The Icon and the Axe

The original fundamentalists and theocrats made an impressive final exit from the stage of history in the late seventeenth century. Even after both positions had been rejected and Avvakum and Nikon were dead, each camp managed to give one last witness to its old ideals: one final ringing vote of no confidence in the new order.

The fundamentalist protest was that of communal withdrawal from the world. In the very year after the council in 1667, peasants in Nizhny Novgorod began to leave the fields and dress in white for all-night prayer vigils in anticipation of the coming end. Further north along the Volga, the unkempt Vasily Volosaty ("the hairy one") was attracting interest in his program for the destruction of all books and the launching of a penitential fast unto death. Others taught that the reign of Antichrist had begun in 1666, or that the end of the world would come in 1674 or 1691 (which was thought to be 1666 years after the entrance of Christ into hell). The death of Tsar Alexis in 1676 just a few days after the final fall of the fundamentalist redoubt at Solovetsk was seen as a sign of God's disfavor and an assurance of His intention to vindicate soon the defenders of the old faith.

Some sought to anticipate the purgative fires of the Last Judgment through self-immolation; others withdrew to form new puritanical communities in the virgin forests. The formation of these communities permitted the fundamentalist tradition to survive into modern times; but their creative activities belong more to the eighteenth than the seventeenth century. The final years of the seventeenth century were dominated by more negative protests against the new order, reaching a climax in the movement to abjure all worldly speech save repetition of the word "no"-the famous netovsh-china of a peasant from Yaroslavl named Kozma Andreev.138

Only a few miles from the spot where Kozma was trying to exercise his veto power against the modern world, there arose at the same time the last great monument to the rival, theocratic protest against secularism: the new Kremlin of Rostov the Great. Built by the Metropolitan Ion Sysoevich during the 1670's and 1680's as part of a deliberate effort to perpetuate the cause of his friend Nikon, the Rostov Kremlin is one of the most magnificent architectural ensembles in all of Russia. The majesty of its symmetry and relative simplicity of its brick and stone construction represent a direct effort to perpetuate the Nikonian style in architecture, and they constitute a massive, silent rebuke to the exotic pretentiousness of the

new state architecture. There could hardly be a more striking contrast than that of this massive yet white and austere ecclesiastical ensemble with the garish colors and chaotic appearance of the new architectural ensembles concurrently built in wood by Tsar Alexis: the palace at Kolomenskoe and the foreign office building within the Moscow Kremlin.

More important, however, the ecclesiastical construction at Great Rostov represented an effort to vindicate Nikon's theocratic ideas by dramatizing the majesty of the ecclesiastical estate and its pre-eminence over the civil. Sysoevich borrowed many of the ideas and technicians that Nikon had used in his own building program. Like Nikon's new monasteries, the ensemble of churches and ecclesiastical buildings at Rostov was built in a spot of beauty by a lake and was richly endowed. As in Nikon's monasteries, Sysoevich established a kind of theocratic rule over the village of Rostov, which even today is totally dominated by its Kremlin.139 Like Nikon, Sysoevich had become preoccupied with the need for discipline and order while serving in the hierarchy of Novgorod. He went so far as to declare once in public that "the Jews were right to crucify Christ for his revolt"- which became regarded by the Old Believers as one of the outstanding blasphemies of the new church even though Sysoevich was severely punished for it.140