II.—OPPOSITION TO MODERN CIVILIZATION.

In spite of himself, Peter the Great both inherited and aggravated the schism. At the present day it is hard to picture the impression produced upon his subjects by Peter I. He not merely astonished and bewildered them: he scandalized them. An open, systematic and sometimes brutal attack was made upon the customs, traditions and prejudices of the people. The reformer did not confine himself to the civil institutions: he laid violent hands upon the Church, and forced his way into the family, regulating, as the whim seized him, both public affairs and the private life of the citizen. The old-fashioned Russian was a stranger in Peter's new empire. His eyes were shocked by the spectacle of an unaccustomed garb, and novel administrative titles fell strangely on his ear. Names and things, the almanac and the laws, the alphabet and the fashions of dress,—everything was transformed. The very elements of civilization were hardly recognizable. The year began on the first of January, instead of the first of September. Men were no longer to date from the creation, but must adopt the Latin era. The old Slavonic characters, hallowed by immemorial ecclesiastical use, were partly cast aside, and what were retained took a new shape. The masculine attire was altered and the chin was shorn of its beard, while the veil no longer might protect the modesty of the women. The impression made by such a succession of shocks upon a nation so bigotedly attached to its ancestral ways was comparable only to an earthquake rocking Old Russia to its foundations.

Many of these innovations, as being borrowed from the Romanists or the Lutherans of the West, had a religious significance for the people. The change introduced by Peter the Great in the ancient calendar, in the Slavonic alphabet and in the national costume seemed but a carrying out of those which Nikon had initiated. So natural was the parallel that the Old Believers held the one to be but the continuation of the other; and the notion took shape in a seditious legend, according to which Peter was the adulterous offspring of the patriarch. The popular aversion felt for the reforms of the latter was augmented by that aroused by the emperor's innovations: the social revolt took the disguise of religion, since it had been provoked by a Church measure, and still more because Russia had not yet emerged from that stage of civilization in which every great popular movement assumes a religious aspect. A national prestige was thus communicated to the Raskol, which in its turn lent to the popular resistance the energy of religion. By giving the social revolt the semblance of a struggle for the rights of conscience the schism imparted to it a vigor and persistency which the lapse of two centuries has not succeeded in crushing.

But the Raskol rebelled not only against innovations and the introduction of foreign elements, but still more obstinately against the principle of the reforms and the modern method of state administration. The Russian, like the Mohammedan East of to-day and all other primitive societies, was most keenly sensitive to the burdens and vexations made necessary by this imitation of the European governmental system. From this point of view the Raskol was the opposition of a half-patriarchal society to the regular, scientific, omnipresent, impersonal system of European administration. It kicks instinctively against centralization and bureaucracy—against the state's encroachments upon private life, the family and the community. It struggles to tear itself loose from the pitiless machinery of government, hemming every life within its iron pale. The Cossack took refuge in the wild freedom of nomadic life, and the Old Believer was equally averse to giving in to the complicated mechanism of government. He would have nothing to do with the census, with passports or stamped paper. He strove to elude the new systems of taxation and conscription, and to this day some of the Raskolniks are in a state of systematic revolt against the simplest of governmental methods. Religious grounds, of course, are found for this insubordination, and they have theological arguments to urge against the census, as well as against the registration of births and deaths. In the opinion of a strict Old Believer the right of numbering the people belongs to God alone, as is shown by the biblical record of David's punishment. Sometimes the official designations strengthen the scruples of these simple folk, with their tendency to attach a great importance to phrases and names; and hence, partly at least, the popular antipathy to the poll-tax under its Russian form, "soul-tax." The revolt against such phrases is the fashion in which this nation of serfs, whose body was chained to the soil, asserted its possession of a soul.[007]

