An Essay · Open Questions
Archpriest Avvakum, the schism that split Russia over how to hold your hand — and why it was never really about fingers.
Somewhere on the road east of Lake Baikal, in the winter of the late 1650s, a priest's wife fell down in the snow. She had been walking for weeks behind a punitive expedition into the Siberian wilderness, her husband under guard ahead of her, two of her children already dead of hunger, and she could not get up. Another exhausted woman stumbled over her and the two lay there together. When her husband reached her she asked him the only question that mattered: How long will this suffering last, archpriest? He answered, Until death itself, Markovna. And she said — the line is his, written down fifteen years later in an Arctic pit, and it is the moment the whole of Old Russia speaks — Well then, Petrovich, let us be going. The husband was Avvakum Petrov, archpriest, the loudest and most stubborn voice of the Old Belief, and the reason he was walking to Dauria was that he refused to cross himself with three fingers instead of two.
It sounds absurd, and you are meant to feel the absurdity before you feel anything else — it is what Sixsmith and every other narrator leans on. In 1652 Tsar Alexei made his friend Nikon, a peasant-born monk of ferocious ability, Patriarch of Moscow. Nikon set out to correct the Russian service books against the Greek originals, from which four centuries of copyists had let them drift. The corrections were, on paper, small: the sign of the cross made with three fingers (for the Trinity) rather than two (for Christ's two natures); the name of Jesus spelled Iisus rather than Isus; three alleluias instead of two; processions walking against the sun rather than with it; a reduced number of prostrations in the Lenten prayer. Nikon issued the first orders in 1653 and had the council of 1654–56 ratify them. Those who refused were to be cursed.
Avvakum refused at once. So did the other members of the little circle he belonged to, the "Zealots of Piety" — Ivan Neronov, Stefan Vonifatiev — village-born priests who had spent the 1640s trying to purify Russian worship of drunkenness, slovenly chanting, and the pagan leftovers of the countryside. Nikon had been one of their number. The bitterness of the schism owes something to that: it was a quarrel among reformers about which way reform ran. The Zealots wanted Russian piety made stricter and more itself; Nikon wanted it made Greek. And the Greek books he corrected against were, as it happened, mostly modern printings from Venice, not ancient manuscripts — a fact his opponents seized on and modern scholars have largely conceded. On the narrow textual question, the Old Believers were often right. It did them no good at all.
Avvakum was arrested in 1653 and sent to Tobolsk, and it is worth pausing on this, because it makes him the first great figure in the literature of Siberian exile — two centuries before Dostoevsky's House of the Dead and three before Solzhenitsyn. In 1656 he was attached to Afanasy Pashkov's military expedition to Dauria, the country beyond Baikal, and the Life is largely the story of what Pashkov did to him: flogged him, chained him, left him in the open in winter, starved his family until the children died and the archpriest was eating "the flesh of dead horses and beasts killed by wolves." Yet the same pages hold the first prose description of Baikal in Russian — the mountains, the birds, the sturgeon and the seals, the sweet water — written with a countryman's eye and no self-pity at all. There is even a hen, the family's one hen, that laid two eggs a day all across Siberia until Pashkov's man killed it, and Avvakum grieves for that hen as he does not quite grieve for himself.
He came back in 1664, after eleven years, and was received kindly by the Tsar, who wanted him quiet rather than dead. He would not be quiet. Exiled again to the White Sea coast, he was brought back to Moscow in 1666 for the great church council that did an extraordinary double thing: it deposed Nikon — who had overreached, claiming the Patriarch stood above the Tsar, and had walked out of his office in a sulk in 1658 — and then confirmed every one of Nikon's reforms and anathematized everyone who resisted them. The man was thrown away; the policy was kept. The state had discovered it did not need the Patriarch to control the church. Peter the Great would draw the conclusion in 1721.
Avvakum was defrocked, cursed, and sent in 1667 to Pustozersk, a fort on the Pechora delta above the Arctic Circle, where he and three companions were kept in earthen pits — log-lined holes in the frozen ground, roofed over, with a window for bread. In 1670 the companions had their tongues cut out and their right hands cut off; Avvakum, for reasons no one has explained, was spared the knife. He was in the pit for fifteen years. From it he wrote — on scraps, smuggled out by sympathetic guards and passed hand to hand across Russia — the letters and epistles that made him the schism's voice, and between about 1672 and 1675 the Zhitie, the Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, Written by Himself.
The Life is a landmark that Russian literary history has agreed on for a century: the first Russian autobiography, and the first sustained piece of Russian prose in something like the spoken language. Church Slavonic was the language of everything written that mattered; Avvakum wrote in it and then broke out of it, mid-sentence, into the coarse, funny, vivid Russian of a Volga village — "I am no rhetorician," he says, and he means it as a boast. He argues with God, curses Nikon as the forerunner of Antichrist, jokes about his own cowardice, and records a wife's words in the snow. D. S. Mirsky called it the greatest work of old Russian literature; Tolstoy read it aloud to his family; Dostoevsky owned it. The man who refused every novelty of his age wrote, without meaning to, the book that opened modern Russian writing.
