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In many ways the Old Believers remained more faithful than the established Church to the spiritual ideals of the common people, from which they drew their democratic strength. The nineteenth-century historian Pogodin once remarked that, if the ban on the Old Belief was lifted by the state, half the Russian peasants would convert to it.¹⁶ Against the emerging Tsarist doctrine of an autocratic Christian state the Old Believers held up the ideal of a Christian nation which seemed to strike a chord with those who felt alienated from the secular and Westernizing state. Old Believer communities were strictly regulated

by the rituals of their faith and the patriarchal customs of medieval Muscovy. They were simple farming communities, in which the honest virtues of hard work, thrift and sobriety were rigidly enforced and indoctrinated in the young. Many of the country's most successful peasant farmers, merchants and industrialists were brought up in the Old Belief.

Persecuted by the government for much of their history, the Old Believers had a strong libertarian tradition which acted as a magnet for the discontented and the dispossessed, for oppressed and marginalized groups, and above all for the Cossacks and members of the peasantry who resented the encroachments of the state against their customs and their liberties. The Old Believers refused to shave off their beards or put on Western clothes, as Peter the Great had demanded in the 1700s. They played a major role in the Cossack rebellions of the 1670s (led by Stenka Razin) and the 1770s (led by Emelian Pugachev). There was a strong anarchistic and egalitarian element in the Old Believer communities -especially in those which worshipped without priests (the bezpoptsy) on the reasoning that all priestly hierarchies were a corruption of the Church. At the heart of these communities was the ancient Russian quest for a truly spiritual kingdom on this earth. It had its roots in the popular belief, which was itself an early form of the national consciousness, that such a sacred kingdom might be found in 'Holy Rus''.

This Utopian search was equally pursued by diverse peasant sects and religious wanderers, which also rejected the established Church and state: the 'Flagellants' or Khlysty (probably a corruption of Khristy, meaning 'Christs'), who believed that Christ had entered into living individuals - usually peasants who were seized by some mysterious spirit and wandered round the villages attracting followers (Rasputin was a member of this sect); the 'Fighters for the Spirit' (Dhikbobortsy), who espoused a vague anarchism based on Christian principles and evaded all state taxes and military dues; the 'Wanderers' (Stranniki), who believed in severing all their ties with the existing state and society, seeing them as the realm of the Antichrist, and wandered as free spirits across the Russian land; the 'Milk-drinkers' (Molokane), who were convinced that Christ would reappear in the form of a simple peasant man; and, most exotic of them all, the Sell castrators' (Skoptsy), who believed that salvation came only with the excision of the instruments of sin.

Russia was a breeding ground for Christian anarchists and Utopians. The mystical foundation of the Russian faith and the messianic basis of its national consciousness combined to produce in the common people a spiritual striving for the perfect Kingdom of God in the 'Holy Russian land'. Dostoevsky once maintained that 'this ceaseless longing, which has always been inherent in the Russian people, for a great universal church on earth', was the basis of 'our Russian socialism'.¹⁷ And there was a sense in which this spiritual quest lay at the heart of the popular conception of an ideal Russian state where truth and justice (pravda) were administered. It was no coincidence, for example, that the Old Believers and sectarians were commonly involved in social protests - the Razin and Pugachev revolts, or the peasant demonstrations of 1861, when many former serfs, disappointed by the limited provisions of the emancipation, refused to believe that the Decree had been passed by the 'truly holy Tsar'. Religious dissent and social protest were bound to be connected in a country such as Russia, where popular belief in the god-like status of the Tsar played such a mighty and oppressive role. The peasantry believed in a Kingdom of God on this earth. Many of them conceived of heaven as an actual place in some remote corner of the world, where the rivers flowed with milk and the grass was always green.¹⁸ This conviction inspired dozens of popular legends about a real Kingdom of God hidden somewhere in the Russian land. There were legends of the Distant Lands, of the Golden Islands, of the Kingdom of Opona, and the Land of Chud, a sacred kingdom underneath the ground where the 'White Tsar' ruled according to the 'ancient and truly just ideals' of the peasantry.¹⁹