Orthodox Russia: the most severe methods of punishing the atheists

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The fires of the Inquisition burned not only in Catholic Europe. They regularly inflamed them in Orthodox Russia. In the fight against disobedient people, all methods were good, and most importantly, they were almost always effective.

"Animal-eating" Zhidyat

They began to crack down on opponents of the church already at the time of the Baptism of Rus. Pagans were often able to convert to the new faith only with the help of fire and sword. For example, Novgorodians stood up with weapons to protect pagan idols and gods. It is not surprising that over the course of several centuries in Novgorod, apostates from Orthodoxy were executed with enviable constancy.

Thus, a chronicler who lived in the 11th century calls the Novgorod bishop Luka Zhidyatu "beast-eating" for his cruel treatment of the Gentiles. "This tormentor cut heads and beards, burned out his eyes, cut off his tongue, crucified and tortured others." In the 13th century, four wise men were tied up there and thrown into the fire, asking for the consent of the archbishop.

They also did not stand on ceremony with magicians and soothsayers. Residents of Pskov burned 12 witches for allegedly sending a pestilence to the city. "For magic" the Mozhaisk prince betrayed the noblewoman Marya Mamonova to the fire. At the same time, the cruel reprisals were not at all connivance on the ground - they were blessed, one might say, officially. In the collection of religious and secular laws of the XIII century "The Pilot Book" for heretical writing and sorcery, it was ordered to curse, and to burn harmful books on their heads. The prescriptions were duly fulfilled. All in the same Novgorod, Archbishop Gennady ordered to burn birch bark helmets on the heads of several heretics, after which two of those sentenced to such torture went mad. And the initiator of this punishment, no matter how absurd it may be, was later ranked among the saints. By the way, Gennady lived at the same time as the famous Torquemada, knew about the Spanish Inquisition and admired it. In this sense, Catholic Europe was an example for the Orthodox archbishop.

Another wild example: some Moscow carpenters Neupokoy, Danila and Mikhail were burned because they ate veal forbidden by church regulations.

In the "Holy Rules of the Holy Apostles" of the 15th century, heretics were directly prescribed to burn and bury them. A special method was popular - burning in log cabins. Church cathedrals were especially active in hanging accusations. Participants in these meetings of the most influential hierarchs often stuck the label of a heretic to unwanted colleagues in order to take possession of their property and lands.

Red-hot cauldron for the schismatic

The peak of the Orthodox "inquisition" fell on the 17th century. The schismatics, or Old Believers, who opposed the reform of Patriarch Nikon, became targets for torture and persecution. Here the Orthodox "Inquisition" roamed: with the approval of the patriarch, they cut their tongues, arms and legs, burned them at the stake, drove them around the city in shame, and then threw them into prisons, where they were kept until their death. At one of the church councils, all the disobedient were anathematized and promised to be executed. The chronicles are full of stories of torture. Much information about the execution of schismatics has been preserved in the writings of Archpriest Avvakum. From them you can find out that the archer Hilarion was burned in Kiev, the priest Polyekt, and with him 14 more people - in Borovsk, in Kholmogory they sent Ivan the Fool to the fire, in Kazan they burned thirty people, the same number in Siberia, in Vladimir - six, in Borovsk is fourteen.

Avvakum himself was thrown into the monastery prison, where there were sixty more people with him. And all of them were constantly beaten and cursed. And they burned the archpriest on the square in Pustozersk in a log house together with two more schismatic teachers.

Church opponents were also tortured in red-hot iron cauldrons. This is how they brought the schismatics Peter and Evdokim to death. Many, unable to endure the torment, converted to Orthodoxy. But this did not always save one from punishment. Thus, the Novgorod schismatic Mikhailov, under torture, renounced his confession, but was still burned to death.

Round-ups were organized against the Old Believers, in which the representatives of the church were accompanied by archers. Whole villages were destroyed in bloody campaigns. The schismatics were looking for salvation in flight abroad, to the Don, beyond the Urals. But punitive detachments got there too.

It is impossible to say exactly how many people were killed in the struggle against schismaticism only in the 17th century - no archives have survived on this score. Historians speak of several thousand.

References to isolated cases of severe persecution of schismatics can be found even in the middle of the 19th century. But in general, starting from the 1840s, the Old Believers began to be treated more tolerantly, they ceased to be persecuted. The restrictions on Old Believers were finally lifted in 1905 by the Decree "On strengthening the principles of religious tolerance."

Better burn yourself

The Old Believers had an effective, albeit somewhat peculiar, way to avoid torture from the church ministers - self-immolation. Among the schismatics in the 17th century, it reached an unprecedented scale.

One of the first mass cases occurred in the Poshekhonovskaya volost of the Beloselsky district, when almost two thousand people committed themselves to death. On the Berezovka River in the Tobolsk Territory, on the initiative of the schismatic monk Ivanishche and the priest Domitian, about 1,700 schismatics were burnt to death. According to information that has come down to our time, in the years 1667-1700 alone, almost nine thousand people committed themselves to such a martyr's death.

However, cases of self-immolation were often associated with the beliefs of the Old Believers themselves, who believed that in this way they undergo a new baptism to achieve the kingdom of heaven.

In stone bags

Heretics and schismatics who were not immediately burnt were thrown into prisons at monasteries. They were of different designs. Some of the most popular are earthen. They were pits into which wooden log cabins were lowered. A roof was laid at the top with a small hole for the transfer of food. The already mentioned Archpriest Avvakum languished in such a conclusion.

In many monasteries, prisoners were placed in narrow stone bags that looked more like cupboards. They were erected on several floors inside the monastery towers. They were isolated from each other, very cramped and without windows or doors.

