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.