The Tale of the Beard
Nothing in the human body has sparked such heated debates, divisions, and even bloodshed as the beard. Take, for example, the hand. No one demanded that hands be cut off every infant, no one wrote multi-volume treatises defending hands, no one taxed hands, and no one saw in hands a sign of the righteousness or holiness of their beliefs. The same can be said of the foot, the head, or any other part of the body.
The beard, however, is a different matter! Vladimir Dal’s dictionary defines it simply as “hair on the cheeks and chin.” But for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, it was far more than just hair. The beard became a religious symbol, a battle standard, and a subject of theological disputes.
In Russian history, the beard holds a particularly significant place, comparable to that of a mid-level statesman. To begin our tale of the Russian beard, we must first speak of its grandmother—the Jewish beard. The reverent, religious attitude toward the beard, so characteristic of the Russian people, cannot be fully understood without a journey into the history of Old Testament Israel.
In the East, the beard was always cherished and groomed. Ancient Sumerians, Assyrians, and Persians grew their beards, curled them, and dyed them with henna. The beard was a sign of masculinity, strength, royalty, and power. To lose one’s beard was considered the gravest insult, a mark of shame, defeat, humiliation, sorrow, or repentance. For instance, the prophet Jeremiah threatens the people of Moab with punishment for their idolatry: “I will bring an end in Moab, declares the Lord, to those who offer sacrifices in the high places and burn incense to their gods… The wealth they acquired is gone. Every head is shaved, and every beard is cut off” (Jeremiah 48:35–37).
The Bible recounts how God spared the Jewish people from humiliation and disgrace, freeing them from Egyptian slavery and leading them to the Promised Land. In modern times, an independent nation is expected to have a state, a constitution, a flag, a coat of arms, and an anthem. In the ancient East, the beard served as a substitute for a flag, coat of arms, and anthem. Thus, when God gave Moses the Torah—the law of the new faith—on Mount Sinai, He also granted the Israelites the beard as a symbol of their newfound freedom. The Torah contains a divine command not to shave or trim the beard: “You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard” (Leviticus 19:27). This distinguished the Israelites from their former masters, the Egyptians, who shaved. In Egypt, only the pharaoh could wear a beard, and even then, it was an artificial one. In the Bible, a shaved beard is seen as a loss of honor.
For example, King Hanun insulted the servants of King David: “So Hanun took David’s servants, shaved off half the beard of each, and cut off their garments in the middle, at their hips, and sent them away.” When David learned of this, he ordered his servants not to return to Jerusalem, “for they were greatly humiliated” (2 Samuel 10:4–5).
The Bible also describes another ancient custom: instead of shaking hands, men would grasp each other’s beards and kiss: “Joab said to Amasa, ‘Is it well with you, my brother?’ And Joab took Amasa by the beard with his right hand to kiss him” (2 Samuel 20:9). Over the three thousand years since King David’s time, the Jewish beard has become a familiar sight worldwide. It is well-known to us as well. The complex image of a devout Jew, observing the Torah’s commandments and not shaving his beard, has been repeatedly depicted in literature and art. The Odessan poet Eduard Bagritsky vividly portrayed this image in his poem February, invoking the shadow of his pious ancestor: “In a long-skirted coat and a fox-fur hat, // From under which, in gray spirals, // Peyot fall and dandruff rises in clouds // Above a square beard…”
With the “square beard,” Christianity came to the Romans and Greeks. Undoubtedly, the apostles—Christ’s disciples and the first preachers of the Gospel—did not shave or trim their beards. From then on, wearing a beard became a pious Christian custom, not mandatory but desirable.
Do Not Trim Your Beards!
Greeks traditionally wore beards, while Romans preferred to shave. In ancient Greece, long before Christianity, many illustrious men—Aristotle, Archimedes, Homer, Plato, Socrates, Themistocles, and countless others—sported beards. In the Roman Empire, officials and soldiers shaved. Thus, on icons and frescoes depicting early Christian martyrs, we see beardless men, not because of their youth but due to their societal roles. For example, the great martyrs Demetrius of Thessalonica and George the Victorious, killed for their faith in the early 4th century, are depicted without beards, not because they were young but because they served the state under Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian himself, a persecutor of Christians, wore a neatly trimmed beard.
