Читать книгу Russia: People and Empire: 1552–1917 - Geoffrey Hosking - Страница 13

The outcome of the Time of Troubles also enormously enhanced the standing of the Orthodox Church, which had shown that at a time of national breakdown it was capable of rousing people to a united effort and of helping to finance that revival. Besides, the first Romanov Tsar, Mikhail, being very young when he came to power, relied a great deal on his father, Metropolitan Filaret, who became Patriarch in 1619 and remained in effect co-ruler, using the title ‘Great Sovereign’ till his death in 1633. For a time it looked as if Tsardom and Patriarchate were a partnership in which the Patriarch was the senior.

However, the church itself was undergoing a period of upheaval caused by the import of new religious ideas from the West, and fuelled by memories of the horrors foreign intervention could inflict. The influence which appeared most threatening was the Counter-Reformation Catholicism of Poland, mediated through the Uniate Church. By the middle of the seventeenth century a reform movement had taken shape which aimed to outbid the intellectual sophistication of the Catholics by purifying the Orthodox Church and spreading its message to ordinary Russian people.

The Zealots of Piety (Revniteli blagochestiia) were a group of parish priests, mainly from the Volga region, who in the 1630s began to agitate for a programme of thorough-going church reform. They were concerned by drunkenness, debauchery and the persistence of pagan practices among the common people, and attributed these deficiencies to the low educational and spiritual level of the clergy, and to the negligent conduct of the liturgy, which they claimed hindered ordinary parishioners from obtaining a real understanding of the faith. In particular they criticized the custom of mnogoglasie, conducting different portions of the divine service simultaneously, so that it was impossible to follow any of them properly (this was done because parish churches had taken over the full monastic liturgy, under which each service would otherwise have lasted several hours). The Zealots recommended heightened discipline, regular fasting, confession and communion, and the frequent preaching of sermons.²³

This was a reform programme not unlike that of the Cluniacs in eleventh-century France, and it had something in common with sixteenth-century Protestantism in much of Europe. At the same time it was firmly rooted in the tradition of Metropolitan Makarii and took a pride in Muscovy’s religious mission. Clerics of this tendency drew attention to themselves by their fiery preaching, notably one Archpriest Avvakum, originally a peasant from beyond the Volga, a vehement protagonist of the simple Russian virtues in contra-distinction to western khitrost’ (cunning or sophistry): he sometimes aroused the resentment of his Moscow parishioners by castigating their worldly vices. The Zealots became influential both in the Patriarchate and at court, especially following the accession of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in 1645. His personal confessor, Stefan Vonifat’ev, was a sympathizer, as were two of his leading advisers, Boris Morozov and Fedor Rtishchev.

Another peasant from beyond the Volga who rose up through the Zealots’ movement was the Mordovian monk Nikon, a tall and dominating figure who became one of Alexei’s most trusted friends and Metropolitan of Novgorod, before being elevated in 1652 to the Patriarchate. In this position Nikon assumed the title of ‘Great Sovereign’ and exercised real secular as well as spiritual authority whenever Alexei was absent, as for example during the Polish war which began in 1654.

If the Zealots of Piety thought that through Nikon they would win a decisive influence over church policy, they were to be rudely disabused. True, he implemented certain aspects of their programme, for example by banning mnogoglasie and prohibiting the sale of vodka on holy days. But his priorities were different and much more ambitious, If they were the Cluniac reformers, he was Pope Gregory VII. The Zealots’ vision was limited to Muscovy and their aim was to bring about an educated and morally pure church close to the people. Nikon by contrast wanted to create a theocracy in which the church would dominate the state and would take the lead in an imperial and ecumenical mission of expansion and salvation. Whereas Ivan Neronov, one of the leading Zealots, advised against war with Poland in 1648, because he feared the moral consequences of war, as well as further incursion of heresy, Nikon welcomed it as an opportunity to enhance the standing of both church and state, and actually encouraged Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi to rebel against Poland in the name of Orthodoxy. Nikon was in close touch with the Eastern Patriarchs, and was eager for the Russian church to play the leading role in Orthodoxy they could no longer fulfil because of their subjection to Ottoman rule.²⁴ In a word, Nikon took absolutely seriously the notion of Moscow as the Third Rome and believed that it meant the creation of a universal Christian empire.

