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 efitire 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