movements were puritanical, replacing a sacramental church with a new, this-worldly asceticism; an established hierarchical authority with local communal rule. Both movements stimulated new economic enterprise with their bleak insistence on the need for hard work as the only means of demonstrating one's election by a wrathful God. Both movements played leading roles in colonizing previously unsettled lands. The Old Believer communities pushing on into Siberia were, like the pilgrims sailing to North America, driven on both by the persecution of established churches and by their own restless hope of finding some unspoiled region in which God's ever-imminent kingdom might come into earthly being.69
Perhaps the most extraordinary of these new communities were those -that spread out along the frozen lakes and rivers of northern Russia. Inspired by the heroic resistance to central authority of the Solovetsk monastery,70 these new communities continued their old communal business practices and traditional forms of worship in surroundings where the imperial authority was less likely to pursue them. The model community for the efitire region was that which developed in the 1690's along the Vyg River between Lake Onega and the White Sea. By 1720 there were more than 1,500 Old Believers in this community, and a rich hagiographical and polemic literature was developing in the Old Muscovy style. An impoverished princely family of the Russian north, the Denisovs, became the administrative and ideological leaders of the new community: in effect, lay elders of a new monastic civilization. The older brother, Andrew Denisov, provided the first systematic defense of the Old Belief in his Answers from Beside the Sea, drawn up in response to theological interrogation by the Holy Synod in 1722. His younger brother Semen developed and codified the martyrology of the schismatics with his History of the Fathers and Sufferers of Solovetsk and his Vineyard of Russia.71
The settlements that developed in the Vyg region were virtually
divorced from the new Petrine empire. Recognizing the value of their commercial activities to the Russian economy, Peter granted them freedoms which continued into the nineteenth century. The 'fathers' and 'brothers' of Vyg amassed considerable wealth and set up in their central commune one of the largest educational centers in eighteenth-century Russia-teaching the literature, music, and iconography of Old Muscovy. There were no professors in this informal center of instruction, just as there were no priests in their temples and monasteries. Yet there was higher literacy and deeper devotion to church forms in these 'priestless' communes of Old Believers than in most parishes of the synodal church. Their entrepreneurial economic activity constitutes, moreover, a remarkable chapter of pioneering heroism. Because of their strong sense of solidarity they set up trading networks which were often able to produce and ship goods to Moscow and St. Petersburg more cheaply than they could be made on the spot. Their ascetic sense of discipline enabled them to establish settlements in some of the bleakest arctic regions of Russia and to send fishing expeditions as far afield as Novaia Zemlia to the east and Spitzbergen to the west. Their own fanciful chroniclers even speak of Old Believer expeditions reaching North America.72
Much less peaceful (and thus somewhat more typical) is the early history of the Old Believers in the Volga region. The Old Beliefs were zealously defended in these newly converted and newly colonized regions, 'not for ourselves . . . but for our fathers and grandfathers.' Long-suffering faithfulness was the supreme virtue of the region where 'to change faith would be a hell beneath hell.'73 Cossacks had recently brought their own traditions of violence to this already embattled region. These Cossack settlers and merchants who controlled the flourishing Volga trade were equally opposed to centralized authority and to Western ways. When representatives of Peter the Great arrived in the Volga town of Dmitrievsk in 1700 to shave, uniform, and mobilize Cossack troops for the forthcoming battles with the Swedes, the Cossacks rebelled. Aided and abetted by the local populace, Cossacks swarmed into the city at night and massacred officials from the capital. Heads without beards were cut off and mutilated, local collaborators were drowned in the Volga, and the voevoda was able to survive only by hiding out long enough to grow a beard and returning as a convert to the Old Belief.74
Whether from conviction or necessity, officials in eastern Russia often had to follow the voevoda of Dmitrievsk and make their peace with the Old Belief. Outside of the main towns in forward areas of colonization, communes of Old Believers were often more numerous than parishes of the official church. There were relatively few orthodox Orthodox in the lower
Volga region and in many other key trading and colonizing areas of eastern Russia. As with the Calvinists, the 'this-worldly asceticism' of the Old Believer communities soon made them wealthy and, by the late eighteenth century, politically as well as theologically conservative. The prophetic priestless sects began to be challenged by the more sedentary communities of 'priested' Old Believers (popovtsy), such as the one which developed in the wilds at Irgiz, beyond the Volga, or at Belaia Krinitsa, in the Carpathian mountains near the border between Russia and the Hapsburg empire. The voice of prophecy was kept fresh, however, by the repeated splitting off of messianic groups and wandering prophets from the Old Believer communities-and also by increasingly frequent contact and interaction with the sectarians.
The historical importance of the Old Believers in the development of Russian culture is out of all proportion to the relative smallness of their numbers. By effectively seceding from the political and intellectual life of the empire, this important nucleus of the Great Russian merchant community helped turn the main centers of Russian life over to foreigners and to the Westernized service nobility. The Old Believers' unique qualities of industry and abstemiousness were never integrated into the building of a genuinely national and synthetic culture. Instead, they withdrew petulantly into their own world, defying the march of history in the belief that history itself was coming to an end. Their communities represented a continuing rebuke to the luxurious life of the Westernized cities and the aristocratic estates. Their intense religious convictions and communal pattern of life represented a voice from the Muscovite past that was to become a siren song for the Russian populists in the nineteenth century.
Equally important for the fate of Russian culture was the fact that much of the native entrepreneurial class became wedded not to a practical world outlook or rationalistic form of religious belief but rather to a most irrational and superstitious form of fanaticism. However ingenious and experimental in their business habits, the Old Believers rebelled at any change or modernization of their beliefs. Thus, whereas the development of an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie in the late medieval West tended to encourage the growth of rationalism in twelfth- century Paris and of sceptical humanism in fifteenth-century Florence and Rotterdam, the emergent merchant class of early modern Russia played no such role. In reality, no Russian bourgeoisie analogous to that of the West survived the transformations wrought by Alexis and Peter. Shorn of their ancient privileges and immunities after the urban riots of the mid-seventeenth century, the entrepreneurial leaders of Old Muscovy had only two choices. They could melt into the medium and upper level of officialdom of the new state along with
various foreign and mercenary elements. Or they could cling to their former ways and ideals by moving on to newly opening areas of the empire and blending their xenophobic complaints with those of other dispossessed elements. One could choose bureaucracy or raskol,75 the 'homeless cosmopolitanism' of the new urban centers or the narrow chauvinism of the Russian interior.
Those who chose the latter course, the native Russian bourgeoisie, were spiritual relatives not of the secularized entrepreneurs of early modern Europe but of its messianic urban preachers: Waldo, Savonarola, and Winstanley. But unlike these Western preachers, the Old Believers were able to survive and flourish into modern times. They were sheltered by vast spaces and fortified by the belief that they were defending the true tradition which would yet prevail rather than synthetically re-creating early Christian piety. By appealing to instinct rather than intellect, to communal honor rather than individual reason, the Old Believers achieved a popular following that proved more enduring than that of most revivalist prophets in the West.
Old Believers rejected the name raskol'nik, or schismatic, which they applied rather to the new, synodal church. Nonetheless, the word raskol, with its physiological suggestions of cracking open as well as its theological meaning of schism, indicates the historical effect of this movement on Russian life. The wounds which it opened in
