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Pokrovskoe for long, however. He abandoned his disciples and once again set out to visit the monasteries. And his wanderings became ever more rigorous. ‘For experience and to test myself,’ he said, ‘I frequently did not change my undergarments for six months at a time when going from Tobolsk to Kiev, and I would often walk for three days, eating only the slightest amount. On hot days I would impose a fast on myself. I would not drink kvass but would work with the day labourers just as they worked; I would work and then take my repose in prayer.’ This is the lofty manner in which Rasputin told the ‘tsars’ about his transformation in his ‘Life’.
    But he told them nothing of what was at the heart of his wandering: the dangerous cloisters concealed deep in the remote Siberian forests, their remarkable beliefs, and the unofficial ‘Orthodoxy of the people’ that had actually formed both the semi-literate Siberian peasant and his mysterious teachings.
    He told them nothing of the hidden religious Rus that had existed for hundreds of years alongside the official Church.
    Hidden ‘Holy Rus’
    Distrust of the official church had deep roots in Russia.
    Christianity had been adopted in Rus a thousand years before in the tenth century. But paganism did not for that reason disappear. Christianchurches in Russia were often built on pagan holy places. The pagan gods that the princes had forced the people to repudiate lived on unseen. The pagan god Volos, for example, whose untrammelled power was manifest, according to pagan beliefs, in the alternating fecundity and destruction of the natural world, was transformed into ‘God’s servant, Saint Vlasy the Miracle Worker’. The pagan god of thunder, Perun, was supplanted by the prophet Elijah who caused the storms to rumble. And the pagan delight in nature, the pagan worship and deification of nature, remained in the people’s souls. The alacrity with which they agreed after the revolution to destroy their own great Orthodox temples at the behest of the Bolsheviks is strikingly similar to the ease with which they smashed and burned their pagan holy places at the order of the princes.
    Entire regions lived through that thousand-year period in a blend of paganism and Orthodoxy. And the ancient sorcerers and saintly healers existed side by side, as well: the healers healed, and the sorcerers cast spells or warded them off.
    Siberia and the Trans-Volga were the centres of that strange ‘Orthodoxy of the people’.
    A ‘Russian America’
    In the seventeenth century, the forests of the Trans-Volga extended without interruption to the far north. Standing along the banks of the Volga’s tributaries were occasional hamlets separated from each other by vast tracts of impassable forest. The people who lived in those hamlets were, in a sense, cut off from the rest of the baptized world, and the area’s Orthodox Russians resembled in their savage customs the primeval denizens of those places, the wild Cheremis and Votyak trappers. Weddings were celebrated in the forest, their participants at once worshipping the holy saints and trees. ‘They lived in the forest, they prayed to stumps, they married standing around a spruce, and devils sang to them,’ it was once said of the Trans-Volga’s inhabitants.
    In the second decade of the seventeenth century, new residents began to appear in those impenetrable thickets. They were the children of the bloody Time of Troubles (1584–1613), which had rolled across the Russian land in insurrections and the collapse of the state. The Time of Troubles had ended with the accession of the Romanov dynasty to the throne. And now in flight from the rage of the new tsars, those involved in the recent mutinies fled to the Trans-Volga and Siberia. The very people who in the Time of Troubles had visited pillaging and bloodshed upon the entire Russian land.They found refuge in the forested regions from the knout and the gallows. It was a unique