Old Believers in a Changing World: Polish Narratives of World War ll

Four—Religious Radicalism in Seventeenth-Century Russia: Reexamining the Kapiton Movement

Four Religious Radicalism in SeventeenthCentury Russia Reexamining the Kapiton Movement In recent years, historians of Western Europe and the New World have made the worldview and religious convictions of ordinary men and women in past centuries the subject of many meticulous and subtle works of scholarship. The impact of their research has spread far beyond the graduate seminar to best-seller lists and movie houses. For a variety of reasons, among them a paucity of appropriate sources and a lack of imagination, scholars of the Russian past—with a few brilliant exceptions—have not made systematic attempts to reconstruct the cosmology and religious convictions and practices of ordinary believers in premodern times.1 The Kapiton movement of radical religious protest provides one window through which to observe the beliefs and observances of Russian peasants and townspeople in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. The Kapitonovshchinahaslongfascinatedandpuzzledhistoriansoftheseventeenthcentury church and society. Any serious historian of the church schism of midcentury and the origins of the Old Believer movement must come to grips with the fact that groups of monks and peasants engaged in radical criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church decades before the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon in the 1650s.2 Doing so is no easy task, for the historian must study Kapiton and his followers through the screen of texts written by their enemies withintheofficialchurchandthegovernmentalapparatus.NothingthatKapiton or his sympathizers wrote—if indeed they could write—has come down to us. Religious Radicalism in Seventeenth-Century Russia 53 The subject poses more general questions as well. Most obvious is the relationship of the most radical currents in Russian religious life to the complex movements of protest against the Nikonian reforms. Once these currents had coalesced into the Old Believer movement with its own institutional and ideological structures, its chief apologists claimed Kapiton and his disciples as martyrs for the Old Faith.3 Most later historians treat the relationship between the radicals and the most prominent leaders of the anti-Nikonian protests such as Avvakum as a far more complex and elusive matter. And some recent Soviet scholars, most prominently A. I. Klibanov, take precisely the opposite position, arguing that the Kapitonovshchina had little or nothing to do with the more conservative Old Believer movement. Instead, by rejecting the authority of the church and offering a searching critique of its moral lassitude and oppressive practices, Kapiton and his followers formed a link in the long chain of radical religious dissent in Russia stretching from the strigol’niki and Judaizer heretics of medieval Novgorod and Pskov to the rationalistic and socially radical sectarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.4 Finally, study of popular religious culture in premodern societies raises significant conceptual problems. Going to the heart of the matter, the legitimacy of the terms “popular” and “culture” in the analysis of religious movements in premodern Europe is a matter of debate. Carlo Ginsburg and others question the usefulness of the world “popular” since it implies a clear distinction between “high” or literate and “popular” cultures, which the documentary evidence does not support. “Culture” likewise is misleading, in that it implies a single system of beliefs and values. More, it has been argued, can be gained by viewing the religious convictions and practices of ordinary people of premodern times as a series of interrelated cultures that varied according to their region of origin and the national identity and gender of their bearers.5 In the face of these theoretical and practical problems, why take up the well-worn and difficult topic of the Kapitonovshchina once again? V. S. Rumiantseva’s book, Narodnoe antitserkovnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v XVII veke, and the collection of documents she published under the same name give us two reasons to return to familiar ground. First, she has brought to light interesting new archival documents on radical currents of religious protest. Second, the essays making up her monograph attempt to place her findings in a new conceptual framework, which examines the interconnections of the many strands of religious protest with contemporary social and institutional realities, without indulging in a simple mechanical decoding of their convictions as statements of popular social protest cast in the rhetoric of a 54 O l d B e l i e v e r s i n a C h a n g i n g W o r l d religious worldview.6 In this respect, Rumiantseva’s work is representative...