
And thus began the great fissure in Russian society known as the Raskol – the Schism – and the appearance on the scene of a new and important group of Russians. In the nineteenth century they would come to be known as the Old Believers. But in these times they were called by the more general term for religious dissidents – the Raskolniki, the Schismatics.
It has sometimes been suggested that the reformers represented progress and the Raskolniki were obscurantist priests supported by illiterate peasants. This is not so. Indeed, Nikon’s new translations were done in such a hurry that they were full of inconsistencies, and he himself insisted upon details which other Patriarchs from the Orthodox Churches declared to be unnecessary. As for the Raskolniki, many were literate merchants and well-to-do peasants.
The Raskolniki also had a cogent objection, which it was hard for the reformers to answer. ‘For if Moscow is, as the Church has long claimed, the third Rome – after which, we know, there shall be no other – then how can all these things the Church has taught and practised now, suddenly, be wrong? Are we to say the practices of the Russian saints, and the liturgy confirmed by the great Church council of Ivan the Terrible, were heretical?’
In a Church which had always relied on the power of tradition, rather than textual analysis or logical proof, these objections were especially telling.
This was the quarrel at the centre. And who could guess what echo would return, after a time, from the hinterland?
Meanwhile, in the years that followed, there were other, mighty rumblings in the land.
1670
It was summer and the normally quiet little town of Russka was in a frenzy of excitement.
For the rebels were coming.
The monks, uncertain what line to take, looked to the abbot for guidance, but he himself could not make up his mind whether to defend the monastery or open its gates to them. In the town, and the nearby village of Dirty Place, opinion was similarly split. Many of the younger folk thought it would be a liberation. ‘He’s going to free the peasants,’ they said. ‘They’ll hang the Bobrovs and the land will be ours.’ But many of the older folk were more pessimistic. ‘If those rebels come,’ a small merchant remarked, ‘they’ll be like a plague of locusts.’
And nobody was even sure where the rebels were. The other side of the Volga, thought some; close by Nizhni Novgorod, suggested others; already across the Oka, declared some alarmists.