On 14 April 1682 Avvakum and his three mutilated companions were taken out of the pits and burned alive in a log cabin, on the order of the young Tsar Fyodor — who died two weeks later. The immediate charge was "great blasphemies against the royal house": Avvakum had written that Tsar Alexei, dead six years, was sitting in hell. Within two months Moscow was in the hands of the musketeers, the streltsy, many of them Old Believers, and a ten-year-old named Peter was on the throne beside his half-brother, with his sister Sophia governing behind them. The fire at Pustozersk and the accession of Peter belong to the same season. Old Russia was burning, and the man who would finish it off was watching from the Kremlin steps.
The Old Believers did not go quietly. The monks of Solovetsky on the White Sea had held out under siege for eight years, until 1676. The boyar's widow Feodosia Morozova, Avvakum's most famous disciple — the woman in Surikov's painting, dragged through the snow on a sledge with two fingers raised — had been starved to death in a pit at Borovsk in 1675. And in the 1670s and 1680s, as the persecution tightened, whole communities in the northern forests locked themselves into their wooden churches and set them alight rather than accept the Antichrist's church. The gari, the burnings, are the schism's most terrible legacy: the estimates are unreliable but run to many thousands, perhaps twenty thousand, within a generation. Avvakum had written from the pit approving of them. That is the thing to hold onto when the story is told as one of heroic conscience: he was a hero of conscience who told frightened people that the fire was the door to God.
So what was the quarrel actually about? Not fingers, and not theology in any sense a Western reader would recognize; there was no doctrine at stake, only practice. The best answer is that the Nikonian schism was Russia's first great argument about a question it has never stopped asking: does truth come from inside Russia, or from outside it? Nikon and the Tsar said the Greeks were right and Moscow had drifted — that Russia must be corrected by a foreign standard. Avvakum said Moscow was the last pure kingdom on earth and the foreigners were the ones who had fallen; the Greeks, after all, had lost Constantinople to the Turks, and what did that tell you? Strip out the incense and it is the Westernizers and the Slavophiles two centuries early, and the intelligentsia's whole nineteenth-century quarrel, and something you can still hear in Moscow today. The peculiarity of 1653 is that the "West" in question was Greece and the reformer was a Patriarch. But the shape is the same, and Peter, who took the foreign standard and made it the whole program of the state, is the direct heir of Nikon, not his opposite.
The second thing the schism decided was who owned the faith. The state won. From 1666 it was clear that the Russian church would believe what the Tsar's council said it believed, and the people who could not accept that were pushed out of the nation — into the forests, into Siberia, into the Cossack lands, across the border into Poland and the Ottoman Empire. They took with them a stubborn literacy, a horror of drink and tobacco, and a habit of trusting only their own; and in the nineteenth century their descendants, the Morozovs and Ryabushinskys and Guchkovs, built a startling share of Russia's textile mills and banks. By 1900 the Old Believers may have numbered a tenth of the Orthodox population, though the figure is argued. The state had exiled its most disciplined citizens for holding their hand the wrong way, and then spent two and a half centuries needing them.
It is easy to make Avvakum a saint and easy to make him a fanatic, and he was both, in the un-Western way that Russian holiness tends to be. What is harder, and worth doing, is to read him as the first witness. Before there was a Siberian exile literature there was a priest walking behind a punitive expedition, writing down what the cold and the hunger did to a family, in a language nobody had written in before. Before there was a Russian argument about the West there was a village archpriest telling the Tsar of all the Russias that the Greeks had it wrong. And before there was a state that decided what its people would believe, there was a council in 1666 that found it could throw away the Patriarch and keep the policy — the discovery, more than any reform of Nikon's, that Peter would build on. Anastasia Markovna lay in the snow and asked how long it would last, and her husband told her the truth. Then they got up and went on. The Old Belief is still here, three and a half centuries later, and it still crosses itself with two fingers.
Further reading: The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum, Written by Himself — the Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees translation (1924, with D. S. Mirsky's preface) or Kenneth Brostrom's (Michigan Slavic Publications, 1979); Robert O. Crummey, The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist; Georg Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia; Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe, on the schism's place in Russian culture; Martin Sixsmith, Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East, whose early chapters prompted this piece.
A note on certainty: the chronology of Avvakum's exiles, the council of 1666–67, the mutilation of his companions, and the burning of April 1682 are secure; the words in the snow are Avvakum's own account, written years later and shaped for effect. The claim that the Greek books used were modern Venetian printings is standard in the scholarship but not the whole story of the corrections. The number of self-immolations and the Old Believer share of the population by 1900 are estimates and argued; both are given here as ranges. The reading of the schism as the first Westernizer–Slavophile quarrel is an interpretation, not a fact — Michels in particular argues that most early dissent was local and social rather than ideological.
Reads alongside The Prince-Pope, on Peter the Great's All-Drunken Synod; The Faith of the Condemned; and The Outer Rings, on Siberian exile. One of the Essays & Open Questions in the Russian History guide.