To say who was responsible for the schism in the Eastern Church of Christ would be no easier than to determine who was responsible for the crucifixion of its founder. In both cases, the main historical arena of the immediate future belonged to men of state: the "great" Peter and Catherine and the "august" Caesar. Yet the "third Rome" was to be haunted by schismatics almost as much as the first Rome had been by the early Christians. The year 1667, which brought a formal end to religious controversy, saw the beginning of two powerful social protest movements against the new order. From the north the monks and traders of Solovetsk began their active resistance to tsarist troops, which was to inspire the Old Believer communities that soon formed along the Russian frontier. At the same time Stenka Razin (who had made two pilgrimages to Solovetsk) began the Cossack-led peasant rebellion which provided the precedent for a new
tradition of anarchistic rural revolt. The subsequent history of Russia was to be, in many ways, the history of two Russias: that of the predominantly Baltic German nobility and the predominantly White and Little Russian priesthood, which ran the Romanov empire; and that of the simple peasants, tradesmen, and prophets from whom its strength was derived.
The original fundamentalists and theocrats made an impressive final exit from the stage of history in the late seventeenth century. Even after both positions had been rejected and Avvakum and Nikon were dead, each camp managed to give one last witness to its old ideals: one final ringing vote of no confidence in the new order.
The fundamentalist protest was that of communal withdrawal from the world. In the very year after the council in 1667, peasants in Nizhny Novgorod began to leave the fields and dress in white for all-night prayer vigils in anticipation of the coming end. Further north along the Volga, the unkempt Vasily Volosaty ("the hairy one") was attracting interest in his program for the destruction of all books and the launching of a penitential fast unto death. Others taught that the reign of Antichrist had begun in 1666, or that the end of the world would come in 1674 or 1691 (which was thought to be 1666 years after the entrance of Christ into hell). The death of Tsar Alexis in 1676 just a few days after the final fall of the fundamentalist redoubt at Solovetsk was seen as a sign of God's disfavor and an assurance of His intention to vindicate soon the defenders of the old faith.
Some sought to anticipate the purgative fires of the Last Judgment through self-immolation; others withdrew to form new puritanical communities in the virgin forests. The formation of these communities permitted the fundamentalist tradition to survive into modern times; but their creative activities belong more to the eighteenth than the seventeenth century. The final years of the seventeenth century were dominated by more negative protests against the new order, reaching a climax in the movement to abjure all worldly speech save repetition of the word "no"-the famous netovsh-china of a peasant from Yaroslavl named Kozma Andreev.138
Only a few miles from the spot where Kozma was trying to exercise his veto power against the modern world, there arose at the same time the last great monument to the rival, theocratic protest against secularism: the new Kremlin of Rostov the Great. Built by the Metropolitan Ion Sysoevich during the 1670's and 1680's as part of a deliberate effort to perpetuate the cause of his friend Nikon, the Rostov Kremlin is one of the most magnificent architectural ensembles in all of Russia. The majesty of its symmetry and relative simplicity of its brick and stone construction represent a direct effort to perpetuate the Nikonian style in architecture, and they constitute a massive, silent rebuke to the exotic pretentiousness of the
new state architecture. There could hardly be a more striking contrast than that of this massive yet white and austere ecclesiastical ensemble with the garish colors and chaotic appearance of the new architectural ensembles concurrently built in wood by Tsar Alexis: the palace at Kolomenskoe and the foreign office building within the Moscow Kremlin.
More important, however, the ecclesiastical construction at Great Rostov represented an effort to vindicate Nikon's theocratic ideas by dramatizing the majesty of the ecclesiastical estate and its pre-eminence over the civil. Sysoevich borrowed many of the ideas and technicians that Nikon had used in his own building program. Like Nikon's new monasteries, the ensemble of churches and ecclesiastical buildings at Rostov was built in a spot of beauty by a lake and was richly endowed. As in Nikon's monasteries, Sysoevich established a kind of theocratic rule over the village of Rostov, which even today is totally dominated by its Kremlin.139 Like Nikon, Sysoevich had become preoccupied with the need for discipline and order while serving in the hierarchy of Novgorod. He went so far as to declare once in public that "the Jews were right to crucify Christ for his revolt"- which became regarded by the Old Believers as one of the outstanding blasphemies of the new church even though Sysoevich was severely punished for it.140
Sysoevich's Kremlin in Rostov was the headquarters for a metropolitan who controlled the rich and powerful Yaroslavl-Kostroma region of the upper Volga, where the most lavish churches of the century were built. The elaborate frescoes of the 1670's and 1680's that filled every nook and arcade of the new churches in this diocese represented a final effort of Muscovy to produce an all-encompassing hieroglyphic encyclopedia of the faith. But the intrusion of secular subject matter-a harvest scene, women looking in a mirror, a nude being seduced by a devil-destroyed the spiritual integrity of these vast new compositions.141 In Yaroslavl and Rostov as elsewhere in late-seventeenth-century Russia, scenes of Christ's passion and crucifixion borrowed from the West began crowding out the more exalted images of transfiguration and resurrection that had traditionally dominated the iconography of the Savior in the East. Christ no longer seemed altogether comfortable on His throne at the center of the new icon screens in the cathedrals of Yaroslavl.142 There was no longer any sanctuary, no place for God to be present on earth, behind the icon screens of the Old Believer temples that were springing up in the nearby woods along the Volga. But there was still the hope that God's presence might be maintained within the great Kremlin of the metropolitan at Rostov; and the legend had begun that "one must see Rostov the great before dying."
Many of its churches rose up directly and majestically over the walls
of the Kremlin. Within them, classical columns framed the approach to the royal doors and a throne behind the altar provided the metropolitan with a suitably Nikonian place of authority. The main church of the Savior on the Walls must have been the scene of marvelous singing in view of its unparalleled acoustics and a choir area nearly as big as the nave. Even today its bells are among the most sonorous in Russia. Faithful to both the xenophobia and the love of pictorial beauty of Old Muscovy, the Last Judgment scene on the west wall of the Church of the Savior is a magnificent monolith that depicts an unprecedented three rows of foreigners among the ranks of the condemned.143
But history was about to condemn this mighty monument of Muscovy rather than the foreigners in its frescoes. In 1691, the year of Metropolitan Ion's death, young Tsar Peter began the humiliation of Rostov, making the first of many forced exactions from its rich store of silver. He was soon to complete the process of subordinating the church by abolishing the patriarchate and establishing a state-controlled synod as its ruling body. There were to be no more "Great Sovereigns" from the clergy like Philaret and Nikon, no more Great Rostovs in the world of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great-and the Great Revolution.