Disasters of consciousness [Suicides are religious, ritual, everyday, methods of suicide] Revyako Tatiana Ivanovna

Self-immolation of Old Believers

Self-immolation of Old Believers

If we turn to the history of the Old Believers, we will see that, starting from the 70s. XVII century, the Old Believers exterminated tens of thousands of their adherents, including children. And the overwhelming majority gave themselves up to self-immolation.

In the second half of 1721 - at the beginning of 1722, the central government agencies sent new decrees and orders with the demand to complete the entry of the schismatics into a double salary as soon as possible. On February 24, 1722, the instruction “On the testimony of male souls” followed, given to Major General P. G. Chernyshev and determining the order of the first revision.

One of the surprises for the Peter the Great's legislators was the stubborn reluctance of the Old Believers, especially in the north and east of the country, to recognize the double capitation system. Agreeing to pay double the salary was seen by many as submission and assistance to the forces of antichrist. A persistent reluctance to be included in the lists of "servants of Satan" was characteristic of the radical directions of the Eastern Old Believers throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

The direct conduct of the census was entrusted to the military. A detachment headed by Colonel A.I. Parfeniev was sent to the Tara sketes. The expedition of Colonel Parfeniev in the eyes of many was a new confirmation of the end of the world and led to tragic consequences: it revived in Siberia a desperate form of Old Believer protest of the past 17th century. - mass self-immolations.

In his reports to the government, Metropolitan Anthony emphasized that the self-immolations were a protest against the introduction of a double salary and that the Old Believers categorically refuse both to pay this salary and to join the Orthodox Church.

The first after the 80s. XVII century the outbreak of mass self-immolations in Siberia was a vivid indicator of the tension in the situation. The victims of these self-immolations are fugitive peasants or peasants who left their villages directly to self-immolate. In October 1722, the Tobolsk authorities were disturbed by the first news of the unrest of the Ishim, Yalutor, and Tyumen peasants. In this area in the fall of 1722 - in the spring of 1724. the following self-immolations occurred:

a fire in the village of Zyryanskaya in the Tyumen district (shortly before mid-October 1722), a fire in the village of Korkinoy on the Ishim of the Yalutorovsky district; the major self-immolation on the Pyshma River, in which, according to rumors spreading in mid-October 1722, about 400 Tyumen and Yalutorovsk peasants died in the Yalutorovsk villages; self-immolation of peasants on December 25, 1722 in the village of Irovskaya Abatskaya settlement on Ishim; On April 21, 1723, 78 residents of 10 yards of the Kamyshevskaya village on the Iset in the amount of 78 people gathered in the house of retired soldier Maxim Dernov for self-immolation, after persuasion of the authorities 7 of them abandoned their intentions, and the rest burned down in early May; between March 12 and 28, 1724, 145 people were burnt in the swampy forests beyond the Pyshma River, who had gathered here from various Tyumen and Ishim villages; among them were several residents of the city of Tyumen.

A. S. Prugavin, a pre-revolutionary historian of the Old Believers and sectarianism, in one of his articles published in 1885 in the journal Russkaya Mysl, tried to count the number of schismatics who had doomed themselves to death in the fire. Until 1772 alone, at least ten thousand people burned themselves alive. It should be noted that this number of self-immolators should be considered minimal. When reporting on group and family self-immolations, archival documents very often add the words “and others with them” to one figure or another. Bonfires of self-immolators broke out after 1772. According to information collected by the same historian, for example, in 1860, 18 Old Believers burnt themselves.

The position of the Old Believers in Russia especially changed for the worse after Catherine's accession to the throne. In 1764 the tsarist troops defeated the schismatic settlements on Vetka. In 1765, instead of ransom money, it was ordered to take a recruit in kind from the schismatics (even those who were in sketes were no exception). A decree of 1767 for merchants recorded in the schism introduced the collection of a double salary from taxes and other fees paid by them from trades and crafts.

In 1768, in opposition to the decree of Peter III, it was again forbidden to build schismatic churches and chapels. Justifying this decision, the bishops of the Orthodox Church from the Synod wrote: “It is true that in Russian Empire non-Orthodox Christian religions, public churches, and Mohammedans are allowed to have their prayers; the schismatics are not an example, for our Orthodox Christians do not receive any damage from those, ”- a different matter from schismatics popular among the people.

At the same time, a path was taken towards common belief: the subordination of the Old Believers, independent of the state, to the official church.

By the decree of 1764, those schismatics were exempted from double taxation, "who do not shy away from the Orthodox Church and accept the sacraments of the Church from Orthodox priests," but they can be baptized with two fingers.

The hierarchs of the official church called the schism "hydra". Like Hercules, the executioners in uniforms not only chopped, but burned the Protestants on fires and in log cabins with fire. At the same time, protest among the schismatics grew. In response to the defeat of Vetka in 1764, the log houses of the self-immolators were set ablaze.

In the Olonets district, a group of schismatic peasants, together with some newcomers, locked themselves in a hut. The headman and the tenants approached the house and began to ask about unknown people. Instead of answering, one of them went out into the street with an ax in his hands, hit the ten-man and cut off his arm. The amazed crowd did not stir. The stranger calmly returned to the hut and slammed the door. Flames flared up in the windows. 15 people of the schismatics died this time in the fire.

In the Novgorod province, the peasants of the village of Lyubach were driven to despair. 35 people gathered at the peasant Ermolin and announced that they would be burnt. Their intention was reported to the authorities. Lieutenant Kopylov arrived in the village with a team of soldiers, a bishop and a priest. They announced to the self-immolators that if they accepted a double salary, they would be released to their homes without any punishment for the gathering. The schismatics answered:

Your faith is wrong, but ours is true, Christian; four-pointed cross - adorable (in the sense of "seducing" - the author), we honor the octagonal; Yes, and in the divine scripture you have many wrongs, and if they begin to ruin us, then we will not give up and will do what the Lord commands. And if they do not ruin us, then we do not want to burn. Let there be a letter for us at the hand of the empress, so that we will be as before, but not in a double salary, and we will not be forced into church.

Soon, another 26 people joined those who had settled in the hut. The end of August came. The vegetables are ripe in the garden. The schismatics asked Kopylov to allow them to go for cabbage. They were allowed to do this. About 20 men and women came out of the hut with guns, axes, clubs. They filled up sacks of vegetables and locked themselves in the hut again.

The Senate reported all this to the Empress. They suggested that if the schismatics continued to persist, then take them by force and send them to Nerchinsk. But Catherine decided differently: she ordered to choose smarter among the schismatics and send them to negotiations. After much persuasion and persuasion, the Lubach schismatics went home and signed up for a double salary.

The self-immolation fire was blessed by the highest authorities of the schism, primarily by Archpriest Avvakum. One of his works, written already during the years of imprisonment, praises the first self-incinerators: “The essence of the retreating flattery, may not perish in evil spirit, gathering in the courtyards with their wives and children and being burned with fire by their will. Blessed is this delight in the Lord. "

Most often, the schismatics did not live compactly, but were dispersed among the rest of the population. Entering into general municipal associations, they at the same time formed their own religious communities, united not only by the unity of faith, but also by the commonality of purely everyday interests.

The ancient Christian communities were the prototype of the self-contained schismatic associations. Based on their traditions, the schismatics considered themselves only true Christians, surrounded by the world of pagans.

The support bases for the formation of the religious communities of the schismatics were sketes and chapels. For example, at the beginning of the 19th century in the Tver province, in the Teterka area, lost in the forest, there was a skete of Fedoseevsky consent. It was soon destroyed by the authorities.

Raskolnikov, persecuted by the government and the church, were defamed in every possible way, spread all kinds of fables about them, obliged to sew a yellow trump card on their outerwear. As a result, they turned into renegades, people looked at some of them as something terrible, and the yellow trump card betrayed the schismatic as a mockery of any courtyard boy. In this situation, the persecuted schismatic "holding his nose and ears, hurriedly ran past the Orthodox Church so as not to smell the incense coming out of it and not to hear its bell ringing."

This is how the character of the schismatics was formed over a number of generations: secretive, proud, but at the same time moral and honest.

All convinced Old Believers were very fanatical. Especially women. During persecutions, during interrogations, they usually answered everything briefly:

Do with me what you want.

Lead to execution.

“Many would willingly subject themselves to torture,” notes one of the persecutors of the split.

In the 19th century, the split became more and more deadlocked. Earthly life, it seemed to the schismatics, did not promise anything positive for them anymore. Remained the last hope for the kingdom of heaven. In these conditions, savage tendencies of religious sanctification of suicide flare up. A schismatic sect of "breeders" emerged, which, in turn, formed the rumors of "self-incinerators" and "uniting with Christ" - suicides or asking fellow believers to take their lives.

Similar tendencies were formed especially among the Net and Phillippians. They argued that if someone consumes himself with fasting, or burns himself, he will become the same saint and great martyr as the saints.

So, around 1830, in the village of Kopeny, Atkarskiy uyezd, Saratov province, several dozen people, adults with children, chose one destroyer from among their midst and all were killed by him.

Another group of people gathered in a separate building, surrounded it with straw, brushwood and set it on fire.

Many were burned, but most of the self-immolators were pulled out of the fire by the police arrived in time.

In the Kalyazinsky district of the Tver province, two young Filippovites, 30 and 18 years old, decided to accept a martyr's death. The elder wrote a will that reflects their mood before death - a detachment from everything earthly in anticipation of the kingdom of heaven:

Farewell, our beloved fathers, Do not remember dashing And do not shed tears for us, Only trust in God ... And we are going to the glory of God.

At night, the young people went to the forest, made a fire. Standing in front of the flames, they sang prayers in a frenzy. The elder wanted to throw himself into the fire first, but the younger begged to give him this right, feeling lack of strength to endure the sight of his friend's torment. Singing a hymn to God, the young man entered the flames. At the sight of his friend's torment, the elder could not stand it. Full of compassion, he threw himself into the fire, pulled out a half-burnt friend, waited until he regained consciousness, began to convince him to save his life, and when the younger friend again fell into oblivion, he entered the flame himself. The exhausted young man witnessed the inhuman willpower of an older friend. They found him in the morning. The young man was still alive, told about everything, but soon died of burns.

