A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

4 Consolidation and Revolt

The end of the Time of Troubles brought peace to Russia and a new dynasty of tsars, one that would remain on the throne until 1917. The decades that followed the Troubles saw the restoration of the social and political order that had existed before, so that Russia looked very much the same as it had on the day that the Assembly of the Land elected Boris Godunov tsar. Yet under the surface of restored customs and institutions, earlier trends gathered speed and new developments appeared. Serfdom provided a rigid framework that determined the life of most Russians and slowed, but did not preclude, economic changes and growth. At the other end of Russian society, at the court and among the higher clergy, shifts in religious sentiment and cultural changes were taking place that would have far-reaching effects.

Rapid population growth meant greater prosperity and also made it possible for Russia to absorb and preserve the new acquisitions in Siberia and on the southern steppes. Growing integration into the burgeoning European markets meant wealth for merchants and townsmen. The rebuilding of the government was not limited to the restoration of the old system and old institutions. The creaky apparatus of the Moscow offices of state managed more or less to maintain control over a huge area and an unruly population. Control, in the Russian context, was always a relative matter, for this was also the “rebellious” century of Russian history: with not just the Troubles but urban riots in Moscow and elsewhere, the first great Cossack and peasant revolt of the legendary Stenka Razin, and the politically crucial revolts of the musketeers at the end of the century. Each time, however, the authorities eventually restored order and, after 1613, the state did not collapse.

In the long run, more important even than economic growth or political success were the cultural changes. These are difficult to describe, for they lack the drama of the later transformation under Peter, and they were all still within the limits of a predominantly Orthodox culture. These changes within Orthodoxy were a response to Russian religious, social, and political needs, but they came by way of close interaction with the Orthodox church of Kiev, with mainly Ukrainian monks and clergy and the books and new ideas they brought to Moscow. For half a century, from the 1630s to the 1690s, Kiev was a major center of influence on Russian thought and life. At the same time, political events in Poland – the revolt of the Ukrainian Cossacks – brought Russia into war with Poland and ultimately changed the political balance in Eastern Europe in Russia’s favor. For most of the seventeenth century the politics and culture of Poland and its peoples were crucial to Russian affairs.

None of these developments were visible in the years immediately after 1613 at the court of the first Romanov, Tsar Michael (1613–1645). Michael resumed appointments to the duma and other offices following the precedence system, as did his predecessors. The court was not quite the same, for the experience of the Time of Troubles seems to have taught the boyars the need for consensus, and for sixty years the court intrigues lost the desperate and murderous quality that had marked the previous century. Michael’s father Filaret returned from Polish captivity in 1619 and was immediately named Patriarch of the church. Within a few years he was the de facto regent of Russia, co-sovereign with his son. Patriarch Filaret’s main goal was to exact revenge on Poland, a goal that the boyars did not share. At his urging in 1632 Russia tried to retake Smolensk by relying on mercenary regiments hired in Western Europe. The war was a disaster and in 1633 Filaret died, allowing the tsar and the boyars to end the war. Tsar Michael, now ruling without his father’s supervision, turned to other matters.

The restoration of order and peace allowed the countryside to recover, and by Michael’s death, most of the damage from the Troubles had been repaired. The great accomplishment of the reign was the construction of several lines of forts at the main river fords and on the hills along the southern frontier. In the woods between the forts, workmen felled trees and left them in a tangle to keep out the Tatar cavalry. The defenses were a huge undertaking running over a thousand miles from the Polish border to the Urals. The purpose was to keep out the Tatar raiders, and it worked well enough to allow the peasantry and gentry to move south, for the first time farming the rich black earth of the steppe in large numbers. The tsar gave land to the settler-soldiers to maintain the line of fortifications. A whole society of petty gentry and peasant-soldiers grew up along the line of forts, and beyond the new line, out in the steppe facing the Tatars, were the Cossacks along the southern rivers, the Don, the Volga, and the Iaik farther east. A hundred years after Ivan the Terrible’s conquests, the southern steppe finally began to add to Russia’s wealth and power.

The seventeenth century was also the first full century of serfdom, yet Russia’s agriculture and population rapidly recovered from the Troubles and trade boomed. The resettlement of areas devastated by the Troubles brought agriculture back to feed an expanding population, and over the century, in spite of a general European rise in prices and growing demand, food prices in Russia remained virtually static. We know little about the life of the Russian peasant in this century beyond these larger facts, but it seems that the village community known from later times had taken final form by the end of the century. The peasants held the land from their lords as a village, and themselves managed the distribution of land among households. Craft production grew and spread, not only in the towns but even in the villages, and at the end of the century men who were peasant serfs in legal status began to enter the ranks of the merchants and entrepreneurs. Siberia came under as effective Russian control as it ever would, and its border with China was defined by treaty in 1689 to run along the Amur river. Every year a caravan of Chinese goods that was modest in extent came to Moscow, but over the years the annual trade brought profit to merchants and tsars alike.

