the body politic would never be entirely healed. It weakened Russia politically and lent a Utopian and apocalyptical flavor to its internal debates which frustrated the harmonious development of a stable national culture.
Here are but a few of the divisions opened up by the raskol'niki. There was, first of all, their own separation from the civil as well as the religious life of Russia. The Old Believers went so far as to use secret codes, nets of informers, and at least two private languages for their internal communications.76 They were, moreover, split off from history- believing that earthly history was nearing an end and that all talk of historical greatness in the empire represented only the predictable delusions of the Antichrist. Among themselves the raskol'niki were soon split into endless divisive groups: the Theodosians, Philipists, wanderers, runners, and so on-each pretending to be the True Church of the original Old Believer martyrs. There was, finally, a schizophrenia in the attitude of all these Old Believers toward the world about them. Extremely stern, puritanical, and practical in everyday life, they were nonetheless ornate, bombastic, and ritualistic in art and religion. Indeed, one may say that the simultaneous allegiance of Old Muscovy to both icon and axe, to both formalized idealism and earthy harshness, was kept alive by the Old
Believers. With the passing of time their influence grew and deepened. Some of the oppressive restrictions of the early eighteenth century were removed in the 1760's. Important settlements of both 'priested' and 'priestless' Old Believers were established shortly thereafter, significantly in Moscow rather than St. Petersburg.77 They became pioneers in providing care for the sick in destitute sections of Moscow. Gradually, the Old Believers began to attract sympathizers and sentimental admirers and to become, in spite of themselves, an influential force in the formation of a new national culture.
The second tradition of conservative protest against the new world of St. Petersburg, that of Cossack-led peasant insurrection, bears many points of similarity to that of the fundamentalist Old Believers. Both traditions have their origin in the religious revival of the Time of Troubles and produced their greatest martyrs during the great change under Alexis. Stenka Razin was for southern Russia the same semi-legendary hero that Awakum and the monks of Solovetsk were for the north. Yet, just as the Old Believers' tradition did not become fully formed except in reaction to Peter, so the tradition of peasant insurrection was in many ways established only with the Bulavin uprising against Peter's rule in 1707-8.78 If the merchants who led the Old Believer movement were protesting against the destruction of the old urban liberties by the central government, the Cossacks who led the insurrectionists were also protesting the extension of burdensome state obligations to their once free way of life. Just as the Old Believers were able to survive because of the remoteness of their settlements and the value of their commercial activities, so were the Cossacks able to sustain their traditions because of the distance of their southern settlements from the centers of imperial power and the importance of their fighting forces to the military power of the empire.
At times the tradition of insurrection merged with that of the Old Believers-particularly in the lower Volga region. However, their methods of opposing absolutism and their social ideals were quite different. The Old Believers were essentially passive in their resistance to the new regime, believing in the imminence of God's intervention and the redemptive value of unmerited suffering. The peasant insurrectionaries were violent, almost compulsive activists, anxious to wreak suffering on the nearest available symbols of bureaucratic authority. The Old Believers' ideal order was an organic religious civilization of Great Russian Christians united by traditional forms of ritual worship and communal activity. The insurrectionaries were animated by a purely negative impulse to destroy the existent order, an impulse which they sought to share with Moslem and pagan as well as Christian groups, along the multi-racial southeastern frontier of Russia.
The peasant insurrectionaries were, of course, protesting a far more degrading and debilitating form of bondage than that which faced the traditional merchants of the north. With the final sealing of all escape routes from lifetime peasant servitude in the mid-seventeenth century and the extension of military service obligation to twenty-five years in the early eighteenth, the lot of the ordinary peasant was, in effect, slavery. The violence of the peasant rebellions must also be placed against the background of continuing Tatar raids and military mobilizations along the exposed southern steppe. The final wresting of the southern Ukraine and Crimea from Tatar and Ottoman hands did not occur until the late years of the reign of Catherine the Great, well after the last great rebellions had been suppressed.
For all their disorganized violence, however, the peasant rebellions were animated by one recurring political ideal: belief in a 'true tsar.' From one point of view this was a revolutionary idea, a call for a coup d'etat based on a claim that a samozvanets, or 'self-proclaimed' insurrectionary leader, was the rightful heir to the throne. But fundamentally this ideal was profoundly conservative-even more so than that of the Old Believers. For the concept of a true tsar implied tiiat the ultimate ruler of the system was its only possible redeemer. The political and administrative system of die new empire was simply to be destroyed so that Russia could return to die congenial paternalism of Muscovite days. The 'true tsar' of peasant and Cossack folklore was thus a combination of benign grandfather and messianic deliverer: batiushka and spasitel'. He was a 'real, rustic man' (muzhitsky), the true benefactor of his children, who would come to their aid if only die intervening wall of administrators and bureaucrats could be torn down. At the same time, die 'true tsar' was given divine sanction in the eyes of the peasant masses by providing him with a genealogy extending in unbroken line back to Vladimir, Constantine the Great, and even to Riurik and Prus.
The first popular rumors of a 'true tsar' appear to have started during the reign of Ivan IV, who was largely responsible for both establishing and breaking this mythical line of succession.79 The False Dmitry, the first of the 'self-proclaimed' in Russian history, and the only one ever to gain the throne, drew skillfully on the people's longing to believe that there had been a miraculous survivor of the Old Muscovite line. Although soon disenchanted because of Dmitry's Catholicism, many Russians came to believe during the Time of Troubles that only a tsar from the old line favored by God could deliver Russia from intrigue and anarchy. The idea that a true tsar existed somewhere spilled over into the peasant masses who participated in the chaotic uprisings that followed die murder of Dmitry. Some
attached themselves to a second Polish-sponsored pretender, but more followed the leadership of a former serf, Cossack, and Turkish prisoner, Bolotnikov, who was rumored to be the nephew of the true Dmitry and the son of Fedor. The chaotic and violent uprising led by Bolotnikov in 1606-7 came close to capturing Moscow and is properly considered the first of the great nationwide peasant rebellions.80 The peasant insurrectionaries appear thus as a throwback to the old Muscovite ideology: their true tsar was to be the leader of an organic religious civilization. At first the idea was also maintained that such a tsar must be descended from die old line dirough Ivan the Terrible; but it soon became enough merely to show that the pretender's claim was more ancient and honorable than that of the incumbent. Much emphasis was laid on the fact that the self-proclaimed leader of rebellion and claimant to the throne was to be a holy tsar (of which there could be but one) rather than just another king or emperor, such as abounded in die corrupted West. The peasant rebels often echoed themes sounded by tile Old Believers: that the title 'emperor' came from the 'satanic' pope, that passports were an invention of Antichrist, that the emblem of the two-headed eagle was that of the devil himself (because 'only the devil has two heads'), and that the special identifying cross mark placed on the left hand of runaway soldiers was an abomination of the holy cross and the seal of Antichrist.81
There were fourteen serious pretenders in the seventeenth century, and the tradition developed so vigorously in the following century that there were thirteen in the final third of it alone. There were some even in the early nineteenth century--the legends about Constantine Pavlovich as the true tsar rather than Nicholas I providing a kind of uncoordinated popular echo of the aristocratic Decembrist program.82 One reason for the boost which the tradition received in the eighteenth century was the sudden development of the belief in a 'substitute tsar.' Properly sensing that Peter's reforming zeal was intensified by his trip abroad, partisans of the old ways began a series of apocryphal legends purporting to explain how someone else (usually the son of Lefort) had been substituted for the
