activities. Icon painting in the Kremlin was placed under the administrative supervision of the armory; and the most important new construction inside the Kremlin in the late years of Alexis' reign was undertaken not for the church but for the foreign ministry, whose director surrounded himself not with icons but with clocks and calendars.93
Whereas Muscovy had thought of Russia as a 'vineyard planted by God' for ultimate harvest in the life to come, Alexis seemed now to think of it as a place in which man could create his own 'many-flowered garden.' These were the titles respectively of the most famous Old Believer protest against the reforms and the most famous collection of poems by the new court poet Simeon Polotsky. Just as Simeon's 'garden' of verse was full of tributes to such non-Muscovite subjects as 'citizenship' and 'philosophy,'94 so Alexis' new Izmailovo gardens outside Moscow were full of Western innovations. Behind the baroque entrance gate there were windmills, herb and flower gardens, irrigation canals, caged animals, and small pavilions for rest and relaxation.90
An even greater symbol of secular elegance was the palace built by Alexis between 1666 and 1668 at Kolomenskoe, outside Moscow.9' There was, to be sure, the superficial traditionalism so characteristic of Alexis' reign, as onion domes and tent roofs dominated the basically wooden construction. But light streamed in as it never had before in Muscovite buildings, through three thousand mica windows, revealing a vast fresco depicting the universe as heliocentric and an equally unfamiliar world of mirrors, opulent furniture, and imported mechanical devices. Pictures of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Darius stared down from walls where icons might have been, and Alexis received visitors on a throne flanked by two giant mechanical lions whose eyes rolled and jaws opened and roared on prearranged signals. Polotsky considered Kolomenskoe the eighth wonder of the world. It would perhaps be more correct to speak of it as the first wonder of a new world in which Western technology began to dominate the monuments of a new empire. Retaining the garish and ostentatious features of native tradition, Alexis had built the first of the palatial pleasure domes that came to symbolize Romanov Russia. He had taken over the pretentious building program of Nikon and the xenophobic arrogance of Awakum; but he had left behind the religious convictions of both. The path was to be long and agonizing-but in some ways direct and inescapable-from seventeenth-century Kolomenskoe and Izmailovo to twentieth-century parks of culture and rest.
The Westernizing changes of Alexis' late years were profoundly revolutionary in the modern sense of the word. But in the seventeenth-century meaning of revolution-the restoration of a violated natural order, based on
the image of a sphere revolving back to its original position-the defeated religious reformers were the true revolutionaries.97 Both the theocrats and the fundamentalists were trying to return Russia to its presumed original Christian calling after an unnatural capitulation to foreign ways. Each put his faith in the Tsar to lead Russian Christendom back to its former purity; yet each instinctively understood that his cause was hopeless. They sorrowfully concluded that Alexis was either another Julian the Apostate who had secretly deserted the faith, or that Moscow had become the 'fourth Rome,' which they had previously thought would never be.98
Everywhere that the religious reformers looked in the new secularized court culture they found signs that the reign of the Antichrist had begun. Not only had the church council been summoned in a year containing the number of the beast, but the new doctrinal work Peace with God for Man presented to the Tsar in that very year by Gizel had 666 pages in it.99 The frontispiece of another Kievan work of the same year showed King David and St. Paul pointing swords toward a globe on top of which rode the tsar of Russia into battle accompanied by a citation from the Book of Revelation -one of the most frequently quoted biblical books of the period.100 The first painting done for the Tsar by his newly commissioned Dutch court painter (and presented to him on New Year's Day of 1667) further intensified the feeling of foreboding by depicting the fall of Jerusalem.101
The apocalypticism of the schismatics was the logical outgrowth of their extreme fidelity to the prophetic Muscovite ideology. But any full understanding of the schism requires not only Russian but Byzantine and Western perspectives as well. Indeed, this seemingly exotic and uniquely Russian schism can, in many ways, be described as 'Byzantine in form, Western in content.'
Of the Byzantine form, there can be little question. The concern over minute points of ritual and procedure, the elaborate court intrigue involving both emperor and patriarch, the constant appeal to Greek fathers on both sides, and the polemic invocation of apocalyptical and prophetic passages- all is reminiscent of earlier religious controversies in the Eastern Christian Empire. Church councils, which included foreign patriarchs along with Russian clergy, were the arenas in which the decisive steps were taken: the initial approval of the Nikonian reforms in 1654 and the condemnation of the fundamentalists and deposition of Nikon in 1667. The destructive internecine warfare between the intellectually sophisticated patriarchal party and the prophetic Old Believers during a century of continuing peril to the Muscovite state recalls in some respects the fateful struggle between the pro-scholastic and the Hesychast party during the embattled later days of Byzantium.
Nonetheless, in reading the detailed argumentation of the ecclesiastical debates, one feels that the essence of the controversy lies deeper than the verbal rationalizations of either party. Awakum turned to patristic sources for the same reason that Nikon turned to Byzantine precedents: as a means of justifying and defending a position that had already been taken. Indeed, both men violated basic traditions of the Orthodoxy that they claimed to be defending. Avvakum's dualism led him in prison to defend the heretical position that the Christ of the Trinity was not completely identical with the historical Jesus. Nikon's ambition led him to claim-in fact if not in theory -greater power for the patriarchate than it had ever tried to assume in Constantinople.
Nothing would have shocked either Awakum or Nikon more than the suggestion that his position resembled anything in the West. Neither had any appreciable knowledge of the West; and compulsive anti-Westernism was in many ways the driving force behind both of them. This very sensitivity, however, points to certain deeper links; for Russia in the time of Alexis was no longer a hermetically sealed culture. Inescapably if half-unconsciously, it was becoming involved in broader European trends- ideologically as well as economically and militarily. Indeed, the schism in the Russian Church can in some ways be said to represent the last returns from the rural precincts on the European Reformation: a burning out on the periphery of Europe of fires first kindled in the West a century before. In broad outline, the schism in the Russian Church-like the schism in the West-grew out of renewed concern for the vitality and relevance of religion amidst the disturbing economic and political changes of early modern times. This 'second religiousness' occurred later in Russia than in the West, primarily because economic change and secular ideas came later. It was more extreme in Russia than in many parts of the West largely because it followed rather than preceded the great wars of the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. The revival of Russian religious concern followed a course broadly similar to the preceding Western pattern. Contending forces within the Church became embroiled in bitter strife, which soon led to physical violence and doctrinal rigidity. The two major parties to the dispute burned themselves out fighting one another and thus cleared the way for the new secular culture of modern times.
If one bears in mind that no precise parallel is intended or direct borrowing implied, one may speak of the fundamentalist faction as a Protestant-like and the theocratic party a Catholic-like force within Russian Orthodoxy.
Neronov's opposition to the wars against Poland, his love of simple parables, his desire to preach to the forgotten, uprooted figures who hauled
barges on the Volga or mined salt in Siberia-all were reminiscent of radical Protestant evangelism. The fundamentalists represented, moreover, the married parish clergy's opposition to the power of the celibate episcopacy. Like the Protestants, the fundamentalists found themselves fragmented into further divisions after
