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though in fact they were a return to the old; but theyconstituted a challenge to the fundamental position ofthe Russian church, built up, as we have seen, for thepast two centuries as the unique treasure house andguardian of the pure salvation of Orthodoxy against theLatins and the Turks, on the basis of an identificationof religion with national feeling.It was found, however, that the texts and practices ofRussian Orthodoxy varied considerably and were in factdefective as judged by the essential appeal to antiquity,of which the Greeks had been the better preservers.The introduction of printing to Moscow in the secondhalf of the sixteenth century added to the necessity ofrevision. This was quietly pursued for a generationbefore Nikon became patriarch, thanks to increasedconnexions with Greek scholars and with the revivedlearning of Kiev, then still in Poland and in close touchwith the Catholic world. Nikon as patriarch threwhimself into the task of completing and enforcing thereforms unequivocally and ruthlessly. "I am a Russianand the son of a Russian," he declared publicly, "butmy faith and convictions are Greek.'' That was whathis opponents could not stomach.The opposition, which was largely recruited from thewhite or secular clergy, called themselves the OldBelievers. Both sides were at one in the fundamentalimportance they attached to ritual; religion was indissolublyreflected and experienced through the rites andworship that were for both not merely symbols but partand parcel of their faith. Hence the struggle concernednot mere minutiae or formulae, but an essential of life.The Old Believers found an heroic, very human,deeply spiritual leader in Avvakum (b. 1621, burnt 1681),like Nikon originally a priest from Nizhni-Novgorodprovince, a man of the people and the most impassionedand unwavering opponent of foreign importations of allkinds, whether from the south or the west. 1 Thus the1There is a translation by Jane Harrison and Hope Mirlees (1924) ofThe Life of the Archprtest Avvakum written by Himself (with his littleblack hen, in her day the champion egg-layer of Siberia), the mostremarkable production of Russian seventeenth-century literature.190