In the Vladimir province, the peasant Nikita burned down his house and in it two of his own children, previously slaughtered by him on the mountain outside the village. During interrogation, he showed that he did so under the influence of the Bible and committed infanticide in the likeness of Abraham, who sacrificed his son Isaac to God. Nikita was exiled to Transbaikalia. He settled in Srednyaya Borz on the Argun. While living here, he often went into the forest, where there was a small chapel. He did not return for a long time. Once the shepherds entered the chapel and found the following in it: a large wooden cross was dug into the ground under a canopy. It was cut down and dug in by Nikita himself. And on the cross hung a crucified man: his head in a crown of thorns tilted to one side. In the bitter frost he hung naked, only girding his lower abdomen with a white handkerchief. There was a wound in the side, the whole body was splattered with blood. At the foot of the cross lay a spear and instruments of the passion of God. When people took him down from the cross, he was still alive. Nikita was cured and summoned for interrogation. He replied that he sacrificed himself for the sins of men and chose the evening of Good Friday for this.

He crucified himself. First, he nailed the legs to the cross with his right hand, holding his left on the crossbar of the cross, then left hand planted on a large nail, driven in advance so that the point sticks out. He wanted to do the same with his right hand, but his strength left him - weakened, hung. So, with lowered hand, the shepherds found him. “I wanted to die, as Christ died for people,” Nikita said.

The righteous fire was far from the only way for the Old Believer to the kingdom of heaven. There was hunger, a pool, an ax, and a knife.

In 1896, the first general population census of the empire took place. In the Tiraspol farmsteads of the Kherson province lived the schismatic nun Vitaly, who had big influence on the Old Believers. In the organized census, she saw the approach of the end of the world, the doomsday. She taught that it is better to die than to be enumerated.

According to the Chief Prosecutor of the Synod Pobedonostsev, some sectarians believed the nun and reacted negatively to this census, seeing in it a violation of their faith and considering it a means of putting them on the lists with the seal of Antichrist. Various means were used to avoid this census, up to the intention of self-immolation.

It was on this basis of religious intolerance that the terrible case of the burial of schismatics alive with their consent took place. Influenced by the sermons of Nun Vitalia, the inhabitants of the farmsteads decided to accept a martyr's death, but remain faithful to their religion. On December 23, 1896, nine sectarians prepared a pit for themselves and sang a burial ceremony over them. When they lay down in the pit, the Old Believer Fyodor Kovalev, like a bricklayer, at their request, laid the pit with a brick.

F. Kovalev was the murderer of 25 people, including his two young children, his wife and 60-year-old mother. All those buried alive and Kovalev himself were convinced that this death would lead them to the "kingdom of heaven."

Four days after this incident, six more people were walled up alive.

On the day of the census, Vitaly, along with some other co-religionists, refused to give information to the census takers. She and five other sectarians were jailed but released after a 5-day hunger strike.

In February 1897, Fyodor Kovalev buried ten more people alive in two stages, including Vitaly.

The disclosure of this terrible case led to the arrest of Kovalev and his imprisonment. Later, the Synod went further and sent him to the prison department at the Spaso-Evfimeevsky monastery in Suzdal.

Fyodor Kovalev was imprisoned in the prison department on February 22, 1898 and placed in a separate cell under the strict supervision of the monastery authorities. He spent seven years in the monastery prison, and then was transferred to the monastery cell. In his letter to his sister, Kovalev announced his reconciliation with the life of a prisoner: he lived in this "box" for seven years, but even if he lived here until he was 70, he would not ask for his release.

A very good article that shows that in the then state practice there was the burning of heretics. This suggests that the so-called "mass self-immolation of Old Believers" is a concealment of their punitive state expeditions against the Old Believers.
Russian Orthodox Church and burnings

E. O. Shatsky
From the school history course, we all remember the medieval Inquisition, about the bonfires on which heretics, gentiles and witches perished in Europe. The Inquisition itself did not execute anyone, but transferred religious criminals to secular authorities with the ominous wording: "For punishment without shedding blood," that is, for burning or hanging. The relationship between the ecclesiastical and secular authorities corresponded to the relationship between the customer and the contractor.

But from school textbooks it seems that the Inquisition was only in Catholic countries... Meanwhile, the ancient provision of ecclesiastical law, which states that secular authorities should help the church to punish religious criminals, is the same for Catholicism and Orthodoxy. For the first time, the decision on the death penalty for the storage of heretical literature was made by the I Ecumenical Council (325), the decision was supported by the Emperor Constantine. In Byzantium, after the division of the churches, in 1119 the head of the Bogomil heresy, Vasily, was burned. Have there been burnings of religious criminals in Russia? Yes, absolutely. Were they due to the influence of Christianity? Also, yes.

The first mention of the burning we find in the chronicle record for 1227. In Novgorod, four wise men are tied up and thrown into the fire. Were the executioners Christian? The chronicle leaves no doubt about the answer to this question - the Novgorodians who arrested the Magi first of all brought them to the archbishop's yard. It is obvious that we have before us devoted adherents of Orthodoxy.

Around the same time, in Smolensk, the clergy demanded the execution of the monk Abraham, accusing him of heresy and reading forbidden books - the proposed types of execution - "nail to the wall and set on fire" and drown. The Life of Abraham unambiguously names those who demanded his execution: “the priests, abbots, and priests, if they could, would eat him alive,” “outrageously the priests, and also the abbots roared at him like oxen; the princes and boyars did not find any guilt behind him, having checked everything and made sure that there was no untruth, but everyone was lying to him. " Draws attention to the compliance of the Christian prohibitions on the shedding of blood with methods of execution: burning and drowning.

Further, in 1284, in the Russian "Pilot Book" (a collection of church and secular laws), a gloomy law appears: "If someone keeps a heretical scripture with him and believes in his magic, he will be cursed with all the heretics, and those books are on his head. burn it. In the XIV century. there also appears the apocryphal “Rule 165 of St. the father of the Fifth Council: against those who offend the holy churches of God ”, punishing by burning at the stake for looting church property. The chronicle for 1438 mentions the "Holy rules of the holy apostles", prescribing "to burn the living or to fall asleep in the earth" for heresy (another version: "The holy rules of the divine law of the holy apostles command such a libertine church to burn with fire or to rake the living into the earth") ... According to the Gustynskaya Chronicle (17th century), in 1438, Metropolitan Isidore, who accepted the Catholic Union, "was condemned to be burned to death from the sacred cathedral, but fled from prison." Obviously, the author of the 17th century. I did not see anything unusual in such a judgment of the Council. According to the Resurrection and Second Sophia Chronicles, the prince did not send a pursuit for the fugitive, precisely because he did not want to burn him. It is also clear that the appearance in Russia of the above laws is associated with Christian church... Methods, again, without shedding blood: burning and burying in the ground.

It is doubtful that Isidore was the only one to whom they decided to apply these laws. Perhaps, the following executions of witches are connected with them: in 1411 twelve witches were burned by the inhabitants of Pskov on suspicion that they had sent a plague to the city, and in 1444 the Mozhaisk prince ordered to burn the noblewoman Marya Mamonova “for magic”. I. Berdnikov mentions the Mozhaisky principality as an example of the influence of the church on secular justice - Prince Andrei Dmitrievich Mozhaisky corresponded with Abbot Kirill Beloozersky, who wrote him a letter with advice on punishing criminals. The son of this prince - Ivan Andreevich - and burned the witch. It is reasonable to believe that Ivan Andreevich received the most Orthodox education, including in the field of law. Of course, according to the laws of that time, "witchcraft" was considered a crime subject to the ecclesiastical court. This also confirms that the Mozhaisk prince acted in alliance with the church authorities.

In 1490, Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod ordered to burn birch bark helmets on the heads of several condemned heretics (apparently, remembering the law on burning heretical books on the head of a heretic). Two of the punished went mad and died. Archbishop Gennady is canonized by the church.

In 1504, a famous church council was held, which sentenced to burning an unknown number of "Judaizing" heretics. The chronicler lists eight people by name, but adds “many other heretics who burned them”. One of the initiators of the burning was Hegumen Joseph Volotsky - also canonized by the church. The burnings were also supported by the heir to the Grand Duke Vasily Ivanovich, who took the throne a year later. The lack of information about burnings in Russia during his reign may be due to an insufficient number of sources.

During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, a certain Russian heretic who fled to Lithuania and was nicknamed "the second Luther" there, said that in Moscow he was supposed to be burned, but the tsar canceled the death sentence. D. ist. n. RG Skrynnikov connects this message with the church council of 1553 - 54, at which a group of heretics headed by Abbot Artemy was condemned. About Artemia, the Cathedral charter stated: "The Tsar and Grand Duke Artemy gave the execution," that is, the pardon was a personal decision of the Tsar.

The list of the executed times of Ivan the Terrible is preserved in his "Synodic", compiled by clerks for archival affairs. But the "Synodik" does not mention how and for what the persons mentioned in it were executed. Comparisons with other sources make it possible to clarify that the carpenters Neupoka, Danila and Mikhail were burned in the spring and summer of 1569 for eating veal prohibited by church rules, and in August 1575, 15 witches were burned in Novgorod ("and the witches say"). Foreigner Petrei in the notes of the beginning of the 17th century. wrote about Grozny:

No matter how cruel and violent he was, he did not persecute or hate anyone for their faith, except for the Jews, who did not want to be baptized and confess Christ: he either burned them alive, or hung them up and threw them into the water.

The drowning of the Jews is known from the annals, but the news of Petreus about their burnings is unique. There is no evidence of the church's involvement in the burnings of the times of Grozny, but let's not forget the basic principle of the Inquisition - the execution is carried out by the secular authorities.

In addition to the burning of witches:

The tale of sorcery, written for Ivan the Terrible, proves the need for severe punishments for sorcerers, and as an example it sets out the tsar, who, together with the bishop (emphasis added by Afanasyev - E. Sh.), “Write books commanded and confirm, and sorcery is cursed, and in the fun of the commandment burn them with fire. "

In 1584 the extremely pious sovereign Fyodor Ioannovich ascended the throne. In 1586 the Russian church was headed by a certain Job (canonized), who in one of his works approved the execution of pagan priests. As far as can be judged from the sources that have come down, in the time of Job, burning became a common execution. The English envoy Fletcher, who lived in Moscow from 11/25/1588 to 05/06/1589, describes one of the burnings of heretics as an eyewitness:

... husband and wife ... were burnt to death in Moscow, in a small house, which they set on fire on purpose. Their guilt remained a secret, but it is likely that they were punished for some kind of religious truth, although the priests and monks assured the people that these people were evil and damned heretics.

