When I wrote The Third Rome I struggled with the Old Belief, and, therefore, the question of the Razin and Pugachev uprisings. Unfortunately, few Slavists are capable of the sensitivity necessary to deal with the earth-shattering questions that derive from the Old Belief, and its clear relation to the notion of modern empire.
Essentially, there is nothing wrong with the common distinction in Russian history between its Petrine, or Imperial period, and its earlier “medieval” period. In fact, this distinction has much merit, and actually corresponds to significant changes in the structures of Russian life during the latter years of Alexis’ reign. Like anything else, it can be applied with a great deal of simplicity, and thus falsified, but the reality is that it is a useful tool in understanding the macro-trends in Russian history.
This split is problematic philosophically, rather than historically. The reason is that one must, as a matter of political and social ideas, come down on one side or the other. Unless I’m misconstruing the situation, there is no real alternative.
Specifically, the schema looks like this: the medievalist would follow the “non-possessorist” trend in Russian history, leading to the Old Believer schism during Alexis’ turbulent and often misunderstood reign. While it remains true that much Old Believer writing takes from the possessorist school, at least as far as monastic rules are concerned, politically, they have much more in common with St. Nil. It seems to me that there is a straight line from the world of St. Joseph of Volok, hading right to the world of Peter. This in no way is meant to suggest that St. Joseph was somehow proto-Petrine, but rather the ideas inherent in the possessorist school of Russian thinking end up with something like an imperial model of state.
Keep a few things in mind. The “state” in pre-Petrine Russia is a misnomer, particularly in relation to modern times. There was no modern state in any sense, as is the case in medieval Europe. In appanage Russia (for lack of a better phrase) the state was non-existent; it basically comprised a crude administration of a warrior chief and a retinue, with “public policy” being the securing of lands for the feeding and maintenance of this retinue. Otherwise, civil life was based on the commune or artel. It was, as I have said elsewhere, “a libertarian ethno-community.”
In the “gathering”period, typified by Ivan III The Great, specific officials were dispatched to oversee certain aspects of this gathering process, being “fed,” so to speak, by the local population. By modern standards, these dues were minimal, though were still resented in many respects. These, in no way, represent the immense power and reach of modern states. In many aspects, the non-possessorist mentality found its home in the rural anarchism/communal-libertarianism of pre-Imperial Russia.
As soon as the “administration” grew to such an extent that more and more lands needed to be distributed, a certain rude form of landlordism was established, though such was very tenuous, given the long standing tradition of the commune, and the large number of peasants involved. Landlords, throughout Russian history simply could not import their imperious will on the peasant classes. This is one of the great myths of the Atlanticist mentality in respect to Russian sociology. They are constitutionally incapable of seeing politics as anything more than the domination of the weaker by the stronger, legitimized by “universalist” ideologies. However, one of the greatest sins in modern historiography is precisely this importation of the Atlanticist ideological black market onto the later mediaeval Russian landscape.
The fact that there remained a rural anarcho-socialism at the local level even into Imperial times does in no manner negate the fact that a change did occur somewhere between the later reign of Alexis and the freeing of the “noble” classes from certain kinds of service under Catherine. And maybe, I can list a few variables necessary to make sense out of that change:
The fact is that the Renaissance in western Europe was a disaster. It created the absolutist, bureaucratic state, based in turn on the destruction of free peasant homesteads, local sovereignty and cultural autonomy. Like it or not, this is how the Atlanticist/Enlightenment mentality defines “progress.” This was financed by foreign bankers, exactions from the peasantry and the mass reorganization of the country from the top down. Peasants became dispensable cogs in the bureaucratic machine. Wars become massive, bloody affairs, with thousands of peasants killing each other, rather than classes of professional knights doing the fighting. Brought to power was a class of rootless capitalists whose definition of political liberty was their personal control over royal taxation (this was the major issue in the French, English and Dutch revolutions). And while modern scholars would not use such lurid language, few will dare to differ with the above characterization of “modernity.”
This bog of ideological filth slowly oozed its way into Russia as Peter was a young man. Is there an understanding of Razin/Pugachev without it? I think it highly doubtful. The notion of Russian elites (there were no “nobles” in the European sense) becoming “Germanized,” a major complaint of Pugachev’s movement, is another way of saying that the notions of European absolutism, and the ideological baggage it contained (though is rarely analyzed) began to light a fire in the brains of those living in the occult/Hermetic symbol/city of Petrograd. Of course, few doubt that there is an immediate connection between the sharpness of class divisions under Catherine and the development of a Russian “empire” in the European sense. But even this can be exaggerated. Even at the height of the imperial period in Catherine’s later life, the overwhelming majority of landlords were as poor as their peasants, and the claim that these men “owned” their “serfs” is pure absurdity only capable of being believed by either Bolsheviks or American academics. Many superficial researchers look only at the Masonic temple of Petrograd to analyze the “elite” in Russia, seeing a French speaking, pseudo-European bureaucratic army that had as much claim to being Russian as I do. And yet, this elite became demanding enough and powerful enough to extract more and more wealth from the peasants to fund increasingly “European” dreams of empire.
