The Icon and the Axe

practices. Gradually a pattern developed of internal colonization by disaffected Great Russians who practiced puritanical, communal living along with the old forms of worship. Belief in the coming end of the world was not abandoned in these new communities, but the expectation of judgment was increasingly invoked to provide a sense of urgency about the work of the new community rather than a sense of imminent apocalypse. Salvation was no longer to be found through the sacraments of the Church or the activities of the state after the reforms of Nikon and Peter respectively. One sought salvation now in the grim and isolated communities in which alone the organic religious civilization of the Muscovite past was preserved.

The parallel between the Calvinists of Western Europe and the Old Believers of the East is striking. Both movements were puritanical, replacing a sacramental church with a new, this-worldly asceticism; an established hierarchical authority with local communal rule. Both movements stimulated new economic enterprise with their bleak insistence on the need for hard work as the only means of demonstrating one's election by a wrathful God. Both movements played leading roles in colonizing previously unsettled lands. The Old Believer communities pushing on into Siberia were, like the pilgrims sailing to North America, driven on both by the persecution of established churches and by their own restless hope of finding some unspoiled region in which God's ever-imminent kingdom might come into earthly being.69

Perhaps the most extraordinary of these new communities were those -that spread out along the frozen lakes and rivers of northern Russia. Inspired by the heroic resistance to central authority of the Solovetsk monastery,70 these new communities continued their old communal business practices and traditional forms of worship in surroundings where the imperial authority was less likely to pursue them. The model community for the efitire region was that which developed in the 1690's along the Vyg River between Lake Onega and the White Sea. By 1720 there were more than 1,500 Old Believers in this community, and a rich hagiographical and polemic literature was developing in the Old Muscovy style. An impoverished princely family of the Russian north, the Denisovs, became the administrative and ideological leaders of the new community: in effect, lay elders of a new monastic civilization. The older brother, Andrew Denisov, provided the first systematic defense of the Old Belief in his Answers from Beside the Sea, drawn up in response to theological interrogation by the Holy Synod in 1722. His younger brother Semen developed and codified the martyrology of the schismatics with his History of the Fathers and Sufferers of Solovetsk and his Vineyard of Russia.71

The settlements that developed in the Vyg region were virtually

divorced from the new Petrine empire. Recognizing the value of their commercial activities to the Russian economy, Peter granted them freedoms which continued into the nineteenth century. The "fathers" and "brothers" of Vyg amassed considerable wealth and set up in their central commune one of the largest educational centers in eighteenth-century Russia-teaching the literature, music, and iconography of Old Muscovy. There were no professors in this informal center of instruction, just as there were no priests in their temples and monasteries. Yet there was higher literacy and deeper devotion to church forms in these "priestless" communes of Old Believers than in most parishes of the synodal church. Their entrepreneurial economic activity constitutes, moreover, a remarkable chapter of pioneering heroism. Because of their strong sense of solidarity they set up trading networks which were often able to produce and ship goods to Moscow and St. Petersburg more cheaply than they could be made on the spot. Their ascetic sense of discipline enabled them to establish settlements in some of the bleakest arctic regions of Russia and to send fishing expeditions as far afield as Novaia Zemlia to the east and Spitzbergen to the west. Their own fanciful chroniclers even speak of Old Believer expeditions reaching North America.72