The Icon and the Axe

Like the Catholic Krizhanich, this lonely Protestant prophet had little direct impact on the Russian scene. Russia in the late seventeenth century was in the process of rejecting all purely religious answers to its problems.20 The West to which Russia had turned was not moving from one religion to another but from all religions to none at all. This was the time of the "crisis of the European consciousness," when faith suddenly became nominal and scepticism fashionable.21 Russia was deeply affected. Grecophiles and Latinizers within the Orthodox Church were rejected as decisively as theocrats and fundamentalists had been earlier; and Russia refused to accept either a purely Catholic or radical Protestant solution to its problems. Thus, from one point of view Krizhanich and Kuhlmann represent two final, foredoomed efforts to provide a religious solution for Russia. From another point of view, however, they represent early examples of an important future phenomenon: the Western prophet who looks to Russia for the realization of ideas not given a proper hearing in the West. Though unre-ceptive to such prophets in the late seventeenth century, the rulers of Russia were to lend increasingly sympathetic ears to prophetic voices from the West: Peter the Great to Leibniz, Catherine the Great to Diderot, Alexander I to De Maistre. But these were a new breed of prophets; and they brought their messages not to the chaotic religiosity of a city on the upper Volga but to the geometric new secular capital on the Baltic. It was not to Moscow but to St. Petersburg that the new Western prophets were to bring their ideas.

The Sectarian Tradition

More than krizhanich-or any other foreign religious voice in seventeenth-century Russia-Kuhlmann was a harbinger of things to come in Russia. For the rejected radical Protestantism of Central Europe was to find roots in eighteenth-century Russia second in importance only to those it found in America.

Kuhlmann was, of course, only one of many prophetic influences that helped launch the vigorous Russian sectarian tradition. There is no firm evidence for the contention that Kuhlmann's teachings provided the original doctrine for either of the two sects that he is sometimes alleged to have founded: the khlysty, or "flagellants" (the sect that first appeared in the late seventeenth century) or the Dukhobortsy (the "spirit wrestlers" who date from the eighteenth century). But the teachings of these and other Russian sects bear greater over-all similarities to the teaching of Boehme, Kuhlmann, and other sectarian Protestant extremists than to that of the Russian schismatics with whom they are often loosely identified.22

In practice, of course, sectarians (sektanty) and schismatics {raskoV-niki) were equally persecuted and equally fractious forms of religious dissent. They often merged or interacted with one another (and at times also with Jewish and even Oriental religious traditions). Moreover, Russian sectarians generally shared with schismatics a hatred of bureaucrats and "Jesuits" as well as a general expectation that providential changes in history were about to take place. Nonetheless, the two traditions are fundamentally different. For the sectarians represent totally new religious confessions rather than attempts to defend an older interpretation of Orthodoxy. This distinction separated the heirs of Kuhlmann from the heirs of Awakum in two important ways. First, the sectarians built their devotional life around an extra-ecclesiastical calisthenic of self-perfection and inner illumination. Russian sectarians disregarded church ritual-old or new-and paid little attention to the celebration of sacraments in any form-or even to the building of churches.

A second difference between schismatics and sectarians lay in the contrasting nature of their historical expectations. Although both traditions were prophetic, the schismatics were basically pessimists, and the sectarians optimists. The followers of Awakum dwelled on the coming reign of Antichrist and the need to prepare for judgment. They believed that earthly corruption had gone so far that God's final, wrathful judgment was all that could be expected from history. The followers of Kuhlmann, on the other

hand, generally believed that the promised thousand-year reign of righteousness on earth was about to begin. However sectarians differed as to the nature and location of this millennium, these self-proclaimed "men of God" generally believed that they could help bring it about.

The Old Believers believed that heaven had moved irretrievably beyond reach; the men of God, on the contrary, believed themselves capable of bringing heaven back within man's reach.23