This difference in customs between Greeks and Romans led to differing attitudes toward the beard in Eastern and Western Christianity. The “hair on the cheeks and chin” was of little concern to the Roman Church. Venerable prelates likely reasoned: wear a beard if you wish, or shave if you don’t. Wise Catholic scholars spilled oceans of ink on theological, philosophical, and legal treatises but paid little attention to the beard, unlike the Orthodox East.
In the Greek Church, beards were mandatory for clergy and monks but optional for laypeople. This distinction is evident in the famous 6th-century mosaic of Emperor Justinian in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. The clergy—Bishop Maximian and two deacons—are depicted with small beards, while the soldiers and officials in Justinian’s entourage are clean-shaven, mustached, or bearded. Justinian himself is beardless.
In the 8th-century Byzantine liturgical collection Barberini Euchologion, there is a special prayer for the trimming of a beard, placed after two prayers for trimming a child’s hair. A priest would symbolically cut a child’s first hairs, wishing them to “grow in age and reach gray-haired old age.” For a young man whose beard was beginning to grow, the following prayer was recited: “Lord our God Almighty, bless the work of our hands, and as the blessing that descended upon Aaron’s head and his beard, and as the dew of Hermon descending upon the mountains of Zion, so may Your blessing descend upon the head of Your servant and his beard.” It was not necessarily implied that the beard was trimmed or shaved after this blessing.
Prayers for trimming hair remain in modern church books as part of the baptismal rite, but the prayer for trimming the beard has fallen out of liturgical use.
By the time of the final schism between Orthodox and Catholics, the custom of clergy wearing beards was widespread among the Greeks. The Greeks condemned the shaved chins of Western clergy and laypeople. In the 11th century, the monk Nikita Stethatos of the Studios Monastery wrote A Discourse Against the Franks, That Is, the Latins. In its Slavic translation, it was included in the Kormchaya Kniga—a collection of rules and laws of the Russian Church. Nikita wrote: “What of trimming the beard? Is it not written in the Law: ‘You shall not trim your beards, for this is fitting for women, not for men’… For by this, all know that those with trimmed beards are servants of heresy. By doing this for human favor, against the Law, you will be hated by God, who created you in His image.”
The Latins did not remain silent. In the 12th century, Leo of Tuscany wrote a polemical work, On the Heresies and Hypocrisy of the Greeks. Among other things, he accused the Orthodox of “their priests growing beards according to Jewish custom.”
In the 10th century, upon adopting Christianity, our ancestors encountered the Greek beard, which can be considered the mother of the Russian beard.
Running a Household Is Not About Shaking Your Beard
It cannot be definitively stated whether the ancient Rus shaved or preferred to wear beards. In 971, Prince Svyatoslav of Kyiv appeared before the Byzantine Emperor John Tzimiskes without a beard. A Greek chronicler noted: “Svyatoslav appeared, crossing the river in a Scythian boat. He sat at the oars and rowed with the others, indistinguishable from them. His appearance was as follows: of moderate height, neither too tall nor too short, with bushy eyebrows and light blue eyes, snub-nosed, beardless, with thick, excessively long hair above the upper lip. His head was completely shaved, but a lock of hair hung from one side—a sign of noble lineage.”
It can be assumed that before adopting Christianity, Svyatoslav’s son, Prince Vladimir the Great, the baptizer of Rus, also went beardless. The Tale of Bygone Years recounts that Vladimir, erecting idols of pagan gods in Kyiv, installed “a wooden Perun with a silver head and golden mustache.” The pagan deity reflected earthly ideals, and Perun embodied the Slavic ideal of a prince and warrior—a man with a mustache but no beard.
However, after 988, with the Baptism of Rus, the attitude of our people toward the beard changed. Along with Christianity, the Greek fashion for “hair on the cheeks and chin” arrived in Kyiv.
