In Moscow there would be skating on the ice of the Moscow river, where a famous fairground with circuses and puppet shows, acrobats and jugglers would draw huge crowds of revellers. But the aspect of the city would change dramatically on the first day of Lent. ‘The endless ringing of bells called everyone to prayer’, recalled Mikhail Zernov. ‘Forbidden food was banished from all houses and a mushroom market started up on the banks of the Moscow river, where one could buy everything one needed to survive the fast - mushrooms, pickled cabbage, gherkins, frozen apples and rowanberries, all kinds of bread made with Lenten butter, and a special type of sugar with the blessing of the Church.’
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During Lent there were daily services. With every passing day the religious tension mounted, until its release in Easter week, recalled Zernov.
On the eve of Easter Moscow broke out of its ordered services and a screaming, raving market opened on Red Square. Ancient pagan Rus’ was greeting the arrival of warm days and throwing down the gauntlet to orderly Orthodox
piety. We went every year to take part in this traditional Moscow celebration with our father. Even from far away, as you approached Red Square, you could hear the sounds of whistles, pipes and other kinds of homemade instruments. The whole square was full of people. We moved among the puppet booths, the tents and stalls that had appeared overnight. Our religious justifi-cation was buying willow branches for the All Night Vigil to mark Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem. But we preferred the other stalls which sold all kinds of weird and useless things, such as ‘sea dwellers’ living in glass tubes filled with coloured liquid, or monkeys made from wool. It was difficult to see how they connected with Palm Sunday. There were colourful balloons with wonderful designs, and Russian sweets and cakes which we were not allowed. Nor could we go to see the woman with moustaches, or the real mermaids, or the calves with a double head.
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The Easter service is the most important service, and the most beautiful, in the Russian Church. As Gogol once remarked, the Rus-sians have a special interest in celebrating Easter - for theirs is a faith based on hope. Shortly before midnight every member of the congregation lights a candle and, to the subdued singing of the choir, leaves the church in a procession with icons and banners. There is an atmosphere of rising expectation, suddenly released at the stroke of midnight, when the church doors open and the priest appears to proclaim in his deep bass voice ‘Christ is risen!’ - to which he receives the response from the thronging worshippers: ‘He is risen indeed!’ Then, as the choir chants the Resurrection Chant, the members of the congregation greet one another with a three-fold kiss and the words ‘Christ is risen!’ Easter was a truly national moment - a moment of communion between the classes. The landowner Maria Nikoleva recalled Easter with her serfs:
The peasants would come directly from church to exchange Easter greetings. There would be at least 500 of them. We would kiss them on the cheek and give them each a piece of
kulicb
[Easter cake] and an egg. Everyone had the right to wander all over our house on that day and I do not remember anything going missing or even being touched. Our father would be in the front room, where he received the most important and respected peasants, old men and elders. He would give them wine, pie, cooked meat and in the maid’s room
our nanny would give out beer or homebrew. We received so many kisses from faces with beards that were not always very clean that we had to wash quickly so we wouldn’t get a rash.
