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.
2 The Secular State of Peter the Great
In the early eighteenth century the strains and rifts imposed on Russian society by the pursuit of empire during the previous century and a half were intensified by the active importation of foreign technological, social and cultural models designed to transform Russia into a fully European power. This alien inflow was necessary: if Russia was to protect her newly acquired imperial territories, she had to be able to match the military potential of the strongest European powers; but it was nonetheless extremely damaging to her social and ethnic cohesion.
By the end of the seventeenth century, Muscovy ruled a huge realm in northern Asia, but it had not yet succeeded in making its strategic situation secure, either from the raiders of the steppe or from the European powers to its west. True, it had won impressive victories against Poland, and with them a good deal of territory, but only after a long and exhausting war. In the north and west it was still blocked off from the Baltic and vulnerable to Swedish imperial designs, while in the south the danger of destructive Tatar raids had not been banned. If it was to remain an empire, it had to be able to defend its own territories, not only in the south and east but now especially in the west, from where the greatest dangers threatened.
In addition, the economic resources of its territories, potentially greater than those of any other power in the world, lay still almost wholly unmobilized. The vast distances, the primitive transport, the often infertile soil and the economic backwardness of the population made it difficult to develop mining, manufacture and trade, while Russia’s land-locked situation, hemmed round by ice-bound ports and straits controlled by potential enemies, obstructed foreign commerce. The truth was that a long-term imperial future could not be secured without a marked improvement in the standard of Russia’s armed forces and an activation of the resources of land and population.
In the early years of his reign, Peter I succeeded, though with great difficulty, in capturing the Turkish fortress of Azov, at the mouth of the Don, and thus gaining a precarious outlet to the Black Sea. But the uncertain nature of Russian military power was demonstrated by the failure of the first attempt for more than a hundred years to obtain a foothold on the Baltic: his large army, attempting to capture the port city of Narva, suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of a much smaller force of Swedes (1700).
Narva, however, proved to be a turning-point. Peter was deeply affected by the humiliation, and drew lessons from the experience-lessons which did not change his policies in their essentials, but imparted to them a new radicalism and a new sense of determination. He was already by character and upbringing disposed to make Russia more European, not