The Icon and the Axe

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.

2. The Westward Turn

Ihe rejection of both fundamentalists and theocrats meant the end of any serious efforts to maintain a civilization completely distinct from that of the West. The religious ideology of Muscovy was rejected as unworkable for a modern state, and the rigid barriers against Western influence which both Nikon and Awakum had sought to shore up were largely removed after 1667.

It was not yet clear how much and what kind of Western influence was to prevail in the ungainly new empire. Only gradually and fitfully was Russia able to fashion a creative culture and an administrative system which harmonized with those in the rest of Europe. The celebrated reforms of Peter the Great pointed the way to the future. But the fresh religious gropings that preceded these reforms and the exotic resistance movements that developed in reaction to them indicate that the triumph of secular modernization was far from complete.

New Religious Answers

The last quarter of the seventeenth century-from the death of Alexis to the assumption of real power by Peter the Great-was a kind of interregnum. The continued progression toward Western ways was dramatized by the emancipation of women from the terem (the special upstairs chamber to which they had previously been largely confined) under the regent Sophia, daughter of Alexis, who became the first woman to rule Russia. Her principal minister, V. V. Golitsyn, provided an important link between the Westernizing work of Alexis and that of Peter. Golitsyn helped reorganize the military establishment, abolish the antiquated system of social precedence (mestnichestvo), and modify many of the more cruel forms of legal investigation and punishment.