The growth of population, commerce, and the state meant that Moscow swiftly became a major city. By the middle of the seventeenth century it contained within its walls perhaps one hundred thousand inhabitants. Half of these Muscovites were part of the army or the palace complex: the soldiers of the elite regiments of musketeers (some 10,000 to 15,000 of them) and their families, and the servants and dependents of the tsar’s household. These palace servants formed whole neighborhoods that supplied the tsar with cloth and silverware, took care of his hundreds of horses, and cooked the food for his giant banquets. Several thousand Muscovites were the bond servants of the great aristocrats, the richest of whom by 1650 had several hundred in their Moscow houses. The other half of the city’s population were the true urban population, the great merchants and innumerable artisans of all types, along with clergy, wage laborers, beggars, and all the variety of folk that peopled a great city. All of them lived on narrow winding streets lined with wooden houses that made the city vulnerable to frequent fires. Only the more important churches were stone, and only boyars and a few great officials or merchants built houses of stone or brick. These larger houses were set deep in courtyards surrounded by high wooden fences and jammed with stables and storehouses filled with food and drink brought from the country by the master’s serfs. Boyars built their houses according to traditional Russian form, not European architectural norms, and divided them into separate women’s and men’s quarters.

Outside the city walls to the northeast was a whole settlement of foreigners, the “German suburb” that was composed of merchants, mercenary officers, and the many others who supplied their needs. Established in 1652 on the initiative of the church, which feared foreign corruption, the German suburb was a small replica of northern Europe, with a brick Lutheran church with a pointed spire and regular streets with brick houses, taverns, and a school. The “Germans” (who included also Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Scots) were the most numerous of the foreigners, ultimately to be the most important, but Moscow was a rather cosmopolitan city. Ukrainian monks and priests found homes in Moscow’s churches and monasteries, bringing a new variant of Orthodoxy to Russia. The Greeks also had their own monastery, and Greek merchants mixed with Armenians and Georgians from the Caucasus. More exotic peoples came from the southern borders and farther east: Circassians serving the tsar, Kalmuks and Bashkirs bringing huge masses of horses every year to sell, Tatars of all sorts, and even “Tadzhiks,” the merchants from Khiva and Bukhara in far-off Central Asia.

Economic prosperity went hand in hand with the recovery and development of the state. By the end of the century several hundred clerks now staffed dozens of offices that tried to administer the vast Russian land. They had developed complex procedures and practices, keeping records of the tsar’s decrees that defined their actions and recording their own decisions on innumerable rolls of paper housed in their archives. Like most early modern states, Russian administration concentrated on the collection of taxes, the administration of justice, and (when needed) on military recruitment. In Russian conditions these were daunting tasks. In order to collect taxes from the peasants, Moscow attempted to discover and record how much land each peasant household had and how good it was. The central authorities had the resources to survey the population for tax purposes every fifteen or twenty years at best, and then not in the most efficient of ways. Given the paucity of local administrators, Moscow sent its officials to a few district centers and relied on the gentry and village elders to provide them with information about each village and household. Obviously everyone, landholder and peasant alike, had an interest in underreporting assets, and the officials could check on them only in the most obvious cases of evasion. Again it was the village elders who actually brought in the taxes, many of which were still paid in kind. The only sure source of revenue was the sales tax and the tsar’s monopoly on the sale of vodka and other alcoholic drinks, sure because it was collected in towns and markets and was often farmed out to merchants and other entrepreneurs.

The attempts to administer justice were no easier. Russia before Peter was not a lawless land of arbitrary rule as later liberals often portrayed it. Indeed the officials of the Moscow offices who administered justice erred as much or more by legal pedantry than arbitrariness. They followed the Law Code of 1649, and indeed the Code circulated in the provinces as well, among officials and gentry alike. The greatest problem was that the Moscow offices (and then the tsar) were the only real courts for most cases, with provincial governors and officials often acting more as investigators than judges. The life of these governors was not easy, and in the investigation of criminal cases they and their few subordinates relied largely on polling the neighbors of the accused and the victim, in order to find evidence. Provincial governors were required to rule areas the size of small European countries with a handful of assistants and no effective armed force. Only on the distant borders did Moscow send out enough men and soldiers to run things effectively and maintain order. Local governors and central offices tried to provide a court of first instance for disputes over land ownership and decisions regarding major crimes, but the lack of officials outside of Moscow and a few provincial capitals on the borders forced the government to rely on the cooperation of local inhabitants, which lead to mixed results. Even with extra manpower, the far borders were still difficult to control, often with disastrous consequences.