His contact with Greek and Ukrainian churchmen had made him aware of the many discrepancies between Russian and Byzantine liturgical practice which had been discussed at the Stoglav Council. He hastened the work of studying and correcting the printed service books, so that the Russian church would be ready for the ecumenical role he intended it should play in Ukraine and perhaps beyond that in the Balkans. As early as the spring of 1653, he issued a new psalter and a set of instructions requiring congregations to introduce a number of ritual changes, including making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of the traditional two. From the outset there were protests from priests who disliked the alterations and who objected that they had been introduced uncanonically, without a church council. Nikon plunged ahead regardless, with assurance of the Tsar’s support, and during the next years added further amendments, none of them of dogmatic significance, but nevertheless repugnant to believers who held that ritual and faith were indissolubly connected.

In 1655 Nikon convened a church council and, with the help of his Greek supporters, pushed his liturgical reforms through. With the approval of the secular power, he set about dismissing his opponents and exiling them. By now, however, Alexei was beginning to be alarmed by the threat to his own authority represented by the Patriarchate, especially when occupied by an overweening character like Nikon. On his appointment, Nikon had made him swear to obey him in everything which concerned the church and God’s law – an exceedingly broad concept in the seventeenth century. As Metropolitan of Novogorod, he had resisted the subordination of monasteries in his diocese to the new Monastyrskii Prikaz, the state monastic administration, and had fought the encroachment of secular courts on what he considered ecclesiastic jurisdiction. As Patriarch he continued to fight these battles.

At first Alexei had acquiesced in ecclesiastical hegemony, but as he gained in experience and self-confidence he grew to resent the domineering tone of his erstwhile ‘bosom friend’, and to worry that if the church acquired too much power, it might seriously obstruct the efforts of the secular state to mobilize the country’s resources by taxation or by the assignment of land to nobles. The high-handedness which Nikon displayed in implementing his liturgical reforms confirmed Alexei’s fears and eventually undermined his relationship with the Tsar.

Affronted by Alexei’s increasingly conspicuous coolness towards him, Nikon in July 1658 suddenly and dramatically renounced the Patriarchate in the middle of a service. Declaring that he felt unworthy of the office, he took off his patriarchal robes and assumed the simple habit of a monk. This gesture of simulated humility was certainly calculated to compel concessions from Alexei, but it had the opposite effect. Alexei after much hesitation and heart-searching accepted his resignation.²⁵

Whatever this rift was, it emphatically did not arise from a dispute over Nikon’s reforms. Alexei was as keen on them as Nikon himself, since he thought they would raise the standing of the state in alliance with the church. He therefore took over the sponsorship of the reforms, while removing their originator. In this way the innovations became as closely identified with the state as they were with the church: a fateful development.

A church council of 1666–7, again attended by the Eastern Patriarchs, not only approved all the textual amendments and liturgical innovations, but went on to pronounce anathema on those who refused to accept them. It also reversed the decision of the Stoglav Council of 1551, which had upheld existing practices in the face of Greek questioning. This was a radical turning-point in more than ecclesiastical policy, since the 1551 Council had consolidated the whole Muscovite ideology propounded by Metropolitan Makarii. Its repudiation implied a rejection of the entire outlook. Symbolically the Council of 1666 explicitly condemned the legend of the ‘white klobuk’ (monk’s cap): this was a story which enjoyed wide currency among ordinary people, telling how, after the Byzantine church had sold out to the Catholics at the Council of Florence, it had been punished by the fall of its capital city to the Turks, and the mission of defending true Christianity had devolved on the Russians. Condemnation of this tale implied rejection of the whole notion of Moscow the Third Rome.²⁶ The Tsars had never explicitly invoked the Third Rome, but all the same to repudiate it undermined much of the justification for their authority.

The Council of 1666–7 thus converted the Russians’ existing national myth into a heritage of those who opposed the state and its increasingly cosmopolitan outlook. It thereby opened up a rift in Russians’ national consciousness which has never been fully healed. The Old Believers pointed out, with impeccable logic, that all the Tsars and hishops had hitherto lived by practices now deemed so heinous that they merited anathema. ‘If we are schismatics,’ they argued, ‘then the Holy Fathers, Tsars and Patriarchs were also schismatics.’ Quoting from the church’s own Book of Faith of 1648, they charged Nikon with ‘destroying the ancient native piety’ and ‘introducing the alien Roman abomination’.²⁷ ‘To make the sign of the cross with three fingers’, they protested, ‘is a Latin tradition and the mark of the Antichrist,’ Archpriest Avvakum, the most articulate and consistent of Nikon’s opponents, wrote from his prison cell to Tsar Alexei: ‘Say in good Russian “Lord have mercy on me”. Leave all those Kyrie Eleisons to the Greeks: that’s their language, spit on them! You are Russian, Alexei, not Greek. Speak your mother tongue and be not ashamed of it, either in church or at home!’²⁸