The reliability of Fletcher's message is confirmed by the description of the method of execution - burning in a log house, often mentioned in Russian documents of the 17th century, but unusual for other countries. If for six months only in Moscow Fletcher managed to witness the burning of two people, then there is reason to believe that there were much more such burnings. Chronicle under 7099 (1590/91) describes the burning of sorcerers in Astrakhan by order of Fyodor Ioannovich: "after torturing them, the emperor ordered to burn them." Coupled with the message of Patriarch Job:

About the great sovereign, the crowned tsar and the great prince Fyodor Ivanovich of All Russia! Truly, you are equal to the appearance of the Orthodox Tsar Constantine, the first in piety, who shone forth in piety, and his grand prince Vladimir, who enlightened the Russian land with holy baptism; But now you are a great autocrat and a true seeker of piety, not crushing single idols, but destroying those who serve them to the end,

this gives us reason to believe that during the time of Fyodor Ioannovich, executions for spiritual crimes were no exception.

The same trend continued under Boris Godunov, when Job remained the head of the church. In January 1605, a letter from the Moscow government about the appearance of False Dmitry in the northern cities reported:

People who were sentenced to burning in the state for their disgusting deeds, and others to exile, fled to Lithuanian land abroad and evil heretical tares sowed.

That is, there were not so few people sentenced to be burned for heresy. Under the same 1605, chronicles report the execution of the apostate Smirny. According to the "Piskarevsky Chronicler" (written in 1621 - 1625):

... the head of Streletskaya Smirnaya Mamatov from Georgia ran to Kizylbashi and got into trouble there, understood his wife. And the tsar ordered him to be executed with various torments: "You de abandoned the Christian faith, but you got stuck!" ...

The New Chronicler (compiled by the patriarch's entourage in the 20s of the 17th century) specifies the method of execution:

... Busurman Smirny found out that he was ubusurmans, ordered him to be given various torments, and in the end he ordered the accursed one to be doused with oil and commanded to light it. Here the accursed one died.

Obviously, the approval of the execution in the entourage of Patriarch Filaret - "accursed".

That under Filaret - the de facto head of the Russian state - burning was recognized as an ordinary execution for religious crimes - is evidenced by Mikhail Fedorovich's letter to the Archbishop of Tobolsk (February 5, 1623). Burning is spoken of as a punishment for "great spiritual deeds." The king responded to the archbishop with the following complaints (I cite in context):

... the thieves of the archpriest of Sofia before the boyar and governors and before the clerk dishonored. And the boyar de and the governors did not do anything to them for that. And after that, in the same week, before you, our pilgrim (Archbishop - E. Sh.), And before the boyar and the governor, many people declared themselves in great spiritual deeds. And the boyar de and the governor, having advised you, our pilgrim, inflicted a slight punishment on them and sent them to many cities, but they did not punish them to the end and did not burn them with fire.

The tsar refused to make a decision until the archbishop wrote to him "what kind of people, and for what guilt the punishment was brought to the end, commit and burn them with fire, and what their great guilt". It is clear from the letter that the abbot was dissatisfied with the too merciful verdict of the governor, who did not inflict punishment "to the end." The tsar did not object, but wanted to know the specific spiritual crimes of the condemned (unfortunately, it was not possible to find further correspondence on the case).

From 1647, the decree of Alexei Mikhailovich in the name of the Shatsk governor Grigory Khitrovo reached us:

And you for the wife Agafyitsa and the peasant Tereshka, having given a spiritual father, ordered them to partake of the holy mysteries of God, it will be worthy, and having communed the holy mysteries of God, ordered them to be taken out to the square and, having told them their guilt and the loathsome deed, ordered them on the square in a pipe, covered with straw, burn.

Agafya and her teacher in witchcraft, Tereshka Ivlev, were accused of killing several peasants to death with the help of spells and the "thread of a dead man with a sentence". The text of the decree is the most pious.

In 1649 g. Zemsky Sobor in Moscow adopted the legislative act "Cathedral Code". The very first article of the Code read:

There will be some gentiles, no matter what faith, or a Russian person, will blaspheme the Lord God and our salvation Jesus Christ, or on the birth of his most pure mistress, our Mother of God and the ever-virgin Mary, or on an honest cross, or on his saints, and about then look for all sorts of investigations firmly. Let it be heard about that, and after exposing that blasphemer, execute, burn.

The 24th article of the 22nd chapter of the Code is also interesting:

And whoever the Busurman by some means of violence or deception of the Russian person will force to his Busurman faith, and according to his Busurman faith he will cut off, but it’s just about that, and that Busurman will be executed on the search, burned with fire without any mercy. And whoever he will put a Russian person into, and that Russian person should be sent to the patriarch, or to another authority, and tell him to issue a decree according to the rules of the holy apostles and holy fathers.

Legislators are not very consistent. If an Islamic missionary succeeded "by some means" to convert a Russian to his faith, then it means that it was either violence or deception. However, a Russian who has been drugged by "violence" is also not left unpunished.

The Code was drawn up according to the rules of the apostles and holy fathers, the laws of the Greek tsars (ie, the "Leader of the Book"), the decrees of the Russian tsars and the judgments of the boyars, that is, in accordance with tradition. The Code was signed by all the participants in the Council, including the Consecrated Council - the highest clergy. Among the signatories was Archimandrite Nikon, who became patriarch four years later. The then head of the Russian Church, Patriarch Joseph, wrote a letter to the Tsar in the same year, in which he referred to the first article of the Code:

In the booked book it is written: whoever utters what blasphemous words against the catholic and apostolic Church - let him die by death. And he, Stephen (Protopop of Annunciation - E. Sh.), Did not blaspheme against the catholic and apostolic Church and against all God's churches - and he dishonored us, your pilgrims. Dear ... Tsar and Grand Duke Alexei Mikhailovich! kings to give him, Stephen, a council [that is, a council court]. Tsar sovereign, have mercy! ...

The sovereign, however, did not betray Archpriest Stephen for reprisals.

So, the burning according to the Code of 1649 was approved Orthodox Church, thereby taking on part of the responsibility for the subsequent executions under this Code.

In the future, sources directly say that the relationship between church and state developed according to the scheme: customer - performer.

Clerk G.K. Kotoshikhin, who lived in the 17th century and is known for his essay "On Russia in the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich", tells about the system of terror that existed in his time (served in 1658-1664) in relation to church opponents:

... and whom they have (in the courts of the patriarch and church authorities - E. Sh.) For spiritual deeds ... they will condemn to death, who deserved what kind of execution, and they, having written out their verdict from the case, are sent with those convicted people to the royal court, and according to their verdict from the royal court ordered to execute without detention, who is worthy of what.

In the robbery order “they burn the living for blasphemy ... for sorcery, for the black book, for the book transposition, who will teach again to interpret as thieves against the apostles, prophets and St. father with cursing. " “The death penalty for the female sex is: for blasphemy ... the living are burned; for charm ... heads cut off. "

The torture of the accused was also carried out at the request of the spiritual authorities: "When it was necessary to torture someone, the spiritual authorities sent the accused to the secular authorities."

Another specific decree, Mikhail Fedorovich Romanov wrote to the Archbishop of Tobolsk:

And which people in spiritual matters will reach what kind of punishment, and you would have ordered them to be humbled according to the rule of the holy fathers, so that they could be subdued from any lawlessness in advance. And there will be people who in spiritual matters will learn not to be obedient, but will come to great punishment, and you would send them to our boyar and the governors.

Austrian diplomat von Meyerberg (was in Russia in 1661 - 63) reports on the rights of the patriarchs:

... they judge all matters pertaining to the clergy, church obedience and Christian morals, and they never receive a refusal from the tsar to approve these sentences.

Foreigners who visited Moscow during this period talk about the burnings of heretics as eyewitnesses:

Heresy is punished by fire. The heretic goes out onto the roof of a small house and from there jumps into the interior; straw with splinters is thrown on him; the flames will soon suffocate him. This punishment is rather and too severe.

Those who arouse any doubts about the faith are imprisoned in small wooden houses and burned alive and looking out.

Let's go back to the witch hunt. At the beginning of 1653, the governors of Tula, Karpov, Mikhailov, Mosalsk, Oskol, and others received decrees that people “henceforth do not hold on to any godless deeds and those renounced and heretical books, and letters, and conspiracies, and fortune-telling books , and they burned roots and poisons, and did not go to the witches and sorcerers and did not hold on to any witchcraft, and did not bewitched with bones or anything else, and did not spoil people. " Regarding those who “will not leave behind such evil and disgusting deeds, such evil people and enemies of God have been ordered to burn in log cabins without any mercy, and their houses have been ordered to ravage to the ground, so that henceforth such evil people and enemies of God and their evil deeds are nowhere to be found. are remembered. "

Was the church involved in the decrees against the "enemies of God"? It is known that in the XVII century. punishments for witchcraft were considered an ecclesiastical, spiritual matter. On the eve of the appearance of the Decree, in ser. 1652 Nikon became the patriarch, whose influence on secular power was originally unprecedented in Russian history.

In 1654, the troops of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich took Smolensk, which had previously belonged to Poland for some time. The following news of Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo (son of the Antiochian patriarch, was in Russia in 1654) has survived:

After the capture of Smolensk, the tsar (Alexei Mikhailovich) found in it many Jews who hid themselves, disguised as Christians, but the Muscovites recognized them due to their inability to make the sign of the cross. By order of the king, they were all gathered and demanded that they be baptized if they wanted to save their lives; those who believed and were baptized kept their lives, and those who did not want to were put into wooden houses and burned.

Authorship and time of writing are especially interesting here. Consequently, already at the beginning of the second half of the 17th century, the news of the burning of the Gentiles in Russia did not cause surprise in the Orthodox East either. At the same time, the credibility of the message is questionable. Most likely, some rumors reached Archdeacon Paul, at least exaggerated. But the exact description of the method - burning "in a wooden house" (log house), adopted precisely in Russia, shows that the news had a real basis.