At Michael’s death in 1645 the boyars and clergy quickly acclaimed his eldest son Aleksei as his successor. Again the tsar was young, only sixteen years old, as he was born in 1629. The constellation of boyars around him at court determined the course of events for the first decade or so. Tsar Aleksei soon married Mariia, the daughter of Ilya Miloslavskii, an ally of the young tsar’s tutor, the powerful boyar Boris Morozov. Morozov in turn married Mariia’s sister, consolidating his position at court and his influence over the young tsar. Morozov’s taxation schemes, which involved substituting a high tax on salt for the usual sales taxes, soon created a crisis. In July 1648, the Muscovites rioted, killed several prominent boyars and officials, and demanded Morozov’s head. Aleksei was able to save him, and the unrest subsided. Part of the resulting compromise was a new Assembly of the Land – this one to confirm a new law code, and in 1649 the printing presses issued Russia’s first compilation of laws, the Conciliar Code of 1649. Morozov returned to the court, but it was Ilya Miloslavskii, Aleksei’s father-in-law, a man whom the tsar feared rather than loved, who held sway. Soon Miloslavskii had a rival in Patriarch Nikon, who ascended the patriarchal throne in 1652. Nikon would set in motion changes in the church that ultimately led to a schism, but his political role outside of the church was no less important. For Russia was already faced with a new crisis, and this time it was a foreign crisis.

Russia was not alone in defending its southern frontier with bands of Cossacks. Poland-Lithuania as well maintained such a force of irregular troops on the Dniepr river facing the Crimeans. The Cossacks settled beyond the frontier in the islands below the rapids (Zaporozh’e). These Cossacks were largely Ukrainian peasants in origin and thus Orthodox in religion. They had come to the border much like Russian Cossacks fleeing serfdom at home, but in this case they fled religious oppression as well, for the usually tolerant Poland did not extend this favor to the Orthodox. The surrender of the Orthodox hierarchy in Poland-Lithuania to Rome in 1596 formed a new Catholic Uniate church on the basis of the previous Orthodox church. The king declared Orthodoxy illegal, confiscated Orthodox church buildings and property, and handed them over to the Uniates. In 1632 a new King of Poland partially reversed his father’s policy and declared a compromise, allowing an Orthodox metropolitanate in Kiev and Orthodox worship in some areas. The compromise was not enough, for the enserfed Ukrainian peasants saw religious as well as social oppressors in their mainly Polish masters. Then in the winter of 1648 the Ukrainian Cossacks elected a new hetman, or commander, without the king’s approval. The new hetman, a minor nobleman named Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, and his Cossack host began to move northwest out of Zaporozh’e, proclaiming relief from religious and other oppression. The hastily gathered Polish army was utterly annihilated and the Ukrainian lands exploded in revolt; peasants and Cossacks alike murdered and expelled the Polish gentry, the Uniates, and the Jews.

Khmel’nyts’kyi could defeat the king’s army in the field, but he knew that soon he would need allies. At first he allied with Crimea, but this alliance was difficult to maintain as the interests of the two parties differed greatly. The hetman turned to Tsar Aleksei, begging him to support his Orthodox brethren. This message was not welcome news in Moscow. The Ukrainian Cossack emissaries arrived soon after the 1648 riot in Moscow, and neither Aleksei nor the boyars had any desire to support peasant rebels in neighboring countries. Besides, Tsar Michael (in his last years) and his son Aleksei had been trying to come to an agreement with Poland to form an alliance against the Crimeans. Aleksei hesitated for five years, offering vague promises to the Cossacks and sending peace feelers to the king of Poland. In the spring of 1653, the hetman sent yet another embassy to Moscow and offered Aleksei overlordship of the Ukrainian Cossack host. This time the tsar agreed, apparently at the prompting of Patriarch Nikon. Shortly afterward in January 1654, an embassy from the tsar signed an agreement at Pereiaslav in the Ukraine with the hetman to take the Cossacks and their land “under his high hand” while affirming their newly-won autonomy, now within Russia. The agreement also committed Russia to war with Poland, a war that fundamentally reshaped the balance of power in Eastern Europe.

The war was to last for thirteen years, until 1667. Aleksei had a new army, for he had hired western officers to form regiments of Russian soldiers on European lines. In the first years of the war the Russian army quickly recaptured Smolensk and went all the way to Wilno. After considerable back-and-forth, and Khmel’nyts’kyi’s death in 1656, Russia and Poland signed a treaty in 1667. Poland regained most of its territory, but the treaty was nevertheless a distinct Russian victory: Smolensk remained Russian and the Ukraine east of the Dniepr with the city of Kiev continued to form an autonomous hetmanate under the tsar. Though even the Russians did not yet realize this, Poland’s time as the great power of Eastern Europe was over, for the Cossack revolt and the war had done too much damage to the social and political fabric of the Polish-Lithuanian state. Its economy and population stagnated for the next hundred years, leaving the field to Russia.

