Marfa was living in a remote convent when, in 1603, a Muscovite soldier named Grigori Otrepev popped up in Poland claiming to be her dead son. He gathered an army, and in 1605, shortly after Godunov died, seized Moscow and was crowned Tsar Dmitri. To validate his claim, the new tsar sent for Marfa. She came to Moscow and publicly swore that Otrepev was her long-lost son. Isaac Massa, a Dutchman then living in Moscow, understood her reasons for lying. “It was not surprising that she recognized Dmitri as her son, even though she knew full well that he was not. She lost nothing thereby; on the contrary, she was thereafter considered a tsarina, treated magnificently, and led to the Kremlin, where she was given the convent of the Ascension as her residence. There she lived as a sovereign.”36
When a boyar group led by Vasili Shuiskii overthrew Otrepev in 1606, Marfa had to change her story. Now she announced that her son had actually died years before and that she had been forced to swear that the pretender was Dmitri. “She said she had merely acted out of fear,” Massa reported, “and in her joy at her deliverance from her sad prison [the remote convent to which Godunov had banished her], she had not known what she was doing.” Shuiskii soon had the corpse of the real Dmitri brought to Moscow so that he could hold a public viewing to establish once and for all that the boy was dead. Again Marfa took her place onstage. In front of a crowd presided over by church and government officials, she looked into the coffin and declared, in awed and prayerful tones, that her son’s body lay there, as fresh as it had been on that sorrowful day fifteen years before when she had laid him to rest. Christians believed that holy people did not decay after they died. So Marfa was testifying that Dmitri had graduated into sainthood. Massa, who attended this ceremony, was no more taken in by it than he had been by Marfa’s certification of Otrepev. He noted that only Marfa and a very few of the highest-ranking clergy were permitted to view the blessed remains.37
Marfa’s career as Dmitri-checker was not yet over. A few years later another False Dmitri knocked at her door. She again agreed to testify that her boy was back. Marfa was spared another staged renunciation, because she died in 1610, before the Second False Dmitri was overthrown and a new dynasty, the Romanovs, came to power.
Years later, another Marfa, this one the mother of Tsar Michael Romanov, donated money for the perpetual saying of prayers for Marfa’s soul. It was not unusual for the mother of a tsar to so honor another, but Romanova may also have been motivated by sympathy for Marfa. Romanova had also been forced to become a nun by Boris Godunov, because her husband Fedor had lost a round in the power struggles of the Time of Troubles. She too had lived in remote monasteries, under orders never to return home and from time to time in fear for her life and that of her son Michael, who lived with her. She could understand why Marfa had told so many lies, and perhaps she thought a few extra prayers would help her soul avoid damnation.38
Fifty years after Marfa’s death, Feodosia Morozova became a leader of a schism that permanently split the Russian Orthodox Church and created a new sect, the Old Believers, that continues to this day. The dispute that gave rise to this rupture began in the 1650s when church leaders ordered revisions in the liturgy. The proposed changes, which included using a different number of fingers when making the sign of the cross, introducing a new spelling of Jesus’ name, and some editing of church interpretations of Christian doctrine, seem innocuous today. Seventeenth-century Muscovites, however, considered them to violate the correct practice of Christianity. The church leaders who ordered the changes believed that they were removing errors that had crept in because the Turkish conquest of Byzantium had diminished contact between Muscovy and the centers of the Orthodox faith in Greece. Unfortunately, many Muscovites, lay and clerical, disagreed. They believed in the sanctity of the uncorrected practices and became convinced that the Devil was behind the revisions. Soon a charismatic priest, Avvakum, began to speak against the reforms, and long-standing discontent with the religious leadership in Moscow began to coalesce into rebellion.
Georg Michels has found that “women formed a strong numerical majority among early Old Believers” and that the work of its first female converts was “absolutely crucial to the formation and survival of early Old Belief.” His words remind us of the equally important role played by women in Christianity’s establishment among the Rus. In both eras, the Kievan and the Muscovite, the earliest and most influential female converts, in the first case to a new faith, in the second to a sect within that faith, came from the wealthier households.
To join the new sect was to rebel not only against the church, but against the tsar. Alexis reacted by demanding recantation. Some women returned to the fold; others defied him. Two abbesses, Elena Khrushcheva and another whose name has survived only as Marfa, made the Moscow convents they headed into bastions of the new sect. After the authorities fired Khrushcheva from her position, she traveled around Muscovy proselytizing. She found shelter with wealthy widows who were promoting Old Belief among their peasants. One of the most rebellious of these widows was Evdokia Naryshkina, the aunt of the Tsar Alexis’s second wife. When, in the 1670s, the tsar sent guards to confine her in her house, Naryshkina rushed at the commander of the detachment and grabbed hold of his beard, thereby gravely insulting his honor. Later she escaped captivity by leading her family across a swamp. The group remained at large in a forest encampment until the tsar’s soldiers tracked them down in 1681.39
The best known of the early Old Believer women was Feodosia Morozova. She became one of the heroines of Russian history, praised in pamphlets written shortly after her death, hailed as a rebel by nineteenth-century revolutionaries, and honored as a holy martyr by Old Believers to this day. There was little in her early life that foreshadowed such a heroic biography. Morozova was born into one boyar family, the Sokovnins, and married into another, the very rich, very prominent Morozovs. She enjoyed a happy, albeit short, marriage with her husband Gleb, with whom she had one son, Ivan. In 1662, Gleb died and Morozova took charge of their extensive properties. “She may have owned eight thousand serfs and had three hundred slaves in her household in Moscow alone,” Margaret Ziolkowski writes. Morozova supervised all these people from luxurious rooms overlooking gardens where peacocks roosted in the trees. She took particular interest in the piety of the peasants on her estates, ordering priests to make sure their parishioners attended church regularly.40
In the early 1660s, Morozova began to criticize the reforms in Orthodoxy. When the Old Believer priest Avvakum returned from exile to Moscow in the mid-1660s, she invited him and his family to stay with her. Soon Morozova was taking in other schismatics and speaking out in opposition to the tsar. Alexis confiscated some of her estates in punishment, but he also attempted to conciliate her, perhaps because Morozova was lady-in-waiting to his wife, Tsaritsa Maria. At first Morozova appears to have wavered in her support for the schismatic movement, but as the years passed she grew more determined. She converted her sister Evdokia to the cause and enlisted the covert support of her brothers. In 1670 she secretly became an Old Believer nun.
Convinced that she was doing God’s will by defending the old practices, Morozova was willing to martyr herself and her loved ones. When her uncle urged her to consider the welfare of her son, who was at mortal risk because of her behavior, she replied, “If you wish, take my son, Ivan, to Red Square and give him over to be torn to pieces by dogs and try to frighten me. Even then I will not do it [accept the reforms]…. Know for certain that if I remain in the faith of Christ to the end and am fit to taste death for the sake of this, then no one can steal him from my hands.”41 Ivan subsequently died, perhaps murdered, and Morozova grieved for him, but she did not regret her decision, for she believed she had chosen the righteous path. God would restore her son to her in heaven.