had come to an end. Tsar and patriarch were declared Antichrist, an easy claim to
maintain once Peter I introduced European culture and radical institutional re-
forms of the Church. Old Believers’response to demands to recant was in keeping
with their devotion to Orthodoxy: when their impassioned preaching failed to sway
Church and state, when their leaders were arrested, interrogated, tortured, exiled,
and executed, most did not mount armed opposition. There was some of that early
on—as Georg Michels showed, some groups latched on to the Old Belief as a form
of social banditry and violently took over villages; the Solovetskii Monastery
violently withstood siege by the tsar’s troops for eight years (1668–76). But the
Old Belief did not provoke years of religious war; as a rule these dissenters resisted
by turning their backs. Some made the awful choice of mass suicide by self-
immolation, an epidemic of which flew through their communities in the
1670s–80s. They justified such suicide (ordinarily a sin in Christianity) by the
extraordinary circumstances of the End Time, but already in the 1690s Old
Believer leaders were preaching against it. Their other response was simply toflee
and await the Last Judgment. To escape a society they considered pagan and a state
they rejected, from the second half of the seventeenth century Old Believers moved
to the empire’s borderlands: the far north, the northwest borderlands, the Urals and
Siberia, the lower Volga, across the border to Poland. There they faced the problem
of how to reconstruct godly lives outside of the institutional Church until they were
redeemed; Chapter 20 explores their various solutions to that challenge in the
eighteenth century.
FOLK BELIEF AND SYNCRETISM
Like all forms of Christianity in early modern Europe, however, the story of the
institutional Church and even of major dissent tells only part of the story.
Throughout the medieval centuries in Europe, laymen assimilated Christian belief
and practice to folk custom. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation went a
long way to standardize belief and practice, but even there folk accretions, magic,
and superstition persisted well into the nineteenth century. Russia’s Christianity
was similarly syncretic, but missed Europe’s stage of confessionalizing and thus
remained more or less unreformed through the nineteenth century.
As early as the sixteenth century European travelers to Russia roundly criticized
Russian Orthodoxy. Much of what they criticized reflected their stance in the
Reformation: Catholics such as Sigismund von Herberstein (1520s) were comfort-
able with liturgy and sacraments, but Protestant travelers such as Giles Fletcher
(1580s) displayed contempt for them, as well as for icons, saints, and monasticism.
Both sides were united in criticizing Russians for immorality (drunkenness, sexual
license) and in particular for ignorance and superstition. Adam Olearius, polymath
intellectual, was particularly critical of Russians’ignorance and distrust of science.
As we saw, the Church Council in 1551 echoed these concerns, particularly the
adaptation by Christians of“pagan”customs. Lacking a concerted effort to con-
fessionalize, Russian Orthodoxy went into the modern period with a syncretic faith.
258 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801