Vladimir Soloveychik on Orthodox Old Believers: 'Fiery' Archpriest Avvakum against Westernizers and merchants

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Three hundred and sixty years ago, the great religious schism began, reverberating through the life of the people for centuries and leaving an indelible mark on the entire history of our country. The fate of Archpriest Avvakum Petrov—the chief opponent of Nikon’s church innovations, backed by the full force of the tsar’s authority—and his “fiery word” in defense of Holy Rus’ remain compelling to this day. He continues to be an inconvenience for the current heirs of those ecclesiastical and secular autocrats, whose conduct in many ways—in essence, style, methods, and state priorities—recalls the deeds of their predecessors.

On February 11, 1653, the first stage of correcting the liturgical books, undertaken by Patriarch Nikon of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (ROC MP), came to an end. Nikon was a man of extreme vanity and ambition, who saw himself as the first among the spiritual rulers of all the Orthodox world. Consumed by prideful ambition, he did not hesitate to disavow his own roots, publicly declaring at church councils: “I am Russian and the son of a Russian, but my faith and convictions are Greek.” To support his ambitions for power over the entire Orthodox world, a power exceeding the tsar’s, he first had to eliminate discrepancies in religious rites between the ROC MP and the Ukrainian and Belarusian metropolias, and the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch… And so Nikon launched his famous church reform—a new Psalter was printed, and during the first week of Great Lent in 1653, a “memorandum” from Nikon appeared in the Moscow churches: henceforth, the sign of the cross must be made with three fingers, in the Greek manner, and not with two, as had been the custom from ancient times in Rus’.

The opponents of Nikon’s innovations became known among the people and later in literature as “Old Ritualists” (staroobryadtsy), although their protest against the church hierarchs and the supporting tsarist authorities was far from limited to rejecting the outward form of the new religious rites. Among the “zealots of ancient piety” were many strugglers and sufferers, but the most vivid, the most outstanding figure was a peasant’s son, Archpriest Avvakum Petrov, who became not only the spiritual leader and ideologist of popular resistance to tyranny, but also one of the first Russian writers, and certainly the first in Rus’—if we define this side of his activity in modern terms—a cartoonist. When one assesses, three and a half centuries later, his life, his struggles, and the literary works left by him, the thought sometimes arises that the “fiery archpriest” burnt alive in Pustozyorsk by order of the tsar and patriarch was that very ideal of a Russian person, the kind a person should be and, alas, so often cannot become. A tall, stately, handsome man, resiliently enduring every hardship—prison and exile, want, and the ordeals of the Siberian march with Cossacks along Lake Baikal and the Angara River; a preacher by God’s grace, whose gaze and words captured hearts and inflamed minds; a writer and publicist with a beautiful natural style and an innate feeling for words…

But let us return to the history of Russia’s “rebellious” seventeenth century, replete with popular uprisings. This century brought the final formalization of serfdom, expressed in the adoption of the Sobornoye Ulozhenie (Council Code) by the Zemsky Sobor in 1649. From then on, freedom was over for the peasants. In response, mass disturbances began, first on religious grounds, then on social grounds. In those years, during the sharpening of social and class contradictions, during the peasant war led by Stepan Razin, the Bulavin Rebellion on the Don, and the peasant war under Yemelyan Pugachev, the Old Ritualists not only advanced their religious slogans but were the most active element among those dissatisfied with the autocratic-serfdom regime, fighting to the death against the landowning nobility and the Nikon-aligned priests who supported them. This was essentially an anti-feudal movement, naturally in a form appropriate to its time, as Friedrich Engels wrote: “The revolutionary opposition to feudalism runs through the entire Middle Ages. It appears, according to the conditions of the time, now in the form of mysticism, now as an open heresy, now as an armed insurrection.” In modern literature, the great religious schism is often interpreted as something purely ritualistic, a hothouse-church phenomenon. But this is not so. “At first glance, it may seem,” noted the well-known historian of Russian folk literature Viktor Gusev, “that the resistance of the adherents of the old rites to the church reform was explained by purely dogmatic considerations, by bookish pedantry—indeed, is it really so important, even from a church-theological standpoint, whether to make the sign of the cross with two or three fingers, to write ‘Isus’ or ‘Iisus,’ to say ‘hallelujah’ two or three times! The real reasons for the fierce resistance to the reform were considerably more serious.”