In 1658 Nikon fell. The church has gone through a period of anarchy. In 1664, the tough administrator Metropolitan Pavel took the place of the guardian of the most important Moscow diocese. In 1666 - 1667, an ill-fated church council took place, at which the Old Believers, as well as all those who did not obey the church, were anathematized and declared worthy of "corporal" execution:

And if anyone does not listen to those commanded from us and obey the saint eastern church and this consecrated council, or will begin to rebuke and resist us, and we such an enemy given to us by the power ... we betray curse and anathema. … We will punish those like that spiritually: even if they begin to despise our spiritual punishment, we will apply bodily resentment to such punishment.

The peak of religious repression is associated with these two events. A week after Paul's appointment, Habakkuk was arrested and exiled. Military expeditions fell upon the forest shelters of the Old Believers. Since 1666, information about burnings has become regular.

In 1666, the Old Believer preacher Vavila was seized in the Vyaznikovsky forests and after interrogation was burnt. A contemporary monk Serapion wrote with approval: "The godless monk Vavilko was burned for his stupidity." In the same 1666, the hetman of the Moscow part of Ukraine I. M. Bryukhovetsky burned six witches. The following is known about Bryukhovetsky's relations with the Moscow government.

After becoming hetman, B. began to strengthen his position with ties with Moscow. He introduced into his relations with the Moscow government that servility and servility that the Ukrainian hetmans had abstained from until now: in his appeals to the tsar, he wrote himself "Ivashka", the "footboard" of the tsar, etc. Moscow, took the title of boyar, married the Moscow boyarina Saltykova. But the most important thing with which he hoped to buy the entire favor of Moscow and strengthen his position was an offer to the Moscow government, allegedly on behalf of the country ruled by him, for increased interference in its internal life. This proposal was extremely pleasing to Moscow, as it cleared the desired path for its traditional politics. In all big cities Little Russia was now sent Moscow governors with expanded competence and the right to collect taxes. For the purpose of taxation, a population census was organized, which aroused a general murmur. In his servility, B. went so far as to ask for the appointment of a metropolitan from Moscow, which the Moscow government refused.

In the light of the above, it is quite logical that Novombergsky's assertion that the burning of witches, by order of Bryukhovetsky, was the execution of Moscow legislation.

In 1670, a woman, a fugitive nun Alena, was burned. Primary sources provide the following information.

1670, December 6. Letter of the regimental voivode Yu. Dolgorukov to the order of the Kazan Palace on his entry into Temnikov and on the testimony of prisoners:

They brought an old woman to us, your servant, a thief and a heretic, who stole and took the army for herself and stole together with the thieves, and with her they brought thieves' conspiracy letters and roots ... , she is a peasant daughter of the city of Arzamas Vyyezdnye Sloboda, and she was married to a peasant in the same settlement; and how her husband died, and she cut her hair. And she was in many places on theft and spoiled people. And in the current de, sovereign, in the 179th year 1, she came from Arzamas to Temnikov, and took many people with her to steal and steal with them, and stood in Temnikov in the war yard with the chieftain with Fedka Sidorov and taught him witchcraft ... The thief was ordered to the eldress for her theft and with her they ordered the thieves' letters and roots to be burned in the log house.

"A message regarding the details of the mutiny recently carried out in Muscovy by Stenka Razin" (Arkhangelsk, September 13/23 days 1671. On the ship "Queen Esther"):

Among other prisoners, a nun was brought to Prince Yuri Dolgoruky in a man's dress, worn over a monk's attire. The nun had seven thousand men under her command and fought bravely until she was taken prisoner. She did not flinch and did not show any fear when she heard the sentence: to be burned alive. Fleeing from a monastery is considered by the Russians to be a terrible crime punishable by death. Before she died, she wished that more people would be found who would act as they should, and fought as bravely as she, then, probably, Prince Yuri would have turned back. Before her death, she crossed herself in the Russian way: first her forehead, then her chest, calmly ascended the fire and was burned to ashes.

In 1671, the Old Believer Ivan Krasulin was burnt to death in the Pechenga Monastery - eloquently the very place of execution. In the winter of 1671/72. In Moscow, a prominent Old Believer, Abraham, was burned; a little earlier in Moscow, the Old Believer Isaiah ascended the fire.

In 1672 in Astrakhan, voivode Odoevsky burned K. Semyonov, who had a notebook with conspiracies. In general, the executions of the early 70s are easy to associate with the Razin uprising: Alyona and Semyonov took part in the uprising, Abraham and Isaiah led the dangerous Old Believer opposition in Moscow. The union of church and state in the fight against the Razin movement is indisputable - the church has anathematized Razin.

In 1673 Joachim became the patriarch, who was "a proven specialist in" work "with the Old Believers." Characteristic is the role he played in the case of the noblewoman Morozova. A friend of the first wife of Alexei Mikhailovich, a representative of a noble family, she openly made her home the center of the Old Believers in Moscow and for a long time enjoyed immunity from the persecution that reigned around the bacchanalia. It was Joachim - then the archimandrite of the Chudov Monastery - who put an end to the stronghold of the old faith. On the night of November 14, 1671, Joachim with his people came to the house of Morozova and ordered to put the recalcitrant in shackles. Soon she, along with her sister and friend, was transferred to a monastery confinement. All three, despite the persuasion, continued to adhere to the Old Believers. Patriarch Pitirim considered it reasonable to free women: “Women's business; that they know a lot. " Joachim held a different view. At the end of 1674, radical methods of admonition were applied to the stubborn Old Believers: torture on a rack and whip. Not having achieved success, they decided to burn Morozova, but the old Moscow boyars could not stand it and turned to the tsar with a protest - the Morozovs were one of the 16 highest aristocratic families of the Moscow state that had the right to hereditary boyars. In 1675, three noble prisoners were starved to death (while the simple nun Justinia, who was sitting with them, was nevertheless burned to death). The touching details of death have been preserved three women: they begged the guards: "Have mercy on me, give me a kolachik!" The method of execution is again Christian - without the shedding of blood.

Zhenka Fedosya, accused of damage, went to the fire in 1674, in the northern city of Totma. Before the execution, she stated that she did not spoil anyone, she spat on herself without enduring the torture. In 1676, in the village of Sokolskoye, another royal decree ordered to burn Panko and Anoska Lomonosov, who conjured with the help of roots:

The Sokolsk gunner Panke Lomonosov and his wife Anosuke give them a spiritual father and tell them their guilt on a trading day in front of many people, and order them to be executed with death, burned in a log house with roots and grass.

In the same 1676, the Old Believer monk Philip, who had established ties between Avvakum and the centers of schism, was “burned by fire” in Moscow. In 1677, a pop old believer was burned to death in Cherkassk, by order of the ataman of the Don army M. Samarin.

In 1681, the church Council, headed by the patriarch, addressed the tsar with a humble prayer:

We ask and pray conciliarly to the Grand Duke Theodore Alekseevich, All the Great and Small and White Russia Autocrat, who are debauchees and apostates, due to many church teachings and punishment and according to our bishop's petition, their conversion of true repentance will be disgusting, the holy church is disobedient, and such opponents would be pointed out Great Sovereign King and Grand Duke Fyodor Alekseevich, Autocrat of all Great and Small and White Russia, to send to the city court and, according to the Tsar's consideration, who is worthy of what, to issue a decree. And about that to the voivods and clerks, to the cities and villages that are now in the voivodships, to send letters, and henceforth to all the voivods and clerks to write in instructions, so that this matter would be under his sovereign fear in firmness, and to the patrimonials and landowners, and to their clerks, who have such opponents and will, for the same reason, announce in the cities to bishops and governors, and who schismatics will show up where and according to the parcels of bishops become strong; and to them governors and clerks on those schismatics to send service people (that is, soldiers - E. Sh.).

On April 14, 1682, Habakkuk and his three companions in prison were burned to death: Theodore, Epiphanius and Lazarus. In the literature, the motivation for the verdict is often mentioned: “for great blasphemy against the royal house,” but it was taken not from an official document, but from the notes of Count AS Matveyev, written after 1716. It is justly noted that the execution followed the decisions of the Church Council of 1681 - 82, which betrayed the Old Believers to the "city court".

In the writings of Avvakum, a lot of information has been preserved about the burning of Old Believers. Hilarion, the archer, was burnt in Kiev. Polyekt, a priest, was burnt in Borovsk ("and with him 14 people were burnt"). Ivan the Fool was burnt in Kholmogory. "In Kazan, Nikonians burned thirty people, in Siberia the same number, in Vladimir - six, in Borovsk - fourteen people."

Before 1682, Kostomarov had no doubts about the burning of Old Believers before 1682 (the remarks he put into the mouths of the participants in the 1682 Old Believer uprising) - Khovansky: “Don't keep that in your mind, so that they begin to execute you in the old way, hang and burn you in log cabins! " ...

Dispute about faith between Old Believers and Nikonians in Klyuchevsky:

The patriarch answered all the questions: "We bear the image of Christ, and it is not for you, the laity, to teach us!" The schismatic instructor Pavel Danilovich, a Moscow bourgeoisie, in a quiet voice remarked to these self-confident words: "It is true, Vladyka, that you wear the image of Christ and we laymen should be in your obedience, but Christ showed us the image of humility, strength and with his pure lips said:" Look at me, how good and humble I am in heart, "and he did not teach people either with fires or with a sword. And the authorities had nothing to answer to these lessons. "

Patriarch's response:

We torment and burn you for this, that you call us heretics and do not obey the churches.

At the beginning of 1682, in addition, a decree appeared on the creation of the Slavic-Greek Academy, which prescribed burnings for many types of religious crimes:

From different faiths and heresies to our Orthodox Eastern faith, those who come and accept it, write them all into the books and give them to the guardian of schools with teachers, so that they can observe them in keeping our Orthodox faith and church traditions, and who of them will transmit their life in it, and whether it is strong and whole, and it contains church traditions, they had news. If any of the newly enlightened ones do not fully preserve our Orthodox faith and church traditions will appear, and such will be sent to our distant cities, to the Terek and Siberia. If anyone appears in keeping with his old faith or heresy, from it he came to the Orthodox faith, and our faith in blasphemy, and such may be burned without any mercy (paragraph 13).

