breaking with the established Church hierarchy. As with Protestantism, however, there were two principal subdivisions: those with and without priests: the popovtsy and bespopovtsy. The 'priestists' roughly correspond to those Western Protestants (Lutherans and Anglicans) who rejected Roman authority while continuing the old episcopal system and forms of worship; the 'priestless,' to those (Calvinists and Anabaptists) who rejected the old hierarchical and sacramental system as well.
The possibility of Protestant influence on some of the early Old Believers cannot be excluded, though there is an absence of direct evidence and an obvious theological gulf between the fundamentalists' fanatical dedication to ritual and icon veneration and the outlook of Protestantism. The already noted saturation of Muscovy with Protestant merchants and soldiers in the seventeenth century may nonetheless have had an impact on attitudes and practices, if not on the actual beliefs, of the fundamentalists. Some of the White Russian Protestants decimated by the Poles in the mid-seventeenth century must have resettled in Russia and may well have retained elements of their former faith even while formally accepting Orthodoxy. Throughout the seventeenth century the Swedes pursued an active program of Lutheran evangelism in the Baltic and Karelian regions, which later became centers of Old Believer colonization. One converted Russian priest wrote a Russian language tract in the late fifties or early sixties seeking to convince Russians that Lutheranism was the way to check the corrupted practices of Orthodoxy.102 The banishment of the once-favored Protestants from Moscow in the late forties was partly justified by accusations of Protestant proselytizing. There were still some eighteen thousand Protestants resident in Russia and five Protestant churches in the Moscow area during the late years of Alexis' reign,103 and the provincial regions in which the Old Belief took root were precisely those where Protestant presence had been the greatest: in the Baltic region, White Russia, and along the Volga trade routes.
Like the first Protestant circles around Luther, the original Old Believers came largely from a bleak but pious region of Northern Europe. For all their anti-intellectualism, many of the early Old Believers (such as Deacon Fedor and the Solovetsk monks) were-like Luther-learned students of sacred texts. They juxtaposed an idealized original Christianity to the recent creations of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, reviled the decadence and complacency of a distant Mediterranean civilization, and sought to
bring monastic piety into everyday life. Neronov, like Luther, was particularly versed in the epistles of St. Paul and was often compared to him by contemporaries.104
The backing of local political leaders was as indispensable in turning the theological concerns of Neronov and Avvakum into a social movement as was the backing of German princes to Luther. Indeed, the amorphous, newly expanded empire of the Romanovs was no less vulnerable to the pressure of divisive forces than the empire of Charles V a century before. If Lutheranism proved more successful than Neronovism, it was only because it accepted the institution of the secular state more unreservedly. But this distinction only serves to identify the Russian schismatic tradition more with the radical, 'non-magisterial' reformation: the tradition of Anabaptists, Hutterites, and the like, whose strength had in any case been greatest in Central and Eastern Europe.105 In their relentless opposition to war and raison d'etat and their tendency to speak of 'houses of prayer' rather than consecrated churches, the Russian schismatics resemble Quakers and other radical Protestant sects.106 In their apocalyptical expectations and ingrown communal traditions, the Old Believer colonizers on the distant eastern frontier of Christendom were close in spirit to some of the sectarian pioneers of colonial America on its far-western periphery.
Other minority religions of the expanding Russian empire may have melted into the schismatic tradition, for the new secular state tended to produce a sense of community among persecuted dissenters. One of the earliest and most influential defenders of the Old Belief in Siberia was an Armenian convert to Orthodoxy, who had been conditioned by his previous Nestorianism to make the sign of the cross with two fingers rather than three.107 Nor can the possibility of some interaction with the Jewish community be excluded. The year 1666, in which the Antichrist was expected by the fundamentalists, was the same year in which Sabbatai Zevi claimed to have become the long-expected Messiah of the Jews. Using many of the same prophetic passages and computations as the Old Believers and influenced perhaps by a wife who was a Ukrainian survivor of the Khmelnitsky massacres, Sabbatai attracted a greater following for his claim than any Jew since Jesus, particularly within the decimated Jewish community of Poland and Russia. The Ukrainian hierarchy which was dominating the new Russian Church denounced Jews along with Old Believers. One Ukrainian priest wrote the first major Christian refutation anywhere of the claims of Sabbatai, The True Messiah, in terms that indicated that Sab-bataian ideas were finding some response within the Orthodox community.108 Since Sabbatai himself became an apostate to Islam and the entire movement was resolutely condemned by Orthodox Jewry, absorption into other
creeds became the norm rather than the exception. Sabbataian ideas influenced Polish thought; and it must have infected the substantial numbers of Jews who sought anonymity and shelter in Muscovy amidst the confusion and massive repopulation of the mid-seventeenth century.109 At the very least, there is a striking similarity between the Sabbataians and the Old Believers in their apocalypticism, fascination with occult numerical computations, ecstatic sense of election, and semi-masochistic acceptance of suffering.
If the Old Believers show a certain kinship with radical Protestantism and Sabbataian Judaism, the theocratic party bears a curious resemblance to Counter Reformation Catholicism. Although Patriarch Philaret was a prisoner and then a diplomatic foe of Catholic Poland, he nonetheless adopted many Catholic ideas-just as Peter was later to borrow heavily from his Swedish adversary. In establishing centralized control over ecclesiastical publication and the canonization of saints, in expanding the bureaucracy, jurisdiction, and landholding power of the hierarchy, Philaret was following Catholic rather than Russian precedents. The same was frequently true of Mogila, whose opposition to Catholicism was purely external and political, but whose conflict with Protestantism was profoundly ideological.
A Swede in Moscow in the early fifties described Vonifatiev, the Tsar's confessor and heir apparent to the patriarchate, as 'a cardinal under a different name';110 and an Austrian likened Nikon, who was chosen over Vonifatiev, to the Pope himself.111 Nikon's attempt to provide rigid dogmatic definition in matters of phraseology is more reminiscent of the Council of Trent than of the seven ecumenical councils. Many of the Greek texts he used for models came from Venice or Paris, with Catholic accretions. His sense of the theatrical in court and ecclesiastical ceremony, his calculated reburials and canonizations, his orders to bring back secular classics along with church books from Greece, his opposition to any council which challenged the authority of the first primate-all have more the ring of a Renaissance pope than of a return to Byzantine purity. His program for building and embellishing new monasteries in spots of great natural beauty climaxed by the creation of his monastery of the New Jerusalem seems strangely reminiscent of Julian II and the building of St. Peter's just before the great split in Western Christendom.
In defending the ecclesiastical realm from civil authority, Nikon used traditional Byzantine texts. But his actual policies as patriarch went beyond established Orthodox practice. An Orthodox visitor who accompanied the Patriarch of Antioch to Russia in 1654-5 complained that Nikon had in fact become 'a great tyrant over . . . every order of the priesthood and
even over the men in power and in the offices of the Government.'112 Nikon, he complained, had arrogated to himself the Tsar's traditional right to name the archimandrites of Russia's leading monasteries and had increased the number of serfs bonded directly to the patriarchate by 250 per cent. Although Nikon was careful not to claim pre-eminence of the patriarch over the Tsar, he did at times argue that the spiritual power was higher than the temporal. In his new edition of the canon law in 1653, he cites the Donation of Constantine, the forged document that had been used to sustain extreme papal claims in the late Middle Ages. Although Nikon at no time suggested the establishment of a Russian papacy, he claimed that the authority of the Muscovite patriarchate derives from its replacement of the lapsed see of Rome, seeming to imply that some of the pretensions of the latter have been