The struggle against the supervision and interference of the state has gone with some sects to the length of refusing submission to obligations imposed by every civilized country. The Stranniki (wanderers) in particular boast of keeping up a ceaseless struggle with the civil authority, and make rebellion a moral principle and a religious duty. From condemning the state as the protector and helper of the Church, they have come to cursing it for its own tendencies and claims. Thus, the singular spectacle is presented of the more extreme schismatics looking upon their native government with the same feelings as were entertained by some of the Christians of the first three centuries toward the pagan empire of Rome. To these fanatics the government of the orthodox czars came to be the reign of Satan and the dominion of Antichrist. Nor was this an empty metaphor: it was a clear, determined conviction, and it still exerts a strong religious and political influence upon the schism. The Raskolniks could see but one interpretation of the overturning of public and private order under Peter the Great, and for what they regarded as the triumph of darkness: to them it was the coming end of the world and the advent of Antichrist. The old customs, it seemed, must carry with them in their fall the Church, society and all mankind. For centuries the extremity of agony or of wonder has wrung this cry from Christendom. After political revolutions and disastrous wars, in the most enlightened countries of Europe, in France and elsewhere, religious persons, in the panic of calamity, have been seen to take refuge in this last solution for the woes of Church or of State, and proclaim with the Raskolniks that the time was at hand. But what must have been the state of mind in Old Russia when the stunning blows of Peter the Great seemed to be dashing everything to pieces? Even at the period of the liturgic reform the fanatics had cried that the patriarch's fall was the harbinger of the world's end. The days of man, they said, are numbered; the Apocalyptic woes are at hand; Antichrist draws nigh. With the accession of Peter the Great, while he was reducing everything to confusion before their bewildered eyes, and trampling under foot the old customs, along with morality itself at times, the Raskolniks were at no loss to recognize in him the coming Antichrist. Nations are not always clear-sighted: the creator of modern Russia was regarded by a considerable portion of his subjects as an envoy or representative of hell; and his empire has never ceased to hold the unexampled position of a government cursed by a part of its own people as the dominion of Antichrist.

This Satanic apotheosis derived no little support from some of the reformer's idiosyncrasies. He was to his subjects what a rejected claimant of the Messianic office may have been to the Jews—a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to the people whom he came to bring to a new birth. His civil and ecclesiastical reforms, with the seeming decapitation of the Church by the abrogation of the patriarchate, were to the mass of the people an enigma only one shade less disreputable than the demeanor of himself and his courtiers. The repudiation of his legitimate wife, Eudoxia, and his adulterous connection with a foreign concubine, the death (perhaps by his own hand) of his son Alexis, even the morbid state of his health and the nervous twitching of his face, and his astonishing triumphs after equally incredible disasters, contributed to invest the sombre and gigantic physiognomy of the reformer with a kind of diabolic halo. The vices of Ivan the Terrible had been as monstrous, but even in the thick of his crimes he was a true Russian, as superstitious a devotee as the meanest of his subjects. But the astonishment and bewilderment inspired by Peter the Great were only deepened by the reverence felt by the old Russian for the person of his sovereign. Men could not help doubting whether such a man, who had cast aside his national and scriptural title for the foreign and heathen style of emperor, could be the true, the "white" czar. The story of the usurpers and the false Dmitri had not faded from the popular memory; and thus there grew up amidst the unlettered and bewildered Russian people a string of legends in which were harmonized their belief in the reign of Antichrist and the popular respect for the czar. In this way the Raskolniks have created a fantastic history which has been handed down to our own days, according to one version of which, as has been said, Peter the Great is the impious bastard of the patriarch Nikon (and from such a parentage only a devil's offspring could be looked for); while another asserts that Peter Alexovitch was a pious prince, like his forefathers, but that he had perished at sea, and in his stead had been substituted a Jew of the race of Danof, or Satan. On gaining possession of the throne, continues the legend, the false czar immured the czarina in a convent, slew the czarovitch, espoused a German adventuress and filled Russia with foreigners. Such is the Old Believers' explanation of the portentous phenomenon of a Russian czar engaged in destroying the institutions of Holy Russia. In the midst of the nineteenth century the incidents of Peter's career, whether insignificant or important—his vices not less than his glory—are used as proofs of his infernal mission. The remarkable victories with which he recovered from terrible disasters were miracles wrought by the help of the devil and the Freemasons. The extension of his power beyond that of all previous Russian monarchs and of all the ancient bogatyrs was effected by the determination of Satan that his offspring should receive divine honors. The same interpretation is applied to the simplest events. Thus, Peter's celebration with allegorical figures and festivals of the beginning of the year on the first of January was due to his desire to restore the worship of false deities and "the old Roman idol Janus." These silly fables, and this incapacity of understanding how a pagan name or emblem can be used without falling back into paganism, betray one of the peculiar features of the Raskol—namely, the realistic nature, of its symbolism, and its matter-of-fact determination to fill images, allegories and words with occult meaning.

