Opposition broke out immediately, starting with the Zealots ofPiety themselves. Avvakum and Ivan Neronov had consistently protested that the Greek books were not antique originals but were influenced by the heretical Catholic west; they protested that the changes in ritual were not justified by religious precedent and that the mandate of Orthodoxy was to change nothing of the sacred heritage; they embraced the 1551 Church Council protocols as authentic Russian tradition. Avvakum, Neronov, and others immediately rejected the 1653 Psaltyr and subsequent revised books, bringing down the Church's wrath. Ivan Neronov was declared an apostate in 1656 and sentenced to monastic exile; he fled confinement and continued fiery preaching against the reforms until called to the Church Council of 1667 as a heretic. There he recanted, but many others did not. Avvakum became the exemplar of this opposition; exiled to Siberia in 1653, he proselytized there and continued to do so when he returned to Moscow in 1664. Brought before the Council of 1667, he and a group of compatriots refused to recant and were exiled to Pustozersk and executed there in 1682. Patriarch Nikon, meanwhile, had resigned his position in 1658 in a stand-off with the Tsar over his assertion that Church was superior to state. Fittingly, in his defense Nikon cited two analogies, one of the Church and state as sun and moon and one defining "two swords" of Church and lay power, that both were arguments used by medieval popes against European kings. Nikon's arguments did not succeed.
The Church Council of 1666-7, dominated by visiting Greek patriarchs, was a turning point in Russian Orthodox Church history. While it deposed Patriarch Nikon, it affirmed his reforms, anathematizing those who resisted. This prompted open revolt by dissenters; hundreds of communities joined the movement, which has become called the Old Belief. By 1684 a draconian law threw the weight of the state on dissenters, up through the death penalty, construing dissent as disobedience to the state.
Open opposition to the Church was a difficult step for ordained churchmen like Avvakum and Neronov, and they were able to justify it only by reference to apocalyptic thinking. Prevalent in Russia in the sixteenth century, millenarianism took on greater force in the seventeenth century with an influx of Ukrainian apocalyptic writings and illustrated works. Already in the 1620s, a millenarian movement of religious dissent emerged in central Russia under the charismatic leader Kapiton that presaged much of the Old Belief's views and structures. In a time oftremendous social and cultural change in Russia (serfdom, taxation, a more bureaucratic state, religious reform), Kapiton and his followers identified their era as the End Time, declaring Church and state heretical. They fled to the forests, living in small monastic-type communities, emulating early Christian fathers in extreme asceticism, condemning the state as heathen.
The Old Belief similarly drew upon apocalyptic belief when it rejected the official Church. Dissenters declared that Nikon's reforms, the Church Council's condemnations, and the Tsar's political persecution signified that Christian history 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 reforms 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 to flee and await the Last Judgment. To escape a society they considered pagan and a state they rejected, from the second halfofthe 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 comfortable 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.
Russian ethnographers in the nineteenth century indeed found animist and pagan beliefs and practices widespread among titular Orthodox. Stella Rock even argues that by then Russian religious syncretism or "dual belief" (dvoeverie, a modern term) constituted a parallel beliefsystem wielded in opposition to Church and state, but for many it was simply normal Orthodoxy.
Across the European Christian world, east or west, conversion to Christianity involved assimilation of local belief and practices. Saints were assigned in the place of local deities. Among the East Slavs, St. Elijah was associated with the god Perun; a cult arose around St. Paraskeva that combined Byzantine Christian cults with veneration of the female deity Mokosh; Christian holydays were matched to many agricultural and calendrical festivals. The Church was complicit in some of this: in rural France, Germany, and Russia, for example, clergy participated in agrarian ceremonies of animist origins. In Russia, peasants venerated arable land as "Mother Earth" and safeguarded key moments in the agricultural cycle with fertility rituals. The start of plowing in some areas involved the men of the village praying with an icon and a loaf of bread at the fields and plowing a single, first furrow before working the whole field. Harvesting was inaugurated by a village woman chosen for her virtue: she lit candles before icons, ceremonially cut the first sheaves and arranged them in the shape of a cross; priests later blessed the grain that they yielded.