The Icon and the Axe

schismatic community arose the prophetic "wanderers" led by a man who deserted first from the army and then from the sedentary Old Believer settlement itself. He refused even to touch coins or anything else that bore the imperial "seal of Antichrist." The entire government apparatus was the work of the Antichrist, whose sign was "the division of men into different ranks and the measurement of the forests, seas, and land."106 Among the sectarians a new leader of the Dukhobors gave a flagellant cast to his sect that they have retained ever since by proclaiming himself Christ and setting out as an itinerant preacher with twelve apostles.

But the most extreme and ghoulish new form of religious protest to Catherine's rule appeared within the flagellant movement: the sect of skoptsy, or self-castrators. As with the "runner" movement among the schismatics, the self-castrators among the sectarians were founded by a deserter from the army. Driven apparently at one of the ecstatic flagellant "rejoicings" to the point of self-castration, he began persuading others to follow his example in the course of the 1770's. For more than a half century he continued to preach the need for this form of purification to interested listeners, which included many of his civil and monastic jailors, General Suvorov, and even Alexander I.

As with the self-burners of the late seventeenth century, the self-castrated of the late eighteenth should not be looked at solely as a masochistic curiosity. Both groups viewed their act as a "new baptism" into the elect of the world to come and as a kind of sacrificial atonement for the redemption of a fallen society. The self-burners appeared at the time of maximum violence and cruelty among the ruling class; the self-castrators, at the time of greatest profligacy. The sacrifice that they each chose to make was thus, in some degree, determined by the character of the society they were protesting against.

The self-castrators, however, had curious political pretensions which provide the first hint of the revolutionary social doctrines that were later to come from the sectarian tradition. They worshipped before icons of Peter III; many believed God had created him impotent in order to lead them.107 The attempt of their leader Selivanov to characterize himself as a castrated Peter III was based on the old myth of the "true tsar." What was new was the contention that the skoptsy as a whole were a kind of "true aristocracy" destined to replace the false, promiscuous aristocracy of Catherine's court. Selivanov's expressed purpose was to set up a world-wide rule of the castrated. The first stage of admission to this elite (castration) was referred to as "the small seal"; and the second stage (total removal of the sexual organs), "the imperial seal" (Tsarskaia pechat'). Selivanov had remarkable success in gaining converts-particularly in Moscow among wealthy

merchants and military leaders who had been denied access to the inner circles of Catherine's court. One of his converts was the former chamberlain to the king of Poland, who came to Moscow after the final partition of Poland and spoke of the skoptsy leadership as a "divine chancery."108 Like the other sectarians the skoptsy considered themselves the true "spiritual" Christians, referring to one another as "doves."

Among the schismatics, the wanderers devised a loose chain of communication and command centered on a village near Yaroslavl, and the new and more radical Dukhobors in the sectarian community came to view Tambov as the region in which God was coming to gather his true servants for the millennial reign of saints. Thus, all of the new forms of religious dissent under Catherine contained an element of radical if essentially passive protest. They were all determined-as the leader of the wanderers put it in his prophetic book The Garden (Tsvetnik)-not to go on "with one eye on earth and one eye in heaven."109 Both eyes were to be lifted above; and the true capital of Russia for these dissonant elements was not St. Petersburg or any of the cities built or rebuilt by Catherine, but the villages or mountains where the leader of the new spiritual army lived-be it the pustyn' of St. Seraphim, the wanderer center near Yaroslavl, or the perennial sectarian center of Tambov.