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opposition was strongly national and Muscovite; and, inaddition to its religious origin, it assumed forms of aninchoate social protest against centralization and oppressionwhether by the church or by the state. But thereligious leaders, if not the rank-and-file, of the OldBelievers, in cleaving fanatically to their old Muscoviteways, were actuated primarily by intense religious feeling,not by patriotism or nationalistic obscurantism. Forthem Orthodoxy was not a national Russian form ofreligion: Russia was holy because she was, and in so faras she remained, the vessel of Orthodoxy.The struggle was much complicated by the personalityof Nikon and his claims as patriarch. As has been seen,he fell, but obedience to his ritual reforms was finallyenjoined (1667) by the same church council that deposedhim, and all those who continued defiant were anathematizedas schismatic. This brought to the front thequestion of obedience to the highest ecclesiasticalauthority, and to the tsar, who enforced its decision byevery means, including burning. The Old Believers heldtheir ground against this persecution, by passive resistance,by self-burning, by flight, even by armed resistance.The Schism became an accomplished fact.Its results were twofold:(1) The Old Believers constituted a considerablesection of the Orthodox, but they included hardly anyof the upper hierarchy or of the upper classes: they werepredominantly peasants and merchants. They were adisintegrating political force inasmuch as they identifiedtsarism with Antichrist owing to its relapse from Orthodoxyby its acceptance and enforcement of the reformsand to its encouragement of Polish and Germanimportations. This idea of the state power as an eviltyranny was very strong before Peter the Great, but itwas intensified by Peter's completely Western modeof living and the scale and energy of his drastic overhaulingof Russian society. At the same time, the OldBelievers were a disintegrated force in that to a largeextent they were compelled to seek refuge in smallcommunities on the frontier. They proved admirablysturdy colonizers, but their scattered distribution191