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Avvakum was indefatigable in his defense of
Russian Church traditions and in his accusations against "Heretical"
innovators. Besides the simple people and the conservative clergy, he had
followers among the nobility, many of whom paid with their lives for their
fidelity to old rituals. The Tsarina Maria strongly sympathized with Avvakum
for a time, but Boyarina Morozova and her younger sister, Princess Urusova,
relatives of the Tsarina were the most faithful to him. They were also close
relatives of F.M. Rtishchev. The two sisters went through awful tortures and
died imprisoned in 1675. The famous painting "Boyarina Morozova" by
V.I. Surikov, who shows her chained and taken on a sled across the Red Square,
on her way from the Kremlin, where she was interrogated by the Patriarch Ioakim
and invited to renounce Avvakum, at the Percheskii Monastery. Tsar Aleksei
himself tried unsuccessfully to bring Morozova back to the traditional Church.
On the occasion in 1671 of his second marriage with Natalia Kirrilovna
Narishkina, the future mother of Peter the Great, hi invited Morozova to his
wedding, but she refused. The Tsar knew that the pain in her legs, which she
gave as an excuse, was not the real reason.
Morozova's biography was written after her death; she was considered a saintly
woman by the traditionalists. Many of them in the northern provinces mourned
her death by immolating themselves, and the self-sacrificing reached large
numbers after the execution of Avvakum.
Avvakum was exiled to Siberia. He was incarcerated for most of the time in the
town of Pustozersk, but he also spent a short time in the jail of the newly
founded town of Tarsk, on the river Angara, where the Soviet Union now has one
of her most celebrated dams. Bratsk was another name for the local Buriat
tribesmen who resisted the Kozaks' conquest of Eastern Siberia. The last
attempt to conciliate Avvakum with the official Church was made in 1666-1667
when he was invited to a Church Council which took place in Moscow. He took the
opportunity to denounce the contemporary Greek Church and severely chid the
present patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, who also represented the
patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem, the same who, in Krizhanich's
words, "Were ready a thousand times to sell Jesus Christ, whom the Jew
Judas sold only once!" Back in Pustozersk, Avvakum continued to write his
epistles denouncing Church prelates and defending his ideals. In 1682 he wrote
to the Tsar Fedor Alekseyevich, telling him that his father was in Hell, and
that he would go there too unless he chased Nikon's followers out of the
Church. Almost two centuries after Savonarola, Avvakum was burned alive at the
stake for "Slandering the House of the Tsar." Mass suicide by burning
followed his death. Then for a time it looked as if the resistance of the
traditionalists only increased with the severity of their persecution. As a
Regent after the death of her father, Tsar Aleksei, Sofia considered that the
ukhaz of 1667 declaring them heretics and excommunicating them was not
sufficient, and in 1684 she issued another ukaz decreeing that the
traditionalists who did not repent would be burned at the stake. There are no
records of how many perished in flames, but the figure at the end of the 17th
century was in the thousands. Many of those who survived were exiled to Siberia
or the northern provinces. They became known as "Raskoniki" -
dissenters, and "Staroobriadtsi" - old-ritualists, and they continued
to live and believe their own way. What originally was a petty detail in the
Church ritual, whether the sign of the cross should be made with two or three
fingers, - became the "Raskol," schism, and caused a strong
nationalistic movement primarily among illiterate peasants, which refused to
accept anything that was foreign including art and architecture. Cruel
repressive measures by the government put an end to the movement, opening the
way to the Russians to gradually break with their sacrosanct cultural
traditions and imitate western customs, education and art.
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