Russia had not escaped entirely unscathed. The war had led to an adulteration of the silver currency with copper coins that moved the people of Moscow to riot in the “copper revolt” of 1662. The tsar had to call out the new-style infantry regiments officered by foreign mercenaries to restore order. Far more serious was the ferment on the Don that broke out as the great Cossack revolt of Stenka Razin in 1670. Similar in some respects to the Ukrainian revolt, the Russian events lacked the religious and ethnic element; indeed, many of the native peoples of the southern border joined Razin. The Russian Cossacks were also more plebeian than the Ukrainian, who included minor gentry among their leaders. They struck terror into the tsar’s court, capturing Astrakhan’ and other Volga towns with the slaughter of nobles and officials alike. Tsar Aleksei’s armies finally defeated and captured Razin in 1671 and brought him to Moscow, where he was executed. As the revolt showed, expansion into the southern steppe added enormously to Russia’s territory, its agricultural potential, its population, and its power, but it also added to the tensions in Russian society.

The southern steppe and its peoples were only one part of the larger complex of territories and peoples that made Russia an increasingly multi-national society. The territory lost to Sweden in 1619 meant the loss of some smaller Finnish groups, the Ingrians and part of the Karelians who had inhabited part of the Novgorod lands from the beginning of recorded history. Swedish attempts to force the Orthodox Karelians into the Lutheran faith and the arrival of Swedish landlords in villages of free peasants brought a sizeable migration across the Russian border into the lands around Lake Onega and even south towards Tver’. Lesser Finno-Ugrian peoples continued to populate parts of the Russian north, but until 1654 the largest of the non-Russian peoples included the Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash and other Volga peoples brought under Russian rule in the sixteenth century. They continued to live under a separate status as payers of yasak rather than the usual Russian taxes. This separate status continued after the establishment of serfdom, with the paradoxical result that the Tatar peasantry was not enserfed. The Russian authorities continued to accept but not encourage Islam, and they staged no organized attempts at conversion. Conflicts were over land, as Russian peasants settled more and more among them, primarily among the Bashkirs, who mounted several small rebellions. Farther south the arrival in the 1630s of the Kalmuks, a Mongolian Buddhist people fleeing internal strife in their homeland, disrupted the relations among the nomads just beyond Russia’s border. As Buddhists the new arrivals had poor relations with the Crimean and other Muslim peoples in the area. The Kalmuks formed important allies for the Russian tsar, accepting his general overlordship and providing him troops in foreign wars and internal disturbances. The Circassians were loyal as well, siding with the tsar against Razin’s rebels.

The Pereiaslav treaty of 1654 brought into the Russian state a new element in the form of the Ukrainian Hetmanate. The originally democratic Cossack host quickly turned into a society ruled by a hereditary elite of Cossack officers. Under the Pereiaslav agreement the Cossacks continued to elect the hetman who in turn appointed the officers, administered justice (according to the old Polish laws), managed his own treasury, and commanded the Cossack army, all this without consulting the tsar. The tsar maintained garrisons in Kiev and other principal towns, whose commanders also exercised control over the towns, though those retained their elected urban governments. The Ukrainian church was more complicated, as the Metropolitan of Kiev was not under the jurisdiction of Moscow but rather of the Greek patriarchate of Constantinople, which accepted the Moscow Patriarch as its head only in 1687.

The inclusion of the Ukrainian hetmanate in Russia had such profound effects because it strengthened the ties between Kiev and Moscow at a time when changes were taking place in the Russian Orthodox church. These changes led the elite of the Russian clergy to turn to Ukrainian models of piety, but also sparked a religious upheaval that ultimately led to schism. Even in the time of Tsar Michael there had been symptoms of renewal in the church. Voices arose among the clergy complaining that Russian priests did not do enough to bring Orthodox teaching to their congregations. No one challenged the centrality of the liturgy, but the reformers called for more systematic preaching and that meant a more learned clergy and a more varied religious literature. By the accession of Tsar Aleksei to the throne, the leader of the new trend was his spiritual father Stefan Vonifat’ev, and the group included Nikon, the Metropolitan of Novgorod, and Avvakum, a village priest from the Volga area who had risen to become archpriest in one of the main Moscow churches. They had the favor of the tsar, but until 1652 they made little headway.

