Archpriest Avvakum

Archpriest Avvakum (Archpriest Avvakum) was an influential spiritual and revolutionary figure, a sharp-penned publicist with whom the movement of the Old Believers (Old Ritualists) began. The fact that the Old Believer church was able to elect a metropolitan only in 1917 shows that the Romanov dynasty regarded it as one of the principal challenges to its power.

Career

Coming from the same part of Nizhny Novgorod Region as Patriarch Nikon (the village of Grigorovo in Bolshimurashkinsky District and the village of Veldemanovo in Perevozsky District, respectively), Avvakum also belonged to the same intellectual circle as the future Patriarch of Moscow (the Zealots of Piety). Over time, however, it turned out that Nikon, owing more to personal traits, found it fairly easy to reach an understanding with the country's administrative system and became head of the Moscow Patriarchate, while Avvakum drew closer to a practice of spiritual insight and direct communication with the people. Nikon set about a church reform in the spirit of asserting Byzantine canons and building up the wealth of the church as a system.

Avvakum, meanwhile, resonating with the mood of the population during the "rebellious" century (the Romanovs had inherited, from the expansive practices of Ivan the Terrible — practices in fact based on the shift of the India-Europe trade routes from the Middle East and the Volga, which had linked the Baltic and Iran to the Atlantic, undermining the prosperity of the actively trading khanates with their mercenary armies — a vast continental empire whose governance required, in some form, the collection of a volume of taxes never before seen by the population, which in the Volga Region was compounded both by the loss of independence of the The Peoples of Nizhny Novgorod and by the aforementioned decline in revenue from the Volga trade route) sharpened his criticism of Nikon's actions.

The clash between the two leaders, each convinced of the intellectual superiority of his own direction, ended in Avvakum's arrest: he was placed in a prison whose disciplinary regime, in severity, was close to a concentration camp (an "earthen pit"). In effect, a prisoner held in such conditions was reduced, in purely physical terms, to so wretched a state that he served as a vivid lesson in loyalty to the ruling authorities, if only through fear. Yet, as often happens with spiritual figures, physical hardship only strengthened Avvakum's resolve to resist. While imprisoned, the archpriest managed to write a book known not only for its strength of spirit but also for its high concentration of strong language.

A significant part of the population sympathized with Avvakum and helped him whenever possible, and a large number of fervent followers emerged, especially in the Volga region, where the remnants of ethnic resistance combined with discontent over the falling standard of living (driven, on the whole, by global economic and technological processes) that arrived there at the same time as the formation of a unified state. The real staying power of the movement of Avvakum's followers was provided by Nizhny Novgorod merchants, who badly needed an ethical and intellectual platform independent of the official worldview of the administrative-bureaucratic apparatus.

400th anniversary of his birth

In 2020 the Old Believer church plans to organize large-scale celebrations marking the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the "people's prophet." The main events are planned for the village of Grigorovo and in Moscow, where trading posts of Volga merchants had already formed an influential Old Believer community back in the 19th century.