To counter the power of the civil estate, Nikon issued a revised edition of the Pilot Book in 1653, and in the following year persuaded the Tsar to instruct provincial voevodas to make more general use of canon law in criminal matters.37 Nikon brought in a steady stream of foreign patriarchs to approve his reforms and foreign relics and icons to sanctify them (beginning with the Georgian Mother of God, which Nikon had procured from Mt. Athos as early as 1648). He set up an academy in the Zaikonospassky Monastery for translating Greek and Latin texts and instructing priests in useful secular knowledge as well as theology. During the plague of 1653-4, for instance, the best of his imported Kievan translators, Epiphanius Slavinetsky, was diverted from a proposed translation of the Bible to a translation of Vesalius' work on human anatomy; and Nikon's book purchaser in the Greek East spent much of his time seeking out savants and manuscripts that would offer additional medical guidance.38
Nikon had the profound misfortune of introducing his program into Russia at a time of great suffering through plague and war. He soon became a focal point of resentment for those who were anxious for a scapegoat and jealous of his closeness to the Tsar. His position was made untenable by the opposition of influential boyars, bureaucrats, and monastic leaders (often one and the same person) and by his own mixing of political and religious considerations. In his campaign against new trends in icon painting, for instance, Nikon ordered the streltsy to confiscate icons forcibly, to gouge out the eyes of the painted figures, and parade them through Moscow-warning that anyone henceforth painting similar icons would be treated in the same way. Nikon himself publicly shattered each of the mutilated pictures- naming just before each "burial" the high state official from whom it had been taken. This action terrified the bureaucracy and led the confused and superstitious Moscow mob to conclude that Nikon was a complete iconoclast responsible for the plague. In his campaign to gain acceptance for the new rituals, Nikon censured uncooperative boyars and anathemized priests during regular church services. He aroused opposition to his program among the proud and conservative monks of Solovetsk by trying to establish patriarchal control even over such sensitive disciplinary matters as drinking habits. He solidified popular feeling in the north behind the monks of Solovetsk by trying to found a rival monastery in the area and giving it a Greek name {Stavros, "cross").
Solovetsk was thus emboldened to begin the organized resistance to Nikon, refusing to accept his new service books in 1657. A few months later three appointed heads of newly created provincial dioceses refused to leave their Moscow sinecures for the distant posts to which Nikon had assigned them. In the following summer the head of the Tsar's imperial household
beat Nikon's chief official assistant as the latter was in the official act of arranging the order of religious procedure for a dinner in honor of the Orthodox crown prince of Georgia. When the Tsar failed to rebuke his official and subsequently the Tsar himself failed to appear at several worship services, Nikon reacted with a characteristic sense of drama.
Following a special liturgy in the Cathedral of the Assumption, Nikon announced that he was retiring to his new monastery, the New Jerusalem, outside Moscow until the Tsar reaffirmed confidence in him and his program. Not for eight years, however, did Nikon receive the Tsar's summons; and then it was to appear before a church council to be formally deposed as Patriarch and sentenced to life exile in a distant northern monastery. Most of his modifications of church worship were formally approved by this council of 1667; but the heart of his program-the attempt to establish a theocratic state under a powerful and disciplined hierarchy-was rejected definitively. It is a tribute to the power and magnetism of Nikon that it took the prikaz of secret affairs and other servants of the new secular state nearly a decade to depose him formally.39 But never again was the church hierarchy to exercise or even claim comparable political power in Russia. The abolition of the patriarchate and the thorough subordination of church to state was to follow in a few decades under Peter the Great.
The Fundamentalist Answer
At the same time that Nikon was heading off to exile and oblivion, another clerical figure was secretly taken even farther north to an even more grisly fate. Superficially, the Archpriest Avvakum was very similar to Nikon. He was a dedicated priest from northeast Russia, passionately opposed to Western influence and deeply determined to keep the Orthodox faith and ritual as the controlling force in Russian life. Avvakum had, indeed, been a friend of Nikon in Moscow during the late 1640's, when both were "zealots of the old devotion." They agreed that the Russian Church must be kept free of Western contamination and secularization. They both supported the first important church reform of the 1650's: the elimination of the "forty-mouthed" simultaneous readings of different offices within the churches.40
However, in the years that followed, Avvakum came to view the need for reform in totally different terms, and indeed to consider Nikon his deepest foe. Avvakum made himself the spokesman and martyr for the fundamentalist position. Like the theocratic view of Nikon, Awakum's
fundamentalism summarized and brought into focus attitudes that had been developing for more than a century.
The fundamentalist position was mainly advanced by the "white" or parish priests in the provinces and was a faithful reflection of the conservatism, superstition, and vitality of the Eastern frontier. It was less a clearly articulated position than a simple equation of trouble with innovation, innovation with foreigners, and foreigners with the devil. The past that the fundamentalists sought to maintain was the organic religious civilization that had prevailed in Russia prior to the coming of "guile from beyond the seas." To do this, they began to urge strict puritanical decrees against such Western innovations as tobacco ("bewitched grass," "the devil's incense") and hops ("bewitched Lithuanian grapes"). Instrumental music and representational art were particularly suspect. The burning of six carriages full of musical instruments in Moscow in 1649 was a graphic illustration of the anti-foreign and puritanical activities of the early years of Alexis' reign.41
Specially hated by the fundamentalists were the "Frankish icons" that had worked their way into Russian churches in imitation of representational art of Holland in the early seventeenth century. "They paint the image of Our Savior," cried Avvakum, "with a puffy face, red lips, curly hair, fat arms and muscles, and stout legs and thighs. All this is done for carnal reasons."42 Although Nikon formally shared their views on icons,43 he had permitted churches near the Kremlin to be decorated with frescoes based on German models, and he was shortly to follow the unprecedented course of posing for a portrait by a Dutch painter.44
Morbid excess, masochism, and heretical dualism often lay just below the surface of puritanical extremism. The numerous though still obscure communities founded north of Yaroslavl in the 1630's by a strange figure known only as Kapiton appear to have discarded Christian doctrine along with ecclesiastical authority. The leader wore heavy chains held down by two huge weights, practiced extreme fasting and mortification of the flesh as well as certain Jewish rites, such as circumcision and abstention from pork. He enjoyed a sufficient following to escape repeatedly from the imprisonment which local officials imposed on him.45
Puritanical and xenophobic discontent was given focus by a revival of prophecy within the established church. Leadership came primarily from a group of the married white clergy who held the title of "archpriest" (protopop), the highest open to the non-monastic clergy. The first of the archpriests, Ivan Neronov, championed a revival of the old trans-Volga tradition of piety, poverty, and prophecy. As a young preacher in Nizhny Novgorod on the upper Volga he was known as "the second Chrysostom." He attracted attention by opposing the war against Poland in 1632 and by