The Icon and the Axe

Only a little later than the "spirit wrestlers" a similar sect arose in the Tambov region: the "milk drinkers" (molokane). The spirit wrestlers received their name from a Church official who had meant to imply that they were fighting with the Holy Spirit; and they accepted it as an indication of their intention to combat matter with spirit. The milk drinkers had been so named because of their practice of continuing to drink milk during the Lenten fast, but they too accepted the name, insisting that it meant they were already drinking the milk of paradise, or dwelling by milky waters. They insisted more than any of the other sects on equality of wealth, and their efforts to produce a simplified, syncretic religion led them to incorporate certain Jewish practices into their essentially Christian forms of worship. One of the most interesting of the many splits that developed within the sectarian movement is the one that occurred between the "Saturday" and "Sunday" milk drinkers.32 The very fact that Jewish elements participated in the life of the sects provides testimony to the fact that the sectarian communities tended to be cosmopolitan in composition. Unlike the Great Russian schismatics, the sectarians tended to welcome all comers as "brothers" (the usual term for member) in a common effort to attain the true spiritual life. The growing number of foreign settlers-particularly Germans and Central Europeans with Mennonite and Anabaptist backgrounds who began streaming into southern Russia after it was opened to foreign colonization in 1762-reinforced the trend toward austere egali-tarianism. But this was already implied in Kuhlmann's teaching that in the coming millennium "there will be no Tsars, kings, princes, but all will be equal, all things will be communal, and no one will call anything his own… ."33

In addition to this tendency toward communal and egalitarian living, Russian sectarians shared a common belief that man was capable of attaining direct links (if not actual identity) with God outside all established churches. Behind all the sects stands the symbol which Kuhlmann (following Boehme) had used as the frontispiece for his new book of spiritual psalms: the figure of a cross melded into a latticework leading men up through the symbolic lily and rose to a new heaven and a new earth.

For each new sect, the ascent to higher truth lay in fleeing the material world outside for the spiritual world within. In place of the old liturgy and ritual, the sectarians worshipped with "spiritual songs," which became a rich and many-sided form of popular verse. The word "spirit" (dukh) itself was to be found in the name or credo of each of the early sects. The

flagellants considered the most important of their new commandments to be "Believe in the Holy Spirit," and intoned their prayers and incantations to "Tsar spirit." The spirit wrestlers carried the dualistic denial of the material world even farther than the flagellants, viewing all of world history as a struggle between the flesh-bound sons of Cain and the "fighters for the spirit" who were descended from Abel. The name the milk drinkers gave themselves was "spiritual Christians."

As with other dualists, there was a kind of totalitarian fanaticism about the sectarians. In rejecting the "tyranny" of the established churches for the "freedom" of spiritual Christianity, the sectarians tended to set up even more rigorous tyrannies of their own. Contending that earthly perfection was possible within their community led them to assume that such perfection was possible only within their community. New forms of "higher" baptism and new sources of infallible truth were introduced; and the quest for perfection often drove them on to acts of self-mortification. It is characteristic that the popular names assigned to all the major sects of the eighteenth century designated some action which was thought to expedite their flight from the material to the spiritual world: flagellation, wrestling, drinking, and finally-in the last and most eerie of all the eighteenth-century sects-self-castration.

As time went on and Russian sectarianism became influenced by pietistic sectarians from the West, the masochistic and dualistic qualities of the tradition tended to be less dominant. Nonetheless, sectarianism kept alive its pretensions at offering a Utopian, communal alternative to the official Church; and it played an increasingly important role in the depressed agrarian regions of southern and western Russia. Sectarianism exercised considerable influence as well on the intellectual community. Its greatest periods of subsequent growth at the grass roots level coincided with the periods of increased political ferment and ideological Westernization at the intellectual level: under Catherine, Alexander I, during the sixties and nineties of the nineteenth century-and perhaps even the fifties and sixties of the twentieth.