Raskol

April 1666: Great Moscow Synod

A contemporaneous portrait of Patriarch Nikon with brothers of the Resurrection New Jerusalem Monastery, circa 1660-65. Artist unknown.

How are we to understand the significance of the raskol or schism that roiled Russian Orthodoxy in the 1660s? Why did thousands of people rise up in protest and refuse to accept seemingly simple (and, from a contemporary perspective – let’s be honest – rather superficial) changes to Russian Orthodoxy’s rituals and texts? Why were thousands willing to face torture, exile, self-immolation, and execution for upholding the old faith? Why do ideas that today look downright medieval still persist? Why, even today, are there still over a million Old Believers, scattered across the globe by the forces of history?

What tectonic shift took place in Moscow 350 years ago? What people, ideas, and beliefs were brought into conflict?

On the surface, the raskol might seem a strange and rather silly chapter in Russian history, if we can label events that took so many lives “silly.”

In the mid-seventeenth century, many enlightened priests were concerned that a number of mistakes had accumulated in Russian Bibles as they were copied and recopied in monasteries over the centuries, sometimes with insufficient attention to accuracy. A mistake in Scripture is a sin. Performing religious rites incorrectly is a sin and prevents prayers from reaching God. Everyone agreed that these errors needed to be corrected. But how? What original source should be used: ancient Russian Scripture or the Scripture that was brought from Byzantium?

A simple procedural question, one might think. But when Patriarch Nikon began to revise Scripture and ritual based on Byzantine (“Greek”) tradition, he provoked a firestorm of opposition.

It is difficult to understand why it matters so much whether one uses two or three fingers in making the sign of the cross, how many Alleluias are sung during a service, or what kinds of bows one makes – full prostration or merely low bows? But it turns out these questions mattered a great deal not only to the church officials who bitterly opposed Nikon’s reforms, but to hosts of monks, peasants, boyars, and merchants.

At first, Nikon introduced his reforms gradually, but in 1666 he convened an Ecumenical Council (also known as the Great Moscow Synod) that included the hierarchs of Orthodox churches from other countries, and this council approved a set of innovations that, from today’s perspective, appear entirely reasonable.

By then, however, the patriarch himself was not in a position to savor his triumph. Nikon, an illustrious, charismatic, forceful, and intelligent man, long enjoyed tremendous influence over Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, who even referred to him as his father. But at some point the tsar became displeased with the patriarch’s thirst for power. He could not have liked the fact that Nikon called himself “great lord” and proclaimed that the authority of the church exceeded that of worldly rulers. Thus, the same Moscow Synod that approved the reforms censured the patriarch for arrogance, insubordination toward the tsar, and building the architecturally ambitious New Jerusalem monastery as the patriarchal residence. Nikon was stripped of the title of patriarch and sent into exile.

If anything, the new church authorities continued to battle old beliefs even more vehemently than Nikon had. Opposition to the reforms grew.

The Old Believers refused to worship in churches where the icons were painted to reflect the new beliefs, where services were based on revised (corrected) Scripture, and where the old rites were performed in new, unfamiliar ways. The struggle between the “old” and “new” beliefs was waged with incredible ruthlessness. Until the tsar timidly asked him to stop, Patriarch Nikon even smashed old icons against the stone floor with his own hands. Protopope Avvakum, a leading defender of the old ways, endured exile, torture, beatings, imprisonment in an underground hut, and finally being burned at the stake, but he never renounced his faith. His famous supporters, the Boyarina Fedosiya Morozova and her sister Yevdokiya Urusova, much like the early Christians, were not broken by brutal torture and, in the end, starved to death in prison.

Hundreds upon hundreds fled into the forests of Siberia to live according to the old faith. If the state managed to catch up with them, they would barricade themselves in “their” churches and commit self-immolation. The young and old, men, women, and children, died convinced that this coerced suicide would earn them forgiveness and save their souls. The monks of the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea set aside their monastic vows to man the ramparts of their remote monastery. They upheld their faith to the bitter end, despite being confronted with horrific torture and execution when troops finally managed to penetrate the monastery (with help from a traitor).

Historians have offered a variety of perspectives on the raskol. Some viewed it as popular resistance to the encroachment of the state into their lives, while others saw it as a reaction against the spread of Western influences within the Tsardom of Moscow in general and the church in particular. Still others see it as nothing but obdurate conservatism compelling people to cling to meaningless rites.

But if, despite all this persecution, the old beliefs have outlasted Alexei Mikhailovich and Nikon by centuries and are still adhered to in communities all over the world, from Bolivia and Canada to Vologda and the Russian Far East (see story, page 50), that must mean that there was something more to the rebellion than a stubborn desire to make the sign of the cross with two fingers rather than three.

One thing is certain. The raskol led inevitably to the total subjugation of church to state in Russia. So many eloquent and independent-minded church leaders and believers left the official church that there was no one left to resist when Peter I set out to finish what his father had started by sending Patriarch Nikon into exile. Under Peter, the church was simply placed under a new bureaucracy, the Holy Synod, which was headed by a secular official. This is one reason why Old Believers saw Peter as the Antichrist, betokening the end of the world.

Avvakum, Fedosiya Morozova, and the thousands of others who chose torture, self-immolation, or exile in their fight to continue worshipping as they had in the past, probably sensed that they were defending not just their right to continue making the sign of the cross with two fingers, but their freedom more generally.

Yet the religion practiced by Old Believers has little to do with freedom. Protopope Avvakum and his followers were no less despotic and tyrannical than their persecutor, Patriarch Nikon. Today’s Old Believers live in accordance with strict, almost medieval rules; they are submissive to parental authority, marrying whom their elders command them to; and they adhere to a generally ascetic way of life (no alcohol or tobacco, for example). But, as we can clearly see today, rebellions are not always about freedom.

The Old Believers do deserve credit. Three hundred and fifty years later, the right to continue living in the past is still being exercised by as many as two million descendants of the stalwarts who stood up to Nikon.