The Real History of the End of the World (21 page)

The
Raskolniki
congregations went beyond the individual suicides of the Kapitonists. They barricaded themselves in their churches and, when the czar's army approached, set the buildings on fire. It is estimated that at least twenty thousand people—men, women, and children—died in this way. Most of these conflagrations occurred in the late seventeenth century, but they continued up until the middle of the nineteenth.
¹⁶

Avvakum praised the suicide/martyrs, saying “And many Zealots of our creed, who shun the temptation of apostasy, gather into wooden houses, and voluntarily burn themselves to death with their wives and children that their souls be not ruined. Blessed be their willingness to die for the Lord!”
¹⁷

Avvakum was to share their fate. In 1682, he was burned at the stake. His death did nothing to end the
Raskol
movement. What it did do was to introduce the concept of religious dissent as a crime against the state. This had been previously unknown in Russia and it would continue into the Soviet era.

The idea of the czar as Antichrist was obvious but difficult for many Old Believers to accept at first. They began by making Czar Alexander simply one of the horns of the Antichrist. But the feeling that the end of the world was approaching and that the czar, by abandoning his duty, taking power that he had never held before and introducing Western ways into the traditional Russian life, was no longer doing the work of God moved him up to the top position fairly rapidly.
¹⁸
They were certain that he was preparing them for the Apocalypse in the fateful year of 1666.

When the world didn't end in 1666, the
Raskol
movement revised their theory about the czar. It wasn't one individual man who was the Antichrist, but the whole dynasty. Thus the end of the world would be delayed until the fall of the Romanovs.
¹⁹
This may be one of the many reasons that there wasn't much support for Czar Nicholas Romanov when the Russian Revolution began in 1918, much to his surprise.

Under Peter the Great (1672-1725) the Old Believers were given some protection, providing that they paid a double poll tax, but his other innovations, like making the boyars shave their beards and wear Western clothing, only convinced the Old Believers that he was not to be trusted. They stayed in their own communities, often deliberately remote. It is ironic that their discipline and hard work, along with the network of fellow believers across the country, made some of them financially successful. Many prospered under Peter.
²⁰

However, like the Jews, they were always in danger of persecution. In 1738, one Old Believer community split on the question of praying for the czar and continuing to thrive or refusing to do so and risking prison. Many chose the latter and created a subsect known as the
Filippovtsy
.
²¹
By the 1800s, there were many splinter sects, some differing only in such things as saying or omitting the prayer for the czar, others so radical as to be unrecognizable to most Old Believers.

Even though the Old Believers began as a reaction to the introduction of foreign ideas into their religion, they seem to have embraced the Industrial Revolution. By 1848, the sect known as the Priestists, those who had created some form of hierarchy, controlled most of the east- west trade in Russia as well as shipbuilding and metallurgy.
²²
Under Catherine the Great (1729-1796), many Old Believers moved from the remote towns they had established and set up their own communities near Moscow, where they engaged in many sorts of manufacture.

One custom that had been established in the early days of the sect was the pooling of funds. Members turned over all their property to the group when they entered, reserving a small amount for their personal use. The Moscow center also received donations from other Old Believers. This money was used to invest in business enterprises.
²³

These groups were a far cry from the early peasant believers; however, almost all Old Believers practiced communal living in that property was held in common. For this reason, one would think that they would have welcomed the Russian Revolution. It's possible that, in the early days, the urban Old Believers thought that the millennium had finally come with communism, but in the countryside, the people saw it as simply a change of masters.

Many Old Believers refused to send their children to state-run schools that celebrated Soviet holidays rather than Christian ones. Others blended Lenin in with their own saints, incorporating him into their worldview rather than adopting the Bolshevik one.
²⁴
But the distrust of any government was by now ingrained in the Old Believers. Many refused to take part in the 1926 census or carry identity cards.
²⁵

The Soviet leaders now took on the mantle of Antichrist. During the 1920s there were many reports of miraculous warnings of the coming end times, although no specific leader appeared to announce it. With the first Five Year Plan in the 1930s, there was widespread belief that “the collective farm heralded the reign of Antichrist on earth.” A letter was circulated, purporting to be from God, saying “ ‘People no longer believe in me. If this continues, then in two years the world will come to an end. I can no longer be patient.' ”
²⁶
And who could blame him? But, of course, he must have given the Old Believers a second chance for they endured throughout the Soviet era.

Some Old Believers have emigrated. One group first set up communities in Mongolia but, with political changes there, were forced to move on. They settled in Australia, Brazil, and the United States. Some came to America at the end of the nineteenth century, in the great rush of eastern Europeans.
²⁷
Others arrived in the 1960s and more after the breakup of the Soviet Union. There are groups in Oregon and, especially, in Alaska where the unpopulated areas have allowed them to rebuild their own collective societies.
²⁸

As with many of the groups that began in expectation of an imminent Apocalypse, the remaining Old Believers have managed to adapt their faith to conform to a longer wait along with creating a lifestyle that allows them to be prepared for when the day finally arrives.

1
Quoted in, David. G. Rowley. “ ‘Redeemer Empire' Russian Millennialism,”
American Historical Review
104, no. 5 (1999): 1582.

2
The death of children influenced Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers in much the same way.

3
Sergei V. Lobachev, “Patriarch Nikon's Rise to Power,”
The Slavonic and East European Review
79, no. 2 (2001): 295-296.

4
Michael Cherniavsky, “The Old Believers and the New Religion,”
Slavic Review
25, no. 1 (1966): 2.

5
Catherine B. H. Cant, “The Archpriest Avvakum and His Scottish Contemporaries,”
The Slavic and East European Review
44, no. 103 (1966): 382-383.

