The Rasolnik: A generic term for dissidents from the Established Church in Russia. Strictly speaking, the name Raskolniki refers merely to those who have kept the outward forms of the Byzantine Rite. The Raskolniks represent in the Russian Church somewhat the antithesis of Protestantism toward the Catholic Church. The name applied by the Russain government to any subject of the Greek faith who dissents from the established church. The Raskolniki embrace many sects, whose common characteristic is a clinging to antique traditions, habits, and customs. The Schism originated in 1667 in an ecclesiastical dispute as to the correctness of the translation of the religious books. The dissenters, who have been continually persecuted, are believed to number about 20,000,000, although the Holy Synod officially puts the number at about 2,000,000. They are officially divided in to three groups: “The Most Obnoxious”: Judaizers, The Molokane, The Dukhobrtsy, Khlysty, and The Skoptsy. The Second group is titled “Obnoxious” and they include the Bezpopovtsy. The Third Group is titled “Least Obnoxious” and ethnic groups include the Popovtsy.
Staroobriadtsy
Like the Donatists in Roman Africa, the religious rebels, the Raskolniki, or the Old Believers, known as Staroobriadtsy or ‘old ritualists,’ of seventeenth century Russia were labeled as heretics by their enemies and successfully castigated as dangerous religious deviants. The terms Raskol, meaning rebellion, division, or schism, and Raskolniki, meaning rebels or dissidents, were at first general ones applied to a broad range of disobedient and unacceptable persons from the perspective of the Orthodox Church. As in the case of ‘the Donatists,’ the pejorative labeling was imposed by outsiders and was first formally applied to a specific kind of dissenter long after the original division had emerged. When the term Raskol first appeared in the 1650s, it was not applied to the Old Believers as such, but was used to designate a broad spectrum of disobedience and dissent. Coming into more frequent use in the 1660s, it was used by both sides, the one to accuse the other of being the real schismatics. It took the action of a large official forum—the great church council of 1666-67 that declared the Old Believers to be heretics—to make the term both an official and a technical one to designate illicit dissent. The dissenters, on the other hand, thought of themselves as preserving the true traditional church and so referred to themselves as ‘the elect,’ ‘the true brothers,’ or, more usually, simply as Christians. The external label of ‘Old Believer’ was only introduced into the dissidents’ own texts in the 1720s, two generations after the events described here (Michaels 1999: 17). In both the cases of ‘the Donatists’ and ‘the Old Believers,’ the invention of the disparaging labels was integrally connected with the campaigns directed by their sectarian enemies to get the state to act. The move ‘to jump’ the struggle to the level of the state resulted from prior internal struggles that had compelled both sides to solicit state support The proximate origins of the use of state violence in Muscovy were rooted in an internal struggle within the Orthodox Church that pivoted on modernizing ‘reforms’ championed by the Patriarch Nikon in the mid-1650s. The reforms sparked a myriad of points of resistance in which local communities and individuals insisted on the continuing validity of traditional forms of worship. The Orthodox Church did not have instruments of military force at its command to repress these threats to its authority. Early on, therefore, its officials began a campaign of warning government authorities that the dissenters represented a threat not just to the church but also to the state itself. There appear to have been two converging currents of pressure on the court. On the one hand, from the 1640s to the early 1650s, well before the Patriarch Nikon’s reforms, the state had already been collaborating with the Orthodox Church in encouraging internal reformist elements to refashion the church into a more state-like institution. The government was more at ease with changes, construed as ‘reforms,’ that would make the church more uniform and more coherent with the new imperial state. On the other hand, once a concerted program of reforms emerged in 1653 that were closely identified with the contentious figure of the new Patriarch Nikon, the changes provoked resistance and division. From this point onward, both sides—the pro-reformers and the traditionalists—began lobbying the Tsarist court, since neither had the power needed finally to trump the other (Lupinin 1984: 143-44). The lobbying was perceived to be necessary since it was not wholly clear where the state would stand on these matters. On the one hand, quarrels between Tsar Aleskei and the aggressive and forceful Patriarch Nikon led to Nikon’s ‘resignation’ in 1658 as the figurehead of reform, even as the very reforms that he championed were
accepted and pushed forward. The changes were structural ones only conjuncturally connected with a given personality. Indeed, some of the first proponents of reform, like Vonifatiev, Neronov, and the archpriest Avvakum, broke with the program and became virulent opponents of modernization.
Through the late 1650s and into the early 1660s, however, the repression of the dissenters by the Orthodox Church was limited; at worst, punishment involved exile and corporal punishment. And these disciplinary measures were balanced by persistent negotiations and efforts at reconciliation. Something more would be required of the proponents of reform to push the state to more forceful and violent action. Each side was therefore involved in long-term petitioning of the state primarily because neither possessed the force finally to settle the issue. Although
it took persistent lobbying to achieve a salience of violence in the seventeenth century
Muscovite state—that is to say, the ‘jumping’ of violence from one level to another of state repression—occurred more quickly than in the Roman case for at least two reasons. First, the bureaucratic distance between the central Tsarist court and local official power was not as great as in the later Roman empire. In Roman Africa there existed intermediate provincial and supra-provincial layers of government and, below this level, a large number of municipal and
submunicipal institutions of government, including ubiquitous local civil courts—all of which had to be moved first before the imperial court would ordinarily entertain appeals to its level of power. This was not generally the case in Muscovy. Here even an archpriest, like Avvakum, could hope to have direct access to powerful political figures at the court. The Tsarist state of the time did not have great depth of administration. The court itself was very much a
personalized center of power and the numbers of aristocratic servitors and bureaucrats it had to effect its wishes were relatively few (Poe 2006: 435-39). So when dissenters gained possession of regional centers of ecclesiastic power in Muscovy, namely the monasteries, they acquired threatening defenses against the Orthodox Church. Dissident centers, such as the Solovki and Paleostrov monasteries, were wealthy, landed, and powerful in their own right. These big
monasteries had a degree of autonomy that was already vexatious to the church and which, under its new reform program, was to be restrained. This was surely
part of the grounds for the church’s desire to acquire the help of the state, but it
was a reason that appealed to the interests of the state as well.
As the state engaged in systematic attacks on the Old Believers, the ideals
of a hardened asceticism, personified, say, by the monk Kapiton, and of
martyrdom came to the fore. Faced with the intransigent figure of the martyr, the
Orthodox Church found itself lacking the instruments of force to ensure the
elimination of the new threats to its authority. Early on, therefore, its officials,
like the Metropolitan Ilarion of Riazan, began a campaign of warning
government authorities that the dissenters represented a threat to the state, and
not just to the church (Vernadsky 1969: 697, citing Pascal 1938/1969: 367).
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