Peter's War on Facial Hair

August 27, 1698, was a day of historic importance for the grooming of the Russian male. It was then that Tsar Peter I (known to history as “the Great”), who had just returned from his Grand Embassy to Western Europe, armed himself with scissors and undertook to mercilessly clip beards from the faces of summoned noblemen and boyars. The royal barber did not stop there: the very next day he had the court jester shear a new batch of beards.

This was followed by a royal decree requiring all of Peter’s subjects to remove their beards (the peasantry and clergy were exempted). Anyone reluctant to part with their facial hair could pay for the privilege to keep it, but the sums required were quite hefty: 60 rubles per annum for the nobility; 100 for merchants; and 30 for less distinguished townspeople. These fees entitled the payer to a token affirming “Beard Tax Paid” and emblazoned with the dictum “The beard is an unnecessary burden” around its edge. A levy was placed on peasant beards as well, but only upon their entrance into and departure from a city. That tax was two dengas – denga being the early term for the rough equivalent to a kopek.

City gates were manned by a zealous anti-beard force charged with shaving the chins of hirsute travelers. Resisters had their beards ruthlessly torn out by the roots. Soon, as Nikolai Gogol so eloquently put it: “Rus was transformed for a time into a barber shop packed to the gills; some offered up their chins while others were forcibly shaven.”

And so, revolutionary and despot that he was, Peter broke with a centuries-old tradition in an effort to make Russians look like other European peoples. The beard became emblematic of the struggle between reformers led by the tsar and adherents of Old-Russia traditions. The monarch was trying to reeducate society, instill a new vision of state power. And the shaving of beards, like other cultural practices in this era of change, was a central element of governmental policy. The tsar, as the culturologist Viktor Zhivov commented, “demanded that his subjects demonstratively retreat from the customs of their fathers and grandfathers and adopt European institutions as the rituals of a new faith.”

But was Peter’s effort to enforce cleanshavenness purely a matter of adhering to European fashions? Was he aware that before their adoption of Christianity the Eastern Slavs had also shaved their beards and mustaches and that a cleanshaven face was considered a sign of nobility in those days? Did Peter realize that he was following in the footsteps of Russia’s pagan Rusichi forefathers? It can be said for certain that his own father, Tsar Alexei, knew the pagan tradition of beardlessness, and he also knew that this tradition had been practiced specifically in Rus: in one of his proclamations, the tsar equated the shaving of beards with pagan nature worship, the singing of demonic songs, and skomorokhstvo (a traditional Slavic form of entertainment considered unholy). There is no evidence that Peter mentioned any of this.

What we do know about Peter’s feelings toward beards is that he associated them with the Streltsy, the arquebus-bearing palace guard that he despised for their attempt to block him from the throne and perhaps even to kill him, and later with the “dangerous” men with whom Peter’s recalcitrant son, Tsarevich Alexei, surrounded himself. After Alexei fled Russia and the duties his father had imposed on him, Peter has been quoted as saying “Had it not been for the nun, the monk and Kikin, Alexei would not have dared do such unprecedented evil. Oy, the bearded ones, the root of much evil – the old men and the priests. My father dealt with one bearded one [the Patriarch Nikon] and I am dealing with thousands of them.”

The tsar firmly believed that changing people’s outward appearance could help change them on the inside, but he did not have an easy time transforming his subjects. Russian men would just as soon cut off their ears as their beards. After all, for many centuries, Russians had seen the beard as a sign of a man’s dignity, a hallmark of his Orthodox piety, and a symbol of his religion’s superiority over Lutherans and other heretics. In the countries of the “heretical” West, as the British writer C. Northcote Parkinson commented in his essay “Beards and Barbarians,” a clean-shaven face has tended to be associated with periods of prosperity. Beards, on the other hand, appear during times of decline and uncertainty. The beard offers a screen behind which wavering and doubts could be hidden.

Beards were relatively uncommon during 1650-1850, and attitudes in Western European societies were distinctly different from those of Old Muscovy. As Parkinson put it: “The beard could stand in for wisdom, experience, reason, and candor. A beard gave men of mature years a prestige independent of achievement or intellect. It could and did serve as a way of masking the ostentatious, the bombastic, the false, and the ignorant.”*

Such negative attitudes toward the beard were utterly alien to its Russian devotees, and not only Russian: Georgi, the Metropolitan of Kiev and author of the polemic “The Struggle against the Latin” wrote of Catholics: “They shave their beards with a razor, which is a departure from the Law of Moses and of the Gospel.” The Torah also condemns a shaved beard as a shameful thing. In Leviticus 19:27 we read: “Thou shalt not mar the corners of thy beard.” And, of course, Jesus Christ and the apostles wore beards.