Under Prince Yaroslav the Wise, Vladimir’s son, the Rus’ Justice—the earliest Russian legal code—was compiled. It imposed a hefty fine of 12 hryvnias for damaging a beard, the same penalty as for a knocked-out tooth, a stolen beaver, or a blow with a stick, cup, horn, or the back of a weapon.
From then on, the beard’s triumphant march across Russian lands began. Five hundred years later, the beard was considered an essential attribute of every Christian, a symbol of masculinity, maturity, and wisdom. Over time, it gained another meaning: it distinguished the Orthodox from non-believers.
Our people enriched the “hair on the cheeks and chin” with numerous proverbs, often mocking the foolishness or unworthy behavior of bearded men: “The beard has grown, but wisdom hasn’t followed”; “A beard a yard long, but a mind an inch wide”; “By the beard, an Abraham, but by deeds, a Ham”; “Running a household is not about shaking your beard.” The people respected the beard, saying, “The beard brings honor, but even a cat has a mustache.” In Rus, beards were neither shaved nor trimmed. However, as often happens, quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi (“What is permitted to Jupiter…”). While common men didn’t even consider shaving, nobles, shielded by their high status, sometimes dared to trim or shave their beards.
A striking example is Grand Prince Vasily III, father of Ivan the Terrible. Vasily was thirty years older than his second wife, Elena Glinskaya, and, as historian Nikolai Karamzin wrote, “loving his young wife, Vasily sought to please her not only with kind treatment but also with a youthful appearance, which was slipping away: he shaved his beard and took care of his pleasing appearance.” Some boyars followed his example.
But Ivan the Terrible put an end to such liberties. In 1551, the famous Stoglavy Sobor convened in Moscow under Tsar Ivan and Metropolitan Macarius, adopting important decrees to promote spiritual enlightenment, strengthen piety, and eradicate vices. The council also condemned those who, contrary to ancient tradition, shaved their beards: “The sacred rules forbid all Orthodox Christians from shaving their beards or trimming their mustaches, for such is not Orthodox but a Latin heresy.” For those who dared to violate church regulations, the council reaffirmed a rule attributed to the apostles: “He who shaves his beard and dies as such is not worthy of a funeral service, nor a forty-day memorial, nor prosphora, nor a candle for him in church; let him be reckoned among the unbelievers.” From then on, the Russian beard grew freely and flourished, protected by both state and church. The encounter with Europe during the bloody years of the Time of Troubles only reinforced our ancestors’ belief in their choice: shaving the beard was a “Latin heresy.”
In 1639, under Tsar Mikhail Feodorovich, the Great Trebnik—a collection of various liturgies and prayers—was printed in Moscow. It included a rite for renouncing the “Latin heresy.” According to this rite, a Catholic converting to Orthodoxy had to curse various innovations of the Roman Church, including beard-shaving: “I curse the God-hated, lustful delusion of the soul-destroying, darkened heresy of shaving the beard.”
In the mid-17th century, under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and Patriarch Nikon, the tragic schism of the Russian Church occurred. Moscow Orthodoxy, with its adherence to Byzantine and ancient Russian traditions, retreated into Old Belief, the old faith, the “schism.” From then on, only there was the spiritual culture of Holy Rus preserved. But it was clear that soon, secular and ecclesiastical authorities would go even further.
Fickle Fashion
Tsar Peter Alexeyevich began building a new Russia by dismantling the old Rus. Enamored with Europe, Peter I waged war on Russian customs, including long beards and traditional clothing. In 1698, he introduced a beard tax, later divided into four categories: courtiers paid 600 rubles annually to keep their beards, wealthy merchants paid 100, other merchants paid 60, and townspeople, coachmen, and drivers paid 30. Those who paid the tax received tokens inscribed with phrases like “The beard tax has been paid” or “The beard is an unnecessary burden.” Peasants were exempt from the tax, but a penny was charged for every bearded man entering a city.
Old Believers faced a special levy. From 1716, they were required to pay double the poll tax. Imagine if today, people of different faiths or nationalities were taxed not 13% income tax but 26%.
The beard immediately became a symbol of popular discontent. For example, in 1707, the Old Believer and rebel ataman Kondraty Bulavin, who defeated Colonel Yuri Dolgorukov’s detachment, explained his actions in a letter to the Kuban Cossacks: the colonel and his soldiers came to the Don and “began shaving beards and mustaches, as well as changing the Christian faith.”