6
Matthew Spinka, “Patriarch Nikon and the Subjugation of the Russian Church to the State,”
Church History
10, no. 4 (1941): 349.

7
Don't sneer at this. Countries have gone to war for more trivial reasons.

8
Vatro Murvar, “Messianism in Russia: Religious and Revolutionary,”
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
10, no. 4 (1971): 293.

9
Cherniavsky, 10.

10
Cant, 386. Avvakum wrote pamphlets, treatises, and his autobiography in eloquent, emotional prose that certainly helped in his appeal to the Old Believers to resist governmental pressure.

11
Murvar, 289.

12
Archpriest Avvakum and Henry Lanz, “Selected Texts from the ‘Book of Discourses,' ”,
The Slavonic and East European Review
8, no. 23 (1929): 254. Not the same monastery as Nikon. That would have been weird.

13
Spinka, 347

14
Cherniavsky, 18.

15
Thomas Robbins, “Religious Mass Suicide before Jonestown: The Russian Old Believers,”
Sociological Analysis
47, no. 1 (1986): 3.

16
Robbins, 6.

17
Avvakum and Lanz, 254.

18
Cherniavsky, 17. He adds that most attention was focused on the Antichrist; the Second Coming of Jesus was not dwelled upon.

19
Ibid., 20.

20
Ibid., 22.

21
Ibid., 23.

22
William L. Blackwell, “The Old Believers and the Rise of Private Industrial Enterprise in Early Nineteenth-Century Moscow,”
Slavic Review
24, no. 3 (1969): 409.

23
Ibid., 413.

24
Lynne Viola, “The Peasant Nightmare: Visions of Apocalypse in the Soviet Countryside,”
The Journal of Modern History
62, no. 4 1990): 753.

25
Ibid., 755.

26
Ibid., 759, 761-762.

27
Anton S. Beliajeff, “The Old Believers in the United States,”
Russian Review
36, no. 1 (1977): 76.

28
The Oregon group has been taken over by urban sprawl, but I ran across some in Alaska who still homeschool their children and live according to the priestless tradition.

We therefore freely, of a ready minde, and with a most chearful
heart . . . give up our lives and estates unto our Lord King Jesus,
and to his people, to become souldiers in the Lambs Army . . . ,
neither will we ever . . . sheath our swords again, untill Mount
Zion become the joy of the whole earth, . . . untill Rome be in
ashes, and Babylon become a hissing and a curse.

—
A Door of Hope,
Fifth Monarchy manifesto (1660), 16

 

 

 

 

O
f all the millennial movements that littered the seventeenth century, the British Fifth Monarchy men were among the most paradoxical. They were not a religion; they were really not even an organization. They were more a unified belief system. And that belief was that they were destined to establish Christ's kingdom on earth. Once they did this, they were certain that Jesus would descend from heaven bodily and take up the crown of Britain, from which base, his armies would conquer the forces of the Antichrist—that is, the pope, along with Catholic countries, and the Ottoman Empire.
¹

When Charles I became king of England in 1625, his prospects were good. He had a private income that allowed him to do much as he liked, and the English people seemed willing to let him, within limits. The limits were soon reached in two areas. The first was taxation without representation. Charles ran through his private income, apparently not realizing that wars are expensive. The king had the power of life and death over his subjects but not the right to take their money. Taxes had to be approved by Parliament.

Charles got around this at first by spending his own money and not convening Parliament. This worked from 1629 through 1640, until Charles needed an army to put down a Scottish rebellion. He was forced to call for parliamentary elections. The problem with this was that a lot of the members of the House of Commons agreed with the grievances of the Scots, who were refusing to swear allegiance to the Anglican Church. After three weeks, Charles dissolved this “Short Parliament.” The Long Parliament followed, but it wasn't any better for Charles. Its members managed to pass laws that curtailed the king's power, especially in levying new taxes and, most important, in controlling the army.

In January 1642, Parliament got fed up with Charles' high-handedness and, in effect, fired the king. Charles went to Oxford, where he set up an “anti-parliament.” So the English Civil War was originally between the king and the Parliament. But soon Parliament became divided between the conservative Presbyterians who wanted to make peace with the king and the Independents (in religion), who wanted to be rid of him.
²

This is where the Fifth Monarchy comes in. In 1648, the Long Parliament was taken over by a section of the Independents, who became the Rump Parliament. Many of its members were believers in the prophecy from the Book of Daniel (2:36-45) in which Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar's dream to mean that there would be four kingdoms. The first, Babylon, was the Golden Age. Then would come kingdoms of silver, bronze, and iron, which were Persia, Greece, and Rome, respectively. Finally, “The God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed. . . . It shall crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever” (Daniel 2:44).
³

These men saw in the overthrow of King Charles the end of the Fourth Monarchy. They blended this with the belief that the Second Coming was at hand. It was their task to prepare the way for the reign of King Jesus. Charles wasn't the Antichrist; the pope had that honor, but the king was considered the little horn of the beast in Daniel's dream, “There were eyes like human eyes in this horn, and a mouth speaking arrogantly” (Daniel 7:8).

This did not bode well for Charles. In the Book of Daniel, the little horn is tried, convicted, and put to death (Daniel 7:11). In the minds of the Rump Parliament, Charles was no longer a king but an embodiment of evil. There was only one way to destroy evil. The king was beheaded on January 30, 1649. In many parts of Europe, kings were still considered to be consecrated by God, so executing one took both courage and conviction.

Many of the Puritans in England felt that the execution was divinely ordained. They were certain that now it was time for the saints to rule. Therefore, the next Parliament, which first sat in June 1653, was called the Parliament of Saints, although it has since been more familiarly known as the Barebones Parliament, supposedly after a member with the unfortunate name of Praise-God Barebone.
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