The anathema supported by the secular power blew up minor liturgical problems not just into major theological issues but into criteria of a person’s whole attitude to church and state. As Robert Crummey has remarked, ‘Once opposition to the liturgical reform and all its implications carried the Old Believers into opposition to the Russian state, their movement became a rallying point for the discontented and dispossessed of Muscovite society.’²⁹ That included those who objected to the fixation of serfdom, Cossacks defending their ancient liberty, local communities losing their self-governing powers to voevodas and their agents, townsfolk fixed to their communes by ‘mutual responsibility’ and heavy taxation, as well as parishes who found that the Council of 1666 had also curtailed their power to choose their own priest.³⁰

The combining of religious and secular motifs fanned the flames of an apocalyptic mood which was already abroad in Muscovite society, exemplified in the preachings of the hermit Kapiton, which were popular in the Volga basin and the north of the country. For if the piety of the Third Rome had indeed been disavowed by both church and state, then what could one conclude but that the reign of Antichrist had arrived and the end of the world was at hand? After all, according to prophecy, there was to be no Fourth Rome.

The final decades of the seventeenth century saw the culmination of this mood in a series of rebellions and mass suicides. The suicides started among communities of people who were determined not to defile themselves before the Judgement Day by contact with the forces of Antichrist, but rather, at the approach of government agents or troops, would shut themselves inside their wooden churches and set fire to them.

The rebellions began in 1668 in the island monastery of Solovki, the great centre both of piety and of economic life in the mouth of the White Sea. Its monks refused to accept the new prayer books. stopped praying for the Tsar and deposed their abbot when he seemed disposed to compromise. They told Alexei: ‘We all wish to die in the old faith, in which your lordship’s father, the true-believing lord, Tsar and Grand Prince Mikhail Fedorovich of all Russia and the other true-believing Tsars and Grand Princes lived out their days.’³¹ Alexei sent an army to enforce his will, but the monks refused them access to their island. With the support of much of the local population, who helped them with supplies, they were able to withstand a siege of eight years, before finally succumbing in January 1676. Nearly all the inmates were summarily put to death by the victorious besiegers.

Many Old Believers fled to the south, to the region of the Don, which had been in upheaval in 1670–71, when the Cossack leader Sten’ka Razin led a campaign up the Volga, calling on serfs and non-Russians to murder the boyars, estate-owners and voevodas. Few if any Old Believers were involved in that insurrection, but they found the region still in turmoil, and they added to the discontent that survived from its defeat. The symbiosis of Cossackdom and Old Belief in the south and east, merging at times with the discontent of Tatars and Bashkirs, created a latent threat to the imperial state for the next century.

In 1682 Old Believers joined with discontented strel’tsy (musketeers) in Moscow to spark off a mutiny. The death of Tsar Fedor Alexeevich had left a disputed succession, which gave the strel ‘tsy a chance to press their own demands for the redress of grievances, for better pay and for the restoration of the Old Belief. The Regent Sofia, who had at first supported their revolt, turned against them when it became clear what a threat they represented to law and order: she had their chief spokesman, the Old Believer Nikita Dobrynin, arrested and beheaded, and thereafter persecuted his fellow-believers with ferocious determination.

For the most part, though, the Old Belief was a not a rebellious movement: it was more a desperate assertion of principle in the face of what seemed like overwhelming force. Old Believers would flee places where the official church and government could readily find them, and take themselves off to the borderlands – some, for example, to the Polish frontier, others as mentioned to the Don, while yet others sought out or created tiny settlements in the forests and lakes of the far north. This was an area which had seen little of landlords or serfdom, and where local self-governing mir communities had retained a rugged independence elsewhere diminished by the depredations of authority. Here religious refugees found a landscape ideal both for eluding officials and for cultivating an ascetic way of life. Thousands of square miles of forest, lake and marsh, crossed only by the occasional muddy track, guaranteed both isolation and a minimum of human comforts. Fishing, gathering and logging provided the bare necessities, which could also be used to trade with, where communications permitted. Usually without a priest, or seldom visited by one, Old Believers improvised services in hastily erected chapels or even ordinary peasant huts, with the help of an icon and an unamended prayer book.

Here in the far north during the 1670s and 80s refugees from the Solovki monastery set up their own hermitages, constructing flimsy shelters from available timber and grubbing up plots of land to grow a little food. Sometimes they would gather a few disciples around them, or allow peasants to visit them, and thus a new Old Believer settlement would come into existence. Lacking a priest, these communities had willy-nilly to devise their own forms of service, with lay people performing sacraments such as baptism and confessions being made mutually to one another. In this way Russia’s most conservative believers were driven to undertake experiments which elsewhere in Europe were the province of the extreme religious radicals.

