Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Tsar Aleksei supported him. His motives, however, were different, imperial rather than ecumenical. He wanted the church’s practices reformed so that it could support the state in spreading its authority in the empire’s new lands. He required a supportive church, not a dominant one. Besides, he increasingly found Nikon’s supercilious behaviour repugnant and gradually cooled towards him. In 1658, offended by Aleksei’s aloofness, Nikon dramatically doffed his patriarchal robes in the middle of divine service and put on the simple habit of a monk. Aleksei accepted his resignation, but continued to support his reforms. Anxious to obtain endorsement from Constantinople, he invited Greek prelates to the church council of 1666–7. They were delighted to enforce Greek norms and invalidate the practices of the Russian church since it had broken with Constantinople in the 15th century. The council not only confirmed the reforms but pronounced anathema on those who rejected them as heretics and schismatics.

Opposition to the reforms came from those who objected to what seemed to them alien violations of long-consecrated Russian practice. ‘If we are schismatics,’ they argued, ‘then the holy fathers, Tsars and Patriarchs were also schismatics.’ Their protestations resonated with all those who opposed the church’s increasing institutionalization, the imposition from above of stereotyped liturgical forms, and the extirpation of ‘pagan’ practices. The Old Belief, as this opposition came to be called, thus had widespread support from both elites and masses. It provided a rallying point for all who objected to a more impersonal, centralized, and bureaucratic style of government, to Polonized Baroque architecture, or to the adoption of Western clothing and the import of Western books.

It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Old Belief. It has survived to the present day, and indeed at times flourished, in spite of intermittent official persecution. It retained the vision which had enabled Muscovy to survive the Tatar overlordship, expand, and then come through the Time of Troubles – a vision of a world of local communities united by personal reverence of the Tsar, by the one true faith, and by obedience to pravda. Old Believers rejected a Latinate faith enforced by official decree and subservient priests. They became bearers of the old Muscovite messianic national myth in opposition to the new Russian imperial state, which the more radical among them regarded as the work of the Antichrist. The idea of Russia as the ‘Third Rome’, the ‘new Israel’, with its own ‘chosen people’, remained as an evocative substratum in Russian culture, always ready to re-emerge in one form or another.

4. Old Believers in Nizhny Novgorod

In the 18th century, Peter I and Catherine II took the work of Aleksei to its logical conclusion in subordinating the church to the state. Peter abolished the Patriarchate, replacing it with a Holy Synod, a council of leading bishops which could be and sometimes was chaired by a layman. Catherine expropriated church lands and replaced the income from them with a stipend amounting to only about a quarter of its value. Meanwhile, the top–down ‘regularization’ of church life continued, mediated by priests appointed by bishops rather than elected by parishes. Priests became a segregated social estate, marked out from the rest of secularized and Westernized elite society by a separate education system and by non-Western dress.

Popular discontent

Of the feelings of ordinary people about this system of government and about serfdom, its consequence, we have little direct evidence. We have to judge from their actions and from the documents of officials and military men who were usually alien to them and sometimes their opponents. Serfdom and joint responsibility did offer peasants some advantages. It guaranteed them land – something of which English rural dwellers at the same period could not be confident – a community for mutual support, not unconditional but usually available, and a parish church for spiritual sustenance. They had their own self-governing assemblies, and on the whole they determined their own agrarian practices, or at least fashioned them by negotiation with the landowner’s steward.