The Byzantine theologian Niketas Stethatos insisted on the necessity of the beard in his treatise “On the Cutting of Beards.” And a resolution issued by the 1551 Stoglav Synod states: “He who practices the shaving of beards is abhorred by God, who created us in His image. If someone shaves his beard and dies as such, he does not deserve to be sung over, or altar bread, or that candles be brought for him to church; he will be counted among the infidels.” Patriarch Filaret, Peter’s great grandfather, condemned the shaving of beards as “a dog-like outrage.”  Furthermore, beardlessness was associated with the “sin of sodomy.”

Metropolitan Macarius (1482-1563), who presided over the Stoglav Synod, called the shaving of beards not only “a matter of Latin heresy,” but also a serious sin. In the old Russian church it was considered blasphemy against the Almighty, who created man, in all his perfection, with a beard: anyone who shaved was therefore blaspheming, in that he was expressing dissatisfaction with the outward appearance the Creator had given him and trying to “correct” God, which was, of course, intolerable. People who practiced shaving were to be expelled from the church. The razor was even seen as a tool of foreign decadence and infidel godlessness.

Beard supporters referred to shaving as a “a Hellenic depraved and vile custom.” Indeed, the ancient Greeks, who placed a high value on youth, agility, and form, were the first to rise up against the ubiquity of beards. Alexander the Great, for example, waged a systematic war against beards, ordering all Macedonian men to shave. He had a practical explanation for this draconian measure: in battle, the enemy could grab you by the beard. But his true motive lay elsewhere: he was really trying to emphasize the special nature of European civilization that he was representing. Following in Greece’s footsteps, the Roman Republic also adopted the fashion of cleanshavenness.

Even before Peter, Russian history had given the beard’s zealous defenders occasion for outrage. One of the first to violate the longstanding prohibition against shaving was the Muscovite Grand Prince Vasily III. At the age of 47, after marrying the 18-year-old Yelena Glinskaya, he suddenly did the unthinkable: he shaved off his beard (leaving only whiskers, thereby mimicking the Polish fashion). In those days, this was a “cheeky” challenge to both everyday custom and religion: after all, this act was tantamount to heresy, to a trespass against the image of God in which man had been made, all the more grievous as it was a divinely anointed ruler doing the trespassing. Whether or not this was his intention, Vasily started a trend: following his example, dandies appeared on the streets of Moscow who not only shaved their beards but also plucked all of their facial hair. According to literary historian Nikolai Gudzy, their grooming “had erotic overtones and was associated with the rather widespread vice of sodomy.”

One chronicler of the times, trying (however clumsily) to defend Vasily, wrote: “It befits tsars to renew themselves and variously decorate themselves.” Historians attribute Vasily’s cleanshavenness to a desire to please his young and capricious wife.

During the reign of Boris Godunov (1552-1605), the foreign fashion of shaving off beards was further popularized. A portrait of Boris himself has survived that shows him in regal dress and wearing Monomakh’s Cap – a fourteenth-century gold and jewel crown – but without beard and whiskers. In his History of the Russian State, Nikolai Karamzin noted that Boris was often criticized for his “partiality toward foreign and new customs (among which the shaving of beards particularly peeved zealous adherents of tradition).”

One of the first portraits made of Prince Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky (1586-1610), a learned man and leading figure in the liberation of Moscow during the Time of Troubles, shows him completely cleanshaven, a clear sign of his Westernizing tendencies and readiness to reject the traditions of his forefathers.

“O, Rus, you somehow have the urge for German doings and customs!” the archpriest Avvakum (1621-1682) lamented in the 1670s. Indeed, even before Peter ascended the throne in 1682, beardlessness was already becoming fashionable within the upper echelons of Russian society, a trend against which conservatives desperately battled. The government wavered: it was striving to modernize, but it also had to deal with the ire of conservatives. To appease them, in 1675, Peter’s father Alexei decreed that “the customs of Germans and others should not be adopted and the hair of the head should not be cut.”

In 1681, Peter’s predecessor, Tsar Fyodor, who himself was beardless, ordered all noblemen and government officials to wear short caftans instead of the traditional floor-length okhaben and the collarless odnorodka – these old-fashioned items were banned from the Kremlin. Fyodor did not, however, succeed in abolishing the age-old tradition of beards. His anti-beard efforts were opposed by Patriarch Joachim, who had been fighting beardlessness since Alexei’s reign, condemning those who “have begun to destroy the image that God has given man.” Joachim expelled from the church not only shavers, but anyone who associated with sinners.

One of the most vociferous opponents of cleanshavenness was Joachim’s successor, Patriarch Adrian (1627-1700), the last Moscow patriarch before Peter abolished that position. Recalling the glorious days of yore when beard shavers would not just be expelled from the church but sometimes also beaten with cudgels or exiled to remote monasteries, Adrian, in his Encyclical to All Orthodox on the Nonshaving of Beards and Whiskers, equated the cleanshaven to cats and dogs. This did not sit well with Peter. The disgraced patriarch was forced to leave Moscow for the Nikolo-Perervinsky Monastery. Disapproving of many of Peter’s reforms, he nevertheless did not actively oppose them, although his silence was a form of protest.