And about this, their guardian with teachers should try to keep the hedgehog of every rank for spiritual and worldly people, magic and sorcerous and fortune-telling and all sorts of forbidden and blasphemous and God-hating books and scriptures from the church, and do not keep very much from them and do not act on them, and other things. do not teach. And they have such books or scriptures nowadays, and these books and writings are burned, and they would not keep any sorceries and sorceries and fortune-telling in the future. Likewise, unlearned people of free teachings to no one Polish, and Latin, and German, and Luther, and Calvin, and other heretical books in their homes do not keep them, for lack of content reasoning and for the sake of our faith in doubt, do not read, and nowhere None of these heretical books and their Eastern Orthodox faith and church traditions have any contrary interpretations of competitions and do not falsify; There is no custom for the preachers, as if they, forgering such forgeries, verbalize, hedgehog they do it not for the sake of faith and church legends of doubt, but for the rank of a scientific competition (in the order of a scientific dispute - E. Sh.). And such books are heretical burned or brought to the guardian of schools and teachers. If anyone is disgusted with this our royal command, and from now on, someone will start from the spiritual and worldly of every rank of people, magic and sorcerous and fortune-telling and all sorts of forbidden and blasphemous and God-hating books and writings from the church in any way to keep and act according to them, and teach others to do this, either without writing such God-hating deeds to do, or to boast of such evil deeds, that he is powerful in doing such, and such a person, for reliable testimony, without any mercy, may be burned. If anyone is unskilful of free teachings to have Polish, and Latin, and German, and Lutherian, and Kalvin, and other heretical books in his house, have, and read them, and from books, have a competition, and forgeries to question our Eastern faith and church traditions podlagati; and such to be executed, depending on their fault, mercilessly (paragraph 14).

If anyone from foreigners and Russian people at a feast, or in any other place, whatever the place, with worthy witnesses, our Orthodox Christian faith or church traditions blaspheme and reproach what words they say about it, and give such to the court in this matter to the guardian of the schools with teachers. And if anyone in the blasphemy of our faith, or church traditions in reproachful words, according to the judgment, appears, or in denial of calling the saints for help, and holy icons of worship and the relics of saints of veneration, will be exposed, and such one will be burned without any mercy (paragraph 15).

So, the decree on the creation of the Academy summarized all the previous laws on the burning of apostates, holders of heretical books, blasphemers.

At the beginning of 1682 in Moscow, Marfushka Yakovleva was burned, convicted of causing damage to Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich. The preservation of the archives makes it impossible to determine the exact number of those executed in the 17th century. A pre-revolutionary researcher who studied the history of exile to Siberia at that time wrote:

In Yeniseisk, I was supposed to look at the old papers of the local archive, but unfortunately I learned that the ancient columns and other documents after two fires all, without exception, burned down.

Since the burnt ancient documents were placed in the Yenisei Rozhdestvensky Monastery, I decided to inspect this monastery, with the thought that if there were any written and oral traditions... My guess was in some way justified; In the monastery I met a remarkable person - this is the abbess of the monastery, Abbess Devorra. According to Devorra, there was an extensive prison in the prison walls of Yeniseisk ... and a special prison section with iron bars was set up in the monastery for the placement of female criminals ... in the Ostroh Yenisei prison there were a lot of those who were exiled to eternal imprisonment for wickedness. There was a special court for executions and, by the way, it remains in the legend that here several people were burned at the stake, convicted of acquaintance with evil spirits.

The Old Believer doctrine of "fiery death", which led to the death of several thousand adherents of "ancient piety", does not have a specific place of origin. It is known that the ideological predecessors of the self-burners were the "morillers" - preachers and participants in mass suicide by starvation, who operated in the 1660s. in the Vologda, Kostroma, Murom and Suzdal forests. They "locked themselves in huts or burrows to avoid the temptation to save their lives, and there they kept complete fasting until their last gasp." The initiative received massive support among the opponents of the Nikon church reforms, and the practice of voluntary death by starvation gradually transformed into self-immolation. The spread of eschatological sentiments at the end of the XVII - early XVIII v. led to the fact that the preaching of self-immolation, identified with immersion in a purifying apocalyptic flame, found a response in the hearts of many Orthodox people.

The theological discussion of the Old Believers about the "fiery death" developed against the background of the mass self-immolations that had begun. The first small self-immolations took place almost simultaneously in a number of localities of the country. So, "small" Senka in 1666 informed the Nizhny Novgorod governor I.S. Prozorovsky, that "in the Nizhny Novgorod district the blacks, when the archers came, locked themselves in their cells, lit them and burned them down." In March of the same year, a certain S.A. Zubov wrote from Vologda to Moscow that the first self-immolation took place here too: “Four people, putting hay and sklav into the hut and shutting themselves up, lit themselves from the inside and burned down; Yes, seven people, hiding from the people, left the village at night in the field and sat in the dekhtyar log house, and lit themselves, and in that log house they burned» .

In 1675, the first mass self-immolations began on the Volga: Old Believer materials speak of "The burns that took place at that time and number up to 2 thousand voluntarily burned down in the region of Nizhny Novgorod, especially along the Kudma River"... In the 1670s-1680s. Poshekhonye, ​​one of the most backward territories of the then Russian state, where, perhaps, not only local residents, but also Muscovites, who took the sermon of "fiery death" to heart, were going to burn, became the center of the spread of burns. Information about the number of those killed in this territory in the first "burnt out" is different: from four to five thousand to 1,920 people. The Arzamas district could also lay claim to the ominous primacy: here significant "burning" began in 1675 and continued until 1678.

Since the Volga elder Kapiton became one of the most notable mentors of the Old Believers-suicides, the doctrine of “fiery death” was called “capitonism” in Russia. Only at first, at the beginning of Nikon's church reforms, Kapiton preached other methods of death. His supporters were accused of "putting the living in a coffin", locking people in cells and starving people. In the future, it was self-immolation that became the favorite method of suicide among the opponents of Nikon's "novins". So, in the petition of the peasants of the Cherevkovskaya volost of the Ustyug district, dated 1690, it was indicated that in their volost "peasants" were burned "in kapidonstvo". Thus, from the south of Russia the doctrine of self-immolation, in the words of the Old Believer author, "fiercely flowed" up the Volga and spread throughout the European North. The rapid spread of "self-destructive death" over a large territory was facilitated by the support of Archpriest Avvakum and a number of other radical leaders of the church schism.

In the last decade of the 17th century. the first wave of self-immolations swept across the European North of Russia. In the Novgorod Territory, the first self-immolation took place on the night of March 9-10, 1682 in the village. Fedovo, Novo-Torzhsky district; killed about fifty people, led by a local priest. The alarmed authorities sent a bailiff to the village to "stop the further spread of self-incinerations." But that was expected by a decisive rebuff: "the local peasants hid the priest and almost killed the bailiff himself."

The tragic series of major self-immolations began with the "gari" in the Kargopol district, in Dorah... This was followed by the largest mass suicides in the history of the Old Believers - Paleostrovskaya in 1687 and 1688 (in which, according to legend, up to four thousand people died) and Pudozhskaya in 1693 (more than a thousand people).

Soon a wave of self-immolations reached Siberia: on October 24, 1687, there was a mass self-immolation in the Tyumen district, which claimed about 300 lives. In the same year, about 100 people died in the fire in Verkhotursky district. In 1688, about 50 people voluntarily burnt themselves in their homes in the Tobolsk district. However, the self-immolations here soon stopped for half a century, and the next took place in 1751, when new fanatical leaders were found.

In the European North, the series of self-immolations did not interrupt throughout the last quarter of the 17th and the entire 18th century. And recurrences of self-immolations happened until the middle of the 19th century. The last self-immolation of the Old Believers, which took place in 1860 in the Kargopol district of the Olonets province, claimed 14 lives.

In some areas of the North, self-immolation was repeated regularly. So, from 1690 to 1753 in the Upper Podvinye there were 8 mass self-immolations, in which 611 people died. In Pomorie, the idea of ​​"fiery death" found support among very influential and educated preachers - former Solovetsky monks who miraculously escaped merciless reprisals after the capture of the "honest monastery" by the tsarist troops. In the Solovetsky Monastery during the uprising of 1667-1676. the ideal of suffering became very popular, and during the rebellion there was a transition from the idea of ​​"passive suffering and non-resistance to violence" to practice "Armed struggle against the servants of the Antichrist"... Gradually, the ideas of voluntary suffering and resistance to power merged together in the doctrine of self-immolation, supported by the Solovetsky monks.

Protopop Avvakum assured his disciples that “in the next world” the Solovetsky monks were punishing Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich for storming an Orthodox shrine and for their own suffering, "Sawing his body and subjecting it to other tortures"... But even “in this world” the participation of the Solovetsky monks in the struggle against the ruling church in general, and in the organization of self-immolations in particular, remained active. To a large extent, this circumstance influenced the further spread of the doctrine of "self-destructive death". He was the first to draw attention to this pattern at the end of the 17th century. Old Believer writer Semyon Denisov in "The Tale of the Siege of the Solovetsky Monastery." So, the self-immolation in 1693 in the village of Strokina Pudozh volost was led by the former Solovetsky monk Joseph Sukhoi. He himself was killed during a squabble with the persecutors: "from the soldiers, denouncing the new things, they were shot with a bullet." But his decisive supporters nevertheless brought to the end the work started by the mentor: "you died by fire, in number as many as a thousand two hundred souls." Ignatius Solovetsky became even more famous: he became a mentor to the Old Believers who seized the Paleostrovsky Monastery in 1687 and committed self-immolation within its walls. Here, according to the Old Believer author, 2,700 people died. In the same year, another Solovetsky monk immortalized his name - "the most honorable deacon and reverent monk" Herman Korovka, who organized the self-immolation in the village of Berezov Navolok.

After the death of most of the Solovetsky monks and their followers, self-immolation continued for some time in accordance with the tradition consecrated by the death of prominent Old Believer preachers and their followers “for ancient piety”.

During the reign of Peter I, a turning point occurred in the spread of "self-destructive death" for which, according to D.I. Sapozhnikov, "A gradual but slow disappearance of this fanaticism from the historical scene should have followed"... But a new phenomenon prevented the complete eradication of self-immolations. Since the 1740s. at the head of the self-incinerators were representatives of the Filipian persuasion, one of the most radical in the Old Believers. They refused to pray for the emperor, limited their followers' contacts with the outside world, and were always ready for self-immolation. The mentor of the Philippians, Elder Philip, "with the prochim", died in the fire of self-immolation organized by him in mid XVIII c., by personal example inspiring their followers to new suicides. The influence of the Philippians persisted throughout the entire 18th century. on the territory of the Russian North, up to the Urals, where the "burning" took place. The fact that some Siberian self-immolations in the 18th century. were headed by Filippovites, indicates, in particular, Academician N.N. Pokrovsky. Yet their influence was inferior to the unlimited authority of the Solovetsky monks. After all, the Filippovites were opposed by other Old Believers' beliefs: the Danilovites, the Fedoseevites, the Aristovites.

