minimized prophetic revivalism in favor of homely readings from their 'revealed' book: The Living Life.31
Only a little later than the 'spirit wrestlers' a similar sect arose in the Tambov region: the 'milk drinkers' (molokane). The spirit wrestlers received their name from a Church official who had meant to imply that they were fighting with the Holy Spirit; and they accepted it as an indication of their intention to combat matter with spirit. The milk drinkers had been so named because of their practice of continuing to drink milk during the Lenten fast, but they too accepted the name, insisting that it meant they were already drinking the milk of paradise, or dwelling by milky waters. They insisted more than any of the other sects on equality of wealth, and their efforts to produce a simplified, syncretic religion led them to incorporate certain Jewish practices into their essentially Christian forms of worship. One of the most interesting of the many splits that developed within the sectarian movement is the one that occurred between the 'Saturday' and 'Sunday' milk drinkers.32 The very fact that Jewish elements participated in the life of the sects provides testimony to the fact that the sectarian communities tended to be cosmopolitan in composition. Unlike the Great Russian schismatics, the sectarians tended to welcome all comers as 'brothers' (the usual term for member) in a common effort to attain the true spiritual life. The growing number of foreign settlers- particularly Germans and Central Europeans with Mennonite and Anabaptist backgrounds who began streaming into southern Russia after it was opened to foreign colonization in 1762-reinforced the trend toward austere egali- tarianism. But this was already implied in Kuhlmann's teaching that in the coming millennium 'there will be no Tsars, kings, princes, but all will be equal, all things will be communal, and no one will call anything his own… .'33
In addition to this tendency toward communal and egalitarian living, Russian sectarians shared a common belief that man was capable of attaining direct links (if not actual identity) with God outside all established churches. Behind all the sects stands the symbol which Kuhlmann (following Boehme) had used as the frontispiece for his new book of spiritual psalms: the figure of a cross melded into a latticework leading men up through the symbolic lily and rose to a new heaven and a new earth.
For each new sect, the ascent to higher truth lay in fleeing the material world outside for the spiritual world within. In place of the old liturgy and ritual, the sectarians worshipped with 'spiritual songs,' which became a rich and many-sided form of popular verse. The word 'spirit' (dukh) itself was to be found in the name or credo of each of the early sects. The
flagellants considered the most important of their new commandments to be 'Believe in the Holy Spirit,' and intoned their prayers and incantations to 'Tsar spirit.' The spirit wrestlers carried the dualistic denial of the material world even farther than the flagellants, viewing all of world history as a struggle between the flesh-bound sons of Cain and the 'fighters for the spirit' who were descended from Abel. The name the milk drinkers gave themselves was 'spiritual Christians.'
As with other dualists, there was a kind of totalitarian fanaticism about the sectarians. In rejecting the 'tyranny' of the established churches for the 'freedom' of spiritual Christianity, the sectarians tended to set up even more rigorous tyrannies of their own. Contending that earthly perfection was possible within their community led them to assume that such perfection was possible only within their community. New forms of 'higher' baptism and new sources of infallible truth were introduced; and the quest for perfection often drove them on to acts of self- mortification. It is characteristic that the popular names assigned to all the major sects of the eighteenth century designated some action which was thought to expedite their flight from the material to the spiritual world: flagellation, wrestling, drinking, and finally-in the last and most eerie of all the eighteenth-century sects-self- castration.
As time went on and Russian sectarianism became influenced by pietistic sectarians from the West, the masochistic and dualistic qualities of the tradition tended to be less dominant. Nonetheless, sectarianism kept alive its pretensions at offering a Utopian, communal alternative to the official Church; and it played an increasingly important role in the depressed agrarian regions of southern and western Russia. Sectarianism exercised considerable influence as well on the intellectual community. Its greatest periods of subsequent growth at the grass roots level coincided with the periods of increased political ferment and ideological Westernization at the intellectual level: under Catherine, Alexander I, during the sixties and nineties of the nineteenth century-and perhaps even the fifties and sixties of the twentieth.
Thus, contact with the West brought sectarian Protestant ideas into Russia along with secular rationalism. The centers of this strange sectarian tradition were the relatively new, western cities of Russia: St. Petersburg and the cities that had arisen on the southern plain of Russia during the Tatar and Ottoman recession: Voronezh, Kharkov, Ekaterinoslav, and Tambov. This latter city played such an extraordinary role in producing prophetic sectarians that it was often popularly called Tambog ('God is there').34 It seems darkly fitting that Tambov should prove a center of Utopian anarchism during the Civil War, one of the last to capitulate to
Bolshevik rule, and the one to which anxious Soviet academicians flocked in the late 1950's seeking to discover why sectarian sentiment continued to exist after forty years of atheistic rule.35 Perhaps it is also appropriate that the leading defender of an ascetic and Utopian reading of Communist doctrine amidst the waning of ideological fervor in post-Stalinist Russia was Michael Suslov, who was brought up in a family of religious dissenters and bore the name of the founder of Russian sectarianism.
The New World of St. Petersburg
The eighteenth century was greeted in Moscow with parades, festivities, and bonfires that lasted for an entire week. Like almost everything else in the official culture of the century to follow, these activities were ordered from above for reasons of state. Author of the decree-and ofjjthe change in New Year's Day from September to January-was, of course, Peter the Great, who has remained in the eyes of historians as towering a figure as his six feet eight inches rendered him to contemporaries. Having finished his tour of Western Europe and crushed the unruly streltsy, Peter was to turn in the first quarter of the new century to the administrative reforms and military campaigns that were to consolidate the position of Russia as a great and indisputably European power. In 1700 he took the first decisive step: he decreed that^beardsjshould henceforth be shaved off and'short, [German style of coats worn for 'the glory and beauty of the government.'36
Yet the suddenness of such reforms and the ruthlessness of their enforcement generated a passionate reaction. From many directions men rose up to defend the greater 'glory and beauty' of the old ways. In the same year, 1700, an educated Muscovite publicly proclaimed that'Peter was in fact the Antichrist, and a violent Cossack uprising on the lower Volga had to be crushed by long and bloody fighting.37 Such protest movements continued to plague the 'new' Russia and to influence its cultural development. A history of that culture must, therefore, include not only the relatively familiar tale of Peter's modernizing reforms but also the counter-nil ack launched by Old Muscovy.
The soldiers of the new order, Peter's glittering new guards regiments, were, after the total destruction of the streltsy, opposed only by a disorganized guerrilla band of Muscovite loyalists. The guards regiments had all the weapons of a modern, centralized state at their command, but the guerrilla warriors had the advantage of vast terrain, ideological passion, and grass
roots support. Although the ultimate victory of the new order was perhaps inevitable, the defenders of the old were able to wage a more protracted and crippling warfare against modernization than in most other European countries. Within the amorphous army of those opposed to the Petrine solution were three groups of particular importance for the subsequent development of Russian culture: merchant Old Believers, peasant insur-rectionaries, and monastic ascetics. Even in defeat these voices of Old Muscovy were able to force the new state to adopt many