In conceiving and carrying out the reform of the rites and the correction of the church books, Tsar Alexei proceeded not only, and not so much, from the aspirations of his spiritual pastor Nikon to stand at the head of the Orthodox world, but rather from the political objectives of the autocratic noble monarchy that was taking shape in that period. Within the country, the changes served to strengthen centralization, including in the administration of church parishes; abroad, they worked toward the de facto unification of the Metropolitanates of Moscow and Western Rus’ (in Ukraine and Belorussia, a reform similar to Nikon’s had already been successfully implemented earlier) and toward increasing the influence of the tsarist government over the Orthodox who were under the rule of the Ottoman Porte. In essence, tsarism attempted to use the influence of the ROC-MP [Russian Orthodox Church – Moscow Patriarchate] within the country and beyond its borders to strengthen its own power, exactly as today’s rulers use today’s chief hierarchs. Despite the passing of three and a half centuries, little has changed in the pragmatic approach of the Kremlin’s inhabitants toward Orthodox churchmen. Let us recall, for instance, how this past February the chief functionary of the ROC-MP, Kirill, openly agitated for the candidate for the post of President of the Russian Federation put forward by “United Russia”; how the same Kirill actively travels to Ukraine, with the aggravation of relations with his Ukrainian counterparts among the ROC-MP apparatchiks quite often coinciding with the latest rounds of Russian-Ukrainian gas disputes. I will not even mention the idea, long lobbied by the leaders of the ROC-MP, of an “All-Orthodox Council,” in which very, very many sincerely believing Orthodox people see not just the danger of an ecumenist heresy, but a “new Nikonism,” fraught with a “second Union of Florence”—not only with Orthodox abroad, but also with Catholics…

Since, in the words of Engels, in the Middle Ages “the feelings of the masses were nourished exclusively on religious food,” therefore, “in order to provoke a stormy movement, it was necessary to present the proper interests of these masses to them in a religious guise.” Such was the objective role of the “fiery archpriest” Avvakum, although he himself did not realize this, and it would indeed be an obvious oversimplification to turn him into a conscious fighter against authority, a precursor of the Decembrists or the Narodnaya Volya. In terms of typology, biography, and behavioral algorithm, Avvakum Petrov rather resembles a Russian Luther, despite the serious differences in the conditions of their activity and worldviews—a point noted by the most perceptive researchers as well. “The main similarity between the Western Reformation and the Russian Schism,” writes Alla Glinchikova, “lies in the fact that they were two such different, yet still attempts to achieve one and the same thing—the individualization of faith. One (the Reformation) succeeded, the other (the Schism) did not…” For reasons, incidentally, that are quite obvious: “In Russian Orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, a sense of personal responsibility before the people, history, and God for all of humanity, for the preservation of Christianity, becomes more acute. The condition for personal salvation becomes the salvation of others, the salvation of the people. The idea arises that we can only be saved together, as a Christian people, and not each one individually, as in Luther’s case.” This ideological line, extending back to Avvakum from Nil Sorsky and the “Trans-Volga Elders,” the “Non-Possessors”—the ideology of early social Christianity—could not help but provoke irritation, and then later—after Avvakum’s refusal, despite being repeatedly urged to repent and receive an honorable and lucrative post as the tsar’s confessor or as the superior of one of the capital’s churches from the tsar himself and from such influential “Westernizers” at the royal court as Artamon Matveev and Simeon Polotsky—hatred and persecution from the tightly interwoven bureaucratic hierarchy of the ROC-MP and the police apparatus of the “sovereign’s servants.” For those moving along the path of creating a synodal church alien to the apostolic and patristic traditions—a church that definitively took organizational shape during the years of Peter’s reforms, but had already become a faithful handmaiden of the tsarist monarchy before that—the rebellious fervor and insubordination of the “fiery archpriest,” who relied exclusively on his personal authority among the faithful, were like a bone in the throat. Precisely as, already in our own times, Patriarch Kirill and his associates have taken a dislike to the wrathful denunciations from Chukotka Archbishop Diomid and other zealots for the “purity of the faith,” many of whom are dealt with, at times, with the aid of state power.