A kind of "self-destructive death" relay race created the preconditions for both the continuous spread of self-immolations throughout the territory of Russia, and for more and more "burns" in those areas where they had taken place before. Until the end of the 18th century, according to D.I. Sapozhnikov, 32 self-immolations occurred in Tobolsk province, up to 35 in Olonets, 11 in Arkhangelsk, up to 10 in Vologda, 8 in Novgorod, 4 in Yaroslavl, 1 in Nizhny Novgorod, Penza and Yenisei - 1 each, and in total - 103 self-immolation.

A general trend in the development of self-immolations has become a gradual reduction in the number of their participants. For the 18th century, as N.N. Pokrovsky, " were not characterized by grandiose burning, each of which carried away in the XVII century. thousand lives "... The most detailed source of information on this issue is the Old Believer Synodikon (a list of the dead, compiled for commemoration), containing references to 45 Old Believer self-immolations that took place in different time in Russia. The first self-immolations at the end of the 17th century. became the most ambitious in history: they claimed the lives of 8,416 people. Further, a downward trend was clearly indicated: in the next 15 "burns", 1,537 people died. And, finally, the most recent mass suicides of the late 18th - 19th centuries. led to the death of 149 people.

Sources allow us to judge another feature of the statistical recording of self-immolations. Information about small, including family, self-immolations was much less likely to penetrate the office work of the authorities, and, therefore, this type of information about mass suicides remains unavailable. The fact that this kind of "burning" took place is evidenced by fragmentary data. These include, for example, the census book of the Arzamas district, dated 1678. The reasons for the desolation of the courtyards in the villages of Kovaksa, Solyanaya Gora and the village of Strakhovo are explained in it as follows: “The courtyard is empty Fofank Andreev, and he, Fofanko with his children, burned down on the barn in 186, but his wife will die. " Or: "The yard is empty Antropka Vasilyev, and he, Ontropko, gathered together in a barn with his wife and children with demonic charm in 183," and so on. A total of 8 peasant households, desolate from burning, are named.

Weakening of eschatological sentiments at the end of the 18th century. led to the cessation of mass suicides. It is likely that by this time almost all more or less radical Old Believers - supporters of the "fiery death", had died in the fire of self-immolations. However, the organization of self-immolations remained throughout the 18th century. the main charge that the authorities brought against the Old Believers. These accusations were not least related to the fact that mass suicides took place in the outlying, already sparsely populated territories and, thus, damaged state interests.

The localization of self-immolations, at first glance, seems paradoxical: residents of those provinces participated in mass suicides where pressure on the Old Believers was not very intense. The explanation for this should be sought, firstly, in the greatest spread of the influence of the Old Believers in the very territory where the repressions remained less noticeable. Secondly, in the effect of the “last drop”: these lands became the last limit where an adherent of “ancient piety” could hide from the “servants of the Antichrist”. After that, again being persecuted, he found only one salvation - fire.

The idea of ​​self-destruction took shape in the Old Believers in the first years of its existence. Initially, suicide was committed by self-mortification with hunger, then they moved on to self-drowning, self-immolation and self-immolation. Other methods of death (self-burial, self-suffocation with smoke in a cave, detonation with a powder charge and alternate chopping off of the heads of all those gathered) did not become widespread. Sources suggest that self-drowning occurred in cases where there was no possibility of organizing self-immolation. So, in 1752, the wife of the peasant Stepan Kudryavtsev, who converted from the “split” to Orthodoxy, frightened by the local churchmen, who insisted that she would be “taken to prison for the split,” “deliberately hollowed out a large hole in the lake and went down under the ice with children, including 7 people ". On the contrary, “gari” were no exception: they became widespread. While the victims of self-immolation numbered in the thousands, only a few resorted to self-immolation.

The choice of the time and place for suicide is quite amenable to logical explanation. Of course, the primary role here was played by success in gathering supporters, the timely completion of the suicide rituals (confession and re-baptism according to the Old Believer rules) and the preparation of the reserves necessary for "burning". But religious motivations are no less important. Self-immolations often took place on the eve of church holidays (for example, Easter). In the Paleostrovsky Monastery, self-immolation took place "of holy and great Lent of the fourth week, worshiping the cross, on the heel of the night."

It would be quite logical to assume that all the previous lengthy rituals were calculated so that self-immolation fell on holidays. From the point of view of a religious person, this is quite understandable. First, in the popular mind, the holiday was associated with a transition to a new quality, reincarnation. Death on such days was considered honorable. For example, among the Ust-Tsilma Old Believers it was considered a blessing to die on the day of Holy Easter, "since on this day the Lord calls to Himself only the most devoted to the faith." Thus, the choice of the time for self-immolation fully corresponded to the traditional ideas about birth, baptism, death and resurrection as manifestations of the all-renewing cycle in nature and human life.

Second, perhaps a more rational, secularized, psychological explanation for the timing of mass suicide. Assessing the tragic consequences of Nikon's reforms, the famous psychiatrist I.A. Sikorsky argued: “The division of the Russian people into Old Believers and Orthodox Christians does not remain without serious psychological consequences, it is capable of shaking the mood of the masses, especially in the midst of exceptional events. Success and uplifting in some may cause opposite feelings in others. " It is likely that this circumstance was taken into account by the Old Believer mentors, for whom it was much easier to push their supporters to commit suicide precisely during the jubilation of the Orthodox - adherents of the "Nikonian" church.

Sources also make it possible to clarify what principles the Old Believer mentors were guided by when choosing a place for "burning". In fact, it was not at all an easy task. On the one hand, the place of self-immolation was most often selected remote places, remote from the settlements, where special buildings were erected, called "burnt houses" in investigative documents. On the other hand, sometimes monasteries connected to the outside world by water or land routes were chosen as places of mass suicide. Finally, sporadic evidence shows that self-immolations could have taken place in places of memory for Old Believers. So, the Paleostrovsky Nativity Monastery "attracted these terrible and stupid drivers to burn out, because according to the Old Believer legend, it was here, by order of Patriarch Nikon, that the first martyr for the old faith, Bishop Pavel Kolomensky, was killed or burned."

In rare cases, self-immolation took place directly in the settlement, in the village, in front of many amazed spectators.

In cities, self-immolation has never been committed. This was also pointed out by the authors of the Complaint: "Gradsk life does not do this at all", not only do they not burn themselves, but also "heartily sigh and constantly pray to God that the Lord of self-immolation would satisfy the rebellion and be sober by reasoning Euangelic truth." This pattern persisted in the 18th century. In reality, this behavior of the townspeople is explained, on the one hand, by the great rationalism of urban life, and, on the other hand, by the great possibilities of control over the life of an individual in an urban environment.

Quite often, Old Believer settlements became the place of self-immolation. At the end of the XVII - the first half of the XVIII century. the ghost of "fiery death" constantly hovered over the Old Believer communities. The emergence of any danger inevitably led to a discussion of whether or not the moment had come when, “as if in some coolness,” it was time to enter the fire. So, when the commission approached O.T. Kvashnin-Samarin (in 1731) " the best people in a hostel (Vygovsky. - M. P.) start thinking what to do, ovi and prepare for the suffering of the verb, as the former fathers in the Paleostrovsky monastery were burned by fire. " Those who did not want to “suffer,” “fled, and they won’t get into their hands, who still want to live, but the best people started to reason about this from the Scriptures and hinder that there’s nothing to suffer for.” Moods provoking self-immolation quickly spread in the settlements adjacent to the Vygov community: “... And I reported to Samarin that several people were burnt, and news came to the monastery from Leksa that they all wanted to burn,” says the Vygov historian Ivan Filippov.

It is quite possible that the long evolution of the Old Believers led to the fact that only at the first stages of its existence self-immolation was a response to persecution, and later, after the end of persecution (during the reign of Catherine II), the emergence of rich and populous Old Believers "communities", weakening eschatological sentiments the motives for self-immolation have changed. In particular, in the self-immolations, a protest gradually began to appear not only against the "world of Antichrist", but also against those Old Believers who abandoned their radical views. In addition, it is likely that in different regions of Russia there were different, albeit united by a common eschatological content, points of view of the Old Believers themselves on such a radical form of rejection of the outside world. Finally, representatives of different Old Believers' denominations, even in the same territory, could react differently to events and choose the moment for self-immolation, guided by their own criteria.

In the choice of the method of suicide, certain patterns are also manifested. As mentioned above, initially the Old Believers preferred death from hunger and drowning to “fiery death”. At the end of the 18th century, when self-immolation had almost completely ceased, self-drowning and self-burial began to come to the fore. So, judging by the decree of the Yalutorovsk office, in 1782 ten peasants, "at the seduction of a false teacher", drowned themselves in Lake Sazykul.

Thus, the spread of the Old Believer doctrine of "fiery death" obeyed certain patterns associated with the continuity of radical sentiments between the Old Believers' mentors - former Solovetsky monks, Vygov "hostels" of the early period of the desert and the Philippians, who separated from other Old Believers precisely because of their adherence to extreme forms of confrontation. "To the world of Antichrist."

Acts of the Kholmogory and Ustyug dioceses // Russian Historical Library. T. 12. SPb., 1894. Stlb. 1000-1002.

Yukhimenko E.M... Kargopol "burns" 1683-1684 (To the problem of self-immolation in the Russian Old Believers) // Old Believers in Russia (XVII – XVIII centuries). M., 1994.S. 64.

Shashkov A.T. Self-immolation as a form of social protest of peasants-Old Believers of the Urals and Siberia in the late 17th - early 18th centuries. // Traditional spiritual and material culture of Russian Old Believer settlements in Europe, Asia and America. Novosibirsk, 1992.S. 297.

Syrtsov I... Self-immolation of Siberian Old Believers in the 17th and 18th centuries // Tobolsk Diocesan Bulletin. 1887. No. 13-14. P. 295.