Increased contract with the Orthodox in the Ukrainian lands had given the Russians new ideas, as the Ukrainians were engaged in a continuous battle to defend Orthodoxy by reinforcing it in the minds and hearts of the believers. In the Kiev Academy the Ukrainian clergy had a new type of education, unknown in Russia, derived from Jesuit models. It emphasized language and rhetoric, the arts of persuasion, as well as philosophy. The Kiev Academy taught its pupils not just Slavonic but also Latin, which was still the language of scholarship in both Catholic and Protestant Europe. In 1649 Tsar Aleksei brought the first group of Ukrainian monks to Moscow to teach and also to help with the editing and publication of liturgical and devotional texts. Then Patriarch Iosif died in 1652, and with prompting from the tsar, the clergy elected Nikon to be his replacement. Patriarch Nikon took with particular fervor to the examination of the service books, and in 1653 he began to issue service books with corrected texts. These corrections were made so as to bring the Russian texts in line with the Greek (and Ukrainian) versions, which he considered more authoritative. The new versions also mandated a few changes in daily devotional practices, such as the manner of making the sign of the cross. For some centuries Russians had done this holding straight the index and middle finger (symbolizing the dual nature of Christ) and folding the other three, while the Greeks held folded together the first two fingers and the thumb (for the Trinity). Nikon, however, commanded the Greek practice, arguing that the Russian version slighted the Trinity. As the Russian (and older Greek) tradition asserted that the entire liturgy and all associated practices recreated the sacrifice of Christ rather than merely reminding one of it, these small actions were of critical importance. Some of Nikon’s former allies in the reform movement under the leadership of the archpriest Avvakum, however, refused to conform. Avvakum recounted later that he heard of the changes during Easter week in 1653 and “we saw that winter was on the way – hearts froze and legs began to shake”. Since Avvakum persisted in his refusal to conform and began to preach against the new books, Nikon and the tsar sent him and his followers into exile, as far away as possible into Siberia to the east of Lake Baikal.

The exile in 1655 of Avvakum and his few followers among the clergy seemed to put an end to the controversy. Nikon’s reforms of the liturgy and his sponsorship of the Ukrainian teachers and scholars in Moscow continued. Nikon was a powerful figure and a personality who brooked no opposition or perceived slight. In 1658 one of the tsar’s favorites insulted Nikon’s servant at a reception for a visiting Georgian prince, and Nikon announced that he was leaving the patriarchal throne. Perhaps he expected an apology from the tsar and the boyar in question, but they were not forthcoming. Nikon retired to his newly founded Monastery of the New Jerusalem to the west of Moscow and remained there. His actions produced a crisis, for he had not abdicated the office of patriarch, he had merely left its duties. Tsar Aleksei sent emissaries to persuade him to return, but he refused.

While Nikon sulked, the remaining church authorities continued to produce new versions of the texts with the help of the Ukrainians. They published new translations of the Greek fathers of the church, this time working from Western printed editions of the Greek texts rather than Byzantine manuscripts. The Ukrainians preached at major court occasions and the principal holidays of the Orthodox calendar, and taught a few Russian clergy their skills. All of this innovative activity took place in and around the court, while at the opposite end of Russian society a storm was brewing. In the provinces the new books began to produce discontent, and local priests and monks remembered Avvakum and his protest. The dissidents began to pick up wider support among the groups of ascetics that had arisen since the 1640s in the upper Volga towns and villages. Aleksei and the bishops were forced to take action. In 1666–1667, just as the Polish war was coming to a close, they called a council of the Russian church, which two of the Greek Orthodox patriarchs and other Greek clergy also attended. The council formally deposed Nikon and selected a successor, though Nikon refused to acknowledge its its authority. The Greek patriarchs also tried to convince Avvakum of his errors, reminding him that in the whole world the Orthodox crossed themselves with three fingers. This argument had no effect, for Avvakum replied that the faith of the other Orthodox peoples was impure: only the Russians had kept the true faith. The council condemned him and approved the changes in the texts. Nikon went into exile in the northern Ferapontov Monastery, but his cause of reform had triumphed. The new books became the standard texts, and most Russians adopted the new rituals. That is, most people – those among the bishops, the clergy, and the population of central Russia – but the dissidents did not disappear. Avvakum went into exile to Pustozersk, a small fort north of the Arctic Circle, but he did not stop writing until his execution in 1680. His teaching began to spread in the northern villages, in the Urals and Siberia as well as the Don and the southern frontier. Tsar Aleksei and his successors sent soldiers to try to force them back to Orthodoxy, and in 1678 in remotest Siberia some of the Old Believers, as they came to be known, tried a new tactic. When the soldiers approached, the entire community assembled in a wooden church and set it on fire, burning themselves to death. This tactic made persecution extremely difficult, for church and state could declare victory only if the Old Believers came back to Orthodoxy. Their deaths, while still unreconciled, signified failure. The result was a standstill, and the Old Belief continued to spread. Its followers already numbered in the tens of thousands and the movement continued to find new adherents. As they grew in numbers they also disagreed among themselves on many issues, some condemning the mass suicides, others not. The more radical groups formed entire dissident churches with no priests or bishops and held simple services led only by an “instructor.” Some Old Believer communities resembled Orthodox monasteries; others were indistinguishable in all but ritual from their Orthodox neighbors. All the Old Believers rejected the authority of church and state, some proclaiming that the Romanov dynasty was the visible Antichrist. Pacific rather than rebellious, the Old Belief nevertheless struck fear into the hearts of tsars and bishops alike for the next two hundred years. An undeniably native tradition of dissent and resistance had been born.