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The procession of the icons on the Easter Monday, in which icons were brought to every house for a blessing, was another ritual of communion. Vera Kharuzina, the first woman to become a professor of ethnography in Russia, has left us with a wonderful description of an icon being received in a wealthy merchant household in Moscow during the 1870s:
There were so many people who wanted to receive the Icon of the Heavenly Virgin and the Martyr that a list was always made up and an order given out to set the route of the procession round the city. My father always went to work early, so he preferred to invite the icon and the relics either early in the morning or late at night. The icon and the relics came separately and almost never coincided. But their visits left a deep impression. The adults in the house would not go to bed all night. Mother would just lie down for a while on the sofa. My father and my aunt would not eat anything from the previous evening onwards so as to be able to drink the holy water on an empty stomach. We children were put to bed early, and got up a long time before the arrival. The plants would be moved from the corner in the front room and a wooden divan put in their place, on which the icon could rest. A table would be placed in front of the divan and on it a snow white table cloth. A bowl of water would be placed on it for blessing, a dish with an empty glass, ready for the priest to pour holy water into it, candles and incense. The whole house would be tense with expectation. My father and my aunt would pace from window to window, waiting to see the carriage arrive. The icon and the relics would be transported about the city in a special carriage, which was extremely solid and cumbersome. The housekeeper would be standing in the hall, surrounded by her servants, who were ready to carry out her requests. The doorman would be looking out for the guests and we knew he would run to the front door as soon as he saw the carriage in the lane and knock hard in order to warn us of its arrival. Then we would hear the thunder of six strong horses approaching the gates. A young boy as postilion would sit at the front and a sturdy man would be posted at the back. Despite the severe frost at that time of year, both would travel with their heads uncovered. A cluster of
people led
by our housekeeper would take the heavy icon and carry it up the front steps with difficulty. Our whole family would greet the icon in the doorway, genuflecting before it. A stream of frosty air would blow in from outside through the open doors, which we found bracing. The service of prayer would begin and the servants, accompanied by their relatives sometimes, would crowd at the door. Aunt would take the glass of holy water standing in the dish from the priest. She would take the glass to everyone to sip from, and they would also dip their fingers in the water in the dish and touch their faces with it. Our housekeeper would follow the priest around the room with the aspergillum and the bowl of holy water. Meanwhile everyone would go up to touch the icon - at first father and mother, then our aunt, and then we children. After us came the servants and those with them. We would take holy cotton wool from bags attached to the icon and wipe our eyes with it. After the prayers, the icon would be taken through the other rooms and outside again into the courtyard. Some people would prostrate themselves before it. The people carrying the icon would step over them. The icon would be taken straight out into the street and passers-by would be waiting to touch it. That moment of common brief prayer would join us to those people - people we did not even know and would probably never see again. Everyone would stand and cross themselves and bow as the icon was put back in the carriage. We would stand at the front door with our fur coats over our shoulders, then we would rush back into the house so as not to catch cold. There was still a festive mood in the house. In the dining room everything would be ready for tea, and aunt would sit by the
samovar
with a joyful expression.
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Religious rituals were at the heart of the Russian faith and national consciousness. They were also the main cause of a schism in the Orthodox community that split the Russian nation into two. In the 1660s the Russian Church adopted a series of reforms to bring its rituals closer to the Greek. It was thought that over time there had been deviations in the Russian liturgy which needed to be brought back into line. But the Old Believers argued that the Russian rituals were in fact holier than those of the Greek Church, which had fallen from grace by merging with Rome at the Council of Florence in 1439. In the Old Believers’ view the Greeks had been punished for this act of apostasy by the loss of Constantinople in 1453, when the centre of Orthodoxy had passed to Moscow. To the Western reader the schism
may appear to be about some obscure points of ritual (the most contentious reform altered the manner of making the sign of the cross from two to three fingers) that pale into insignificance when compared with the great doctrinal disputes of Western Christendom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But in Russia, where faith and ritual and national consciousness were so closely associated, the schism assumed eschatological proportions. As the Old Believers saw it, the reforms were the work of the Antichrist, and a sign that the end of the world was near. During the last decades of the seventeenth century dozens of communities of Old Believers rose up in rebellion: as the forces of the state approached they shut themselves inside their wooden churches and burned themselves to death rather than defile themselves before Judgement Day by coming into contact with the Antichrist. Many others followed the example of the hermits and fled to the remote lakes and forests of the north, to the Volga borderlands, to the Don Cossack regions in the south, or to the forests of Siberia. In places like the shores of the White Sea they set up their own Utopian communities, where they hoped to live in a truly Christian realm of piety and virtue untouched by the evil of the Russian Church and state. Elsewhere, as in Moscow in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they tended to remain in particular neighbourhoods like the Zamosk-voreche. The Old Believers were a broad social movement of religious and political dissent. Their numbers grew as the spiritual life of the established Church declined and it became subordinated to the state in the eighteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century their numbers peaked at an estimated 20 million, though their continued persecution by Church and state makes it difficult to say with any certainty that there were not still more in the wilderness.