The prison of the Solovetsky Monastery was famous for the inhuman content of prisoners. The stone bags there reached 1, 4 meters in length and meters in width and height. The inmates could only sleep in a bent position.

Most often they sat in monastic prisons in hand and foot shackles, chained to the wall or to a huge wooden block. Prisoners, especially dangerous for the church, were also put on "slingshots" - an iron hoop around the head, which was closed under the chin with a lock with the help of two chains. Several long iron shields were attached to it perpendicularly. The construction did not allow the prisoner to lie down, and he was forced to sleep while sitting.

The prisoners were often tortured. One of the bishops described the "educational" methods as follows: "These executions were - wheel, quartering and impaling, and the easiest one was to hang up and chop off heads." Racking was also in use: the victims of this method were “tied to their feet with heavy blocks, on which the executioner jumped and thereby increased the torment: the bones, coming out of their joints, crunched, broke, sometimes the skin broke, the veins were stretched, torn and thus unbearable torment was inflicted. In this position, they beat the naked back with a whip so that the skin flew in rags."

As a rule, they were imprisoned “desperately,” that is, forever, until death saved the prisoner from the torture. For example, the peasant of the Kaluga province, Stepan Sergeev, served 25 years, and the peasant of the Vyatka province, Semyon Shubin, 43 years.

The state went to meet

The church cracked down on its opponents with the hands of secular authorities. The priests demanded that this or that apostate be tortured and burned, and the rulers complied with such requests.

The worldly rulers themselves also displayed at times fierce hatred of the "infidels." Ivan the Terrible hated Jews. During the capture of Polotsk by the Russian troops, all representatives of this people were thrown into the water, and only those who converted to Orthodoxy were spared. In Smolensk, the Jews were burned.

Death was threatened by the transition from Orthodoxy to Judaism. There were few such cases. But the punishment persisted even in the 18th century. In 1738, a naval officer Alexander Voznitsyn was burned in St. Petersburg together with a Jew who persuaded him to the Jewish faith.

The reformer Tsar Peter I, showing tolerance towards Catholics and Lutherans, brutally persecuted schismatics. Under him, the Bishop of Nizhny Novgorod Pitirim himself tortured the Old Believers and punished them by cutting out their nostrils. He converted almost 68 thousand people to Orthodoxy by force. One and a half thousand were tortured to death.

Another ally of the tsar, the Novgorod bishop Job, also tried to rid the Russian land of this "filth". He showed such zeal that the manager of the Olonets factories, de Gennin, asked Peter I to release the experienced foreman Semyon Denisov from imprisonment and stop the persecution of the schismatic workers so that there would be someone to work at the plant. The request went unheard.

In the struggle for the purity of the faith, Orthodox leaders did not know the measure. Moreover, not representatives of other religions or confessions were subjected to the most severe persecutions, but Orthodox Christians who had gone into schism.

And yet, the Orthodox "Inquisition" can hardly be compared, for example, with the Spanish one, which only from 1481 to 1498 sent 9 thousand heretics to the stake. At the same time, three million infidels - Jews and Muslim Moors - went into exile. And what is the death sentence for all (!) Residents of the Netherlands.

For witchcraft, according to various studies, in Europe from the 14th to the 18th century, from 20 to 60 thousand people were burned. Both Catholics and Protestants were zealous in the "witch hunt". The last execution for witchcraft in Europe took place in 1782, and in Protestant enlightened Switzerland.

And the last witch in world history was burned in Catholic Mexico in general in the 19th century, in 1860.

In Russia, witches and witches were left alone much earlier. And even before that, we could not boast of a "European scale" in the fight against them.

The bonfire cried for the boyaryna

A famous schismatic martyr was the noblewoman Theodosia Morozova. A friend of the first wife of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, a representative of a noble family, she turned her Moscow house into the center of the Old Believers.

For a long time, thanks to her authority and connections, she managed to avoid the millstones of the Inquisition. But one night, Archimandrite of the Chudov Monastery Joachim burst into the boyar's house with his people and ordered them to put shackles on her.

Morozova, along with her sister and friend, were thrown into the monastery prison. The women were persuaded to abandon the Old Believers, but they steadfastly held on to their faith.

Even the patriarch Pitirim acted as the defender of the influential boyar. But Joachim was adamant. The Old Believers were tortured with whips and racks. In the end they were sentenced to be burned. But the Moscow boyars rose to the defense of the noble prisoners - and the fire was canceled. However, they still could not save the women - all three were starved to death in prison.

To the Orthodox cross - both Muslims and Uniates

There were attempts to convert Muslims to Orthodoxy. In the 17th-18th centuries, there are cases when churches were erected on the site of Tatar mosques. Particularly zealous churchmen could even imprison the rebellious, forcibly baptize them in a font with their hands tied, or take children away from the "infidels" and hand them over to the "newly baptized" for education.

Catherine II, Nicholas I and even Nicholas II did not abandon their attempts to make Greek Catholics (Uniates) Orthodox. The story of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Polotsk, which since 1667 belonged to the Uniates, is very indicative. During the Northern War, the cathedral was closed by the Russian army. Peter I handed it over to the Orthodox community, but they refused to accept the council, fearing that after the withdrawal of the Russian troops, repressions would begin against them.

The news of this reached the king. And, according to one version, drunk Peter I with soldiers burst into the cathedral and demanded the keys to its royal gates. When the monks refused to do this, the enraged king killed the abbot of Sophia and four monks, and ordered their bodies to be drowned in Dvina.

However, from the preserved royal documents it follows that the bloody conflict was "a spontaneous manifestation of the tsar's anger, provoked by the insolent behavior of the Uniate monks."