When once the presence of Antichrist was clearly made out, there was nothing to hinder the application to Russia of the gloomy descriptions of the prophets. Their disposition to hunt out mysterious enigmas in names and numbers made it easy for the fanatics to find the whole Apocalypse in modern Russia; and the number of the Beast was sought in the names of Peter and of his successors. Each letter of the Slavonic alphabet, as of the Greek, has a numerical value, and the problem is thus to add up the total of the letters of a name, and so obtain the Apocalyptic number 666 (Rev. xiii. 18). By inserting, reduplicating or omitting certain letters, and not insisting too strongly on an exact result, the sectaries have discovered the infernal number in the names of most of the Russian sovereigns from Peter the Great to Nicholas. Such alterations are defended on the ground that to throw investigators off the scent the Beast changes the number which is meant to designate him, so that he should be recognized under the number 662 or 664 as clearly as under 666. Turning from the particular sovereign to the imperial title, the Raskolniks have unearthed the number of the Beast in the letters composing it. Singularly enough, it happens that all which is needed to obtain the Apocalyptic number from the word imperator is the omission of the second letter; whence they say that Antichrist hides his accursed name behind the letter M. By an equally odd and embarrassing coincidence the Council of Moscow—which, after deposing Nikon, definitively excommunicated the schismatics—met in 1666. Here, plainly enough was the fatal number, and when the reform of the calendar attracted the attention of the Old Believers to the point, they considered it a weapon thrust into their hands by their opponents. The year in question, accordingly, was fixed as the date of Satan's accession. But not content with turning the line of monarchs into so many emissaries of hell, some of these champions of Old Russia have managed, by the help of an anagram, to identify their native country with the mysterious land which is the object of so many prophetic curses. In the Asshur of the Bible they find Russia, and apply to it the anathemas launched by the prophets against Nineveh and Babylon.

The infernal sign, however, was visible to the Raskolniks not only in the title and the names of their rulers, but in all their innovations as well, and in all that they imported from abroad. Since Russia is under the dominion of the "devil, the demon's son," the truly faithful are bound to reject all that has been introduced during "the years of Satan." Encouraged by the notion of Antichrist, the Raskol's opposition against the modern reform of government spread until it embraces in its hostility everything brought from the West. In no other of its developments do we see more distinctly the characteristic features of the schism, its narrow formalism and its coarse allegorizing, its blind worship of the past and its national exclusiveness. It presented the novel spectacle of a group of popular sects holding in abomination every object of foreign commerce, everything new—material articles of consumption not less than the discoveries of science. While the products of the East and West Indies were pouring into the rest of Europe, the Old Believer rigorously excluded them. He frowned upon the use of tobacco, of tea, of coffee and of sugar, and by a curious transfer of his respect for antiquity to his meat and drink, he stormed against almost all colonial produce as heretical and diabolical. All that had come in since Nikon and Peter was put under the ban by the champions of the ancient liturgy. One Raskolnik forbade traveling on turnpikes, because they were an invention of Antichrist. More recently, another showed that the potato was the forbidden fruit which caused the fall of our first mother. On every side the Old Believer raised about him a wall of scruples and prejudices, entrenching himself behind his stagnation and ignorance, and anathematizing all civilization in a breath. To meet Peter's edicts enjoining a new costume or alphabet or calendar, the Raskol put forth a second decalogue: "Thou shalt not shave; Thou shalt not smoke; Thou shalt use no sugar," etc. In the North, where they are stricter and more numerous, many Raskolniks still have conscientious scruples about using tobacco and putting sugar in their tea. The scriptural arguments urged for this opposition are generally marked by the coarsest realism. The Old Believer who will not smoke adduces the passage, "There is nothing from without a man that entering into him can defile him; but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man." The rebuker of the use of sugar urges that blood is used in its manufacture; whereas Scripture forbids the eating of the blood of animals—a prohibition, by the way, which seems to have been maintained longer in Russia than in any other Christian country. The true ground of the opposition to this or that article or habit is to be sought not in these theological arguments, but in its novelty and late introduction. As regards his way of life and his faith, his table and his devotions, he is minded to tread in his forefathers' footsteps. A Raskolnik and a member of the orthodox Church were drinking together, when the latter took a cigar. "Out on the infernal poison!" cried the Raskolnik.—"What do you, think of brandy?" asked his companion. "Oh! Wine" (vino, the Russian name for brandy)—"wine was Noah's favorite drink."—"Very good!" said the other: "now prove to me that Noah was not a smoker." These folk are still in the patriarchal stage, and an appeal to antiquity is an end of controversy, "Jeer not at the old," says one of their proverbs, "for the old man knows old things and teaches justice."