To the churchmen of that time, Avvakum did not fit in, and, in modern parlance, mentally. “The tsar had an assistant, a Greek named Paisius Ligarid, who passed himself off as the Metropolitan of Gaza,” writer Dmitry Zhukov recounts in what I consider the best biography of Avvakum. “He had studied at a Jesuit college. Having converted to Orthodoxy, this artful swindler obtained a see in Gaza but continued to extort a salary from the Catholic Congregation of Propaganda. Patriarch Paisius cursed Ligarid and deprived him of his see. Then Ligarid turned up in Moscow with forged documents. He would beg large sums from the tsar allegedly for the needs of his diocese, speculate in sables and precious stones, arrange divorces for money, act as a broker, write denunciations… There was no vileness of which this worthy pupil of the Jesuits was not capable. The tsar knew about all his affairs and… forgave him. He needed, desperately needed, Paisius Ligarid both for the consecration of bishops, for the preparation of the council, and for the struggle against adherents of the old ways… The other Eastern clergymen who had settled in Moscow were a fine lot, too. Deacon Meletius, who made a living by usury. Deacon Agathangel—a wine merchant, brewer, and keeper of gambling dens, who once lost all his money and clothes and robbed his neighbor, a priest. Archimandrite Dionysius, whom Avvakum not without reason accused of the sin of Sodom, committed even in church… Cunning, insolent, money-grubbing men, they all became valuable agents of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich in negotiations with the ecumenical patriarchs and in the preparation of the great council.” Doesn’t this picture remind readers of the mores of the “pioneers” of Russian privatization and the customs of their foreign advisers? And it also resembles the lifestyle of many influential figures in the apparatus of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) repeatedly described in print and online media. As if three and a half centuries hadn’t passed… It’s obvious that the Westernizers of that era, with their mercantile streak, treated the Russian people no better than today’s liberal heirs—all those Kokhs, Yavlinskys, and Kobrinskys. And it was precisely this, as Zhukov writes, that Avvakum could not forgive them: “What?! They call Russians fools!.. This Avvakum could not endure. He finished off the Gospel words about the lawless with a torrent of abuse. ‘Dogs, Nikonians, thieves, other Russian Germans’—these were not the strongest curses he used at that time. ‘There’s no point even listening to you: all you know how to talk about is how to sell, how to buy, how to whore with women, how to grab boys by the ahedron in the altar!’ Much had happened under the vaults of the Cross Chamber, but such a thing had never occurred before. All forty-odd men threw themselves upon Avvakum, shoving him, beating him…” In exactly the same way today, the liberal-market pack cannot stomach the true patriots of our Fatherland, and again and again, in the intervals between “grabbing boys by the ahedron” and other places, the bestial roar resounds: “Beat him!”

And the methods of lies and slander used by that whole crew against Avvakum have remained essentially the same, although they have notably improved in detail—progress does not stand still… “Avvakum was a welcome guest in the homes of the Moscow nobility,” Dmitry Zhukov relates. “Many became his spiritual sons and daughters. An intelligent and subtle psychologist, an excellent storyteller, the archpriest drew people to him like a magnet. Thus he immediately became close with the boyarina Feodosia Morozova and her sister, Princess Evdokia Urusova.” It was precisely this closeness that led the boyarina and her sister to a tragic death in prison. Researchers write of an “unconfirmed accusation in the records of the seventeenth century that, consorting with Archpriest Avvakum, the boyarina Morozova supposedly ‘gives birth to babies.’” Whether this was true or not is not for us to judge, but an early-widowed, exalted, very wealthy woman, living “without a man’s caress,” could well have transferred her passion to serving the “sacred old ways” and defending their chief preacher. In any case, the relationship between Feodosia and Avvakum gave Russian literature, for the first time, an example of a tender epistle, worthily included in the treasury of national letters: “My tongue is too short to reach your kindness and beauty; my mind cannot encompass your feat and suffering. I think about it and can only throw up my hands!.. My light! Are you still breathing? My heartfelt friend! Are you still breathing, or have they burned you, or strangled you?”

The same style marks the famous “Life.” For the first time, the rich speech of the Russian town, the abundant language of the Russian village, the living word of the Russian people, whom he loved so much, burst into written language under Avvakum’s pen. “Do not despise our simplicity of speech, for I love my natural Russian language, I am not accustomed to adorning speech with philosophical verses… I am not concerned with eloquence and do not disparage my Russian language…” It is no accident that Ivan Turgenev never parted with the “Life” during his long stay abroad, speaking of it in rapturous tones: “What a book!.. Here is the living speech of Moscow…” No wonder Maxim Gorky echoed him: “The language, as well as the style of the letters of Archpriest Avvakum and his ‘Life,’ remains an unsurpassed example of the fiery and passionate speech of a fighter, and in our ancient literature in general there is much to learn.” And it is understandable why: in the words of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Archpriest Avvakum Petrov “…was a man, not a milksop with slop…”

It is precisely for this that he is close to us. Not to “milksops with slop,” but to fighters for a better, genuine Russia. A different Russia. That is, one where there will be no place for modern-day Alexeis and Nikons and for the Dionysiuses who have multiplied under the conditions of liberal-market reforms and joined them.

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