The council of 1666–1667 had restored order in the church everywhere but in the remote wilderness where the Old Believers took refuge. At the court in Moscow the changes in religious practice deepened and spread, bringing with them new cultural forms. In 1664 a new figure appeared at court, the Kiev-trained Belorussian monk Simeon Polotskii. Simeon very quickly won the favor of the tsar and many boyars, and Aleksei appointed him tutor to the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Aleksei. When the boy died in 1669 Simeon remained an important figure, preaching in and around the court, writing celebratory verse for court occasions as well as panegyrics and consolatory verse for great boyars. He ran a school where the children of clergy and officials studied Latin and Church Slavic and learned to write and preach by the rules of classical rhetoric. Simeon’s work was symptomatic of the cultural shift in the Russian elite. Starting in the 1660s or 1670s a few boyars began to have their sons taught Polish and Latin and books no longer exclusively religious, began to circulate among the small court elite, the officials, and a few of the Moscow clergy. Books of physical and political geography, sacred history as understood in the West, and other tracts brought new vocabulary and new concepts to Russia, even if they lacked the intellectual apparatus that brought them forth in Europe. The readers of these texts among the clergy cultivated the styles of writing that were fashionable in Warsaw and Kiev – panegyric and religious verse, sermons, and other forms. The sermons, especially the printed sermons of Simeon Polotskii, began to find an audience outside of Moscow and the court elite. In the last years of the reign of Tsar Aleksei, the tsar and his favorite and foreign minister, Artamon Matveev, sponsored a court theater which presented examples of Baroque drama in Russian. The playwright was the Lutheran pastor Johann Gregory from the German Suburb and the boy actors were only the pupils from his school, but the texts were in Russian and the performances even included ballet interludes. Tsar Aleksei’s interests extended beyond theater, for he asked the Danish ambassador for a telescope, or as the tsar put it, “a tube of the invention of Tycho Brahe.” The theater ceased after Tsar Aleksei’s death, but his son and successor Fyodor (1676–1682) provided Simeon Polotskii with ample support, even allowing him to set up his own printing press where he printed his sermons and his rhymed Psalter.

By the 1680s the new cultural forms were well ensconced. Patriarch Ioakim (1675–1690) sponsored in 1685 the establishment of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, the first more or less European school in Russia. Ioakim had very definite views of the West, as he was a firm opponent of Catholicism and the Protestant churches. Part of his reason for supporting the school was to combat what he saw as Catholic tendencies among the Russian and Ukrainian followers of Simeon Polotskii in Moscow. To teach and manage the school he appointed two Greeks, the brothers Sophronios and Ioannikios Likhudes, who taught what they had learned in Italy and the Greek schools of the Ottoman lands – that is to say, the European Jesuit curriculum founded on philology and the explication of Aristotle. The Greeks brought Western culture to Russia as much as did the Ukrainians.

All these innovations in culture and religion were the work of the court and ecclesiastical elite, and only slowly spread to the rest of the population and the provinces. The new culture does not seem to have been the work of any one faction or group, rather it was common to the elite as a whole, though more prominent in the lives of some individuals than others. Religion and culture failed to produce discord in the court, but other factors made it the scene of great political drama. The relative harmony of the decades after the Time of Troubles began to come apart by 1671.

In the early years of the reign of Tsar Aleksei the dominant figures at court were his erstwhile tutor and brother-in-law Boris Morozov, his father-in-law Ilya Miloslavskii, and in 1652–1658 Patriarch Nikon. Morozov’s death in 1661 left Miloslavskii the single dominant figure, but as Aleksei grew and matured he relied less on his father-in-law, whose behavior was often abrasive. Miloslavskii died in 1668, after Aleksei had signed the peace with Poland against the wishes of many of the boyars. He appointed the architect of that peace, Afanasii Ordin-Nashchokin, to head the Ambassadorial Office. Ordin-Nashchokin, a provincial nobleman who knew foreign languages and had the tsar’s favor, received boyar rank. He and the tsar both shared the aim of turning the peace with Poland into real cooperation against the Ottomans. Some such alliance was all the more necessary since the establishment of Russian overlordship in the Ukraine and the Russian garrison in Kiev put Russia in a new position in Eastern Europe, now facing Crimea across the steppe. The country faced the full might of the Turks, and the tsar and his minister wanted Polish allies, something upon which the boyars looked with suspicion. Unfortunately Ordin-Nashchokin’s arrogant manner of implementation of the policy of reconciliation with Poland in the Ukraine led to rebellions and Ordin-Nashchokin fell from favor. In 1670 Tsar Aleksei found a new head for the Ambassadorial Office who understood the need for alliances against the Turks but who also got along well with the Ukrainians. He chose the musketeer Colonel Artamon Matveev, several times a successful emissary to the Cossacks and now the tsar’s new favorite.