The point is, of course, that Empire is expensive. And further, that this expense, and the various fiscal institutions necessary to mediate this financial burden, necessitate changes in the basic internal structure of any nation. In some respects, the transition from the Third Rome to European empire mirrors what Spengler, not to mention Leontiev, termed the transformation from “culture” to “civilization,” a distinction I find extremely useful. “Culture” is the vital life blood of a people, a nation properly so-called. “Civilization” is a culture when it has entered the modern world: tradition is replaced by bureaucracy, and independent local communities are replaced by the state, itself created, at least in the west, by centralized capital. Ideology replaces customary laws, and government becomes “management” or “administration” rather than a royal association for mutual defense.
The nature both of the Old Belief and Razin is protest against this transition. Though it was often not articulated as such, the general ideological tone of the rebellions strongly suggests that a national-economic struggle was developing. The notion of Orthodoxy “becoming European,” on the one hand, with a gaggle of imported European advisors and military personnel, on the other, was a major complaint in the revolts. The Old Belief is different in no manner from Orthodoxy as a whole dogmatically, but rather was aimed at Russian becoming “just another European empire” with a church meant to undergird it.
All of this can be exaggerated by the historian. The Russian Orthodox Church maintained its ancient rites throughout her history, regardless of who ruled from Petrograd. During the Synodal period, in no manner was the basic, day to day connection between church and laity altered, harmed or changed. The structural changes at the higher levels of the clergy had only the smallest and indirect connection to the church’s functioning at the village level.
Empire strongly suggests the bureaucratization of aspects of life previously governed by custom. Without this understanding, Razin or the Old Belief become incomprehensible. Absolute states in western Europe (whether republican or royal) revolved around the necessity of extracting more and more cash or services from the peasantry. Under Catherine, this ideological foundation was made more odious by the release of the nobility from service. Thankfully, Tsar Paul helped bring a few of the noble classes back to their traditional roles, and was murdered as a result.
The Nikonian idea, dogmatically and ritualistically harmless, has an element within it that is worth pondering. Nikon’s reforms mirrored the growing “globalization” of Russia’s role in Europe’s bloody concert of empires. Any radical alteration in a nation’s foreign policy immediately requires a subsequent alteration in domestic policy, In Peter’s case, a generation after Nikon, it was the financial burden of “Europeanness” that was the efficient and final cause of his reforms. This was mirrored ritually in Nikon’s case. If Russia’s military might was to be more and more expanded abroad, then the financial burden needed to be reassessed at home.
In the contemporary United States, domestic policy is an appendage of foreign policy, specifically, the U.S. global financial position. If the U.S. is to be the leader of the New Global Regime (which is being challenged not merely by Russia and China, but the Regime’s European branch offices as well), then its domestic sense of self must be altered. The economic system of the late 18th century, which in turn was the foundation for the American consitution, was based on communal farming in certain regions, yeoman landholding, state and county independence and racial and linguistic commonalities given the region. None of that, of course, is even remotely compatible with a global empire or 21st century American realities. Centralization, a cosmopolitan consciousness and a removal from traditional moral anchors is necessary for the consuming, rootless identity necessary to maintain a commodity-based capitalist and globalist structure, a structure, importantly, controlled by equally rootless, privately-owned entities (rather than the state, which, in the American case, is reactive and clumsy). Therefore, specific policies of the state since the Second World War need to be understood in this light. This also explains the otherwise inexplicable elite support for radical social ideologies. Therefore, it might be said that the constitution only makes sense when joined with a socio-economic reality that no longer exists. Yet, this is a digression.
Slowly, in the rebuilding process after the time of troubles, reaching its maturity in the later part of Alexis’ reign and finding its apex during Catherine’s (roughly a century), culture became civilization, tradition became bureaucracy, custom became ideology and Moscow became Petrograd. Therefore, without taking anything away from the achievements of any of the 19th century emperors (and Russia was lucky in this regard), a major split opened up at the beginning of Peter’s reign, and eventually took the form of Pugachev under Catherine. Regardless of the crudeness and vulgarity of Pugachev personally, he did represent what was best in the Russian tradition. The Old Belief, closely allied with these rebellions, based itself on the autonomous village and Russian ethnic culture. Large administrative centers were slowly taking the place of the agrarian ideal, and the power of the landlord grew in direct proportion to Peter’s foreign adventures and empire-building.
It needs to be said, however, that, in spite of this process of centralization, Russia did remain the lest centralized of the major European empires. The fact remains that her direct taxes were the lowest in Europe, and, in spite of moves to the contrary, Russia still remained a commune-based, localized agrarian community (or more accurately, a set of communities). Therefore, it is an error to ideologize this rift exploited by Pugachev. However, both the Old Belief, as well as the rebellions, did offer a sense of royal authority radically different from what Peter saw in the west: a popular monarch who merely oversaw these islands of communal autonomy that was Russia. This vision, is, in my view, the very essence of the Russian Idea, politically speaking.
Can it be said, then, that there is a direct line from the non-possessors, to the Old Belief, to Pugachev? There is an argument to be made, though the possibility to dogmatize this division remains the greatest pitfall to this line of research. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a direct line from The Nikonians to Peter to Bolshevism. The persecution of the Old Belief, the single greatest error of Russia’s monarchs, removed from Russian life the strongest, most pious and most militantly royalist elements of Russian society. The Old Belief did make Russia different. The persecution of the Old Belief removed from Russia the possibility of a reform movement that would provide more autonomy to local agrarian communes, and instead opened the door to Herzen, who exploited this idea, and rendered it a cosmopolitan unit of administration rather than a truly ethical basis of reform.