In 1700, Peter issued a decree against traditional Russian clothing. Samples of new attire—Hungarian and Saxon jackets and hats—were displayed at city gates. Soldiers stationed there enforced the decree. If someone passed through the gates in a long caftan, they were forced to kneel, and their caftan was cut off at ground level. Tailors were forbidden from making Russian garments, and merchants were prohibited from selling them. Old Believers, conversely, were ordered to wear traditional clothing.
In 1722, the Tsar mandated that Old Believers wear specific old-style garments—zipuns, feryazis, and odnorjadkas. Two years later, an additional decree required the wives of Old Believers and bearded men to wear opashens and horned caps.
Thus, under Emperor Peter I, the old Rus was transformed into a new Russia. Only the Old Believers, persecuted by the authorities, remained loyal to the old Russian faith and way of life. This loyalty came at a steep cost—not only in special taxes and duties but also in thousands of lives.
For the Old Believers, the beard became a religious symbol, a sign of true faith. Members of the state church wishing to convert to Old Belief had to recite a special renunciation of the “Nikonite heresy,” which included: “Those who reject the Holy and Patristic Scriptures prohibiting beard-shaving, let them be cursed.”
What was sacred and true for some seemed foolish and false to others. For instance, Mikhail Lomonosov’s Hymn to the Beard mocks the “hair on the cheeks and chin.” The hymn deserves to be quoted in full, but we’ll limit ourselves to lines about the beard tax for Old Believers, whom the poet calls Kergenets, referring to their communities in Kerzhents:
The beard brings revenue to the treasury
Increasing it year by year:
To the beloved Kergenets brethren
With joy, a double tax
For it they bring to the collection,
And with a low bow they ask
To be admitted to eternal peace,
Headless, with a beard.
Persecution of Old Believers and the Russian beard eased somewhat during the reign of Catherine II, whose government sought support from Old Believer merchants with their “great enterprises and trades.” Catherine issued decrees improving the status of Old Believers and granting them equal rights with the rest of the empire’s population. Peter’s laws on beards, Russian clothing, and the double tax were repealed. It was also officially forbidden to call adherents of the old faith “schismatics”; instead, the derogatory term was replaced with “Old Believers.”
Yet, even under the benevolent Catherine, the beard remained a symbol of peasant discontent. Emelyan Pugachev, the self-proclaimed Tsar Peter III, raised the beard as a banner. To all who recognized him as sovereign, Pugachev promised various freedoms, including the right to practice the old faith—crossing oneself with two fingers, praying with pre-Nikon books, and wearing beards.
With Pugachev’s severed head, the beard fell on the scaffold and never rose again.
From the time of Alexander I, facial hair—mustaches and sideburns—returned to Russian men’s faces. However, shaving beards remained mandatory for soldiers and officials. Only under Alexander II were officials permitted to grow beards, and Alexander III extended this permission to the military.
Under Nicholas I, Slavophile philosophers emerged, sparking a fascination with all things à la russe—Russian patriotism, kosovorotkas, kvass, kasha, and beards. This trend was satirized by the wit Ivan Myatlev in his macaronic poem Sensations and Observations of Madame Kurdyukova Abroad, Dans l’Étranger:
Some patriot among us cries,
“Du kvas, du kvas, oh, kvas divine,
And pickle brine, so crisp, so fine!”
He drinks, poor soul, with a wince and a sigh…
One must love what’s native, they say,
Even if it’s worth not a single kopeck, nay!
Je ne dis pas, la kasha,
Semolina with its creamy crust.
La moroshka, les openki,
Piglet with horseradish, a must!
Le kisel and le studen,
Oh, so tasty, it’s no lie.
But patriotism, let’s note,
Isn’t found in what you eat, by rote!
Yet fashion had its way. We can no longer imagine Dostoevsky, Mendeleev, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, and other great figures of 19th-century Russian culture and science without their beards and mustaches.