The need for a new man to direct foreign policy came at the same time that a major dynastic issue arose. In 1669 the heir to the throne, Tsarevich Aleksei Alekseevich, died, an event followed swiftly by the death of his mother Mariia. The second son was Fyodor (born 1661), a capable and intelligent boy but extremely sickly. The third surviving son Ivan (born 1666) was both physically and (it seems) mentally handicapped. In addition, Aleksei had already lost several children, mostly boys, and without a new wife he could not be sure of the succession. The new wife, whom Aleksei married in 1671, was to be Natalia Naryshkina, the daughter of a colonel of one of the musketeer regiments. The Naryshkins were clients of Aleksei’s new favorite, Artamon Matveev, with whom they had served in Moscow and other places. Natalia bore the tsar a son on May 30, 1672, and baptized him Peter. Peter was a healthy boy, and Matveev had now another reason to enjoy the tsar’s favor and maintain allies in the tsaritsa’s family.

Matveev was not only in favor through his connections with the Naryshkins. He managed the complicated relations with the Ukrainian Cossacks, Poland, and Russia’s other neighbors, and appointed his clients to almost all the major offices of the Russian state. He faithfully executed the tsar’s wishes, if disagreeing with him on occasion, and arguing his and the tsar’s views in the duma. Aleksei did not give him a monopoly of power: the palace administration and the tsar’s household remained under the aegis of Bogdan Khitrovo, the tsar’s other major favorite in his later years, though Khitrovo seems to have avoided major political issues. In the words of the Danish ambassador, Matveev was Russia’s “kinglet.” Such a rise to power could not fail to provoke the jealousy of the boyars, but as long as the tsar lived, Matveev remained supreme. Then, in January 1676, Tsar Aleksei died suddenly at the age of forty-seven.

The accession of Tsar Fyodor, only fifteen years old and sickly, put power back into the hands of the senior boyars. Within weeks they ousted Matveev’s clients from the main offices and engineered the exile of Matveev himself. Prince Dolgorukii and Ivan Miloslavskii, the cousin of the tsar on his mother’s side, were the most influential, and behind the scenes Tsarevna Irina, the young tsar’s aunt, was the most powerful of all. As Matveev slowly moved toward Siberian exile, his enemies lodged a charge of sorcery against him. The accusation was a wild combination of dramatic charges from former servants that came down to his reading of a book borrowed from the Apothecary’s Office, probably containing chapters on medicinal astrology. Then some of Tsaritsa Natalia’s Naryshkin brothers were accused of attempting to kill the tsar several years before during a session of archery practice. Gruesome torture of the Naryshkin servants and clients yielded extensive testimony but confirmed nothing substantial. At the widowed Tsaritsa Natalia’s intervention Tsarevna Irina put a halt to the proceedings. Matveev went back to an even more remote exile and several of the Naryshkins were exiled to their estates. For the next few years Matveev’s enemies at court reigned supreme, forming a sort of boyar regency over the young tsar. Tsaritsa Natalia remained in the background, raising her son and looking to the future.

Fyodor was physically weak but surprisingly strong-willed. On Irina’s death in 1680 he married for the first time and began to emancipate himself from the tutelage of the boyars. His new wife even appeared in Polish dress, and Fyodor’s health seemed to revive. When she died during childbirth a year later, all seemed to be lost, but instead Fyodor moved on, reforming court dress and then at the end of 1681 moving to reform the army and abolish the precedence system that in theory had ruled the court, administration, and army for two centuries. He had his own favorites and relied in his military reforms on Prince V. V. Golitsyn, one of Russia’s greatest aristocrats. Fyodor allowed Matveev to return to his estates near Moscow and lifted the exile of the Naryshkins. In February he married Marfa Apraksina, a young girl from provincial gentry, a marriage that brought to the court her younger borothers Petr and Fyodor, still boys now on the way to greater things. The tsar’s health worsened and on April 2, 1682, he died, plunging Russia into a crisis.

The crisis again arose from the problem of succession. Fyodor had no children, and his eldest brother, Ivan, was fifteen years old, but weak and unhealthy. None of the boyars seem to have considered him fit to rule, nor did Patriarch Ioakim. The alternative was Peter, then nine years old. The choice of Peter would mean that the Miloslavskii clan, the maternal relatives of Ivan, would lose their chance for power, for Peter’s mother was a Naryshkin and an ally of Matveev, who had recently returned from bitter exile.

The death of Tsar Fyodor coincided with murmurs of discontent among the musketeers – the soldiers who guarded the Kremlin and had provided the core of the infantry army before the advent of European style regiments. Their discontent was aimed at the oppressive practices of their colonels, but someone convinced them that their real enemy was the Naryshkins and Matveev. The musketeers stormed into the Kremlin and demanded that their enemies be turned over to them. Terrified, the boyars advised surrender, and Matveev was hurled from the stairs onto the upturned pikes of the musketeers. Several of the Naryshkins were hunted down and killed, though Natalia was able to save her father and eldest brother. The soldiers rampaged through the city, killing two of the Princes Dolgorukii and others who were suspected of favoring Peter and his family. After a few days the clergy and boyars met together and proclaimed Ivan and Peter co-tsars. The disturbances ceased, but two new stars had risen on the horizon, Prince Ivan Khovanskii and Tsarevna Sofia.

