partial pardon from the imperial court. Nonetheless, Nikon used prophetic terminology similar to that of Awakum in denouncing the principal author of the resolutions of the Church council as a 'precursor of the Antichrist.' He saw in the new 'Babylonian captivity' of the Russian Church to state authority a worse bondage than the Mongol yoke.131 A pamphlet supporting him in 1664 divided the world into those who sing 'praises to the holy patriarch' and those who serve in the regiments of Antichrist.132
Rebels against the new secular state looked on Nikon no less than on Awakum as a potential deliverer: the defender of an older and better way of life. Just as the rioting streltsy were to glorify the rejected Old Believers, so did the Cossack leaders of the Stenka Razin uprising of 1667-71 glorify the rejected patriarch as a possible deliverer from the 'reign of the voevodas.'138
The points of similarity between these two figures serve as a reminder that the basic schism in Christian Russia was not the formal one between those who accepted and those who rejected the Nikonian reforms. The real schism was, rather, the basic split between the Muscovite ideal of an organic religious civilization shared by both Avvakum and Nikon and the post-1667 reality-equally offensive to both of them-of the church as a subordinate institution of a secularized state.134
The real loser amidst all this religious conflict in Russia was-as it
had been in the West-the vitality of surviving Christian commitment. The two main forces within the Church spent their time and energy combating and discrediting each other rather than the secular forces undermining them both. The Russian Church after 1667 tended to borrow secular ideas rather than spiritual ideals from each of the old positions. The official Church became neither a prophetic community as the fundamentalists had wished nor a self- governing sacramental institution as the theocrats had desired. From the fundamentalists modern Russia took not fervid piety so much as xenophobic fanaticism; from the theocrats, not so much Christian rule as ecclesiastical discipline.
This ideological protest against modernization left a corrosive legacy of xenophobia. Internal schism in the wake of widespread violence engraved the anti-Jewish attitude implicit in the Muscovite ideology deep into the popular imagination. The Old Believers accused Nikon of permitting Jews to translate sacred books; and the Nikonians accused the Old Believers of letting Jews lead sacred services. Both parties considered the council of 1666-7 a 'Jewish mob,' and an official publication of the council blamed its opponents for falling victim to 'the lying words of Jews.' Throughout the society rumors spread that state power had been turned over to 'cursed Jewish governors' and the Tsar lured into a corrupting Western marriage by the aphrodysiacs of Jewish doctors.135 Anti- Catholicism also became more widespread if not more intense than during the Time of Troubles. One Orthodox historian has pointed out that 'until the sixties of the seventeenth century, aside from the name itself, the simple people could in no way distinguish Uniat from Orthodox.'136 Henceforth, the general antagonism vaguely felt toward the Pope of Rome and 'the Latins' was also directed at the Uniat Church as a tool for the 'guileful politics of the Polish republic.'137
To say who was responsible for the schism in the Eastern Church of Christ would be no easier than to determine who was responsible for the crucifixion of its founder. In both cases, the main historical arena of the immediate future belonged to men of state: the 'great' Peter and Catherine and the 'august' Caesar. Yet the 'third Rome' was to be haunted by schismatics almost as much as the first Rome had been by the early Christians. The year 1667, which brought a formal end to religious controversy, saw the beginning of two powerful social protest movements against the new order. From the north the monks and traders of Solovetsk began their active resistance to tsarist troops, which was to inspire the Old Believer communities that soon formed along the Russian frontier. At the same time Stenka Razin (who had made two pilgrimages to Solovetsk) began the Cossack-led peasant rebellion which provided the precedent for a new
tradition of anarchistic rural revolt. The subsequent history of Russia was to be, in many ways, the history of two Russias: that of the predominantly Baltic German nobility and the predominantly White and Little Russian priesthood, which ran the Romanov empire; and that of the simple peasants, tradesmen, and prophets from whom its strength was derived.
The original fundamentalists and theocrats made an impressive final exit from the stage of history in the late seventeenth century. Even after both positions had been rejected and Avvakum and Nikon were dead, each camp managed to give one last witness to its old ideals: one final ringing vote of no confidence in the new order.
The fundamentalist protest was that of communal withdrawal from the world. In the very year after the council in 1667, peasants in Nizhny Novgorod began to leave the fields and dress in white for all-night prayer vigils in anticipation of the coming end. Further north along the Volga, the unkempt Vasily Volosaty ('the hairy one') was attracting interest in his program for the destruction of all books and the launching of a penitential fast unto death. Others taught that the reign of Antichrist had begun in 1666, or that the end of the world would come in 1674 or 1691 (which was thought to be 1666 years after the entrance of Christ into hell). The death of Tsar Alexis in 1676 just a few days after the final fall of the fundamentalist redoubt at Solovetsk was seen as a sign of God's disfavor and an assurance of His intention to vindicate soon the defenders of the old faith.
Some sought to anticipate the purgative fires of the Last Judgment through self-immolation; others withdrew to form new puritanical communities in the virgin forests. The formation of these communities permitted the fundamentalist tradition to survive into modern times; but their creative activities belong more to the eighteenth than the seventeenth century. The final years of the seventeenth century were dominated by more negative protests against the new order, reaching a climax in the movement to abjure all worldly speech save repetition of the word 'no'-the famous netovsh-china of a peasant from Yaroslavl named Kozma Andreev.138
Only a few miles from the spot where Kozma was trying to exercise his veto power against the modern world, there arose at the same time the last great monument to the rival, theocratic protest against secularism: the new Kremlin of Rostov the Great. Built by the Metropolitan Ion Sysoevich during the 1670's and 1680's as part of a deliberate effort to perpetuate the cause of his friend Nikon, the Rostov Kremlin is one of the most magnificent architectural ensembles in all of Russia. The majesty of its symmetry and relative simplicity of its brick and stone construction represent a direct effort to perpetuate the Nikonian style in architecture, and they constitute a massive, silent rebuke to the exotic pretentiousness of the
new state architecture. There could hardly be a more striking contrast than that of this massive yet white and austere ecclesiastical ensemble with the garish colors and chaotic appearance of the new architectural ensembles concurrently built in wood by Tsar Alexis: the palace at Kolomenskoe and the foreign office building within the Moscow Kremlin.
More important, however, the ecclesiastical construction at Great Rostov represented an effort to vindicate Nikon's theocratic ideas by dramatizing the majesty of the ecclesiastical estate and its pre-eminence over the civil. Sysoevich borrowed many of the ideas and technicians that Nikon had used in his own building program. Like Nikon's new monasteries, the ensemble of churches and ecclesiastical buildings at Rostov was built in a spot of beauty by a lake and was richly endowed. As in Nikon's monasteries, Sysoevich established a kind of theocratic rule over the village of Rostov, which even today is totally dominated by its Kremlin.139 Like Nikon, Sysoevich had become preoccupied with the need for discipline and order while serving in the hierarchy of Novgorod. He went so far as to declare once in public that 'the Jews were right to crucify Christ for his revolt'- which became regarded by the Old Believers as one of the outstanding blasphemies of the new church even though Sysoevich was severely punished for it.140
