The Icon and the Axe

The irony, of course, is that Russia in the seventeenth century was far more intensely Christian than most of the increasingly secular West. Indeed, whatever the ultimate causes of the crisis that overtook Muscovy in this turbulent century, its outer form was religious. The raskol, or schism, which fatally divided and weakened Russian Orthodoxy under Tsar Alexis, had repercussions in every area of this organic religious civilization. The administrative consolidation and building of a new Western capital by Alexis' son, Peter the Great, did not bridge the ideological cleavages that the schism had opened in Russia, but only made them deeper and more complex. Religious dissent continued to haunt modern Russia.

i. The Split Within

Ihe decisive moment of the century-what Russians call the perelom (divide in the stairs, breaking point of a fever)-was the formal, ecclesiastical pronouncement of the schism in 1667. It represented a kind of coup d'eglise, which in religious Muscovy was as far-reaching in its implications as the Bolshevik coup d'etat exactly 250 years later in secularized St. Petersburg. The decisions of the Moscow Church Council of 1667, like those of the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1917, were a point of no return in Russian history. Even more than in 1917, the significance of 1667 was not fully appreciated at the time and was challenged from many different directions by various defenders of the old order. But change had taken place at the center of power, and the divided opposition was unable to prevent the arrival of a new age and new ideas.

The raskol (like the Revolution) came as the culmination and climax of nearly a century of bitter ideological controversy which involved politics and aesthetics as well as personal metaphysical beliefs. Seventeenth-century Muscovy was in many ways torn by a single, continuing struggle of "medieval and modern," "Muscovite and Western," forces. Such terms, however, apply better to the self-conscious and intellectualized conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The issue in seventeenth-century Russia might be better described with two conflicting terms that recur in the chronicles and polemic literature of the time: khitrosf and blagochestie, These terms-like the controversies in which they were used-are difficult to translate into the Western idiom. Khitrosf is the Slavic word for cleverness and skill. Though derived from the Greek technikos, it acquired overtones of sophistication and even cunning in Muscovy. For the most part, this term was used to describe proficiency in those activities that lay outside religious ritual. "Cleverness from beyond the seas" (zamorskaia khitrost') came to be applied to the many unfamiliar new skills and techniques which foreigners brought with them in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries.1 When Boris Godunov became Russia's first elected Tsar in 1598, he had to quiet popular misgivings about the procedure by publicly proclaiming that he had been chosen "in faith and truth without any kind of guile" {bezo vsiakie khitrosti).2 The revolt of the Old Believers was based on the belief that the Russian Church, like those in the West, was now seeking to know God only through "external guile" (yneshneiu khitrostiiu).s Subsequent Russian traditions of peasant revolt and populist reform were deeply infused with the primitive and anarchistic belief that even the use and exchange of money was a "deceitful mechanism" (khitraia mekhanika).4 The post-Stalinist generation of rebellious writers was also to cry out against the "deceitful (khitry) scalpel" of bureaucratic censors and "retouchers."5

In his famous troika passage Gogol insists that Russia be "not guileful" (ne khitry) but like a "straightforward muzhik from Yaroslavl." Precisely such types organized in Yaroslavl in 1612 the "council of all the land," which mobilized Russian resources for the final expulsion of the Poles from Moscow, and served as the model for the council which installed Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613. The primitive frontier forces that had descended on Moscow from the cities of the Volga brought with them a deep distrust of all "cleverness from beyond the seas." Brutal directness was characteristic of the military men who liberated Moscow and stayed on for the councils which acted as a kind of collective regent for the young tsar. Like Gogol's "straightforward muzhiks of Yaroslavl" who moved "not through the turn of a screw" but "with the clean stroke of axe and chisel," the provincial ruffians decapitated Polish prisoners in Red Square with scythes, and pulled out the ribs of suspected traitors with hot irons. The seal of Yaroslavl-a bear carrying an axe-seemed for awhile to have become a symbol of the new regime.