Khovanskii made himself the darling of the soldiers, and for a tense summer he seemed to be poised to assert supreme power behind the façade of the two boy tsars. Khovanskii, however, was outmaneuvered, and it was Sofia, Ivan’s sister and Peter’s half-sister, who assumed power. In September, when the musketeers had quieted down, she had Khovanskii arrested and executed, and for the next seven years she ruled as regent of Russia. Her favorite and, effectively, her prime minister was Prince V. V. Golitsyn, who had recently come to prominence under Tsar Fyodor.

From the very beginning Sofia presided over a court riven by faction. Early on she managed to sideline her Miloslavskii relatives and rule with Golitsyn alone, though in the mind of Peter, then and later, it was the Miloslavskii clan that was his and his mother’s enemy. For Natalia did not cease to aspire to claim full power for her son. As he grew up, she acquired allies among the boyars, Prince Boris Golitsyn (the cousin of V. V. Golitsyn) and the more exotic Prince Mikhail Alegukovich Cherkasskii, a boyar but by origin a Circassian from the north Caucasus serving the Russian tsars. Relations were tense, and Cherkasskii even brought out a knife during a dispute with V. V. Golitsyn – in the yard of the Trinity Monastery no less.

Peter was still too young to participate in the intrigues and the arguments, and he spent these years outside of Moscow at Preobrazhenskoe, a village to the east of Moscow where his father had built a small wooden house for the summer. There Peter began to “play” soldiers, forming his servants and courtiers into European style infantry regiments and having them drilled by European officers. Peter was fascinated by artillery and he learned how to use it in these years as well. Soon he had a trained force of several hundred men, his own personal regiment. Even more significant was his encounter with boats.

He told the story himself, many years later. In an old barn Peter happened to notice a small boat, one that was constructed differently from Russian boats. Peter was already studying mathematics, probably for military purposes, with Frans Timmerman, a Dutch merchant and amateur astronomer, and he asked Timmerman why the boat did not look like typical Russian boats. The answer was that it was built to sail against the wind. Peter was amazed by the answer, and Timmerman found a Dutch sailor who put the boat in order and showed the young tsar how to tack into the wind. Peter was captivated immediately, and took the boat to a nearby lake to practice. He also asked the young Prince Iakov Dolgorukii, who was about to leave for France on a diplomatic mission, to bring him back navigational instruments. Dolgorukii returned in 1688 with an astrolabe, and thus began Peter’s love affair with boats and navigation – an affair that would last his whole life.

In the mean time Sofia had committed Russia to a new foreign policy. She wanted to continue the policy of confronting the Ottomans, in this respect following Matveev, but unlike him she decided to do it in close alliance with Poland. The opportunity had come with the foundation of the Holy League in 1682 by Austria, the Papacy, Venice, and Poland, with the aim of a united struggle against the Turks. After long and tiresome negotiations, Sofia joined the League in 1685–6 and entered into military collaboration with Jan III Sobieski, the King of Poland and the victor at the great siege of Vienna of 1683. Russia’s part in the coalition was to defeat Crimea. Thus, in 1687 Golitsyn took a large Russian army south from the Ukrainian hetmanate across the steppe to Crimea. The Tatars burned the waterless steppe, depriving his horses of fodder and he had to retreat. His only accomplishment was to replace Hetman Samoilovych, a Naryshkin ally and an opponent of the war, with the compliant Ivan Mazepa, a name that would return. A repeat of the campaign in 1689 brought the same result, and rumors even circulated that Golitsyn had made a secret deal with the enemy. On his return, Sofia tried to portray the campaign as a success, rewarding the troops and ordering triumphal liturgies, but Peter would have none of it.

Peter was now seventeen, and he stayed away from the Kremlin in Preobrazhenskoe. Suddenly on August 7, 1689, one of his chamberlains was arrested in Moscow and the rumor swept the city that Sofia was going to have Peter killed. One of the musketeers rode out to warn Peter, who got out of bed in his shirt and jumped on a horse. With his closest servants and courtiers he rode through the night to the Trinity Monastery, soon to be joined by his mother and her boyar allies. The next weeks were a standoff, but by the end of the month it was clear that most of the boyars, Tsar Ivan’s household, the patriarch, and the foreign mercenary officers were on Peter’s side. Even the musketeers would not back Sofia. Peter returned to Moscow in triumph and sent Sofia to the Novodevichii Convent on the southwest side of Moscow. Peter, with his Naryshkin relatives, was now securely in power, for Ivan presented no challenge and died in 1696. No one could have then predicted it, but Russia was poised for a fundamental transformation.