The Icon and the Axe

At times the tradition of insurrection merged with that of the Old Believers-particularly in the lower Volga region. However, their methods of opposing absolutism and their social ideals were quite different. The Old Believers were essentially passive in their resistance to the new regime, believing in the imminence of God's intervention and the redemptive value of unmerited suffering. The peasant insurrectionaries were violent, almost compulsive activists, anxious to wreak suffering on the nearest available symbols of bureaucratic authority. The Old Believers' ideal order was an organic religious civilization of Great Russian Christians united by traditional forms of ritual worship and communal activity. The insurrectionaries were animated by a purely negative impulse to destroy the existent order, an impulse which they sought to share with Moslem and pagan as well as Christian groups, along the multi-racial southeastern frontier of Russia.

The peasant insurrectionaries were, of course, protesting a far more degrading and debilitating form of bondage than that which faced the traditional merchants of the north. With the final sealing of all escape routes from lifetime peasant servitude in the mid-seventeenth century and the extension of military service obligation to twenty-five years in the early eighteenth, the lot of the ordinary peasant was, in effect, slavery. The violence of the peasant rebellions must also be placed against the background of continuing Tatar raids and military mobilizations along the exposed southern steppe. The final wresting of the southern Ukraine and Crimea from Tatar and Ottoman hands did not occur until the late years of the reign of Catherine the Great, well after the last great rebellions had been suppressed.

For all their disorganized violence, however, the peasant rebellions were animated by one recurring political ideal: belief in a "true tsar." From one point of view this was a revolutionary idea, a call for a coup d'etat based on a claim that a samozvanets, or "self-proclaimed" insurrectionary leader, was the rightful heir to the throne. But fundamentally this ideal was profoundly conservative-even more so than that of the Old Believers. For the concept of a true tsar implied tiiat the ultimate ruler of the system was its only possible redeemer. The political and administrative system of die new empire was simply to be destroyed so that Russia could return to die congenial paternalism of Muscovite days. The "true tsar" of peasant and Cossack folklore was thus a combination of benign grandfather and messianic deliverer: batiushka and spasitel'. He was a "real, rustic man" (muzhitsky), the true benefactor of his children, who would come to their aid if only die intervening wall of administrators and bureaucrats could be torn down. At the same time, die "true tsar" was given divine sanction in the eyes of the peasant masses by providing him with a genealogy extending in unbroken line back to Vladimir, Constantine the Great, and even to Riurik and Prus.

The first popular rumors of a "true tsar" appear to have started during the reign of Ivan IV, who was largely responsible for both establishing and breaking this mythical line of succession.79 The False Dmitry, the first of the "self-proclaimed" in Russian history, and the only one ever to gain the throne, drew skillfully on the people's longing to believe that there had been a miraculous survivor of the Old Muscovite line. Although soon disenchanted because of Dmitry's Catholicism, many Russians came to believe during the Time of Troubles that only a tsar from the old line favored by God could deliver Russia from intrigue and anarchy. The idea that a true tsar existed somewhere spilled over into the peasant masses who participated in the chaotic uprisings that followed die murder of Dmitry. Some