The Icon and the Axe

The possibility of Protestant influence on some of the early Old Believers cannot be excluded, though there is an absence of direct evidence and an obvious theological gulf between the fundamentalists' fanatical dedication to ritual and icon veneration and the outlook of Protestantism. The already noted saturation of Muscovy with Protestant merchants and soldiers in the seventeenth century may nonetheless have had an impact on attitudes and practices, if not on the actual beliefs, of the fundamentalists. Some of the White Russian Protestants decimated by the Poles in the mid-seventeenth century must have resettled in Russia and may well have retained elements of their former faith even while formally accepting Orthodoxy. Throughout the seventeenth century the Swedes pursued an active program of Lutheran evangelism in the Baltic and Karelian regions, which later became centers of Old Believer colonization. One converted Russian priest wrote a Russian language tract in the late fifties or early sixties seeking to convince Russians that Lutheranism was the way to check the corrupted practices of Orthodoxy.102 The banishment of the once-favored Protestants from Moscow in the late forties was partly justified by accusations of Protestant proselytizing. There were still some eighteen thousand Protestants resident in Russia and five Protestant churches in the Moscow area during the late years of Alexis' reign,103 and the provincial regions in which the Old Belief took root were precisely those where Protestant presence had been the greatest: in the Baltic region, White Russia, and along the Volga trade routes.

Like the first Protestant circles around Luther, the original Old Believers came largely from a bleak but pious region of Northern Europe. For all their anti-intellectualism, many of the early Old Believers (such as Deacon Fedor and the Solovetsk monks) were-like Luther-learned students of sacred texts. They juxtaposed an idealized original Christianity to the recent creations of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, reviled the decadence and complacency of a distant Mediterranean civilization, and sought to

bring monastic piety into everyday life. Neronov, like Luther, was particularly versed in the epistles of St. Paul and was often compared to him by contemporaries.104

The backing of local political leaders was as indispensable in turning the theological concerns of Neronov and Avvakum into a social movement as was the backing of German princes to Luther. Indeed, the amorphous, newly expanded empire of the Romanovs was no less vulnerable to the pressure of divisive forces than the empire of Charles V a century before. If Lutheranism proved more successful than Neronovism, it was only because it accepted the institution of the secular state more unreservedly. But this distinction only serves to identify the Russian schismatic tradition more with the radical, "non-magisterial" reformation: the tradition of Anabaptists, Hutterites, and the like, whose strength had in any case been greatest in Central and Eastern Europe.105 In their relentless opposition to war and raison d'etat and their tendency to speak of "houses of prayer" rather than consecrated churches, the Russian schismatics resemble Quakers and other radical Protestant sects.106 In their apocalyptical expectations and ingrown communal traditions, the Old Believer colonizers on the distant eastern frontier of Christendom were close in spirit to some of the sectarian pioneers of colonial America on its far-western periphery.