For adherents of beardedness looking to the church for support, silent protest was not enough. They demanded action and were indignant at Adrian’s diffidence. One witness to the times, the Prussian diplomat Johann Gotthilf Vockerodt, observed that many defenders of tradition “would sooner put their head under the axe than be deprived of their beard.”

One form of protest against Peter’s facial-hair reform was the self-denunciation, a last resort for true die-hards. For example, in 1704, one Andrei Ivanov of Nizhny Novgorod cried out: “Sovereign word and deed” – a way of proclaiming that you have evidence of some crime against the state (usually someone else’s). Under interrogation, these brave bearded ones would then confess: “My sovereign deed is that I have come to inform the sovereign that he is destroying the Christian faith in ordering beards to be shaved, foreign clothing to be worn, and tobacco to be smoked.” Ivanov also cited the Stoglav Synod, which had banned these “outrages.” He perished in a torture chamber. His case was far from unique.

Another example of passive resistance is offered by John Perry, a British engineer working in Russia. He described instances of Russians with strong religious feelings about their beards being forced to submit to the royal decree and shave them. Many, however, rather than discard their shaved facial hair, stored it away so that it could later be placed in their coffin and presented to St. Nicholas in the life beyond. Not all priests fought to keep their beards – many clergy members enthusiastically supported Peter’s reforms, including the metropolitan and theologian Dmitry Rostovsky (born as Daniil Tuptalo, 1651-1709), who was later canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. Rostovsky penned a treatise “On the Image of God and the Resemblance in People,” arguing that it was not the beard that was important in God’s creation of man in his image, but the invisible soul, and that it is not a beard that does man credit, but good deeds and an honorable life. Dmitry told his flock to worry first and foremost about the salvation of their souls rather than superficial appearances and piety.

The anti-beard camp tended to justify their position in purely practical terms. That same John Perry pointed out that a full beard leads to untidy eating and drinking. Later, the poet and historian Nikolai Karamzin was much harsher in his condemnation of beards. In his Letters of a Russian Traveler, he wrote:

The beard belongs to the state of the savage; not shaving it is no different from not cutting one’s fingernails. It protects only a small portion of the face: how much discomfort it causes in summer, in intense heat! How much discomfort it causes in winter to wear hoarfrost, snow, and icicles on one’s face! Is it not better to have a muff that warns not just the chin, but also the face?

Peter was forceful in imposing this new fashion, and the disobedient felt his heavy hand. In Moscow in 1704, during an inspection of government workers, he ordered that the nobleman Naumov be mercilessly beaten with knouts for failing to shave his beard and mustache. The authorities treated ordinary Russians even more callously. In Astrakhan, the local governor, Timofei Rzhevsky, used brutal means to ensure that the new rules were followed. Later, the people of Astrakhan complained: “They cut off our beards with flesh, and in the bazaars, along the streets, and in churches, they cut the arses off Russian robes and caused much wailing from that in the artisan settlements.” Spontaneous protests in Astrakhan grew into a rebellion that, in 1705, Field Marshal-General Boris Sheremetev had to put down with fire and sword. In keeping with the spirit of the campaign, Yakov Nosov, one of the rebels, had his beard shaved before his head was cut off. Such was Peter’s approach to getting his subjects to submit to his will. The rebellion would have been more troublesome if Cossacks had heeded the call to come to the Astrakhaners’ aid. However, since the authorities were turning a blind eye to the Cossacks’ failure to obey Peter’s anti-beard decree, they refused to support the rebels.

A century later, when Russian troops entered Paris after their victory over Napoleon, the bearded Cossacks made quite an impression on the French. Beards “à la russe” quickly came into fashion. The Parisian newspapers wrote: “The beard is a natural adornment for those of the strong sex. It is a part of male beauty... Only a beard can make a man’s face imposing.”

THERE SHALL BE BEARDS ~ Some hirsute Russian leaders and artists from before and after Peter's ban.

But in Russia, anti-beard laws were still in effect. They continued to be issued by Peter the Great’s august successors right up to the mid-nineteenth century. People had grown accustomed to shaved chins. Alongside the long-held attitude that the “beard is a godly image and likeness,” there existed in the popular consciousness bits of wisdom along the line of: “His beard has grown, but it didn’t bring his mind along” and “Wisdom is in the head, not in the beard.” It wasn’t until the reign of Emperor Alexander III, who was not fond of the razor, that the beard was fully rehabilitated. He himself wore a beard, as did his successor, Russia’s last emperor Nicholas II.

By then, however, for most Russian men, to wear a beard or not to wear a beard was a matter of choice.