The Icon and the Axe

Nikon was, of course, less decisively rejected by the new church than was Avvakum. In contrast to the fiery martyrdom of the archpriest, the dethroned patriarch died peacefully on his way back to Moscow in 1681 with a partial pardon from the imperial court. Nonetheless, Nikon used prophetic terminology similar to that of Awakum in denouncing the principal author of the resolutions of the Church council as a "precursor of the Antichrist." He saw in the new "Babylonian captivity" of the Russian Church to state authority a worse bondage than the Mongol yoke.131 A pamphlet supporting him in 1664 divided the world into those who sing "praises to the holy patriarch" and those who serve in the regiments of Antichrist.132

Rebels against the new secular state looked on Nikon no less than on Awakum as a potential deliverer: the defender of an older and better way of life. Just as the rioting streltsy were to glorify the rejected Old Believers, so did the Cossack leaders of the Stenka Razin uprising of 1667-71 glorify the rejected patriarch as a possible deliverer from the "reign of the voevodas."138

The points of similarity between these two figures serve as a reminder that the basic schism in Christian Russia was not the formal one between those who accepted and those who rejected the Nikonian reforms. The real schism was, rather, the basic split between the Muscovite ideal of an organic religious civilization shared by both Avvakum and Nikon and the post-1667 reality-equally offensive to both of them-of the church as a subordinate institution of a secularized state.134

The real loser amidst all this religious conflict in Russia was-as it

had been in the West-the vitality of surviving Christian commitment. The two main forces within the Church spent their time and energy combating and discrediting each other rather than the secular forces undermining them both. The Russian Church after 1667 tended to borrow secular ideas rather than spiritual ideals from each of the old positions. The official Church became neither a prophetic community as the fundamentalists had wished nor a self-governing sacramental institution as the theocrats had desired. From the fundamentalists modern Russia took not fervid piety so much as xenophobic fanaticism; from the theocrats, not so much Christian rule as ecclesiastical discipline.

This ideological protest against modernization left a corrosive legacy of xenophobia. Internal schism in the wake of widespread violence engraved the anti-Jewish attitude implicit in the Muscovite ideology deep into the popular imagination. The Old Believers accused Nikon of permitting Jews to translate sacred books; and the Nikonians accused the Old Believers of letting Jews lead sacred services. Both parties considered the council of 1666-7 a "Jewish mob," and an official publication of the council blamed its opponents for falling victim to "the lying words of Jews." Throughout the society rumors spread that state power had been turned over to "cursed Jewish governors" and the Tsar lured into a corrupting Western marriage by the aphrodysiacs of Jewish doctors.135 Anti-Catholicism also became more widespread if not more intense than during the Time of Troubles. One Orthodox historian has pointed out that "until the sixties of the seventeenth century, aside from the name itself, the simple people could in no way distinguish Uniat from Orthodox."136 Henceforth, the general antagonism vaguely felt toward the Pope of Rome and "the Latins" was also directed at the Uniat Church as a tool for the "guileful politics of the Polish republic."137

To say who was responsible for the schism in the Eastern Church of Christ would be no easier than to determine who was responsible for the crucifixion of its founder. In both cases, the main historical arena of the immediate future belonged to men of state: the "great" Peter and Catherine and the "august" Caesar. Yet the "third Rome" was to be haunted by schismatics almost as much as the first Rome had been by the early Christians. The year 1667, which brought a formal end to religious controversy, saw the beginning of two powerful social protest movements against the new order. From the north the monks and traders of Solovetsk began their active resistance to tsarist troops, which was to inspire the Old Believer communities that soon formed along the Russian frontier. At the same time Stenka Razin (who had made two pilgrimages to Solovetsk) began the Cossack-led peasant rebellion which provided the precedent for a new

tradition of anarchistic rural revolt. The subsequent history of Russia was to be, in many ways, the history of two Russias: that of the predominantly Baltic German nobility and the predominantly White and Little Russian priesthood, which ran the Romanov empire; and that of the simple peasants, tradesmen, and prophets from whom its strength was derived.