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Updated: June 8, 2025
Thus, the Raskol is the direct opposite of ordinary Protestantism, which by its very nature sets small store by outward ceremonies, regarding them as needless ornament or a dangerous superfluity.
She had arrested certain "old believers," who at the discussion in the Palace of Facets had challenged the patriarchs and orthodox prelates, and she had caused the ringleader to be executed. Khovanski, chief of the streltsi, whether from sympathy with the raskol or whether he wished to please his subordinates, affected to share their discontent. The court no longer felt itself safe at Moscow.
The national chin was the centre of a conflict less puerile than might be fancied. Long before Peter the Great imitators of Western ways had begun to shave, thus setting at defiance the Oriental custom which everywhere prevailed in Russia. Under Peter's father one of the Raskol leaders, the protopope Avvakum, denounced "these bold-faced" men bold-faced meaning shaven.
The outbreak of the Raskol synchronizes with the introduction of foreign influence; and the coincidence is not accidental. The schism was but the reaction against the reforms which the Romanoffs carried out in so European a spirit.
Two things which have especially tended to give the Raskol a democratic or even liberal complexion are serfdom and the bureaucratic despotism of the country. It was no mere coincidence which caused the Raskol to break out about half a century after serfdom was established. Much of its popularity and life was due to the enslavement of the mass of the people.
The defenders of the old faith found themselves, at the first step, deprived of the means of practicing its rites. A single bishop, Paul of Kolomna, had held out for the ancient books at the time of Nikon's reform, but he had been imprisoned, and perhaps put to death: at all events, he died without consecrating a bishop, and the Raskol was consequently left without an episcopate or a priesthood.
Once carried away by the spirit of revolt, an irresistible tendency sweeps the schism on in the direction of civil liberty; and both in theory and in practice some of these sects have reached the most unbridled license. Hence, by one of those contrasts which are so common in Russia, the Raskol is judged in two utterly different ways, each of which is partly correct.
The Raskol offered to all the oppressed a moral, and often a material, refuge, an asylum for all enemies of the master and the law, and a shelter for the fugitive serf, for the deserter, for public debtors and outlaws of every description.
So spontaneous has been its growth that in all its phases it is its own best interpreter, and if confined to an isolated continent, its development would have been the same. The Raskol is the most national of all the religious movements to which Christianity has given birth, and at the same time the most exclusively popular.
It is, rather, an aggregate of doctrines and heresies, which are often divergent or even contradictory, with no other tie than a common starting-point and a common hostility to the official orthodox Church. In this respect the Raskol is more nearly analogous to Protestantism than to anything else.
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