In October 1917, the fashion for beards came to an end. No one banned or persecuted them, but the “rough tongue of propaganda” whispered to the people that beards were worn by their enemies—the priest and the kulak. Lenin, Marx, and Engels were exceptions.
Beards remained with old-fashioned village grandfathers and outdated scholars, like Professor Preobrazhensky in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog: “A gentleman of intellectual labor, with a French pointed beard and gray, fluffy, dashing mustaches, like those of French knights.”
Revolutionary mustaches, like those of Comrade Budyonny or Comrade Stalin himself, were in vogue. However, the “All-Union Elder” Mikhail Kalinin wore a beard, befitting his role as the “people’s advocate” and “mourner of the Russian land.”
But any self-respecting person shaved their beard in those turbulent times. Even clergy from the reformist “Living Church” did not shy away from this, which was unthinkable for traditional Orthodox clergy. The head of the Living Church, Alexander Vvedensky, was clean-shaven.
The Great Patriotic War restored the beard’s masculine and heroic significance. With it, and with a PPSh submachine gun, the brave partisan roamed forests and swamps. This is the same partisan whose bronze eyes gaze at Muscovites and visitors from the monuments at the Belorusskaya and Partizanskaya metro stations.
The bearded old man at Partizanskaya is Hero of the Soviet Union Matvey Kuzmin, a simple Russian peasant who performed a heroic feat at 83. Beards suited not only old partisans but also “young lads,” as sung by Leonid Utesov in the famous song Partisan Beard: “Now reconnaissance, now an ambush, // When do I have time to shave or trim? // An inevitable nuisance, // The beard is to a partisan. // My beard, my little beard, // How you’ve grown! // They used to call it a brush, // Now they say it’s a broom.”
After the war, interest in beards revived in the late 1950s during the Cuban Revolution. Bearded revolutionaries (barbudos) Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, fighting for freedom and equality, won the sympathy of Soviet citizens. Influenced by the Cubans, Soviet youth—especially “stilyagi” (hipsters) and creative types like journalists, artists, and musicians—began wearing beards. In 1962, Yuri Kazakov described visitors to an art exhibition in his story Adam and Eve: “No one understands anything, they shout, argue, guys with little beards, in jeans, dazed, wandering in circles.”
These were wonderful times of guitar songs, cheap port wine, and friendly greetings of “old man.”
Years passed, but the beard remained a hallmark of the free artist. In Yuri Koval’s magical tale The Lightest Boat in the World (1984), one of the main characters, the artist Orlov, wears a beard. While riding a train, a “man in gold glasses” starts a conversation with them, voicing truisms that ordinary people still use to pester bearded men today: “Why do young people wear beards? Why? I don’t understand… In the old days, people read little—so they wore beards. But now, why the beard? I’d take all the bearded ones and forcibly shave them to make them look like people.”
The author of these lines has often heard such remarks. What savagery—a young man with a beard! With a higher education, and a beard! A cultured person, and a beard!
What can one say in response? For me, the “hair on the cheeks and chin” is, if you will, the fulfillment of childhood dreams. As a child, I saw a photo of Ernest Hemingway—a weathered face framed by a noble gray beard, wearing a rough sweater. “I want to be like that!” I thought.
I was 13 when Vladimir Bortko filmed Heart of a Dog. I was stunned by the movie, memorized it, and was obsessed with its sepia tones. Oh, those Hanging Gardens of Semiramis! The heavy, tomb-like table covered with a white cloth, plates adorned with paradisiacal flowers and wide black rims, and three crystal decanters with multicolored vodkas.
I knew for certain that when I grew up, I’d become Professor Preobrazhensky, specifically as portrayed by Yevgeny Yevstigneyev, and no one else!
And I grew up… My dreams came true only in part. The lamp with a silk shade, Persian rugs, and cherry curtains remained in the film. From the professor’s erudition, I inherited only the beard. And, stroking it in front of the computer screen, I echo Lomonosov’s words:
If someone is unattractive in body
Or immature in mind,
If born in poverty
Or not honored by rank,
He will be attractive and wise,
Honored by rank and not poor,
Thanks to a great beard:
Such are its fruits!
-Dimitry Urushev