Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [233]
And thus began the great fissure in Russian society known as the Raskol – the Schism – and the appearance on the scene of a new and important group of Russians. In the nineteenth century they would come to be known as the Old Believers. But in these times they were called by the more general term for religious dissidents – the Raskolniki, the Schismatics.
It has sometimes been suggested that the reformers represented progress and the Raskolniki were obscurantist priests supported by illiterate peasants. This is not so. Indeed, Nikon’s new translations were done in such a hurry that they were full of inconsistencies, and he himself insisted upon details which other Patriarchs from the Orthodox Churches declared to be unnecessary. As for the Raskolniki, many were literate merchants and well-to-do peasants.
The Raskolniki also had a cogent objection, which it was hard for the reformers to answer. ‘For if Moscow is, as the Church has long claimed, the third Rome – after which, we know, there shall be no other – then how can all these things the Church has taught and practised now, suddenly, be wrong? Are we to say the practices of the Russian saints, and the liturgy confirmed by the great Church council of Ivan the Terrible, were heretical?’
In a Church which had always relied on the power of tradition, rather than textual analysis or logical proof, these objections were especially telling.
This was the quarrel at the centre. And who could guess what echo would return, after a time, from the hinterland?
Meanwhile, in the years that followed, there were other, mighty rumblings in the land.
1670
It was summer and the normally quiet little town of Russka was in a frenzy of excitement.
For the rebels were coming.
The monks, uncertain what line to take, looked to the abbot for guidance, but he himself could not make up his mind whether to defend the monastery or open its gates to them. In the town, and the nearby village of Dirty Place, opinion was similarly split. Many of the younger folk thought it would be a liberation. ‘He’s going to free the peasants,’ they said. ‘They’ll hang the Bobrovs and the land will be ours.’ But many of the older folk were more pessimistic. ‘If those rebels come,’ a small merchant remarked, ‘they’ll be like a plague of locusts.’
And nobody was even sure where the rebels were. The other side of the Volga, thought some; close by Nizhni Novgorod, suggested others; already across the Oka, declared some alarmists.
And what of their leader, the daring Cossack, Stenka Razin? In the space of a few short years his name had already become a legend. ‘He’ll rule in Moscow,’ they said, ‘like a true Tsar.’
It was amidst all this excitement that the little children of Dirty Place found a new amusement. This was to taunt a quiet, serious, sixteen-year-old girl. She paid no great attention to them, although their persistent question, accompanied by giggles and peals of laughter, hurt her more than they knew. Her name was Arina, and the question they asked was always the same. ‘Arina, is Stenka Razin really your father? Is he coming to save us? Tell us, Arina, is it really your father coming?’
It hurt her because she did not know.
Who was her father? No one would tell her.
Until she was five, she supposed it was the steward: after all, they lived with him. He was a stern, sour-faced man, and although he sometimes took her on his knee, it made little Arina sad because she sensed he did not love her. No doubt it was her fault. But when she was five, he died, and she and old Elena moved into her uncle’s large izba. And it was a little after this that a little girl told her: ‘Your father was a Cossack.’
She did not understand, and when she asked her grandmother about it, old Elena just said: ‘What nonsense.’
But Arina soon realized, instinctively, that there was something strange about her. Something wrong. There were whispers and giggles. And finally, when she was seven, Elena abruptly told her: ‘The steward wasn’t your father. It was a Cossack. That’s all. Don’t talk about it.