One of the underdeveloped issues in the history of the Russian Schism is the phenomenon of Old Believer self-immolations that swept across Russia in the second half of the 17th - 18th centuries. Self-immolation, or as they were otherwise called - burning, was practiced by adherents of the old faith, who disagreed with the church reform of Patriarch Nikon. Initially, the Old Believers tried to hide from the official Orthodox Church and government authorities in remote places on the outskirts of the country: the Russian North, the Urals, Siberia. Here they tried to establish their way of life: they built hermitages, were engaged in farming. Military teams were sent in search of them. When such a team found a secret refuge, the Old Believers preferred to burn themselves with the elderly, women, including pregnant women, and children, including babies. They gathered in the largest room of the hermitage, which was filled with straw, wood and other combustible materials inside and out, locked up and set on fire in front of the military team that opened their secret hideout.
A brief chronicle of Russian, including Altai, fires is as follows. According to Old Believer authors, the first burns occurred in 1676-1683. They began in the Volga region, then their geography began to quickly spread to the North-West: to Onega and the White Sea and to the east, to the Ural-Siberian region. Large burns in the European part of the country took place in the Kargopol district in 1687-1688, in which about 4000 people were burned. In total, according to the encyclopedic dictionary "Old Believers", in Russia until 1690, about 20,000 people died in burnt-out areas. In 1693, about 1000 people were burnt in the Pudozh fire. Self-immolations took on such a wide character that even Old Believer authors pointed out that the adherents of the old faith were engulfed in a whole epidemic of self-destruction.
The first news of burning in Siberia dates back to January 6, 1679. It happened on the river. Berezovka in the Tobolsk district near the city of Tyumen. On this day, the schismatics were burnt, who took refuge in the Old Believer desert of Elder Danila (in the world of Domentian). In the Berezovskaya fire, according to various sources, from 300 to 1700 people burned down. Less than a month later, another burnt out occurred, also near Tyumen: on February 4, 1679, Old Believers of different classes: peasants, dragoons, Cossacks gathered in the yard of the dragoon K. Avramov and. despite the persuasion of the local clerk, they obeyed the deacon I. Fedorov, who called for self-immolation, and everyone was burnt. In October 1722 about 400 peasants-Old Believers were burnt on the river. Pyshma is again near Tyumen. Several large burns were recorded by the authorities near Tomsk. One of them took place on July 2, 1725 in the village. Morozovo, Vertsky prison, when 147 people burned down in the fire.
In Altai, the first and largest burnout took place in 1725 in the Elunskaya Pustyn, which was headed by Ivan Semyonov, a leader of the Vygovski Center of the Bespopovites. In July 1739, about 300 hundred peasants committed self-immolation near the village. New Shadrino on the territory of the modern Kosikhinsky district of the Altai Territory. In 1742, self-immolation took place in the Altai village. Lepekhino, Beloyarskaya Sloboda. In 1746 - 1747 fires swept through the villages of the Steppe Altai (modern Shipunovsky district). In the Ust-Charysh village, the self-immolation was led by the Old Believer mentor I. Zakurdaev.
In the Christian understanding, suicide, and self-immolation has always been interpreted by the Russian Orthodox Church only in this way, is not just a mortal sin, but the only sin in which it is impossible to repent, therefore, to receive from God forgiveness and salvation of the soul. It is no coincidence that in Christian funeral practice, suicides were never buried or buried in a cemetery. Christianity views suicide as depriving oneself of one way or another of life. The reasons for the phenomenon of self-immolation in Russian history it is necessary to look for in the religious ideology of several generations of Old Believers in the 17th - 18th centuries, in the essence of the confrontation between the Schism and state power, and in the attitude of the Old Believers to self-immolation as the path they chose to achieve salvation.
As for the Old Believer ideology, since the second half of the 17th century. was completely eschatological. The schismatics sincerely believed that after Nikon's church reforms, the last times had come. Confident that they were experiencing the real end of color, the leaders of the Schism and the schism teacher openly denounced as the Antichrist, first Patriarch Nikon, then Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, then Emperor Peter I. They were characterized by the understanding that the last times had already come: the Antichrist reigned as in the church and in society. In recent times, it was supposed to hide and hide from the Antichrist and his servants, which the schismatic-bespopovtsy did almost until the end of the 18th century, hiding in remote places of the country. Therefore, if the authorities managed to find the Old Believers in their secret sketes, then they preferred death in fire - the "fire-burning communion" to the violent return to the world of the Antichrist.
The harsh struggle of the state is partly due to the extreme stubbornness of the Old Believers, easily reaching fanaticism. The tough government policy in relation to the Old Believers met with the fiercest resistance on his part. In the society of bespopovtsy, burning - self-immolation was considered a martyr's death in a fire, to which many Old Believers voluntarily went so as not to fall into the "hands of the Antichrist." In the Old Believer literature, which condemns the self-immolation of the past, the emphasis is still made on the fact that the scars were preceded by numerous executions of the leaders and the most implacable schismatics by being burned in a log house. Old Believer authors emphasize that the fact that the official church and government used to intimidate the adherents of the old faith in the form of a special punitive execution according to the Twelve Articles of Princess Sophia, they began to be perceived as a Christian feat. But at the same time, it should be noted that in the Old Believers themselves there was a movement of protest against the practice of self-immolation at the same time. Thus, since 1680, the monk Araamy of Hungary actively opposed the schismatic self-immolations in the Tobolsk region. The Pomor elders opposed the practice of burning, who wrote an interesting document "Complainant", in which self-immolation was unconditionally condemned. In 1691, Elder Euphrosynus's accusatory treatise "A Reflective Scripture about the Newly Invented Way of Suicidal Death" appeared. Then the correspondence council of priests, held by correspondence in 1691, condemned the self-immolators. During the Samarin commission in the 40s. XVIII century the inhabitants of the Vygov community wanted to commit self-immolation, but then they reasoned that such "arbitrary suffering" could not be "salutary." However, defeating the epidemic of self-destruction was not easy. Even Old Believer authors recognize the fact described in the works of N.N. Pokrovsky and other Soviet historians that among the bespopovtsy there were professional organizers of self-immolations, who several times left the fire of the burnt places unharmed in order to summon the people again in a new place for the fiery communion. True, according to their understanding, they were guided by a good goal: to save as many Christian souls as possible from the "clutches of antichrist servants" - military teams sent to search for fugitive schismatics. As a result, the entire XVIII century. was filled with self-immolations of Old Believers.
Another aspect of the problem concerned the ways of leaving life. In the Old Believers' protest practice against the world of Antichrist, there were two types: self-mortification with hunger and self-immolation. The first method in the Old Believer protest practice was not widely used, in contrast to self-immolation. It should be noted that the Old Believers tried to some extent to avoid punishment in the afterlife for the sin of suicide, therefore, when committing a fire, they tried to observe the following rules. In order to distance themselves as much as possible from what they were doing, and not to set fire to themselves, they put a lighted candle on the bolt of the room closed from the inside, piled heaps of straw on the floor, when the soldiers broke down the door, then the candle fell on the straw, which covered the entire building with fire ...
The next aspect was the attitude of the schismatics to fire. The common properties and uses of fire by humans are well known. But in the Old Testament tradition and the New Testament, too, fire is often combined with the manifestation of God, as, for example, at Sinai, in Psalm 17 and in other books of the Old and New Testaments. The special nature of fire is mentioned in the books of the Old Testament: Genesis and Exodus. In Old Testament times, fire descended from God and devoured the prepared sacrifice. He descended from heaven at the consecration of the Tabernacle, and by God's command it could not be extinguished. The New Testament Epistle to the Solunians said that Jesus Christ in the second coming would appear in blazing fire. The descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost on the apostles happened in the form of tongues of fire. The phenomenon of Kuviklia is known all over the world. New Testament literature states that the last thing fire will be the end of the world. In books Holy Scripture the word "fire" was often used as a metaphor to denote a great loss or grievous trial.
About the Old Believers, we can say that they more often read the Old Testament, which spoke about the purifying functions of fire, and fire as a way of making a purifying sacrifice than the New. For the schismatics, who stood on the basis of the biblical tradition of interpreting the end of the world, self-immolation was not a mass suicide, but the only salvation from the power of the Antichrist, moreover, they all sacredly believed that by their martyrdom they deserve the forgiveness of all their earthly sins, after which they fall into the "kingdom of heaven." Some Old Believer scholars supported the idea of ​​self-immolation with the authority of Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, who interpreted the miracle of three youths saved from the "cave" of King Nebuchadnezzar, as follows, Ananias, Azarias and Misail "through their adventure prophetically showed the burning of the righteous at the end." The Old Believer Elder Sergius in 1722 argued that "it is truly impossible, so that we do not burn," for he did not see any other way out of salvation from the Antichrist who reigned in the world. The Old Believer historian I. Filippov wrote: this fiery suffering is for the sake of our weakness. " The remembrance of "those who were burned for the sake of piety" was included in the unpopular Synodikon.
Subsequently, the attitude of the Old Believers to self-immolation began to change. According to the Old Believers' encyclopedic dictionary, the causes of self-immolations were rooted in the teachings of extreme religious fanatics about the coming of the Antichrist into the world. But, trying to understand such fanatics, Old Believer authors assess the second half of the 17th century. as a situation of horror and despair that gripped many schismatics. It is no coincidence that they compare what happened in Russia in the 17th - first quarter of the 18th centuries. with the times of the Roman Empire, when persecuted Christians also expected the imminent end of the world, mistaking Nero for the Antichrist. But the understanding of the arrival of the Antichrist in this world turned into an irreparable tragedy for the Bezopovites.
As for Gorny Altai, no burns were recorded on its territory. Reasons for the absence of self-immolations in the mountainous region of the south Western Siberia were as follows. At first, the Old Believers' society consisted of fugitive schismatics who reliably hid in the gorges behind the mountain ranges. Later, with the acceptance of the fugitive Old Believers into Russian citizenship in 1791, a model of the relationship of Old Believers of various persuasions with the state authorities developed here. In addition, among the Bezpopovites at the end of the 18th century, since the end of the world did not come, the doctrine of the "mental Antichrist" was formed, who long ago reigned in the world and rules it invisibly. The idea of ​​flight and the attitude towards self-immolation have changed accordingly. Now it was necessary to leave not from the world as such, but from the sin that was hidden in it. Hence, the main meaning for the Altai Old Believers was the preservation of the old faith and the traditional preservation of the way of life, identified with true Orthodoxy.

