The Icon and the Axe

Much less peaceful (and thus somewhat more typical) is the early history of the Old Believers in the Volga region. The Old Beliefs were zealously defended in these newly converted and newly colonized regions, "not for ourselves . . . but for our fathers and grandfathers." Long-suffering faithfulness was the supreme virtue of the region where "to change faith would be a hell beneath hell."73 Cossacks had recently brought their own traditions of violence to this already embattled region. These Cossack settlers and merchants who controlled the flourishing Volga trade were equally opposed to centralized authority and to Western ways. When representatives of Peter the Great arrived in the Volga town of Dmitrievsk in 1700 to shave, uniform, and mobilize Cossack troops for the forthcoming battles with the Swedes, the Cossacks rebelled. Aided and abetted by the local populace, Cossacks swarmed into the city at night and massacred officials from the capital. Heads without beards were cut off and mutilated, local collaborators were drowned in the Volga, and the voevoda was able to survive only by hiding out long enough to grow a beard and returning as a convert to the Old Belief.74

Whether from conviction or necessity, officials in eastern Russia often had to follow the voevoda of Dmitrievsk and make their peace with the Old Belief. Outside of the main towns in forward areas of colonization, communes of Old Believers were often more numerous than parishes of the official church. There were relatively few orthodox Orthodox in the lower

Volga region and in many other key trading and colonizing areas of eastern Russia. As with the Calvinists, the "this-worldly asceticism" of the Old Believer communities soon made them wealthy and, by the late eighteenth century, politically as well as theologically conservative. The prophetic priestless sects began to be challenged by the more sedentary communities of "priested" Old Believers (popovtsy), such as the one which developed in the wilds at Irgiz, beyond the Volga, or at Belaia Krinitsa, in the Carpathian mountains near the border between Russia and the Hapsburg empire. The voice of prophecy was kept fresh, however, by the repeated splitting off of messianic groups and wandering prophets from the Old Believer communities-and also by increasingly frequent contact and interaction with the sectarians.

The historical importance of the Old Believers in the development of Russian culture is out of all proportion to the relative smallness of their numbers. By effectively seceding from the political and intellectual life of the empire, this important nucleus of the Great Russian merchant community helped turn the main centers of Russian life over to foreigners and to the Westernized service nobility. The Old Believers' unique qualities of industry and abstemiousness were never integrated into the building of a genuinely national and synthetic culture. Instead, they withdrew petulantly into their own world, defying the march of history in the belief that history itself was coming to an end. Their communities represented a continuing rebuke to the luxurious life of the Westernized cities and the aristocratic estates. Their intense religious convictions and communal pattern of life represented a voice from the Muscovite past that was to become a siren song for the Russian populists in the nineteenth century.

Equally important for the fate of Russian culture was the fact that much of the native entrepreneurial class became wedded not to a practical world outlook or rationalistic form of religious belief but rather to a most irrational and superstitious form of fanaticism. However ingenious and experimental in their business habits, the Old Believers rebelled at any change or modernization of their beliefs. Thus, whereas the development of an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie in the late medieval West tended to encourage the growth of rationalism in twelfth-century Paris and of sceptical humanism in fifteenth-century Florence and Rotterdam, the emergent merchant class of early modern Russia played no such role. In reality, no Russian bourgeoisie analogous to that of the West survived the transformations wrought by Alexis and Peter. Shorn of their ancient privileges and immunities after the urban riots of the mid-seventeenth century, the entrepreneurial leaders of Old Muscovy had only two choices. They could melt into the medium and upper level of officialdom of the new state along with

various foreign and mercenary elements. Or they could cling to their former ways and ideals by moving on to newly opening areas of the empire and blending their xenophobic complaints with those of other dispossessed elements. One could choose bureaucracy or raskol,75 the "homeless cosmopolitanism" of the new urban centers or the narrow chauvinism of the Russian interior.