It was only natural that they should turn with sympathetic interest to Kiev, for the revival of Ukrainian culture appealed to them in various ways. They were well aware of the bitter feud that was going on in Ukraine between the Orthodox and the followers of the Union and they had hopes of bringing Ukraine under their own domination. There was something attractive in the Orthodoxy of Kiev and they could dream of Moscow as an Orthodox Slav state accepting support from other Orthodox Slavs when it galled them to appeal directly to the Greeks. Besides that, there was a group of the Orthodox in Kiev whose religious antagonism to the Catholics overshadowed any questions of Ukrainian patriotism. As early as 1626, some of these monks had broached the idea of a union with Moscow, and exactly as they in a later time tended to facilitate the submission of the Kozaks to Moscow, so they dreamed that they might tap the more abundant resources of that state for intellectual accomplishments and perhaps for personal aggrandizement. Yet there was no doubt that any such rapprochement would be stubbornly contested by the masses of the Muscovite population and by many of the boyars and nobles. It required all the power of an autocratic monarch and ruthless force to carry through even the slightest correction of the books and the introduction of any ideas that were at variance with the traditional Muscovite mode of life. Throughout the entire seventeenth century, the Old Believers, as they were called, adopted the most desperate methods of opposition. Mass suicides of people who objected to living under the regime of Antichrist took place. The streltsy, the guards of the tsar, rose in armed revolt and the Don Kozaks burst out in several waves of destructive fury as they demanded the preservation of the old faith and the beard. It was undoubtedly this furious attitude of fanaticism that prevented any close relations between the Kozaks and the revolt of Stenka Razin or between Mazepa and the revolt of Bulavin in the days of Peter the Great. It was probably more than a coincidence, however, that the first serious invitations to Kievan scholars to come to Moscow coincided with the beginning of the revolt of Khmelnitsky. In 1649, Tsar Alexis, under the influence of Nikon, invited the Metropolitan of Kiev to send Arseny Satanovsky and Damaskin Ptitsky to Moscow to translate the Bible. Ptitsky went later, but he was replaced on this mission by Epifany Slavinetsky who remained in Moscow to the end of his life. Nikon and his friends were undoubtedly as much aware of the possibilities of securing control of Ukraine, if Poland were to be disintegrated, as they were of the aid that they would receive in intellectual matters from the Kiev scholars.