The parties to any political or religious contest need a standard—some outward sign which appeals to the eye and the intelligence of all. The most serious of the political questions that convulse France to-day are symbolized and summed up in the color of a flag; and thus in the Russian conflict between popular obstinacy and the modern propagandism the rallying-sign of the Old Believers, and the emblem of the champions of nationality and conservatism, was the beard. The national chin was the centre of a conflict less puerile than might be fancied. Long before Peter the Great imitators of Western ways had begun to shave, thus setting at defiance the Oriental custom which everywhere prevailed in Russia. Under Peter's father one of the Raskol leaders, the protopope Avvakum, denounced "these bold-faced" men—bold-faced meaning shaven. The prohibition of Leviticus (xxix. 27; xxi. 5) was first adduced, in conformity with the love for alleging religious scruples. Recourse was next had to the ancient missals and the decrees of the Stoglaf, a sort of ecclesiastical code attributed to a national council. The prohibition of the razor was at first confined to the clergy, but it spread by little and little to all the faithful of the orthodox Church. Up to the time of Nikon the patriarchs had laid hardly less stress on forms and on the exclusion of foreign ways than their future opponents of the Raskol, and had condemned shaving as "an heretical practice which disfigures the image of God, and makes men look like dogs and cats." This is the main theological argument of the foes of the barber, and their current interpretation of the verse of Genesis, "God created man in His own image," "The image of God is the beard," writes a Raskolnik about 1830, "and His likeness is the moustache." "Look at the old images of Christ and the saints," urge the Old Believers: "all of them wear their beards." And so cogent is the argument that the orthodox theologians are fain to hunt up the scanty list of beardless saints to be found in Byzantine iconography. Whatever the force of the arguments drawn from divinity, at bottom the opposition was only the simple folks' one way of seeing things—the same clinging to forms, the same compound of symbolism and realism. The living work of God is to them as sacred as the text of the divine word. Every word and letter of the sacred office must have its separate significance; and they cannot admit that the hair with which the Almighty has covered a man's face is without a meaning. It is to them the distinctive mark of the male countenance; to remove it is to change, and therefore to disfigure, the divine handiwork: it is, in short, hardly less than mutilation.[008]

The beard, like the single repetition of the Hallelujah and the cross with eight branches, has had its martyrs. No later than last year (1874), on the Gulf of Finland a peasant who had been drafted for the navy obstinately refused to be shaved, and rather than betray his religion underwent a sentence of several years for insubordination. Scruples of this sort have led the government to grant permission to wear the beard in the case of certain corps (for instance, the Cossacks of the Ural) which are mainly composed of Old Believers. Peter the Great used every means to overcome these popular prejudices, but the beard was too much for the reformer. Finding himself unable to shave all the recusants by force, he bethought him of laying a tax on the wearers of long beards, but in vain. He was similarly foiled in his attempt to lay a double tax on the schismatic upholders of the ancient ways. He forbade them to live in the towns; he deprived them of civil rights; he forced them to wear a bit of red cloth on the shoulder as a distinctive badge; but these measures only marked them out as the bravest champions of national traditions, and increased the respect everywhere rendered them.

Such an attitude toward civilization leaves no room for mistake as to the social and political character of the schism. It is a popular protest against the irruption of foreign customs. It is a reaction against the reforms of Peter the Great, somewhat as Ultramontanism is a reaction against the spirit of the French Revolution. The Staroveres are the champions of ancient customs in the civil sphere as well as in the religious. The Old Believer is emphatically the old-fashioned Russian—the Slavophilist of the lower classes—and hence extreme to the point of absurdity. His revolt against authority has more resemblance to that of La Vendée than to that of the Jacobins. Like a conscript obstinately refusing to join his regiment, he holds back from all part and lot in the changes of modern Russia; and in this light the schism is the feature which above all others assimilates Russia to the East.