The most settled and successful of these communities was one set up on the River Vyg, which flows out to the White Sea. Its leaders, the brothers Andrei and Semen Denisov, were good organizers, with a practical sense of economics. They were also able polemicists. At a time when the official church began trying to counter the Old Belief by persuasion rather than persecution, Andrei composed a systematic exposition of its tenets laid out as answers to the accusations of the Nikonians. This Pomorskie otvety became thereafter the guide which all Old Believers accepted on dogmatic questions.

Semen, who succeeded him as abbot, wrote a treatise, Vinagrad rossiiskii (The Russian Vineyard), in which he set out his view of the Holy Russia they had lost. According to him, Rus’ had been the finest example of a people ruled by the divine will, the one truly Christian realm in a world threatened by Satan in the form of Catholicism, Protestantism and Western rationalism. Now however the Russians too had been corrupted, first by the ‘papist Latin heresy’ at the Council of Florence, then by the impious reforms of Nikon, which touched the very heart of Russia’s sacred mission.

Nevertheless, in Semen Denisov’s view, something had been preserved among the ordinary people. ‘In Russia,’ he wrote, ‘there is not one single city which is not permeated with the radiance of faith, not one town which does not shine with piety, nor a village which does not abound with the true belief.’ True, all this was overlaid by an apostate state bearing the mark of the apocalyptic beast, but staunch cultivation of the faith, together with courageous resistance to persecution would enable Russia one day to revive and return to the true path. Denisov evoked at length the memory of the saints of Rus’, who ‘by their piety, faith and virtue unite the Russian nation with Christ in one single flock at pasture in the meadows of Heaven’.³²

In reformulating the faith of Makarii for the needs of his own time, Denisov stumbled into a fateful novelty, the implications of which he certainly did not realize. He was unable to follow Makarii in seeing the essence of Russian nationhood as residing in the Tsar and the church, since both had departed from the true faith. Both might one day return to it, but until then the only possible bearer of ideal Russian nationhood was the people itself in their ‘towns shining with piety’ and their ‘villages abounding with the true belief ‘. As Sergei Zen’kovskii has put it, Denisov ‘transformed the old doctrine of an autocratic Christian state into a concept of a democratic Christian nation’.³³

That was the real strength of the Old Belief. For all its shortcomings, its narrow-mindedness and parochialism, it offered a religious explanation for a perceived reality, the increasing alienation of the mass of the people from a cosmopolitan and secular state, which intensified during and after the reign of Peter I. The Old Belief not only withstood official persecution and discrimination throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in numerical terms actually flourished. By the early twentieth century, 250 years or so after the schism which gave it birth, it probably claimed some ten to twelve million adherents, or between a fifth and a quarter of adult Great Russians.³⁴

Even that did not mark the full extent of its influence, for it exerted a partial hold on the consciences even of many who acknowledged the official church. Frederick Conybeare, an American anthropologist who investigated popular religion in the 1910s, commented that ‘Its strength lies less in its overt adepts than in the masses who mutely sympathise with it … [as] a product no less than a glorification of popular customs and ideas … In many regions, among the petit peuple we meet with the singular opinion that official orthodoxy is only good for the lukewarm, that it is a worldly religion through which it is barely possible to attain salvation, and that the true and holy religion is that of the Old Believers.’³⁵

An investigator of the Old Belief in the 1860s, V.I. Kel’siev, went even further. He asserted that The people continue to believe today that Moscow is the Third Rome and that there will be no fourth. So Russia is the new Israel, a chosen people, a prophetic land, in which shall be fulfilled all the prophecies of the Old and New Testaments, and in which even the Antichrist will appear, as Christ appeared in the previous Holy Land. The representative of Orthodoxy, the Russian Tsar, is the most legitimate emperor on earth, for he occupies the throne of Constantine.’³⁶

Even allowing for an element of exaggeration here, it is clear that the schism had long ago ceased to be about making the sign of the cross with two fingers. It marked the opening of a radical split in Russian consciousness, when large numbers of conservative and patriotic Russians became alienated from the imperial state and took the decision to conduct their spiritual and even their community life outside the framework it offered. As Miliukov has remarked, ‘Russian popular piety disengaged itself from the piety of the ruling church. The unhealthy and fateful rift between intelligentsia and people, for which the Slavophiles reproached Peter the Great, took place half a century earlier.’³⁷

Already by the end of the seventeenth century, then, enserfment, recruitment and the pressures of the service state had combined with the ecumenical ambitions of the church to exhaust and embitter the population and to engender a schism which sapped popular loyalty to both state and church and undermined the sense of national unity.