The Icon and the Axe

The sectarians were in many ways modern religious thinkers, beginning with the assumption that man was essentially an isolated being, separated from God in an unfriendly universe. The aim was to recapture lost links with God by uniting oneself with divine wisdom. Following the pantheistic tendencies of Central European mysticism, they saw all of creation as an expression of divine wisdom, for which Boehme used the hallowed Greek word "sophia," giving to it for Russian mystical and sectarian thought a different meaning from what it had traditionally possessed in Eastern Orthodoxy. "Sophia" was understood as a physical-sometimes even sexual-force as well as a merely intellectual form of "divine wisdom." New paths to salvation were provided by a host of sectarian writers, some emphasizing the physical and ecstatic, some the rationalistic and moralistic, path to God. Occult and kabbalistic tracts were translated, revised, and plagiarized by a series of religious popularizers. Boehme's claim to have unraveled the "great mystery" of creation and read the divine "signature of things" inspired other prophets-as it had Kuhlmann-to draw up their own "new revelation" or "key to the universe."24

Each sect tended to regard the teachings of its particular prophet as the revealed word of God, which was meant to supplement if not supplant all previous tradition and scripture. The emphasis on simplifying ritual and introducing new beliefs gave sectarianism many points of contact with the emerging secular culture of the new aristocracy. In contrast, the schismatics remained suspicious of, and isolated from, this new and Westernized world. Only when the aristocratic dominance of Russian culture came to an end in the mid-nineteenth century did the schismatics become an important force in the main stream of Russian culture.

The Russian sectarian tradition can be traced not only to the prophecies of Kuhlmann but also to transplanted White Russian Protestants who filtered into Muscovy in the late seventeenth century: the persecuted survivors of a once-rich Polish Protestant tradition. Typical of these was the gifted Jan Belobodsky, against whom Medvedev wrote his doctrinal treatises. Belobodsky was formally converted to Orthodoxy apparently to qualify as a diplomat and official translator in Moscow. His main interest,

however, lay in converting the new academy in Moscow into a kind of revanchist theological bastion for the struggle with the Jesuits: the "Pelagians" of the modern world.25 The Jesuits offended Belobodsky's Calvinism by placing too much emphasis on what man can accomplish through his own works and on the saving power of the sacraments and too little on God's awesome remoteness. Although Belobodsky was soon condemned for heresy, his anti-traditional approach became fashionable in Petrine Russia, where even native Russians were found substituting a placard of the first two commandments for the traditional icon in the reception hall.26

Under Peter one finds the first mention of a new Russian sect: a curious group who called themselves "God's people" (Bozhie liudi). Their more familiar name, "flagellants" (khlysty), points to the ecstatic, Eastern strain that was incorporated into Russian sectarianism.27

The first documentary reference to this sect occurred in 1716, at the time of its founder Ivan Suslov's death; but it allegedly originated in the weird proclamation of a runaway soldier, Daniel Filippov, on a hillside near Viazma in 1645. Daniel claimed that he was God Sabaoth himself, come to give men twelve commandments in place of the ten originally given on Mount Sinai. He spent the disturbed early years of Alexis' reign prophetically exhorting Russians to leave the existing church in order to live as "God's people," throwing all books of secular learning into the Volga, and abstaining from alcohol, honey, and sexual relations. In 1649 Daniel apparently declared that Suslov (a peasant formerly bonded to the Westernized Naryshkin family, from which Peter the Great was descended) was his son, and thus a Son of God. Suslov's followers referred to Jesus as "the old Christ" and Suslov as the new. As he moved from Nizhny Novgorod to Moscow and thence (apparently in 1658) to prison, fanciful pseudo-Christian legends were attached to his name. The building in Moscow where his followers met was said to be "the House of God" or the "New Jerusalem." Suslov was said to have been born of a barren 100-year-old woman, crucified in the Kremlin (with Patriarch Nikon as Caiaphas and the author of the law code of 1649 as Pontius Pilate), and then resurrected from a tomb which was watched over by a faithful group of virgins dressed in white.