The Icon and the Axe

At the same time that Nikon was heading off to exile and oblivion, another clerical figure was secretly taken even farther north to an even more grisly fate. Superficially, the Archpriest Avvakum was very similar to Nikon. He was a dedicated priest from northeast Russia, passionately opposed to Western influence and deeply determined to keep the Orthodox faith and ritual as the controlling force in Russian life. Avvakum had, indeed, been a friend of Nikon in Moscow during the late 1640's, when both were "zealots of the old devotion." They agreed that the Russian Church must be kept free of Western contamination and secularization. They both supported the first important church reform of the 1650's: the elimination of the "forty-mouthed" simultaneous readings of different offices within the churches.40

However, in the years that followed, Avvakum came to view the need for reform in totally different terms, and indeed to consider Nikon his deepest foe. Avvakum made himself the spokesman and martyr for the fundamentalist position. Like the theocratic view of Nikon, Awakum's

fundamentalism summarized and brought into focus attitudes that had been developing for more than a century.

The fundamentalist position was mainly advanced by the "white" or parish priests in the provinces and was a faithful reflection of the conservatism, superstition, and vitality of the Eastern frontier. It was less a clearly articulated position than a simple equation of trouble with innovation, innovation with foreigners, and foreigners with the devil. The past that the fundamentalists sought to maintain was the organic religious civilization that had prevailed in Russia prior to the coming of "guile from beyond the seas." To do this, they began to urge strict puritanical decrees against such Western innovations as tobacco ("bewitched grass," "the devil's incense") and hops ("bewitched Lithuanian grapes"). Instrumental music and representational art were particularly suspect. The burning of six carriages full of musical instruments in Moscow in 1649 was a graphic illustration of the anti-foreign and puritanical activities of the early years of Alexis' reign.41

Specially hated by the fundamentalists were the "Frankish icons" that had worked their way into Russian churches in imitation of representational art of Holland in the early seventeenth century. "They paint the image of Our Savior," cried Avvakum, "with a puffy face, red lips, curly hair, fat arms and muscles, and stout legs and thighs. All this is done for carnal reasons."42 Although Nikon formally shared their views on icons,43 he had permitted churches near the Kremlin to be decorated with frescoes based on German models, and he was shortly to follow the unprecedented course of posing for a portrait by a Dutch painter.44

Morbid excess, masochism, and heretical dualism often lay just below the surface of puritanical extremism. The numerous though still obscure communities founded north of Yaroslavl in the 1630's by a strange figure known only as Kapiton appear to have discarded Christian doctrine along with ecclesiastical authority. The leader wore heavy chains held down by two huge weights, practiced extreme fasting and mortification of the flesh as well as certain Jewish rites, such as circumcision and abstention from pork. He enjoyed a sufficient following to escape repeatedly from the imprisonment which local officials imposed on him.45

Puritanical and xenophobic discontent was given focus by a revival of prophecy within the established church. Leadership came primarily from a group of the married white clergy who held the title of "archpriest" (protopop), the highest open to the non-monastic clergy. The first of the archpriests, Ivan Neronov, championed a revival of the old trans-Volga tradition of piety, poverty, and prophecy. As a young preacher in Nizhny Novgorod on the upper Volga he was known as "the second Chrysostom." He attracted attention by opposing the war against Poland in 1632 and by

adding special buildings for feeding and housing the poor to the new cathedral which he took over in Moscow. Neronov began the grass roots opposition of the parish priesthood to Nikon's reforms early in 1653 by speaking in defense of another archpriest whom Nikon had deposed for insolence to civil authority. Though Neronov was also punished for his defiance, he rallied a number of other archpriests to his defense, including Avvakum, who rapidly became Nikon's most violent critic. The diaspora of the protesting archpriests began in September with the banishment of Avvakum to distant Tobol'sk in Siberia, and was continued the following year by a Church council which anathemized and exiled Neronov. Neronov set the pattern for the future Old Believers by rejecting the authority either of the Church council (which he likened to the Jewish court that had tried Christ) or of Nikon (who was unworthy to hold office because of his "voevodish tricks" and "lack of respect to the priestly class").46