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In many ways the Old Believers remained more faithful than the established Church to the spiritual ideals of the common people, from which they drew their democratic strength. The nineteenth-century historian Pogodin once remarked that, if the ban on the Old Belief was lifted by the state, half the Russian peasants would convert to it.
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Against the emerging Tsarist doctrine of an autocratic Christian state the Old Believers held up the ideal of a Christian nation which seemed to strike a chord with those who felt alienated from the secular and Westernizing state. Old Believer communities were strictly regulated
by the rituals of their faith and the patriarchal customs of medieval Muscovy. They were simple farming communities, in which the honest virtues of hard work, thrift and sobriety were rigidly enforced and indoctrinated in the young. Many of the country’s most successful peasant farmers, merchants and industrialists were brought up in the Old Belief.
Persecuted by the government for much of their history, the Old Believers had a strong libertarian tradition which acted as a magnet for the discontented and the dispossessed, for oppressed and marginalized groups, and above all for the Cossacks and members of the peasantry who resented the encroachments of the state against their customs and their liberties. The Old Believers refused to shave off their beards or put on Western clothes, as Peter the Great had demanded in the 1700s. They played a major role in the Cossack rebellions of the 1670s (led by Stenka Razin) and the 1770s (led by Emelian Pugachev). There was a strong anarchistic and egalitarian element in the Old Believer communities -especially in those which worshipped without priests (the
bezpoptsy)
on the reasoning that all priestly hierarchies were a corruption of the Church. At the heart of these communities was the ancient Russian quest for a truly spiritual kingdom on this earth. It had its roots in the popular belief, which was itself an early form of the national consciousness, that such a sacred kingdom might be found in ‘Holy Rus”.
This Utopian search was equally pursued by diverse peasant sects and religious wanderers, which also rejected the established Church and state: the ‘Flagellants’ or
Khlysty
(probably a corruption of
Khristy,
meaning ‘Christs’), who believed that Christ had entered into living individuals - usually peasants who were seized by some mysterious spirit and wandered round the villages attracting followers (Rasputin was a member of this sect); the ‘Fighters for the Spirit’ (
Dhikbobortsy),
who espoused a vague anarchism based on Christian principles and evaded all state taxes and military dues; the ‘Wanderers’ (
Stranniki),
who believed in severing all their ties with the existing state and society, seeing them as the realm of the Antichrist, and wandered as free spirits across the Russian land; the ‘Milk-drinkers’ (
Molokane),
who were convinced that Christ would reappear in the form of a simple peasant man; and, most exotic of them all, the Sell castrators’
(Skoptsy),
who believed that salvation came only with the excision of the instruments of sin.
Russia was a breeding ground for Christian anarchists and Utopians. The mystical foundation of the Russian faith and the messianic basis of its national consciousness combined to produce in the common people a spiritual striving for the perfect Kingdom of God in the ‘Holy Russian land’. Dostoevsky once maintained that ‘this ceaseless longing, which has always been inherent in the Russian people, for a great universal church on earth’, was the basis of ‘our Russian socialism’.
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And there was a sense in which this spiritual quest lay at the heart of the popular conception of an ideal Russian state where truth and justice
(pravda)
were administered. It was no coincidence, for example, that the Old Believers and sectarians were commonly involved in social protests - the Razin and Pugachev revolts, or the peasant demonstrations of 1861, when many former serfs, disappointed by the limited provisions of the emancipation, refused to believe that the Decree had been passed by the ‘truly holy Tsar’. Religious dissent and social protest were bound to be connected in a country such as Russia, where popular belief in the god-like status of the Tsar played such a mighty and oppressive role. The peasantry believed in a Kingdom of God on this earth. Many of them conceived of heaven as an actual place in some remote corner of the world, where the rivers flowed with milk and the grass was always green.
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This conviction inspired dozens of popular legends about a real Kingdom of God hidden somewhere in the Russian land. There were legends of the Distant Lands, of the Golden Islands, of the Kingdom of Opona, and the Land of Chud, a sacred kingdom underneath the ground where the ‘White Tsar’ ruled according to the ‘ancient and truly just ideals’ of the peasantry.
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