Mukaeva Larisa Nikolaevna,
Gorno-Altai State University,
assistant professor
Department of Russian History
Candidate of Historical Sciences,
Gorno-Altaysk, Russia

List of sources used
Old Believers. Persons, objects, events and symbols. Experience of the encyclopedic dictionary. M. Church, 1996.S. 249.
In the same place. P. 250.
Starukhin N. Siberia on the paths of fidelity to ancient Orthodoxy (17th century - 1st half of the 18th century) // Starover. Gorno-Altaysk. 1994. July. P. 43.
Pokrovsky N.N., Aleksandrov V.A. Power and society. Siberia in the 17th century Novosibirsk. 1991.
Starukhin N. Decree. op. ... p. 44.
In the same place. P. 45.
Complete Orthodox Theological encyclopedic Dictionary... T. II. M., 1992.S. 1999.
Mukaeva L.N. The Secret of the Split // Eurasians. Gorno-Altaysk. - 5. 2009.S. 27 - 28.
Old Believers. ... p. 249.
In the same place. P. 250.
In the same place.
Complete Orthodox Theological Encyclopedic Dictionary. S. 2000.
Old Believers. ... p. 250.

Old Believer self-immolations have become the subject of research by Russian specialists since the middle of the 19th century. The problems of the spread of "fires" across the territory of Russia, as well as the ideological foundations of the preaching of "fiery death", were studied most thoroughly. Much less attention is paid to the consequences of self-immolations, including the preservation of the memory of those who perished in the name of the old faith. This article examines the main folklore stories associated with ritual suicide in the Old Believer environment. It is known that when organizing self-immolations, the Old Believers had to overcome the decisive prohibition on suicide contained in popular beliefs. According to the information collected by D.K. Zelenin, “the people believe that the soul of a suicide roams the earth and scares people. To prevent this, an aspen stake is driven into the grave. " Among the peasants of the Vladimir province. it was considered a sin "even to remember the suicides with a prayer", and the family prayed for them in secret. Other peoples of Russia had their own similar prohibitions. Thus, the Udmurts tried to get rid of the bodies of the suicides "as quickly as possible." Their bodies "were not even brought into the hut, they were kept in a hole dug in the courtyard or outside the outskirts." For a long time, among the northern Komi Old Believers, there were explicit prohibitions on the commemoration of suicides.

Popular ideas about the posthumous fate of suicides were actively used in the Old Believer polemics about the admissibility of "burns". Those Old Believers who were opponents of self-immolation, relying on popular ideas about suicides, identified the burned out with evil spirits, dangerous mythical inhabitants of the underwater world. So, in the work of the Old Believer publicist Euphrosynus, a description of the amazing adventures of "a certain youth" is given. The guy went to the river to water his cattle, but suddenly a supernatural force invaded his daily work. Suddenly, "a man is black out of the water" and carried the lad into the abyss. The parents searched in vain for him for two days ("two days of lavishness"). All this time the lad was in a river pool. The picture of the underwater residence of the self-incinerators is clearly caricatured: "and the sight of that man, sitting in different places, weaving bast shoes, otherwise creative, all the same silent and no one verbs anything." But soon "by the will of God" the guy got rid of the power of the spirit - "master" of the underwater world and returned safely. He asked his wise parents about the strange inhabitants of the underwater world and understood who he had to deal with: "as if they are the essence, who burned them for themselves." In the Lopsky churchyards (in the north of Karelia), according to the testimony of the same author, the local residents who survived the self-immolation “heard a terrible cry in the place where they burned it for themselves, and a terrible cry, even up to fourty days similar to everyone who hears, fear and horror, and sorrow I do not a little for everyone. "

The place of death in the name of the old faith in the European North of Russia endowed the people's memory with the same supernatural features. So, in the Ust-Tsilemskiy krai (now - on the territory of the Komi Republic) the place of self-immolation of Old Believers even in the twentieth century. was considered dangerous among hunters. Here, in their opinion, sometimes "a woman in a red scarf comes out of the stone and frightens the hunters." She can even "take people to the forest and leave them there forever." At the same time, local Old Believers worship this stone. They attributed its appearance to the intervention of supernatural forces. God turned the soul of the burnt maiden into a bird and sent it to paradise, and turned the body into stone, as a memory of the dead Old Believers. Thus, in the popular consciousness, as I. Paperno notes, the central role was played not by the "Christian concept of mortal sin", but "the sense of danger associated in the pagan consciousness with suicides as people who died an unnatural or wrong death."

At this point, attention should be paid to two circumstances. Firstly, in modern ethnographic works, the opposition of ancestors ("parents") and unclean ("pledged") deceased is viewed as "not so harsh", "a pledged deceased could become a saint." Perhaps the fear of the Ust-Tsilma hunters before the place of self-immolation "was dictated by the idea of ​​the sanctity of the land," where they once perished in the name of faith and where profane, everyday activities were now prohibited. Secondly, popular ideas about suicides receded into the background before the doctrine of the coming of the Antichrist and reliable ways to get rid of his power. Spiritual verses, written down in the 19th century, but which apparently existed earlier, openly called the people to self-immolation:

Do not give up, you my lights,

To that snake the sediglava.

You run to the mountains, to the nativity scenes,

Make big fires there,

Put in them combustible sulfur,

You will burn your bodies.

Suffer for me, my lights,

For my faith in Christ:

I am for you, my lights,

I will open the heavenly room,

And I will bring you into the kingdom of heaven,

And I myself will live with you forever.

Sometimes the locals identified the self-immolations burnt in the flames with beautiful birds rushing straight into the Kingdom of Heaven. So, among the inhabitants of the village. Verkhovskaya (p. Pizhma, Komi Republic) the following legend is still widespread: “There was a double-storey skete on Pizhma, and somehow a shpienka came from Moscow”. She set fire to the lower floor of the skete and disappeared. "And the wanderers prayed, dek their souls with doves and white swans flew to heaven." In the legend, an unknown woman is blamed for the death of the "wanderers". Thus, in the popular memory, an attempt has been made to reconcile the veneration of self-immolators and the Christian (as well as the common people) idea of ​​the sinfulness of suicide.

The positive memory of self-immolations, the veneration of self-immolators as martyrs who suffered for piety, is found in folklore texts. Gradually, the remains of the sufferers and the places of their death ceased to be an object of superstitious fear and turned into an object of worship. Information about the regular commemoration of the burnt-out Old Believers is found in ethnographic data associated with the European North of Russia. So, for a long time, the reverent memory of the Old Believers who burned down in 1743 on the river was preserved. Tansy. At the beginning of the XXI century. in the village cemetery, a large wooden cross and a chapel, built by local residents in memory of them, were preserved. In the Russian North, “chapels were often sacred memorial signs”. So the rapidly emerging Old Believer cult of self-incinerators became a manifestation of a general tendency that exists in the religious life of the outskirts of Russia. A legend tells about the tragic event associated with the mass death in the fire: “when the hermitages burned<…>the girl Elena jumped out of the monastery, turned into a dove and flew away. The soldiers flew as far as they went, and the soldiers came and froze on a huge stone on the high bank of the Tansy. That stone is called Elenin the guard. Everyone who drives along the river remembers the burned ones. A stream flows next to it, and they call it Elenin as well ”. Another proof of the righteousness of the self-burners was the legends: at the end of the 20th century. folklore texts have survived, telling that the "martyrs-incinerators were subsequently found incorruptible" voluntarily burnt on the Pizhma River.

Sympathetic words addressed to self-incinerators were also heard in Karelian folklore. So, judging by the modern records of legends prevailing in the village of Tunguda, in the minds of local residents the image of the participants in the "fires" has merged with another popular plot - "panami". In one of the local villages “the proud people of Pana lived”. They wanted to convert them "to this faith," but they did not obey. "And when they came to force them again, they burnt themselves, but did not renounce their faith." In the local village of Koivuniemi, "according to the behest" they went to the "burners". The events associated with the "burns" were depicted by local residents in a peculiar, but quite recognizable form. Old Believers “specially came to burn their sins so that they would not have sins<…>And burned there inside. And then on that place they built a house [chapel] and put icons there, they went there. " The reasons for the massive visits to memorial sites turned out to be quite prosaic: “Those who have a toothache, there [were] icons for toothache. As your teeth hurt, so they go there, pray, as if it stops [hurting] ”. The village of Riihuvaara had its own memories of the self-incinerators. Here, the memory of them was associated with a huge pit, to which the locals regularly went to pray. When asked about the motives for self-immolations, they answered evasively: “The time has come, they did not love the Old Believers, so they burned<…>Much time has passed since then. "

Justification of self-immolations, careful propaganda work of Old Believer mentors led to the fact that only in a few folklore texts self-immolation was regarded as a kind of madness or a consequence of witchcraft, leading to madness and suicidal mania. So, “in the past, the schismatics of the Bryansk forests,<…>if they could not convince them with a word of persuasion for some reason the right person and convert to their faith ", then they resorted to witchcraft:" they gave this man a cranberry, drunk with some kind of poison. " The potion contained in this cranberry had a terrible effect on people: "if someone ate it, he got a desire to go to the Bryansk sketes, and when he ate it saw fire, then in a frenzy he threw himself at it, since here he imagined paradise and the angels sitting in it" ... This plot is first presented in the work of St. Demetrius of Rostov. His description of the sinister sorcery preceding self-immolation is given in an expanded form. Folklore texts provided both literary men and ordinary people with abundant food for thought on mystical topics. At the end of the 17th century. in Swedish Karelia, a terrible legend spread about how a certain monk cut off the arms and legs of a dead child and burned them. From human ashes, he made a powder that relieves people of their instinctive fear of fire and creates a morbid tendency to self-immolation in them. Before he was seized, he had time to test this powder on a dog that happened to turn up, which, after eating the drug, immediately threw itself into the fire.

Thus, the veneration of the places of Old Believer self-immolations was a kind of continuation of the discussion about the "fiery death" that began among the Old Believer mentors at the end of the 17th century. At the same time, the long-standing Russian tradition of venerating “holy places” influenced the formation of the traditions of worshiping places of mass suicide. Over the years, they have accumulated a variety of "information about misfortunes - fires, an invasion of snakes, as well as about terrible droughts or massive diseases that happened in the area." Such a perception, quite usual for peasant consciousness, of the places of "burnt places" to a certain extent reconciled the Old Believers - opponents and supporters of self-immolation.

Bibliographic list

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