And just as the East has bound itself fast to externals, so the Raskolnik praises his fossilism to the skies, and would gladly run the risk of petrifying society in its inherited shape. With him, as with the child or the Oriental, wisdom and science belong to the infancy of civilization, and the maxims of antiquity leave nothing to be learnt. Under both aspects the Old Believer is reactionary, opposed to the very principle of progress—the hero of routine and a martyr to prejudice. His gaze turns naturally to the past, and if reform ever enters his mind, he dreams of a return to the good old times of yore. Even his struggle against authority is based on the old idea of sovereignty: his political motto, as well as that of most of the people, is, "No emperor, but a czar!" The czar was one day pointed out to a Raskolnik conscript. "That is no czar," he said: "he wears a moustache, a uniform and a sword, like all the rest of the officers. He is nothing but a general." These worshipers of the past, with their devotion to ceremonial, think of the czar only as a long-bearded man in a flowing robe, such as they see in the ancient images. The Old Believers are the exaggerated representatives of the spirit of stagnation which everywhere confronts the Russian government. Nothing gives a clearer conception of the obstacles still in the way of reforms which elsewhere would be matters of course (as, for instance, the substitution of the Gregorian for the Julian calendar) than the resistance which other measures have already encountered.

In principle the Raskol is conservative, not to say reactionary, but its attitude toward the Church and the State, and the habits engendered by two centuries of opposition and persecution, give it a revolutionary, or even an anarchical, character. A secret tie unites all the branches of public authority, and the rejection of one leads to the rejection of another. As has been said by an eminent historian of Russia, the refusal to submit to a single form of authority brings into activity a disposition to rid one's self of all social and moral ties. The Hussite revolt against Rome speedily results in the Taborite revolt against society: Luther calls the Anabaptists into being. The same phenomenon is repeated in Russia, in England and in Scotland. Once carried away by the spirit of revolt, an irresistible tendency sweeps the schism on in the direction of civil liberty; and both in theory and in practice some of these sects have reached the most unbridled license. Hence, by one of those contrasts which are so common in Russia, the Raskol is judged in two utterly different ways, each of which is partly correct. The reactionary movement in its inception had the appearance of an assertion of the rights of individual liberty and national life, as opposed to the autocratic government; and such it was, after a fashion—the fashion of refractory conscripts or of smugglers, not to say of brigands—the fashion, in short, in which all abuses and prejudices are defended. What it claimed was liberty, indeed, but liberty as the commonalty understand it—liberty to retain its customs, its superstitions and its ignorance—liberty to go and come as it chose. But in all this there was no notion of political freedom. With all his hatred of foreign importations, the Old Believer is no enemy to reform in the sense of national tradition or of furthering the interests of the lower classes, the artisan and the peasant. Like all popular movements, the Raskol is essentially democratic, and in some of its sects socialistic and communistic.

Two things which have especially tended to give the Raskol a democratic—or even liberal—complexion are serfdom and the bureaucratic despotism of the country. It was no mere coincidence which caused the Raskol to break out about half a century after serfdom was established. Much of its popularity and life was due to the enslavement of the mass of the people. The slave was proud of having a different faith from his master; and slavery is always a propitious soil for the growth of sects. This nation of serfs dimly felt the Raskol to be an assertion of religious liberty and self-respect against master, Church and government; and these were symbolized by the beard and the peculiar sign of the cross. The Raskol offered to all the oppressed a moral, and often a material, refuge, an asylum for all enemies of the master and the law, and a shelter for the fugitive serf, for the deserter, for public debtors and outlaws of every description. Some sects (as the Wanderers, for example) are specially organized for such purposes. In these respects the Raskol was unconsciously one form of the opposition to serfdom and official despotism; and hence the Old Believers are most numerous among the most refractory elements of Russia—in the North among the free peasants (the old colonists of Novgorod), and in the South among the independent Cossacks of the steppes. Religious and political opposition have joined hands, and to this combination is due the strength of the great popular movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as the Streltsy insurrections at the time of the revolt of Pougatchef, whose excesses curiously recall the wars of the Peasants and Anabaptists in the West before the abolition of serfdom. In the great Russian Jacquerie, and in all the seditions which held out the hope of emancipation, the first place was taken by the Old Believers and the Cossacks, most of whom held the same faith. These two forms of national resistance are naturally akin. They equally personify the character and the prejudices of the old Russian. Their main point is their character of protests, so that an Old Believer may be described as a Cossack in religion, transporting into that domain the instincts peculiar to the wild horsemen of the Don. But both Cossack and Starovere have found themselves forced to give way before the march of civilization, and the different branches into which the Raskol has split have reached very divergent conclusions both as to politics and religion.